Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

  As she followed each of Lyon’s whispered cues, it seemed that within two or three minutes’ time her very physical presence had changed before the two men’s amazed eyes. Her hands were steady now. All her movements were unhurried. No trace of her earlier distress could be seen anywhere in her face or body. She brimmed with confidence. And yes, thought cameraman Shamroy, she was now every bit as stunning as Ben Lyon had promised after all.

  “Put the cigarette out…” continued Lyon. “Get up…Walk forward toward the camera…”

  As she advanced nearer to Shamroy’s view-finder, a cobalt-hued mistiness about her eyes and a garnet-hued luminosity about her lips seemed to intermingle with the scintillations of her gown. For a moment it appeared to him that millions of particles of colored light were clustering around her from all directions in a field of energy, which she in turn channeled straight into the all-consuming mechanical eye that he held trained upon her. Shamroy cocked his head above the viewfinder to better see what was happening. Perhaps, he had to conclude, it was only a freakish effect generated by a spotlight’s glare on the viewfinder in combination with the glittering of her sequined gown.

  But many times throughout the day, his thoughts returned to the test. He wondered intensely how it was going to turn out. And late in the afternoon, when he viewed the newly processed film on the flickering screen of the Moviola, he got a cold chill.

  “This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures,” Leon Shamroy was to recall several years afterward of the impression it made on him. “She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson. Like one of those lush stars of the silent era.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ford Sports Coupe

  From a taxi rounding the corner onto Nebraska Street not many mornings later, Jim Dougherty spotted his 1935 Ford sports coupe parked in Aunt Ana’s driveway. It told the twenty-five-year-old sailor that this time he’d caught his wife at home. And that so far his plan was working.

  Seconds later he rang the doorbell and waited, his mind flashing down to his newly bought suit and to all the trouble he’d had finding a decent fit after docking yesterday because of wartime shortages still going on everywhere…

  …When the door opened and there stood Norma Jeane.

  Jim Dougherty took in a breath. She’d become a blonde. And missing now seemed to be half of the adorable chubbiness about her cheeks. Neither in body was she quite his solid old Norma Jeane, as though the shedding of the darker coloration had shifted some weight off her feet and lifted her partway up into the air.

  Nor was anything else the same when their eyes met. There was no sending forth her rollicking laugh or throwing her arms up to hug him as in the wonderful days of the past. Too much had happened since then. Instead she chose to avert her look and stick out her lower lip like a sulking child.

  “Why did you cut off my allowance, Jimmie?” were her first words as she drew a flimsy wrapper around herself against the chilly air. Her face was devoid of makeup. She’d come to the door straight out of bed, where obviously she hadn’t been sleeping too well.

  “Look, kid, you don’t pay for anything unless you’re getting it,” replied Jim, affecting an unfeeling face.

  Norma Jeane gave him a sharply pained look as if her ears had just heard something too unbelievably crass. Now here, thought Jim with delight—despite all this new blondness and sleekness—here was his same old Norma Jeane! So very proper. So easily shocked. He felt a constriction in the area of his chest and throat before the reappearing sparks of her old life and loveliness. Notwithstanding that now she had the nerve to launch into a sob story about being in the hospital in Las Vegas with a terrible mouth infection just when the government letter arrived telling her the allotment money was ending.

  Jim laughed out loud as sarcastically as he could. “Well gee, Norma Jeane,” he broke in, “I’m so sorry I had that money cut off when you were sick! How thoughtless of me! Umm—I wonder, since we happen to be on the subject of surprise letters…”

  This was the amazing thing, he was thinking. Here was this girl, so quick-witted and perceptive in every other way—who’d proven herself, in fact, even as far back as the day she’d married him at the age of sixteen, to be more levelheaded and adult than Jim himself had been then at the age of twenty-one. Yet at certain times, he was always having to spell out the most basic things to her.

  “…I wonder,” he went on, “if you maybe gave any thought to my feelings when you had that letter sent to me on board ship?”

  Norma Jeane stared at him blankly for a moment and then just looked away. She couldn’t answer.

  “From a lawyer, for God’s sake!” he pursued, his already-big voice growing louder. “You couldn’t even have the decency to let me know in your own words that you were going to dump me!”

  The booming of his voice caused her to tilt her head to one side and indicate behind her in the direction of their old bedroom. “I think my mother’s getting sort of upset,” she said softly.

  Jim leaned inside the door to take a look. Staring up at him apprehensively from the one bed in the apartment was Norma Jeane’s mother—the strange, petite Gladys who only a few months before had been released from a mental hospital. He immediately said to himself, There go my hopes of settling everything in bed. Which was a shame because, no matter what, everything between them always turned out perfectly in bed.

  Norma Jeane seized on the distraction to start looking him over carefully while allowing a bit of the old twinkle to come into her eyes. This was a look that he loved above everything else. Never had it failed to melt his heart.

  “Your suit doesn’t fit,” she said.

  “I know. But I wanted out of that sailor suit,” admitted Jim.

  Saying so was tantamount to offering her a white flag of surrender after the terrific row they’d had in January. The truth of it was that since then, he’d spent most of seven months at sea in deep reflection. And now he saw that Norma Jeane—however far off the track she may have gotten in this madness of hers about modeling—had been right about something else. That purely for the sake of a little financial security in shaky times, Jim had been stretching his wartime stint with the Merchant Marine too far beyond the end of the war for the good of their marriage. It had brought her to the point where, here at the door, she was now uttering the most outlandish proposals.

  “Jimmie, we can still be close,” he heard Norma Jeane saying in her sweetest voice. “We can still date. We can go on just like before…” And incredibly to Jim’s ears, she went on babbling about how this divorce of hers was just a career move—how she was trying to land a movie contract, how the studios only hired single girls, and so on.

  “Are you crazy?!” he broke in, his mind suddenly awhirl. “I want a wife and kids. You want a divorce? We’ll get a divorce! Then it’s over.”

  “Let’s talk tomorrow,” suggested Norma Jeane softly. “Maybe a little later in the day, OK? Can we do it then, Jimmie? Please?”

  “OK,” Jim said, shoving his long arm past her and grabbing the set of keys he’d been noticing on her small table just inside the door. “I’ll take the car. I’m gonna need it to get around during my leave.”

  “Oh!” came a little surprised cry from Norma Jeane. “Well, I really do need it to—umm…” She drew her words out, waiting for him to change his mind, because of course she wanted the car to make more of her confounded modeling rounds. But Jim had no intention of giving up the keys, and they both knew that the car was registered in his name. “…Well, all right, Jimmie.”

  He spun angrily around, sprang down to the walk, and strode off toward his sports coupe, finding means to congratulate himself only at the cost of wild irrelevancy, “Good, at least I’ve rescued my car from her! She’s a terrible driver anyway—an actual menace behind the wheel!”

  Jimmie,” Norma Jeane called after him.

  At the car, he turned and glowered back at her. She was standing very still in the doorway. He’d bee
n speaking to her in a certain contemptuous tone of voice that he’d very rarely ever used before because of how deeply he knew it was capable of hurting her.

  “I think…soon…I’ll be making a lot mm-more mm-money,” she said mysteriously.

  “That’s nice, Norma Jeane,” sneered Jim. “I’m very glad for you.”

  “Bye, Jimmie,” she called, her voice small. “Sorry about this mm-morning.”

  Even in his anger, Jim’s conscience rebuked him for hurting her the way he had, but he told himself, That’s OK, she doesn’t even know the meaning of hurt! The tailspin of agonies he’d felt upon receiving her lawyer’s letter aboard ship in Shanghai was rushing back on him so vividly that he choked back a sob as, without answering her, he got into the sports coupe.

  Sorry about this morning! What about the divorce? What about our whole life?!

  Certainly his pride had been stung by her suggesting he take a demotion from the rank of husband to that of a favorite beau while she replaced him in their bed—replaced Jim, who knew and loved her far better than anyone else in the world—with that nutty, floating-in-and-out mother Gladys whom Norma Jeane had never once gone to see in the mental hospital during the almost four years of their marriage. But worse than anything else was the aching in his heart because he hadn’t even been able to embrace her this morning.

  As he headed for his folks’ place in Thousand Oaks, Jim took consolation in one thing. He’d been right about her so-called career. It looked no less like a failure now than it had looked to him seven months ago. Her very first words to Jim this morning about the allotment money had said it all. She was still broke. Sure, maybe she’d gotten her face on a few magazine covers around the country, but who had paid for it? He had! She’d emptied out their bank account. It was drained—finding that out was a big part of what had so angered him in January. She’d pawned everything except the radio. She’d even sold their silver. All this just to cover the costs of her makeup and clothes, items which were considered quite incomprehensibly by the photographers to be her responsibility. Well, if she wasn’t going to be his wife, he certainly wasn’t going to be her meal ticket for one more day.

  But something still mystified Jim. It came to him suddenly as he drove, after he’d considered everything else, and it stopped him dead in his thoughts.

  Wait a minute. Did she say she’d decided to become an actress?

  An actress? Jim was sure he’d heard her say that. Whereas here he’d always assumed that he was the ham in the family, once having gone as far as to win top honors playing Shylock in a big interschool competition. It was Jim who’d rubbed elbows with the stars, having been active in the Van Nuys High School Masquers’ Club with Jane Russell, who was now making a nationwide sensation in The Outlaw—and having been close working buddies at the Lockheed factory with Bob Mitchum, who just that past April had been up for an Academy Award for his supporting role in The Story of G.I. Joe. It was Jim who in the past had found occasion to introduce an overawed Norma Jeane to these old friends of his, not the other way around. So where on earth was all this coming from?—this ambition of hers, first to become a model and now all of a sudden to act, to get into the movies? Certainly she’d never spoken a word about the movies to him before! Not a word.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Oceans of Print

  “I’ve got it!” cried Norma Jeane several days later as she burst into her aunt Grace’s home in the San Fernando Valley. “I’m an actress!”

  Waving a copy of the contract in her hand, she rushed toward Grace, who stood beaming in the kitchen.

  “I’m with the finest studio in the world! I’m with 20th Century-Fox! They liked my screen test! I’m really on the payroll. Look!”

  But Aunt Grace, instead of reaching excitedly for the document, went to the stove for coffee while her niece gushed on about the wonderful people she was encountering at 20th Century-Fox. Not until Grace turned around again did Norma Jeane really look at her and stop. Something wasn’t right. “She was still smiling at me,” the younger woman would later recall, “but she was standing still. Her face was pale and she looked tired, as if life was something too heavy to carry much further.”

  For an instant, that sight frightened Norma Jeane. It felt as though the very foundations of her world were momentarily slipping out from underneath her. Her guardian was beginning to drink too much. This had been obvious ever since Grace’s return from the four-year sojourn back east which had separated her from Norma Jeane during the war.

  What a time for Aunt Grace to be falling apart! Now, just as the dream promised to turn into reality. For it had been Grace’s dream to start with, not Norma Jeane’s. Out of the depths of the Depression, it was Grace who’d first spoken it. From that awful hour when Norma Jeane’s mother Gladys had lost her hold on reality and needed to be hospitalized, it was Gladys’ best friend—Grace McKee—who had first prophesied it. They’d be standing in a long line at the Holmes Bakery waiting for their pitiful twenty-five-cent sackful of old bread, and Grace would grin down at the child who’d been left in her charge. “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane,” she’d repeat. “You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big. You’re going to be an important woman. You’re going to be a movie star! Oh, I can feel it in my bones!”

  The words had possessed the power to make the stale bread taste like cream puffs. And today, with Norma Jeane grown to half a foot taller than her pert little guardian, the dream was starting to come true.

  Norma Jeane put her arms around Aunt Grace and helped her to the table.

  “I’m all right,” Grace protested. “The coffee will fix me up fine.”

  Once seated, Grace began surveying the contract’s oceans of fine print. Hers had always been an absolute power of choice with regard to everything that concerned Norma Jeane. Only two things had the girl’s debilitated young mother, Gladys Baker, required—that her child never be taken to live outside California, and that she never be given up to anyone else for adoption. Otherwise everything had been left up to the energetic Grace McKee, aided by a meager twenty-seven dollars a month that came from the County of Los Angeles. To feed her “niece” through all those hard years. To buy her what clothes she could. To see to her schooling. To find relatives of her own or of Norma Jeane’s to house the girl during the frequent periods when it was undesirable to do so herself. To arrange at one point, unavoidably in the circumstances of the moment, for her to be placed in an excellent nearby orphanage for twenty-one months. Even to engineer a sort of interim marriage between Norma Jeane and Jim Dougherty, when competing needs had taken Grace away to West Virginia at the start of the war.

  Finally now, as legal guardian for the soon-to-be divorced but still underage Norma Jeane, it was for Grace McKee—whom marriage in the meantime had turned into Grace Goddard—to cosign her ward’s contract with 20th Century-Fox.

  She took up her pen and did so. The two women wept.

  “I told you, honey!” cried Aunt Grace again and again, “I said you were going to be a movie star! I told you!”

  “It’ll be different now for all of us,” promised Norma Jeane. Soon she’d buy Aunt Grace a new house, she declared, and hire her a fulltime maid.

  But first came the question of a name for the dazzling screen goddess-to-be whose job would be to make all these things possible. Mr. Lyon at the studio had suggested they find something better than Norma Jeane Dougherty. And immediately the new starlet and her aunt fell to discussing possibilities.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Five O’Clock Girls

  The head of publicity for 20th Century-Fox, Harry Brand, called Jet Fore down to his office.

  “Jet, this is Norma Jeane Dougherty,” said Brand. “I want you to take her around and introduce her to the department.”

  Jet quickly sized up the new girl. His boss seemed to be singling her out for a little special treatment, and Jet was trying to gather some inkling as to why. Could she, for instance, be the girlfriend of anybody special?


  “In those days,” he was later to recall, “we had probably fifty or sixty girls and guys who were under what they called stock contracts. They went to school on the lot every day. Drama school, singing school, dancing school, that kind of thing. And then the studio would use them as bit players and extras in pictures. I handled all these stock kids—wrote little two-or three-page biographies on them, took them places, tried to get them little bits of publicity. Norma Jeane had been signed to a stock contract, so she was now going to be sort of under my charge. She looked eighteen or nineteen. I thought she was a pretty girl all right, but we had plenty of other girls under contract who were just as pretty. Just as pretty.”

  Surely, Jet presumed, she was too young to already be one of the Five O’Clock Girls. Such was the term used for a considerable troop of attractive and ambitious young employee-volunteers of both sexes known, at least at one of the studios in town, to offer unabashedly personalized services to producers and other executives in exchange for hopes of advancement in their careers. The name had been coined with an exquisite perversity to indicate not the hour at which they reported to offices all around the lot ready to perform in so questionable a way—that time actually being 4:00 p.m. sharp—but rather an hour later, when they could expect once again to be unceremoniously dumped out of the sanctums of power and back into the commonplace hallways and mean company streets.

  As Jet Fore began showing the new player through Fox’s Publicity offices, he pinpointed a quality about her that just might have been enough to win, on its own, the extra push from the formidable Mr. Brand. Beneath her attractive figure and pretty face began to shine a disarmingly warm personality. “She was just an awfully nice girl—friendly,” Fore was later to remember. “I took her around and introduced her to everyone in our big department. There were the guys who planted our stories in the trade papers and on the wire services. There was our contact for the major magazines. We had one person who only planted Louella Parsons’ column and another who only planted Hedda Hopper’s column. There was a fashion coordinator, the fan magazine contact, radio planters, and so on—about fourteen offices taking up about a third of the administration building’s second floor. Norma Jeane charmed every one of these people just by being a down-to-earth kid who seemed to feel very lucky to be doing what she was doing.”