by Donald Spoto
Her mentor caught the slightly fey aspect of Norma Jeane’s personality—the girl who giggled easily, who took her work seriously but somehow gave the simultaneous impression that there was something vastly amusing about what she was doing.
“When you stop to think about it,” she said years later,
it’s kind of funny. You smile for the camera, you hold very still, you act as if you’re having a good time—but it’s a day when you’re really having terrible cramps. I guess I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes modeling seemed so phoney and fake I just had to laugh. They thought that was great, they had a great smile from you, and they just snapped away, thinking that, well, I was having a good time. Sure, sometimes it was fun. But modeling can also be a little crazy. I once asked why I had to wear a bathing suit for a toothpaste ad. He looked at me as if I was some kind of crazy!
Lydia Bodrero Reed recalled that Norma Jeane was “very serious, very ambitious and always pleasant to be with. There was only one problem for her. She did so many covers that for a while she was considered overexposed—the magazine and advertising people had seen so much of her that after a year she couldn’t get much work.” According to Bodrero, there was another danger for a model, a different kind of overexposure. “Miss Snively warned us never, ever to appear ‘undraped’ (as she called it)—nude photography, we were told, was the kiss of death for a model.
For Norma Jeane, Snively had an additional particular recommendation: that she lighten her brown hair. Whereas a brunette would always emerge darker in a photo (and, Snively believed, would bring a dusky hue to everything), a blonde could be photographed in any wardrobe and in any light. She reminded Norma Jeane that, in the words of the play, gentlemen prefer blondes; she also pointed to Betty Grable and, before her, to Jean Harlow.
Accordingly, that winter Snively dispatched her to a photographer named Raphael Wolff, who just happened to be an old friend of Doc Goddard. He agreed to use Norma Jeane in some shampoo print advertisements, but only (and almost certainly in collusion with Snively) if she would dye her brown hair. Soon she was sitting nervously at Frank and Joseph’s, a popular movie colony salon, where a beautician named Sylvia Barnhart supervised the straightening and bleaching to a golden blond. The maintenance of this coiffure would require regular repetitions and a lifetime of meticulous care—especially later, when the color was made even lighter, to glazed and haloed blond and eventually to shimmering platinum.
That winter the trio of Snively-Wolff-Barnhart brought closer to reality Grace’s long-cherished hope that in her precious Norma Jeane there would one day be completed the fantastic recreation of Jean Harlow. And when the Goddards moved back to California from West Virginia that summer, no one was more thrilled than Grace with Norma Jeane’s new image. But Jim Dougherty returned to California, too (from his overseas service), and he saw more changes than simply his wife’s hair color. She was particularly excited about a short silent film that the Blue Book Agency had just made of her. Smiling directly into the lens in medium-closeup shot, she modeled a swimsuit, walked in a summer sundress, smiled and waved at the camera. It had been, she told him, the most exciting day of her life thus far. Despite Norma Jeane’s earlier report that Jim had approved her modeling aspirations, he was now unimpressed with the results.
1. The two published accounts consist of a thirteen-page article, “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” which appeared in the March 1953 issue of Photoplay, pp. 47–85; and a later 142-page book that expanded that article—The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe (Chicago: The Playboy Press, 1976). Under the name of Dougherty’s sister Elyda Nelson, there also appeared “The True Life Story of Marilyn Monroe,” published in the December 1952 issue of Modern Screen. According to her brother, this ghostwritten article was based on anecdotes provided by him and was much dramatized by the editors.
2. Norma Jeane was in fact rated as “above average” by her supervisors at Radioplane.
3. Conover (who was dispatched to his task by his superior officer, Ronald Reagan) wrongly stated in his memoir Finding Marilyn that they were first introduced on June 26, 1945; in fact there had been at least a dozen meetings during the seven months before then, as Norma Jeane’s letters to Grace reveal. Alas, Finding Marilyn abounds with inaccuracies, unconscionable reams of fabricated dialogue and imaginatively concocted events. Conover (1919–1983) was a talented photographer but a patent fabulist, too.
