Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  A fellow student at Emerson Junior High, Bette Sue Dugger (later Westcott) became good friends with Norma Jeane. “I never knew Marilyn Monroe,” Bette Dugger would say more than seventy-five years later. “I only knew Norma Jeane Baker. She was a very pretty, very sweet girl who lived with her aunt. In later years, when I’d see articles about her, I was always very surprised to read about the sad parts of her childhood. It wasn’t something she wanted us to know about.”

  What was important to Norma Jeane was fitting in. She was already compartmentalizing parts of her personality. “She never once talked about wanting to be an actress,” Bette remarked. The two girls were schoolmates until Bette’s parents moved to another district.

  “We lost touch after that, which I regret,” Bette said. “I just feel that if we had stayed in touch it might have made a difference. She would have known she’d always have a safe place to come to, out of the limelight. Because I never knew the sex symbol. Maybe sometimes she felt like she wanted to be ‘Norma Jeane’ again. But by then she didn’t have anyone who would have recognized that sweet girl.”*

  * * *

  By the end of 1941 Aunt Ana, who suffered from a heart condition, felt she could no longer take care of the teenage Norma Jeane. With nowhere else to turn, Grace McKee-Goddard once again took Norma Jeane to live with her. Although she was still living with her husband, Doc, she felt that the danger of him going after Norma Jeane again was minimal—his two daughters from a previous marriage, Nona (who went on to have a minor career in movies as Jody Lawrance) and Eleanor, were living with them. Norma Jeane would share a room with Eleanor “Bebe” Goddard, who was the same age. Both girls were attending Emerson and became close for a while.

  When Norma Jeane was fifteen, Doc Goddard got a job offer in West Virginia. Grace and Doc decided that he should take it. Even though Norma Jeane had been living with them, Grace felt that it would be too much of an expense to take Norma Jeane along to start over in West Virginia. Los Angeles foster care would stop paying for her keep if Grace moved Norma Jeane out of state.

  Once again it was left up to Grace to find living arrangements for the girl. Ever resourceful, this time Grace came up with a different kind of scheme. Norma Jeane was maturing, she was lovely—why not marry the teenager off? Grace didn’t have to search far to find a suitable contender for a marriage: She literally looked to the boy next door. Grace’s next-door neighbor, Ethel Dougherty, had a handsome twenty-year-old son named Jim who Grace thought would make an ideal husband for Norma Jeane. Handsome, blue-eyed, and popular, Jim Dougherty was a former Van Nuys High School football captain and class president, currently working the night shift at Lockheed Aircraft.

  Grace hastily arranged for them to have a date to a Christmas Eve dance. There was indeed a spark between the two. Before long Grace approached Ethel suggesting that perhaps her son would consider marrying young Norma Jeane. A sympathetic Ethel asked her son.

  “My God, she’s just a baby,” he replied.

  “Think about it,” his mother urged. “It will keep her from going back to the orphanage.” Jim took Norma Jeane on a few more dates and decided that, yes, he would like to marry her. She told her schoolmates at Van Nuys High that she would not be returning to school after she completed tenth grade.

  After their wedding the young couple moved into a one-room bungalow. Norma Jeane tried hard to be a good wife. “At that time she needed to feel secure and she needed to feel loved,” Dougherty said. “She wanted to feel like she belonged to somebody. That was very important to her.”

  For a while Norma Jeane seemed content in the marriage, with the notion that she was safe at last. As a married woman she was now considered an adult—no one could move her or place her with strangers. But as it had been throughout her life, she was living in a situation she had been placed in and had no control over, and, as always, she did her best to make it work.

  Norma Jeane was an expert at fantasizing and playacting. With Jim she never really felt like a wife; she was a little girl playing housewife. “The only family she had at that time were her dolls,” Dougherty observed. “She had rag dolls. And porcelain dolls. All kinds of dolls. I’d find them on the bed because that’s where she kept them. They’d be there when she needed them.”

  In her new role as a wife, Norma Jeane longed for her father. There was never any doubt in her mind that Charles Stanley Gifford, the man in the photograph her mother had always kept and showed her, the man who looked like Clark Gable, was her father. She got his number and built up the courage to call him. Gifford abruptly hung up on her. “She was real sad,” Dougherty remembered. He had to sit with her and comfort her for a while.

  Dougherty maintained that they were both content in the marriage. Norma Jeane was an “immaculate housekeeper” and a “good cook.” What is more likely is that she was simply going through the motions of what was expected of her. She was used to presenting a robotic facade of the girl that people needed her to be. As a wife she cooked, she kept house, she made love.

  She tried to love him and at times she felt she did—Jim was all she had. Yet Dougherty occasionally sensed that there were some signs that Norma Jeane was not the happy newlywed she tried to project. “She was two different people, really,” he revealed. “She was a Gemini. I could see Norma Jeane some days. Some days I didn’t recognize the girl. Who was she? She’d be deep in thought or something. But she’d always come back and be Norma Jeane again.”

  After a year of marriage, with the war in full swing, Jim enlisted in the merchant marines. He was sent to Catalina Island for training, and for a while Norma Jeane joined him there. He was shipped out to the Pacific in the spring of 1944 and would be gone for long periods of time. With her husband away, seventeen-year-old Norma Jeane went to live with Jim’s mother. Her mother-in-law was working at Radio Plane, an aircraft plant, and she was able to get Norma Jeane a job there folding and inspecting parachutes.

  One day that fall—and it was one of the most fateful days in the life of Marilyn Monroe—while she was working, an army photographer named David Conover came to take publicity pictures of attractive young women working in the American factories—to boost the soldiers’ morale. On an assembly line, Conover came across Norma Jeane. He asked her to pose and snapped. He was stunned. Something happened between Norman Jeane and the lens. Conover was the first person to discover what many, many others would soon learn: The camera loved Norma Jeane.

  Excited by her potential, Conover asked Norma Jeane to pose for him again. Norma Jeane wrote to her foster sister, Bebe Goddard, that Conover advised “I should buy all new clothes to go into the modeling profession.… He said he had a lot of contacts that he wanted me to look into.”

  Conover continued photographing Norma Jeane, building up a professional portfolio for her. And he was true to his word. When he felt she was ready he introduced her to the modeling agent Emmeline Snively.

  * * *

  At the Blue Book Modeling Agency, Emmeline Snively assessed the nineteen-year-old hopeful, but she didn’t get a sense of sexuality. Instead she found Norma Jeane to be “a clean, shining, pleasant, expressive-faced little girl. We said, ‘the girl-next-door type.’ She looked at the board of cover girls and said, ‘Oh, those girls are so pretty.’ But I thought what a wonderful little doll she would be on a cover someday.”

  Snively talked Norma Jeane into straightening and bleaching her hair, assuring her a blonde would get more jobs. “She started out with less than any girl I ever knew,” Snively said, “but she worked the hardest … she wanted to learn, wanted to be somebody, more than anybody I ever saw before in my life.” Some of the emptiness that her husband had sensed in her was being filled as professionals became interested in her beauty as a commodity.

  In her excitement Norma Jeane wrote to Dougherty to inquire how he felt about her modeling. “I told her if she was enjoying herself it didn’t bother me much.” But Dougherty was soon to find out “it cost more to be a model than she made. S
he took all the money we had in savings and bought clothes with it. It was alright. I didn’t mind. She enjoyed doing it and … it just grew after that.” Dougherty thought it was fine. It was just something for her to do until he got home.

  * * *

  One of the first people to whom Snively sent Norma Jeane was the photographer Laszlo Willinger. “I made some tests with her,” Willinger recalled. “From that time on I used her for years.… She was a very good model. I had her on, easily, a hundred magazine covers. Her face and figure were well known long before she became Marilyn Monroe.”

