Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  AUTUMN 1938

  Social Living (history, civics, geography): C

  Physical education (gym class): B

  Science: C

  Office practice: A

  Journalism: B

  SPRING 1939

  Life Sciences (elementary biology): C

  English: B

  Bookkeeping: B

  Physical education: C

  “She was very much an average student,” recalled Mabel Ella Campbell, who taught the Life Sciences class. “But she looked as though she wasn’t well cared for. Her clothes separated her a little bit from the rest of the girls. In 1938 she wasn’t well developed. Norma Jeane was a nice child, but not at all outgoing, not vibrant.”

  Marilyn elaborated twenty years later:

  I was very quiet, and some of the other kids used to call me The Mouse. The first year at Emerson, all I had was the two light blue dress-suits from the orphanage. Aunt Ana let them out because I’d grown a little, but they didn’t fit right. I wore tennis shoes a lot, because you could get them for ninety-eight cents—and Mexican sandals. They were even cheaper. I sure didn’t make any best-dressed list. You could say I wasn’t very popular.

  Reserved in her new environment, embarrassed about wearing the same uniform every day, and with no experience of socialization outside the confines of the orphanage, Norma Jeane found friendships difficult. “She was neat but plain, as I remember,” recalled Ron Underwood, another classmate. “She was also somewhat shy and withdrawn, and apparently had few friends.” Marian Losman (later Zaich) remembered that “she always seemed to be alone.” Gladys Phillips agreed: “She really wasn’t close to anyone at all.” Norma Jeane’s isolation was intensified by the fact that Ana Lower had no telephone.

  Close attachments to women were made even more problematic after her thirteenth birthday (June 1, 1939), when Grace took Norma Jeane by train to San Francisco, where Gladys was living (as she would for several years) in a clinic-supervised boardinghouse. Her mother was not violent or unkind; she did not seem irrational or sedated; she was clean and evidently well attended. But she spoke not a word, neither during the initial meeting nor during lunch—nothing until Norma Jeane and Grace prepared to depart. Gladys then looked sadly at her daughter and said quietly, “You used to have such tiny little feet.”

  Life with Ana was hardly exciting, and Norma Jeane had, as yet, nothing like a social life—but at least the girl felt secure with Grace’s aunt. As ever, she returned to what was “home” with no sense of family.

  But as she entered eighth grade, beginning in autumn 1939 at Emerson, her social life began to change, specifically because her body shape did, too. And her interest in classes—cooking, office practice, elementary Spanish and mathematics—suddenly faded into virtual oblivion, like a child’s watercolor exposed to the sun. As if someone had thrown a switch over the summer and fall, Norma Jeane, as 1939 drew to a close, had grown to her full adult height of five feet, five and a half inches. And there was a figure emerging—pertly rounded breasts, which she exhibited (without a brassiere) beneath a tight tan sweater (“and without an under-blouse, which was a no-no,” added Gladys Phillips).

  Because there was no money for new clothes, her blue skirt was rather too tight about the hips, and Ana could alter it only so much. But the girl was resourceful: she bought an inexpensive pair of boy’s trousers, reversed a front-button cardigan for a completely different (and more alluring) look on top, and in one week that autumn caused such a sensation that (trousers being forbidden to girls) twice she was sent home to pour herself back into the tight skirt—which of course had exactly the same effect. She was, therefore, no longer “Norma Jeane the String Bean” (an alternate classmate sobriquet to “The Mouse”).

  “Suddenly, everything seemed to open up,” she said later of that season.

  Even the girls paid a little attention to me just because they thought, “Hmmm, she’s to be dealt with!” I had to walk to school, and it was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn—you know, workers driving to work, waving, and I’d wave back. The world became friendly.

  More than friendly, it was positively, energetically responsive. And Norma Jeane was ready to cooperate with the new geniality that attended her. The bus fare from Nebraska Avenue to Emerson was only five cents, but she preferred to walk to school, surrounded by two, three or more boys arguing over who would carry her books and lunch bag. And it was the same way in the afternoon.

  “Physically, she developed earlier than most of us, and she had no shame about displaying her figure,” according to Gladys Phillips.

  Her body just seemed to show through that sweater. And it was unusual for girls to wear bright red lipstick and makeup to school, but Norma Jeane did. This led some of the girls to consider her indiscreet, which she wasn’t—but of course they were jealous. There was nothing vulgar about what she wore, but when her name was mentioned in class, boys smiled and raised their eyebrows, and sometimes you’d hear some of the boys humming “Mmmmmmmm!”—I’ll never forget it! Suddenly she just seemed to stand out in a crowd.

  It was as if her childhood dream of adorers all round her, had in a way come true. After years of Grace’s tutelage, Norma Jeane knew how to attract attention with cosmetics; but now, aware of her figure and the new, frankly sexual allure she suddenly projected, she rose early in the morning, devoting hours to primping before school. Once there, according to Gladys Phillips, Norma Jeane stood for a long time before the mirror in the girls’ lavatory, brushing her light brown hair again and again, running her fingers through every curl. Something of a school canard began to circulate: it seemed every time a girl entered the washroom, there was Norma Jeane Baker, refreshing her makeup.

  She was indeed trying to rise above a confused and confusing past; refining her appearance before the mirror, she was reshaping, in a way “covering up” and dismissing, the forlorn and abandoned child—refashioning herself into someone new, as Grace often reminded. And the means to do this were ready to hand, for in Los Angeles there were more colorful, experimental, dramatic, inexpensive cosmetics than anywhere in America. On weekends, Hollywood Boulevard was crowded with hawkers, distributing free samples of new lipsticks, rouges, face powders, eyeliners and colognes. At thirteen, then, Norma Jeane Baker became immediately aware of her ability to attract and to fascinate, and this she wished to do in an innocent way, without the threat of scenes such as she had had with Doc and Jack. In fact, she may have felt, this was all she had to offer, to display; no one had seemed to regard her opinions or feelings terribly much, so her body was meant to be praised, prized—just as by the worshipful adorers of her childhood dream.

  She was not, as each of her schoolmates testified, an unusually beautiful girl; there was nothing striking about her hair or features. But she radiated, as Mary Baker Eddy said in quite another context, “animal magnetism.”

  It must be stressed, however, that in 1939 such a display of candid, forthright sensuality was not equated with an announcement of sexual availability—although she seems to have been regarded as (thus Gladys Phillips) “a bit racy.” Even as she attracted attention, there was neither promise nor threat. She was in control.

  High-school sex was not, after all, the commonplace it later became. Birth control pills were unknown, the simplest devices for men and women were not easily available (in fact, they were still officially illegal under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1933) and there was widespread fear of venereal disease—for which in 1939 antibiotics like penicillin were not yet refined for general public benefit. A furtive kiss on a back porch at night, necking in a borrowed car way up on Mulholland Drive, with the city lights twinkling below: that was the extent of sex for the vast majority of Los Angeles adolescents. The fantasies of some high-school boys may have smoldered at the sight of a “whoo-whoo girl,” and movie ads talked of “hot-blooded passions,” but the only fires raging out of control that winter blazed in the newsreels chronicling the outbreak of war in Europ
e. As Gladys Phillips and others recalled, there was the occasional rumor about one or another “bad” girl or “wild” boy, but there were no such tales about Norma Jeane.

  She was, in other words, at last beginning to live up to Grace’s expectations of her, for at Emerson Junior High School during the winter of 1939/40, she began to be something of a star. The school was a large, impersonal factory, and she did what she could to be noticed. Long neglected by those to whom she had the right to look for security, she was even now “performing,” pretending to be a siren when in reality she was a naïve adolescent simply yearning for a little applause.

  Norma Jeane wanted desperately (so classmates Phillips, Underwood and Losman recalled) to be liked, admired and even respected by them—but there were no opportunities to realize those goals at home. Ana’s sedate, cramped quarters on Nebraska Avenue, without telephone or space to receive guests, disallowed Norma Jeane the chance to extend invitations to classmates for an after-school glass of lemonade, or to visit and enjoy her Glenn Miller records on the windup portable Victrola Grace had given as a Christmas present. “Norma Jeane was really awfully nice and sweet,” Gladys Phillips said, “but she also seemed a little pathetic, because she was constantly ashamed of her background.”

  During summer 1940, Norma Jeane, fourteen, blossomed even more fully. She had one colorful print blouse around which she invented several outfits. Tucked into her blue skirt, it was proper enough for Sunday services with Ana; worn outside her trousers, it was comfortable for riding with a boy on the handlebars of his bicycle; tied high above her waist, it exposed her midriff. Thus did she stop traffic and turn heads when she went to the popular Westwood hangouts—at Tom Crumpler’s, a popular soda parlor across from the Westwood Village movie theater; at Mrs. Grady’s, on the southeast corner of Westwood and Wilshire boulevards; at Albert Sheetz, where she also met boyfriends who bought her Coca-Colas and hovered for hours; and at the Hi-Ho drive-in, a little bit cheaper and a trifle less tidy. At the Hi-Ho, boys looking for trouble could find it without too much difficulty.4

  It was apparently at the Hi-Ho, that summer of 1940, that Norma Jeane first met an older Emerson student named Chuck Moran—a wisecracking, rebellious fellow who borrowed cars (sometimes without permission) to take girls on dates to Ocean Park Pier, between Venice and Santa Monica. Popular with the boys because he was a natural leader and a good athlete, and with the girls because he was a freckle-faced redhead quick to flatter and sweet-talk, Chuck favored Norma Jeane that summer. She was shapely, she laughed at his jokes and smiled back at his winks, and she seemed shy—a confederation of qualities he found irresistible. When she walked into a soda parlor, Chuck Moran called out, “Here comes the Mmmm Girl!”

  Several times that summer, Moran squired Norma Jeane in his father’s old jalopy, and they often drove out to the dance hall at the pier, where Lawrence Welk led his orchestra while actress Lana Turner and her husband, bandleader Artie Shaw, danced the night away. Later, she recalled long, hot summer evenings at the pier:

  We danced until we thought we’d drop, and then, when we headed outside for a Coca-Cola and a walk in the cool breeze, Chuckie let me know he wanted more than just a dance partner. Suddenly his hands were everywhere! But that made me afraid, and I was glad I knew how to scrape [i.e., fight back] with the best of them—life at the orphanage [and with Doc and Jack] taught me that. Poor Chuck, all he got was tired feet and a fight with me. But I thought, well, he isn’t entitled to anything else. Besides, I really wasn’t so smart about sex, which was probably a good thing.

  That she “wasn’t so smart about sex” and had no untidy reputation among her schoolmates is further indicated by a notation in the school newspaper’s prophecy (“A Peek into the Future”) that Norma Jeane would one day be “the smiling and beaming Chairman of the Beverly Hills Home for Spinsters.” This report appeared despite the fact that she was no wallflower, was quite adept at the rumba and the conga and, by graduation time, was “doing something really modern, The New Yorker”—considered the most sophisticated, languorous new dance to reach California.

  Moran’s charm somehow kept him out of trouble—both with the police (regarding cars he “borrowed”) and with the families of several Emerson girls (whom he often failed to deliver back home until dawn). His dates with Norma Jeane ended when classes resumed in September 1940: she was back at Emerson for ninth grade, and he was off to the tenth, at University High School.

  In the group photograph of his graduating class, students smile attentively, trying to look dignified for posterity. But there is Chuck Moran, impolitely raising the middle finger of his left hand toward the camera. The reaction of school authorities and parents when this managed to slip past proofreaders can only be imagined. In any case, Chuck sent Norma Jeane a card on Valentine’s Day for the next two years. Dismissed from senior high school eighteen months later for misconduct, Moran then vanished briefly before volunteering for army service. He was shipped off to war, where he was killed a month after his twentieth birthday.

  Before 1940 ended, Norma Jeane at last had a friend her own age. Another of Doc Goddard’s daughters, Eleanor, arrived to live with her father and Grace on Archwood Avenue, Van Nuys. At the same time, Ana Lower began to suffer from severely impaired circulation and other cardiovascular problems, and so Norma Jeane returned to the Goddards and befriended Eleanor, always called by her nickname, Bebe.

  Just six months younger than Norma Jeane, Bebe Goddard was a winsome, pretty girl who turned fourteen a week before Christmas. She was also brave—as she had to be, for her childhood was truly appalling. When she was eighteen months old, her parents divorced. For a time she and her siblings lived with their mother, but then Mrs. Goddard became mentally ill, and dangerously so. “It was tragic,” Bebe Goddard recalled years later. “She was a true sociopath—no conscience, no knowledge of right and wrong—charming and believable when she wanted to be, but then she turned suddenly violent and menacing.” Booted hither and thither from relatives to strangers to a dozen foster homes all over Texas, Bebe matured, caring for her brother and sister while enduring and somehow surviving the most dreadful insecurities and the apparent indifference of her father until 1940.

  It is important to detail these unhappy events in Bebe’s early life, for much of what Marilyn later claimed to be her childhood history was actually Bebe’s. The legend of her twelve or thirteen foster homes, the whippings, the near-starvation—all these were borrowed from Bebe’s past and conveniently grafted onto her own when they became helpful in winning press and public sympathy. “What I told Norma Jeane that winter made a great impression on her. She felt enormous pity for me, and we became friends very quickly.”

  The two girls were full of fun and vitality. With exactly the same height, weight and hair color, they shared clothes and makeup, and Grace was ever vigilant with cosmetic advice. For the first time in her life, according to Bebe, Norma Jeane developed an unfettered sense of mischief and learned to laugh: “Everyone adored her. She had such a sense of fun.”

  Norma Jeane continued to attend Emerson Junior High until her graduation from ninth grade in June 1941. Her final grades in Spanish, Social Living, science and physical education were unimpressive, and she nearly failed Rhetoric and Spoken Arts because so often fear of seeming verbally inept and socially unacceptable paralyzed her throat and silenced her.

  But in Miss Crane’s journalism class she showed a remarkable aptitude and humor. The name Norma Jeane Baker often appears that year in the school newspaper, The Emersonian, for she was a contributor to the “Features” columns. Given her later success (especially in a certain film), it is interesting to note that she provided this little story to the paper:

  After tabulating some 500-odd questionnaires, we have found that fifty-three percent of the gentlemen prefer blondes as their dream girl. Forty percent like brunettes with blue eyes, and a weak seven percent say they would like to be marooned on a desert island with a redhead. . . . According to th
e general consensus of opinion, the perfect girl would be a honey blonde with deep blue eyes, well molded figure, classic features, a swell personality, intelligence, athletic ability (but still feminine) and she would be a loyal friend. Well, we can still dream about it.

  She was in fact writing a description of herself—mostly as she was, but with some qualities she longed to develop.

  One of these was better speech. Notwithstanding Norma Jeane’s increasing popularity and her growing sense of her power to attract and charm, there was a basic insecurity she never overcame. This had recently been exhibited by her poor performance in Rhetoric and Spoken Arts, in which her teacher, Mr. Stoops, was driven nearly to distraction by her shyness and anxiety about public speaking. As the teacher cajoled and the student grew ever more reticent, there developed an unfortunate sequel—the beginning of Norma Jeane’s lifelong tendency to stutter. As a member of the school newspaper staff, she was asked to be class secretary, “and I’d say, ‘M-m-m-minutes of the last m-m-m-meeting.’ It was terrible.”

  But just as she could exploit a meager wardrobe to superb advantage, so did Norma Jeane turn a slight impediment to her social benefit. She is listed among only a few young men and women singularized for a class alphabet in June 1941: “A for Ambitious: John Hurford . . . G for Glamorous: Nancy Moon . . . R for Radical: Don Ball . . . V for Vivacious: Mary Jean Boyd,” and—at her own witty insistence, simply “M-m-m-m: Norma Jeane Baker.” In and out of school, she was “the Mmmm Girl.” Capitalizing on her stammer, she linked it to the sound she heard the boys mutter. Vulnerable, cautious and shy she always was—but sufficiently resourceful to turn a liability into an asset.