Chapter Six
DECEMBER 1945–AUGUST 1946
WE GOT ALONG REAL WELL as long as she was dependent on me.” Thus did Jim Dougherty summarize his first marriage.
When he had first left for military service, his last sight of Norma Jeane could have been a scene from a sentimental wartime movie. His devoted child-bride had clung to him at the harbor; she then waited tearfully, waving a pink scarf as his ship glided slowly from shore and out into San Pedro Bay before slipping over the horizon.
But when Dougherty returned eighteen months later in December 1945, anticipating a joyful Christmas reunion with her and his family, there was no emotional greeting at dockside. Years later he recalled:
She was an hour late. She embraced me and kissed me, but it was a little cool. I had two weeks off before resuming shipboard duties along the California coast, but I don’t think we had two nights together during that time. She was busy modeling, earning good money. It was my first inkling of her ambition.
Speaking of the same time, he added without conviction, “It never occurred to me that she was unfaithful.” That statement, in light of what he soon learned, is incredible. Dougherty was surely canny enough to see the danger signals: his wife’s emotional distance, her evident career aspirations—and, the day after his arrival, her departure for the Christmas holidays to work with a handsome stranger.
André de Dienes was thirty-two, a blue-eyed, muscular Transylvanian immigrant. After sojourns as a darling of café society in Rome, Paris and London, de Dienes arrived in Hollywood; there, he was much in demand because of his talent with a camera, his burly attractiveness and both a manner and an accent that seemed to unite the sinister allure of Bela Lugosi with the Byronic charm of Charles Boyer. That autumn, Emmeline Snively had arranged a meeting between de Dienes and Norma Jeane. According to Snively, “she still seemed a scared, pretty, lonely little kid who wore mostly fresh white cotton dresses and wanted somebody, somewhere, to think she was worth something.”
De Dienes began simply. He positioned her, shoeless and smiling, along a stretch of Route 101 outside North Hollywood: despite the blinding sun, she gazed unblinkingly into the shutter. The results of this session were more than encouraging, for there was Norma Jeane, pert in pigtails, a red skirt dotted with white stars and a striped jersey—like a sporty hitchhiker, heedless of traffic, sunburn and a photographer who knew how to get what he wanted. He then took her into a grassy field, removed the ribbons from her hair, exchanged the tight shirt for a frilly white apron and borrowed a newborn lamb from a nearby field: now she was the farmer’s daughter, unworldly but somehow ripe with what de Dienes called “naive but disturbing charm.”1 There followed another quick change of clothes, her hair was tied back of the neck, she donned a pair of blue jeans and a red blouse was knotted just under the bosom for a peekaboo midriff: she perched on a fence and smiled at the camera as she was about to enter a barn. Daisy Mae was beckoning to every Li’l Abner in America.
When Norma Jeane showed these photographs to Jim, he manifested frank indifference: “So far as I was concerned, she was turning into another human being. She showed me the pictures, her new dresses and shoes—as if I cared about such things. She was proud of her magazine covers and her new popularity at Blue Book, and she expected me to be, too. She wanted a career.” She was, in other words, no longer the dependent castaway; she was now a young woman with ambition, and this was unacceptable to the sturdy, macho marine.
Just before Christmas, to the horror of Ana Lower and Ethel Dougherty (not to say the simmering indignation of the abando
ned husband), Norma Jeane left for another, longer journey with de Dienes. “The truth is,” she said years later, “that I began the trip with only business in mind [de Dienes paid her a flat fee of two hundred dollars]. But André had other ideas.” By this time, due no doubt to Dougherty’s apathy, Norma Jeane’s zeal and de Dienes’s ardor (“I longed to make her my mistress”), she was hurled again into romantic jeopardy. “The plain truth is that she was exploited by André,” according to actor Alex D’Arcy, who knew the photographer. “He was a thoroughly crazy creature who let her think he was indispensable to her.”
André and Norma Jeane first stopped at Zuma Beach, where he clicked away as she tossed a volleyball, waded into the surf, sported a two-piece bathing suit and ran along the shore. Then they headed for the Mojave Desert, where only the simplest outfit was needed to suggest the link between two types of natural beauty. From there they proceeded north through Yosemite, then on to Nevada and Washington. André’s ardor was not cooled as he photographed his model on the snowy slopes near Mount Hood, but when they stopped at a cabin or motel at night, Norma Jeane at first kept the relationship platonic and insisted on separate rooms: “She needed a really good night’s sleep to look her best the next day [and so] she asked me to be good.” For the present he endured, affecting the gloomy dissatisfaction of a rejected suitor even as he slid notes under her door. “Come to me,” he scrawled. “We’ll make love. You won’t be disappointed.”
But a telephone call Norma Jeane put through to Grace Goddard set in motion a chain of events that eventually brought the model to her photographer’s bed. Gladys was then living in Portland, Oregon, and Grace arranged for mother and daughter to meet.
The reunion between the two women after more than six years was predictably awkward; it was also unbearably sad for Norma Jeane. After the San Francisco clinic found that she was no danger to herself or others, Gladys had been given two hundred dollars and two dresses, and after nearly a year of wandering alone around the Pacific Northwest (often finding shelter with the Salvation Army), the poor woman took a room in a seedy hotel in downtown Portland. Long accustomed to being treated like a mentally ill incompetent, Gladys had lost the ability of normal socializing; anorexic and impassive, she gave an appearance that terrified her daughter, who had arrived with gifts and who gave, that afternoon, a sterling performance.
She embraced her mother, who was completely withdrawn as she sat rigidly in a wicker chair; she then showed Gladys some of André’s photos and gave her a bag of candy. But Gladys displayed neither gratitude nor pleasure. She could not even manage to reach out and touch her daughter, and after a long and awkward silence (during which de Dienes paced nervously nearby) Norma Jeane knelt at her mother’s feet.
And then for a moment the cloud of separation seemed to part. “I’d like to come and live with you, Norma Jeane,” Gladys whispered. This frightened Norma Jeane, who scarcely knew her mother and, foreseeing the end of her own marriage, shrank from the thought of being burdened with Gladys’s care. Just then, André spoke up, saying that he was going to marry Norma Jeane after she divorced, and that they were going to move to New York. Norma Jeane tried to interrupt him, to correct his expectations, but he announced abruptly that they had to leave the hotel. “I’ll see you soon, Mama,” Norma Jeane said. Fighting tears, she kissed her mother, left her address and telephone number on the table with the gifts and quietly withdrew. Back in André’s car as they headed south toward home, she wept inconsolably.
Throughout her life, Norma Jeane was haunted by the thought of Gladys, who outlived her by twenty-two years. As she later said, there had never been a chance for a normal mother-daughter relationship, and the fear of sharing a family mental illness compounded the pointed resentment her childhood memories evoked. The actress Marilyn Monroe never took the risk of permitting a situation in which Gladys could again reject or withdraw from her. But this engendered a pattern with motherly women in her life: need clashed with fear, and to forestall pain she often rejected others first. Ashamed and avoiding reminders of her past, she tried in vain to forget her mother, although from afar she covered Gladys’s material needs when she could.
* * *
That evening Norma Jeane and André stopped at a country inn. There, just as she had sought comfort in Jim’s arms after the (real or feigned) rejection by her father, so now she reached out to another strong, older man. “In my dreams I had explored her body,” de Dienes wrote tremulously years later; “reality far surpassed my imagination. . . . [And then] I realized she was crying.” The tears, he saw, bespoke only Norma Jeane’s happiness, her pleasure, her relief after the tensions with Dougherty and the difficult reunion with Gladys. She was not mired in remorse, for throughout the rest of the journey she was “playful and provocative” (thus de Dienes), an energetic, eager lover who played peekaboo with sheets and nightgowns and who teased before satisfying. Of that night, and of this brief affair in early 1946, Norma Jeane later said nothing.
