by Donald Spoto
Transcribed in 1952 but not included in the final published version of the 1953 article “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” this forthright statement provides a clue to the basic psychological gap that separated the couple. It is also an important corrective to the image of a delightful, carefree, passionate young bride artfully but somewhat disingenuously presented in Dougherty’s short book.
For one thing, he realized at once that he was more her father and protector than husband. “She called me ‘Daddy.’ When she packed my lunch for work, there was often a note inside: ‘Dearest Daddy—When you read this, I’ll be asleep and dreaming of you. Love and kisses, Your Baby.’ ”
But Dougherty was a gregarious chap who had many friends, played games, loved to go out and thought that flirting with pretty girls at dances and parties was harmless and permissible. Norma Jeane, on the other hand, was friendless, had few social skills, was nervous about embarrassing them both in public and became jealous, angry and frightened of being abandoned if he paid attention to any other woman. He preferred to save a portion of his income, but she asked for extra cash and spent it prodigally—especially on gifts for him such as expensive Van Dyke cigars and new shirts, as if from his own paycheck she could buy his devotion.
Crucial differences in their sensibilities were immediately evident that summer. Since the shooting of her beloved dog Tippy a decade earlier, Norma Jeane had been extremely sensitive about the mistreatment of animals. “She loved them all and was always trying to pick up strays,” according to Eleanor Goddard; as Grace had pointed out, the same was true of Jean Harlow, who throughout her life had a menagerie of dogs, cats and ducks. Hence when Jim returned one evening with a dead rabbit ready for skinning, she was unable to bear the sight and became almost hysterical. The consequent idea of eating the poor animal was repugnant beyond description.
Related to this, he complained that “she couldn’t cook for ducks.” Deficient in the kitchen and lacking any preparation for ordinary household tasks, Norma Jeane was constantly anxious, terrified of displeasing her husband and therefore perhaps of being sent away—to where, she knew not. No wonder she clung to his arm so insistently on her wedding day.
She was, therefore, prone to culinary miscalculations. She overseasoned percolated coffee with salt; whiskey was served undiluted, in twelve-ounce tumblers; there were endless helpings of mixed peas and carrots, because she had once been told foods should have a pleasing color combination; and she did not know how to cook fish when her husband returned with a Sunday catch. When Norma Jeane once inadvertently brought a trout to the table virtually raw, her husband muttered sarcastically, “You ought to cook dinner once in a while,” which elicited her tearful reply, “You’re nothing but a brute.” There followed a terrific argument that ended only when he pushed her, fully clothed, under a cold shower. “I went out for a walk, and when I came back she’d cooled off.” Such treatment quite naturally increased her feelings of incompetence and her fear of abandonment.
As for their intimate life, Dougherty was often publicly rhapsodic: “Our life was idyllic, sexually and otherwise.” Consistent with this, there is attributed to him the description of Norma Jeane as an insatiable nymphette who, while riding in a car, would suddenly shout to her husband, “Pull off the road here! Pull off here!” Demanding instant sexual intercourse, she forthwith redefined the term autoeroticism. Neatly concocted by imaginative editors at the Playboy Press eager to serve the later tabloid image of the eternally sexy Marilyn Monroe, such anecdotes are not to be found in Dougherty’s more discreet notes for his memoir.
More significantly, this sort of assertion is wildly variant from her private conversations with friends. To director Elia Kazan she later confided that she did not enjoy “anything Jim did to me—except when he kissed me here,” whereupon she gently touched her breasts; after he was satisfied, Jim usually fell asleep, leaving her awake, confused and discontent. She spoke frankly with other friends, too, about her marriage with Dougherty—in artless but thoughtful recollections, unconcerned with self-justification, much less retribution:
Of course I wasn’t very well informed about sex. Let’s just say that some things seemed more natural to me than others. I just wanted to please him, and at first I found it all a little strange. I didn’t know if I was doing it right. So after a while, the marriage itself left me cold.
To be sure, Dougherty was never cruel; but in his youthful ardor, manly egoism and spirit of independence, he was perhaps equally unprepared for the demands of marriage. As he admitted in his franker moments,
I used to stay out and shoot pool a lot with my buddies, and this hurt her feelings. I shouldn’t have done that, I know. She cried easily when I left her alone, which maybe I did too much.
Far from finding security with a “daddy” during the first year of her marriage, Norma Jeane quickly learned that in a crucial way her new relationship to this man bore a familiar pattern: she again felt nonessential.
“Her mentality was certainly above average,” Dougherty added privately. “She thought more maturely than I did, because of her rough life.” But given his attitude toward marriage in general (and this marriage in particular), he may have resented Norma Jeane’s maturity: thus his distance from her, and his occasional unwittingly callous attitude. He had considered the union as a favor to a sweet and attractive girl—and “an enchanting idea” for himself; it was also undertaken as a gesture by which he could give her a home with his mother when he went to war.
But however innocent and even benevolent, these are not the best motives for matrimony—a commitment for which he, as well, was apparently too emotionally callow. They both seem to have been aware of this complex of issues, for they mutually and firmly agreed on a crucial matter: they would not have children. In any case, Norma Jeane, little more than a child herself, was “terrified of the thought that I would become pregnant. . . . Women in my family had always made such a mess of mothering, and I was still getting used to being a wife. Becoming a mother was something I thought of as far off in the future.” Aware of the problems in their union (and of his eventual departure for military service) as well as their increasingly different perspectives, Dougherty was blunter: “I insisted on birth control.”
* * *
For a few months in early 1943, they lived at 14747 Archwood Street, Van Nuys—the home of Dougherty’s parents, who were living for a time outside Los Angeles. Jim continued to work at Lockheed, where his co-worker, the future actor Robert Mitchum, noticed that Dougherty brought the same lunch to work each day: a cold egg sandwich.
“Your old lady makes you the same sandwich every day?” Mitchum asked.
“You ought to see my old lady!” Dougherty replied.
The response was pure Mitchum: “I hope she looks better than your egg sandwich.”
A few days later, Dougherty brought a snapshot of his wife. Mitchum allowed that she bore no resemblance to the lunch. When Marilyn and Mitchum met a few days later, he thought she was “very shy and sweet, but not very comfortable around people.”
When Dougherty’s parents returned to Archwood Street in mid-1943, the young couple moved for several months into a house on Bessemer Street, Van Nuys. Here for the first time they enjoyed some social life with other couples: a young artist and his fiancée, an accountant, two medical students and their wives. Norma Jeane asked these friends to add their own phonograph recordings to hers for several evenings of dancing. And then, to Jim Dougherty’s astonishment, there was an almost instantaneous transformation of Norma Jeane, from demure housewife to natural performer. She loved to dance, she cut in to go from man to man, she giggled and gyrated tirelessly. Jim grew jealous as the male guests became transfixed by her energetic allure, for as Jim’s sister Elyda recalled, “She was just too beautiful. She couldn’t help it that men’s wives looked at her and got so jealous they wanted to throw rocks!” That summer of 1943, as Dougherty recalled, they often went on weekends to the beach at Santa Monica or Venice, wher
e Norma Jeane attracted attention “because [said Jim] she wore a bikini that was two sizes too small!”
While living in Van Nuys, Norma Jeane adopted a stray collie to whom she became much attached, naming him Muggsy and devoting hours each day to grooming and bathing the dog and training him. Otherwise, she spent much of the day taking similar care of herself, trying out new cosmetics, taking long baths and scrubbing her face many times with soap and water to prevent blemishes and (she believed) to improve the circulation. It seemed that in her constant effort to improve her appearance she was attempting to achieve the impossible ideal of universal acceptance—to be noticed as beautiful, even more so than she had worked toward that goal in high school. “She was a perfectionist about her appearance,” Dougherty recalled. “If anything, she was too critical of herself.”
This is not surprising, for Norma Jeane still had no close women friends. The only companions with whom she felt comfortable were her husband’s young nieces and nephews, toddlers for whom she loved to baby-sit, bathing them, cleaning their clothes, playing with them, reading to them. “Just her presence in a room seemed to keep them content,” Dougherty observed. On the other hand, he remembered that he often saw a forlorn and distracted gaze on her face when he returned home—as if she had feared he would not.
Although Dougherty’s job at Lockheed was considered essential for defense and could have maintained his deferment from active service, he longed for overseas duty with his buddies. But Norma Jeane, praying for an end to the war, implored him to wait a while longer—not to leave her in 1943, but to join the Merchant Marines at home. After a few weeks of boot camp on Santa Catalina Island, he was ordered to supervise a company of rookies at its Maritime Service Training Base, where his wife and Muggsy joined him before the end of 1943.
Twenty-seven miles offshore in San Pedro Bay, Catalina is a mile longer than that distance, and eight miles across at its widest point. In 1919, the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley began to develop the island as a resort, and there he built a great casino and promoted deep-sea fishing and other recreational activities. A popular tourist spot since the 1930s, Catalina remained largely undeveloped in 1943, when its year-round population consisted solely of several hundred retired folk. Connected by schooner, ferry and helicopter to the mainland, Catalina had only one inhabited town, Avalon; the rest of the island—with its roaming bison and goats, its mountains, canyons and inlets—offered a view of unspoiled California. Primitive though it has always been, Catalina was nevertheless the place chosen by movie moguls Cecil B. De Mille, Joseph Schenck, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn for the first theater acoustically engineered for sound films. Across the channel they came in their luxurious yachts, to preview and to discuss their various achievements.
But with the outbreak of World War II, Catalina was closed to the public and became a military training ground. The Hotel St. Catherine (named for the same saint as is the island) was used as a cooking school for service chefs; the Yacht Club was converted into classroom space; the Coast Guard trained at Two Harbors; the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency) set up shop at Toyon Bay; and the Signal Corps built radar posts at Camp Cactus. The Merchant Marine Corps, to which Jim Dougherty reported, was headquartered in Avalon, whence recruits went forth to exercises, scaling the seacliffs and mountain summits and cutting through the dense forest underbrush in preparation for more hostile conditions overseas. On Catalina Island during 1943 and 1944, the Dougherty marriage, too, became an often tangled conflict to be warily negotiated.
“We got along real well as long as she was dependent on me,” Dougherty said significantly years later. But that year, at seventeen, his wife slowly began to revaluate both her husband’s dominance and her own contingency.
Spending half his monthly salary for rent, Dougherty moved his gear, his wife and their dog into an apartment set on a hillside in Avalon, where his job was to train Marine Corps recruits. “There was a scarcity of women, of course,” he recalled,
and that’s where the trouble with men began. She was jealous whenever I ever talked about my old girlfriends, but I had more reason to be jealous of her that year on Catalina. Norma Jeane realized very well that she had a beautiful body and knew men liked it. She took Muggsy for walks wearing a tight white blouse and tight white shorts, with a ribbon in her hair for a touch of color. It was just like a dream walking down the street.
And so it appeared to the scores of military men, for whom Norma Jeane enjoyed disporting herself in “skimpy bathing suits,” according to Dougherty: “Every guy on the beach is mentally raping you!” he complained. But she could not understand his attitude: she did not wear bikinis by day and tight sweaters at night to seduce men, but simply because (as Dougherty had to admit later) “she realized what she had, didn’t think it was bad, and didn’t mind showing it off.” She also intended to keep it, and so from a military instructor named Howard Carrington (a former weight-lifting champion), she began to use barbells and dumbbells to improve her figure and posture. Just as no other female on the base was quite so natural and unashamed in displaying her body, so was Norma Jeane eager to undertake a rigorous program of physical fitness with gymnasium equipment routinely used only by men.
One evening that winter, Stan Kenton’s famous band came to entertain on the island. Girlfriends, volunteers and wives were ferried over from the mainland, and the vast Catalina Casino ballroom was alive with gaiety, couples crowding onto the dance floor with an encircling outdoor loggia affording splendid moonlit views of the sea and the town. Beer and cocktails were available, but Norma Jeane drank only ginger ale and root beer; she was still in a way Aunt Ana’s nontippling Christian Scientist “niece.”
But during the seven-hour gala, Dougherty had only one dance with his wife, who was by far the most popular partner of the evening. He recalled standing on the sidelines, hearing the men remark about his wife’s charms. “I’ll admit I was jealous, not proud of her,” he said years after they divorced.
And then, with the music and dancing still in full swing, Dougherty suddenly announced to his wife that they were departing.
“I’ll go home with you, but I have a mind to come back,” she said. “I’m having a good time!”
“But where will you sleep, Norma Jeane?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you leave me at home to come back here, you don’t have to bother coming home again!”
He won this round, but his wife had an amusing and potent riposte. Soon after the dance, he returned early one afternoon from headquarters to find the apartment door uncustomarily locked. When he knocked and called to her, Norma Jeane answered, “Is that you, Bill? Oh, just a minute!” Dougherty then announced himself. “Oh, sorry!” she replied. “I didn’t think you were coming over so soon, Tommy!” From within, there was much thumping, the apparent sounds of furniture being moved, and (so Dougherty was convinced) muted conversation. With no rear door for a lover’s swift escape, he thought he had caught her in a compromising situation, all his worst fears finally confirmed, his jealousy justified.
Almost crazed with rage, he shouted again—and then his wife opened to admit him, a wide grin on her face. She was alone, wrapped in a bath towel because he had interrupted her shower. His unwarranted anger had demonstrated that he could be unreasonably, childishly suspicious—that Dougherty did not trust his wife. And it was trust that she required more than anything to guide her securely through the shoals of young adulthood. Her retaliatory joke may also have unwittingly revealed more serious feelings: it is not hard to imagine that she would indeed have wished to be with another man, even if “Bill” and “Tommy” were only momentary fantasies.
But in a way Dougherty was right when he said that his wife was dependent on him; whatever her inchoate longings, she had no one else on whom to rely, and she was miserable when, in spring 1944, he was sent to the Pacific and Southeast Asian war zones. “She begged me not to go,” he recall
ed,
and when I said I had no choice, she begged to have a baby—a child would be her way of having me with her. But I knew that a baby would be very hard for her, and not only financially. She really wasn’t up to being a mother. I said we would have children later, after the war.
Whatever her mixed feelings about him and their marriage, Dougherty’s departure revived the old feelings of abandonment. “She wanted something, someone she could hold onto all the time,” Dougherty remembered—as he did her tears and anguish the day he left.
Now the wife of a soldier overseas, Norma Jeane went to live with her mother-in-law at 5254 Hermitage Street, North Hollywood. Ethel Dougherty worked in nearby Burbank, as a nurse at the Radioplane Company, a plant owned by the English actor Reginald Denny, who developed the first successful radio-controlled, pilotless aircraft for target training and antiaircraft. By April 1944, Ethel had found a job there for Norma Jeane, too—the unpleasant task of spraying a foul-smelling varnish on fuselage fabric (working in the “dope room,” as it was called), but it provided a steady income. With major footholds in both aircraft and defense industries, the Southern California economy was booming during the war; there were, therefore, jobs for thousands of women.
Life with her mother-in-law was reasonably comfortable and undemanding, but Norma Jeane longed for the companionship of her husband. Paradoxically, it must be admitted that she may have missed him because he was not always the most attentive and sensitive companion. Norma Jeane, in other words, was one of many who often continually seek a neglectful or even unwittingly hurtful mate, in an effort to find the earlier situation of rejection and to correct it by reversal. It was a pattern that would deepen and be repeated in the years to come.