  Some seventy years later Willinger’s assistant during that time, Christian Larson, remembered: “I did her body makeup—that could be a legacy in itself. She did cheesecake and lots of semi nudes. She was very comfortable with her body, no hang-ups at all about displaying herself around the studio completely naked. One time when she was booked for a shoot she called and said she couldn’t make it because she discovered that she was allergic to penicillin and developed a rash. Laszlo didn’t believe her. So I went over and picked her up. She came out of the dressing room and did a charming little striptease for us. Sure enough she was covered with little red welts. She said, ‘See? I told you so!’ I’ll always remember the cute way she said it.”

  Norma Jeane was appearing on magazine covers both locally and internationally. Dougherty, still traveling in the merchant marines, recalled, “I was in Buenos Aires and here was a magazine with her picture on the cover. I told the guys ‘this is my wife.’ They said, ‘Sure. Sure it is.’” They didn’t believe young Dougherty was married to the incredible cover girl.

  Dougherty was beginning to get concerned. When they had an opportunity to talk he would tell her, “When I get out of the service and come home, this stops. We’re going to have a family.”

  Norma Jeane always replied, “Yes, that’s true. That’s true.” But she was starting to feel differently.

  * * *

  In 1946 her appearance on five magazines in one month led to an interview with 20th Century-Fox casting agent Ben Lyon. He was knocked out by Norma Jeane. “The most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life,” he gushed. He wanted to give her a screen test right away, but he needed permission from the studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck. Rather than risk being refused, Lyon came up with a plan to test her on the set of a Betty Grable movie, Mother Wore Tights, currently shooting on the lot. His scheme was to sneak Norma Jeane onto the set when it wasn’t filming, using cameras from that production to test her.

  To ensure the success of the test he brought in Leon Shamroy, one of their top cinematographers, and Alan “Whitey” Snyder to do her makeup. Whitey would become a close friend, and after she became a star, he would do her makeup for all her movies and important events of her life.*

  For Norma Jeane’s first performance on film she was directed to walk across the set, sit down, light a cigarette, and put it out. Then she walked upstage, looked out a window, and exited off-camera.

  The film was developed and ready to be viewed a few hours later. The screen test lasted for only a few minutes, but Shamroy was amazed. “I got a cold chill…” he said later. “She got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow.… Every frame of that test radiated sex.”

  Lyon slipped the test into the daily rushes that Darryl Zanuck would be viewing. After it screened Zanuck took a puff of his cigar and said, “That’s a damn fine test.” As a result Norma Jeane Dougherty was offered her first movie contract. The terms were that she would be paid seventy-five dollars a week for six months. Then she would be reviewed, and if the studio decided to extend her contract for a year, her salary would rise to one hundred dollars per week.

  In 1946 Grace McKee-Goddard and her husband, Doc, moved back to Los Angeles. Now that Norma Jeane was twenty, Grace no longer had to look after her or worry about her living situation. Grace was of course thrilled with Norma Jeane’s bright-looking future—but in her marriage with Doc, Grace had started drinking heavily and the ravages of alcoholism were taking a toll.

  In August 1946 Grace accompanied Norma Jeane to the Fox studio to sign the contract with her since, being under the legal age of twenty-one, she still needed a guardian’s signature. The moment was bittersweet. Norma Jeane was a promising young actress—being compared to their long-ago idol Jean Harlow. A shining new life seemed to be waiting for her after the signing of the contract. For Grace, already rapidly on the decline, it was like signing something away, something she had once held very dear, giving up the title to a dream she had helped create.

  But Norma Jeane was not yet completely ready to start down a new road toward stardom. Lyon explained that they needed to change her name. Norma Jeane Dougherty, he said, didn’t sound like a star, and her contract with Fox gave them the right to rename her.

  “You’re a ‘Marilyn’!” he exclaimed finally. According to him, she responded, “That’s a lovely name.” Now the new “Marilyn” was concerned about keeping something that was connected to her previous self. “I wanted my mother’s maiden name, ‘Monroe,’ because I felt that rightfully was my name,” she explained. “I couldn’t take my father’s name very well. I wanted at least something that was related.”

  “In everything she did, she wanted to be perfect,” her foster sister Bebe Goddard remembered. Now that Marilyn’s career was taking off, the young starlet knew she could no longer be a factory worker or a housewife. Her husband was looking forward to coming home and having children.

  Still in the service, Dougherty was on the Yangtze River in China when the mail came on board his ship. Dougherty received a letter from an attorney stating Norma Jeane’s intention of divorcing him. When he arrived back in Los Angeles he went to see his wife. She presented him with divorce papers. Dougherty spent the whole day with her trying to change her mind. But she had already made her decision: She was going to start over as Marilyn Monroe.

  Also around this time of transformation, her mother was let out of Agnews State Hospital. She lived for a while with an aunt in Portland, Oregon. She sent her daughter pleading letters, until Marilyn saved enough money to send her so she could come back to Los Angeles. Marilyn rented two rooms in Aunt Ana’s apartment so that, at last, mother and daughter could attempt living together. Gladys, however, was by no means the “mother” or confidante that Marilyn had always hoped for. She remained strange and remote—obviously mentally ill. She insisted on wearing a nurse’s uniform and had become obsessed with Christian Science, reading compulsively from Science and Health.

  Also during this period, Marilyn’s half sister, Berniece, from Gladys’s first marriage, to Jack Baker, visited Los Angeles with her husband, Paris, and their daughter, Mona Rae. At last Marilyn had a chance to meet her half sister. For a while they were all living in apartments under Aunt Ana’s roof. Marilyn tried to persuade Berniece to move to Los Angeles with her young family, but Paris didn’t want a life there.

  Gladys also decided that she didn’t want to live with Marilyn. After a brief stay she felt she had to make it on her own, and with vague plans in her vague head, she traveled back to Oregon. Gladys would remain a shadow, a phantom figure for the remainder of Marilyn’s life.

  With her provisional family spreading out and making their way in the world, Marilyn began living alone for the first time in her life. It was scary, but it was also a relief. She had to answer to no one and could concentrate on creating Marilyn Monroe.

  * * *

  Although she worked tirelessly at improving herself, Fox didn’t utilize the young beauty except for some extra work. She can be glimpsed fleetingly as she passes by and says hello in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! a comedy about a pair of prize mules. She also had a bit part as a waitress in Dangerous Years (1947).

  Based on this very limited work, the studio dropped her. Yet her agent, Harry Lipton, recalled that Marilyn soon recovered from the shock and became diplomatic. “After all it’s a case of supply and demand,” she said. Marilyn already was beginning to understand the movie
industry. There were dozens of pretty young girls in supply on a studio lot. It was up to her to single herself out.

  FIVE

  “A STRAY LITTLE KITTEN”

  After her contract with 20th Century-Fox was dropped, Marilyn fell into a shadowy, drifting period. She led a vagabond existence, living hand to mouth. Sometimes she had some money from modeling gigs, and other times there were long stretches in between jobs. Many days she could only afford one meal.

  Her biggest enemy was loneliness. Marilyn had always been alone; it was all she knew. But now she was old enough to understand that it wasn’t the only emotion, the only condition. She saw people around her with friends and family, and she longed for some kind of connection. “I looked at the streets with lonely eyes,” she said.

  Marilyn had nobody, really, to depend on, living in between two lives: her Norma Jeane, waif, child-bride days, which included Jim Dougherty, Grace Goddard, and Aunt Ana (all of whom were rapidly slipping farther and farther away from her day-to-day life), and her starlet years, which were just beginning. Without roots, she moved very quickly and easily from place to place. “I had no family. I mean I had no place to go just to have a roof over my head,” she would say.

  Los Angeles could be a lonesome, sordid town for a young girl without family and connections. Marilyn started to learn to use what she had to get by. Survival kicked in. To survive Marilyn could be a chameleon. The biggest talent she had—all the more potent combined with her beauty—was the ability to become what people wanted her to be. It wasn’t something she did in a calculating way; for Marilyn it was instinctual.