But the romance with de Dienes marked a turning point. He was her first sexual partner outside marriage (or the second, if David Conover’s dubious account is accepted). But apart from his obvious physical attractions and the fact that he was an older man (like Dougherty, a kind of surrogate father), he had—like Conover—won her over simply because he was a photographer. The men behind the still cameras in these early years were like the later cinematographers, producers and agents. They could present her to the world in literally the best light; she needed them, was grateful to them, felt she owed them and repaid them with herself, the reality whose image they were promoting and capturing for anonymous others.
This was the beginning of an important pattern in her life, for she was excited by the act of being photographed. “Making love” to the camera is both satisfying and safe: one may fantasize anyone or everyone, but the moment is unthreatening. This is not so uncommon among models and actors, whose desire to be seen, recognized, approved and accepted, whose longing to please and to gratify others, is at the foundation of their craft.
In this regard, she was very like Jean Harlow, who flirted (sometimes outrageously) with photographers. At an outdoor session with photographer Ted Allan, for example, Harlow was once handed a fishnet to throw over a white dress. She promptly stripped naked and stood wearing only the fishnet. “Isn’t this better?” she asked Allan, who later thought that Harlow “figured that if I were turned on, I’d take better pictures. I realized then that she always needed something personal—that feeling of being liked. It made her feel secure.” Norma Jeane was not so different from the woman who had been constantly set before her as an idol.
Observed and admired for her body, each wished to please the gazer, to gratify those who desired her. Sex for Norma Jeane became the logical extension of a character trait within her from childhood and throughout her school years: it was a simple attempt to win approval. The girl who dreamed of worshipers before her nakedness could now give herself in the flesh, could gratify their adoration. To Norma Jeane this was not a matter of immodesty or immorality, nor did she ever seem to feel guilty. She was indeed, as David Conover had said, “doing what came naturally.”
Norma Jeane returned to Los Angeles a more experienced young woman, and this must have been evident in her manner. She found a furious husband who demanded that she make a choice between him and her career. She argued that she had no reason to be a housewife when there had been no husband around for two years; besides, she insisted, what was wrong with modeling? The answer to that was twofold: Dougherty wanted a sedate housewife, not a glamour-queen-in-the-making; he also wanted children. A new cold war infected the Dougherty household that spring of 1946, especially when (thus Jim) his wife “nearly went berserk—she thought she was pregnant.” Perhaps they both thought to question the paternity; in any case, the onset of her period resolved the matter.
In late January, Jim was recalled to duty in the Pacific, where the Merchant Marines helped to retransport men and supplies back
to Europe and America after the Allied victory; he said that he expected her to have become wiser by the time he returned later that year.
When she heard that Norma Jeane was alone, Grace occasionally invited her to Van Nuys for a meal or a weekend visit. But Norma Jeane invariably declined. This may have been partly a desire to further her independence from the past, but there was another, more ominous, reason for her distance. By 1946, Grace was a seasoned alcoholic, sometimes inappropriately giddy and verbose, frequently gloomy and remote. Like Gladys, Grace too was now unpredictable.
From her small apartment beneath Ana Lower’s, Norma Jeane went out to work as a model. Emmeline Snively now had a wide variety of photographs to circulate round the offices of Los Angeles artists and photographers, and her telephone rang almost daily with offers.
In February, Norma Jeane posed for the Scottish photographer William Burnside, who was struck by “the lost look in the middle of a smile” and, like Conover and de Dienes, was charmed by her cooperation and her alacrity to please. “A kiss took weeks to achieve,” Burnside said years later; from there it was a short route to closer intimacy. First she loved the camera, according to Burnside: “it soothed her;” then she loved the man who held it. But Norma Jeane was no rapacious starlet offering sex as barter to advance her career: Burnside remembered “her shyness and sense of insecurity. She did not like to be touched too soon. One could not even think of sexual conquest by force.”
Norma Jeane herself was undergoing a rapid transformation. The awkwardness, the concern for acceptance, the occasional stutter and the hesitation were still there, but now she was giving herself—simply visually, to the camera, or frankly sexually, to the photographer. In the case of Burnside and perhaps others, a professional’s talent secured her gratitude, and her gratitude was expressed with her body. But Burnside soon ended their romance. She sent him a lyric: