by Donald Spoto
I could have loved you once, and even said it
But you went away,
A long way away.
When you came back it was too late
And love was a forgotten word.
Remember?
In February and March 1946 she posed for the artist Earl Moran and for the photographer Joseph Jasgur, and in both cases her relationship was very warm but strictly platonic. Moran paid her ten dollars an hour, photographing her in a variety of dress and semidress: as a bathing beauty in skimpy two-piece swimsuits; drying herself after a bath; bare-breasted, hanging up her lingerie to dry. From these snapshots he then drew charcoal and chalk pictures he sold to Brown & Bigelow, the major calendar-art company in America. “She liked to pose,” Moran said years later. “For her it was acting, and emotionally she did everything right.”
Jasgur, a celebrity photographer known for his contributions to Silver Screen, Photoplay and the Hollywood Citizen-News, agreed to Emmeline Snively’s request for test photos of Norma Jeane. One afternoon, he opened the door of his Hollywood studio apartment to find “a shy girl, nothing like a typical model, all breathless and anxious.” She was also over an hour late, which surprised him, for it seemed incompatible with her obvious earnestness about her career; he later thought her tardiness was related to “her uncertainty that she was presentable or acceptable.”
Norma Jeane told Jasgur that she had no money to pay for the photographs and that she lacked even the price of a good meal—surely an exaggeration given her full work schedule that winter. But Jasgur was a friend of Snively, and while the first negatives dried that March 10 evening, he bought her supper. Their sessions continued throughout that month—atop the Hollywood sign and at Zuma Beach, where he took color as well as black-and-white photos, capturing her friskiness as she drew hearts on the wet sand.
Laszlo Willinger also made some extraordinary photos of Norma Jeane that year.
When she saw a camera—any camera, she lit up and was totally different. The moment the shot was over, she fell back into her not very interesting position. But she had a talent to make people feel sorry for her, and she exploited it to the best of her ability—even people who had been around and knew models fell for this “Help me” pose.
With her husband away and the circle of her acquaintances widening, it would not have been surprising to find this pretty, lonely nineteen-year-old available to a sharp admirer. But the situation was quite different. The actor Ken DuMain, as well as Norma Jeane’s colleague Lydia Bodrero, remembered that Snively’s models often double- and triple-dated with friends in the spring of 1946. Evenings with Norma Jeane might include a movie and a ride out to the beach, or a few hours dancing at a club. She did not have a reputation for easy virtue, although she did go out with several young men more than once. DuMain recalled escorting her to a Sunset Strip nightclub she especially liked, “where a female impersonator named Ray Bourbon attracted crowds of admirers. She loved this sort of thing and was great fun to be with. There was also an innate sweetness and decency about her that no atmosphere or joke could alter.”
Even had she been so inclined, the opportunities would have been short-circuited by a new and awkward circumstance in her life. Piteous letters arrived almost daily in Norma Jeane’s mailbox that spring, for Gladys begged to come and live with her. She would be no trouble, Gladys promised; she would find a job. In April, Norma Jeane sent cash to cover the journey, and soon they were sharing the one bed and two small rooms on Nebraska Avenue. This would be Norma Jeane’s last brief and ineffective attempt to establish a relationship with her mother.
Such was the domestic situation Jim found when he returned on a brief furlough in April. Arriving at the apartment, he found Gladys staring at him blankly: it was clear, as he recalled years later, that Gladys by this time was not a woman who could care for herself. But neither could her daughter assume such a responsibility.
The precise nature of Gladys’s mental and emotional problems remains vague, for the few medical reports remaining among family records are inconclusive. On the one hand, she was alert, aware of her surroundings and her identity, and she was not violent; she did not suffer from hallucinations, paranoia or frank schizophrenia. Contrariwise, there was a retreat from the ordinary business of living; she seemed, in other words, unable or unwilling to maintain ordinary human relations, much less steady employment: in general terms, she seems to have suffered a loss of affect. “She wandered,” Eleanor Goddard recalled, “and she was unpredictable. She was docile, but she was not ‘there.’ ” Years later, more sophisticated medical examinations might have located a biochemical imbalance or even a benign tumor; psychological counseling might have disclosed chronic, treatable phobias or a guilt complex; and drug treatment might have provided help. But in 1946 there were no human or financial resources for Gladys.
The immediate corollary of her living with Norma Jeane was clear: there was no room for three, and so after only a few moments Jim departed to spend the two-day leave with his mother. In light of their earlier disputes over her career and his plans for their future, he interpreted Gladys’s presence as a convenient way for Norma Jeane to prepare for a separation. She was “calculating,” it seemed to him. “She had made sure that Gladys would be living there on Nebraska Avenue, that her mother would have my place in the only bed in the apartment.” But this assessment may have been too harsh: unaware of Gladys’s earlier request in Portland, he felt resentful, summarily excluded from contact or conversation with his wife about their marriage. To him, Gladys seemed simply “a woman without much emotion,” not to say an unwelcome intrusion. He returned to Merchant Marine duty without seeing Norma Jeane again.
In late April, Gladys entered a Northern California clinic, where her daughter struggled to send money to provide supplements for her mother’s basic care. Such contributions never ceased, although Norma Jeane’s primary concern was now her career.
During early 1946, she spoke several times with Emmeline Snively about the possibility of working in the movies. Conover, de Dienes, Burnside and Moran had told her that this was not a vain hope, that she was a natural for the studio “stables” of starlets. Annually, hundreds were tested and signed low-paying contracts. Sometimes they were cast in bit parts, a handful were trained and groomed for small speaking roles and, for the very few fortunate, there was eventual graduation to supporting-player status.
Among these aspirants, only a minority became stars. The studios knew that public taste was fickle and that great success rarely endured. Apprentices had to be available, a pool of “talent” from which producers could select the new starlets. Among the accepted norms, one was unwritten but taken for granted. An unmarried young woman was more favorably regarded for possible advancement in the system: pregnancy, after all, could cost a studio enormous sums if a picture had to be canceled or recast during production. Eager starlets had to be ready for a variety of sacrifices.
These facts of studio life were impressed on her not only by Snively and photographers but also by Grace, with whom Norma Jeane met at least once in April. The Dougherty marriage would have to be formally terminated if Norma Jeane hoped to be groomed for stardom. Grace had arranged Gladys’s initial hospitalization; she maneuvered her guardianship of Norma Jeane; she decided the girl’s sojourn at the orphanage. She had planned the marriage to Jim Dougherty, and now she could abet its dissolution. Indeed, as Jim had said, “Grace had a lot to do with everything.” And so, on May 14, Norma Jeane was shipped from Ana Lower to another of Grace’s aunts—a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Minnie Willette, who lived most conveniently at 604 South 3rd Street in Las Vegas, where divorces could be obtained almost as easily as entrance to the local gambling casinos.
Two weeks later, on duty near Shanghai, Dougherty received a letter with a Nevada postmark: a lawyer named C. Norman Cornwall announced that Norma Jeane Dougherty had filed for divorce. “First she thought she had security with me,” Dougherty recalled thinking at that time,
“and now she figures a studio contract can provide it better. There are a thousand-and-one girls who can sing and dance and look good, and she wants to be in the movies. Well, good luck to her.” Jim at once wired the appropriate government office in Los Angeles to cease sending monthly payments to his wife.
By the end of June, he was back in California, where Ana Lower gave him a telephone number. But Norma Jeane was not with Minnie: she was in a Las Vegas hospital, under treatment for a mouth infection.
At first Dougherty did not recognize her deep voice on the telephone—a tone due not to her medical condition, as he learned at once. “They tell me I have to lower my tone if I’m going to be in the movies,” she said candidly, adding at once: “The nurse brought me a letter a few days ago. Why did you cut off my allowance?”
“Look, kid,” Dougherty replied with equal candor, “this is the way it goes. You don’t pay for anything unless you’re getting it.” When she went on to say that she did not want to lose Jim, that they could still “date”—and that she was merely being practical about her career—he was adamant. “She thought we could live together without being married,” Dougherty said years later, “that we could go on just as before.” Unsure of her future, she was attempting a safe middle ground.
“Are you crazy?” Jim asked. “I want a wife and kids. You want a divorce, we’ll get a divorce. Then it’s over.”
And so it was. Charging Dougherty with the typical generic assertion of “extreme mental cruelty that has impaired the plaintiff’s health,” Norma Jeane filed a suit for divorce and was uncontested by her husband. At two o’clock on the afternoon of September 13, 1946, Norma Jeane and Minnie appeared for a final hearing before District Judge A. S. Henderson in Las Vegas. After stating her name and Nevada address, the plaintiff answered a few questions put to her by her attorney:
“Is it your intention to make [Nevada] your home and permanent place of residence?”
“Yes.”
“Has that been your intention since your arrival in May?”
“Yes.”
“You intend to remain here for an indefinite period of time?”
“Yes.”
“You have stated that your husband treated you with extreme cruelty without just cause or provocation on your part. Will you tell the Court some of the acts upon which you base this cruelty charge?”
“Well, in the first place, my husband didn’t support me and he objected to my working, criticized me for it and he also had a bad temper and would fly into rages and he left me on three different occasions and criticized me and embarrassed me in front of my friends and he didn’t try to make a home for me.”
“What effect did this have on your health?”
“It upset me and made me nervous.”
“So much so that you cannot live with him under the conditions and enjoy good health?”
“Yes.”
“Is a reconciliation possible?”
“No.”
After less than five minutes in court, Judge Henderson slammed his gavel, saying, “A decree of divorce is granted,” even as he rose from his chair. The marriage was dissolved at that moment. James Edward Dougherty countersigned the decree two weeks later, giving Norma Jeane Dougherty her freedom and his 1935 Ford coupe. They neither met nor spoke again. “I married and was divorced,” she told a reporter four years later. “It was a mistake and he has since remarried.” That was her last public statement on the matter.
Considering her testimony, the State of Nevada might have charged Norma Jeane with perjury, for she had not in fact lived there without interruption from May 14 to September 13, as the divorce law required. During the summer, she had slipped quietly back to Los Angeles, where Emmeline Snively had contacted her friend Helen Ainsworth. A severe, two-hundred-pound agent familiarly known as “Cupid,” Ainsworth managed the West Coast office of a talent agency known as the National Concert Artists Corporation. As a favor to her old friend Snively, Ainsworth arranged an introduction for Norma Jeane with an executive at the Twentieth Century–Fox Studios on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.2
Precisely at the appointed hour, ten-thirty on the morning of Wednesday, July 17, 1946, Norma Jeane arrived at Ben Lyon’s office. Then forty-five, Lyon had a long stage and screen career behind him, most notably as the hero of the picture firmly establishing Jean Harlow’s career—Howard Hughes’s production of Hell’s Angels in 1930. Lyon and his wife, actress Bebe Daniels, had lived in England during World War II (during which he served with distinction in the Royal Air Force), and on their return to America he was instantly engaged by Fox as recruiter of new talent and director of casting. He handed Norma Jeane a section of the script for Winged Victory and asked her to read a few lines; in Fox’s 1944 wartime melodrama, the words had been spoken by Judy Holliday, another slightly breathless blonde with great potential for comedy. Nothing is known of this first meeting, nor of Norma Jeane’s reading, but Lyon asked her to return for a film test.
And so on July 19, 1946, Norma Jeane was led to one of the sets being built for a new Betty Grable picture, Mother Wore Tights. There she was introduced to the great cinematographer Leon Shamroy (who had won Academy Awards for The Black Swan, Wilson and Leave Her to Heaven); to veteran makeup artist Allan Snyder (who supervised the cosmetics for, among others, Fox’s major stars Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell and Alice Faye); to director Walter Lang (known for glossy, popular entertainments); and to wardrobe designer Charles LeMaire. Lyon had summoned four of the studio’s best technicians for the test scene.
But contrary to popular belief, this was no simple task. “She’d been modeling,” recalled Snyder, “and so she came to us knowing everything about everything, or so she believed. I remember thinking that here was a very determined and ambitious girl, despite her obvious nervousness.” Norma Jeane demanded that Snyder apply heavy makeup, which was entirely inappropriate for a Technicolor test, and when Shamroy saw this he put down his large cigar and bellowed Snyder’s nickname: “Whitey, what the hell have you got on that face? We can’t photograph her that way! Take this girl downstairs, wash the damn stuff off, do her face the way you know it ought to be and bring her back up!”
Her anxiety, and what Norma Jeane knew was her tactical error, at once caused her to stutter and perspire, and (as often throughout her life) embarrassment and fear of failure caused red blotches to emerge on her face. To her great relief, she was then told this would be a silent test: only the merits of her appearance would be presented for the approval of production chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Norma Jeane was given a series of simple commands, the small crew of miracle workers set to their task, a hundred-foot roll of Technicolor stock was put in the camera and Lang cried “Action!”
There was silence on the set. Wearing a floor-length crinoline gown, Norma Jeane walked back and forth. She sat on a high stool. She lit a cigarette, stubbed it out, rose and walked toward a stage window. A remarkable transformation occurred: while the camera was in operation, she showed not a trace of distress; her hands were steady, her movement unhurried, poised; she seemed the most confident woman in the world. Most memorable, her radiant smile evoked smiles from the bystanders.
“When I first watched her,” Leon Shamroy said five years later,
I thought, “This girl will be another Harlow!” Her natural beauty plus her inferiority complex gave her a look of mystery. . . . I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson . . . and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow. Every frame of the test radiated sex. She didn’t need a sound track—she was creating effects visually. She was showing us she could sell emotions in pictures.
Either during that weekend or the following Monday, the film was screened for Zanuck, whose approval was necessary if a contract were to be offered. As it happened, he was not particularly zealous about Norma Jeane. For one thing, she had never acted anywhere—not a single role, even on an amateur ni
ght, nor had she ever had an acting lesson. Zanuck, who personally preferred brunettes like Linda Darnell, also felt that Betty Grable supplied enough blond sex appeal for the studio. In any case, he did not see the same radiance that excited his colleagues. But there was no financial risk in deferring to Lyon and Shamroy. The studio’s legal department was instructed to draw up an agreement, and on Tuesday afternoon, July 23, Helen Ainsworth appointed her colleague Harry Lipton to represent the new client on behalf of National Concert Artists.
Norma Jeane was offered a standard contract without exclusions, exceptions or emendations. Her guaranteed salary, paid whether she worked or did not, was to be seventy-five dollars a week for six months, with the studio’s option to renew for another half-year at twice that amount. Her fate would be determined not so much by her talent as by the interest she might evoke from the ninety-person press and publicity staff at the studio. These “flacks,” as they were called, aroused public curiosity about players, planted stories in newspapers and fan magazines and kept the attention of the most influential columnists of the day: Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky. They, along with Photoplay, Modern Screen, Silver Screen and other slick publications, were courted and cajoled to advance the careers of certain actors. Their power was literally unlimited.
However modest the deal and uncertain the future, Norma Jeane was thrilled—as she was at the first mention of her name in a Hollywood gossip column, on July 29. Hedda Hopper’s syndicated roundup of movie news included this item: