Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

  Not that, in the eyes of Jet Fore or of his colleagues, every refreshing kid necessarily had a glowing future on the silver screen. “As a matter of fact,” he would remember, “I thought she’d probably only be around for about a year or so.”

  Inevitably too, some of the others in Jet’s department were cynical enough to calculate the odds of Norma Jeane Dougherty’s ending up, during that time, as one of the Five O’Clock Girls.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Broken Cobwebs

  No word about the Five O’Clock Girls had ever been heard in the house on Nebraska Street. Yet there existed among Norma Jeane’s closest family more than one intuitive soul who keenly sensed that the girl’s new life, while admittedly thrilling, might also be fraught with perils. Consequently certain letters had passed back and forth across the country, and these, though they contained no explicit mention of the problem, had the effect of bringing Berniece Miracle to Burbank Metropolitan Airport one or two days later out of the bright summer sky.

  The cleverly turned out twenty-seven-year-old, emerging with her small daughter at the top of her plane’s passenger ramp, had urgent preoccupations all her own. She peered anxiously across the wind-swept tarmac at the faces of those watching the flight’s arrival from Nashville, and immediately spotted that of Norma Jeane. The girl was waving one hand wildly—as Berniece was to write many years later in a meticulous recounting of the scenes of her trip—and with the other was holding strands of very blonde hair away from her eyes in the whipping wind. The two half sisters had already met once before, and their rapport on that occasion had been instant and lasting.

  There was one circumstance about this particular meeting that overrode every other consideration for both sisters and made this day virtually epochal for Berniece. A technically even closer relative was expected to be waiting there with Norma Jeane. This was no less a person than Berniece’s own mother, their mother, Gladys Baker—a woman of whom Berniece had practically no memory at all. Now the moment had come for her to put an end to years of tug-of-war between the two poles of curiosity and dread, to take her six-year-old child Mona Rae by the hand, to resolutely step down the ramp, and to meet at last the woman from whom she’d been “stolen” when she was three years old.

  The nervous young mother had progressed with her child half the distance across the tarmac when she began to discern the others who were there with Norma Jeane. She recognized dear Aunt Grace bobbing on tiptoes trying to spot Berniece amidst the arriving passengers. Close to Aunt Grace stood another person clearly not Berniece’s mother—a large woman with white hair who could only be the legendary Aunt Ana Lower. Ana in turn had one arm wrapped around the shoulders of a petite woman in her midforties who remained motionless and unsmiling while the rest of them all waved and beamed. This woman’s hands were clasped downward in front of her body with both arms held rigidly straight. Her eyes at that moment appeared closed into slits against the wind and glare of the airfield. It seemed possible she was praying. Yet even constrained in so bizarre an attitude and at twenty or twenty-five paces away, there was a lovely symmetry to be traced in this woman’s delicate features.

  A sense of recognition flooded over Berniece Miracle. Here in life was the identical stamp of mysterious beauty which had comprised Berniece’s only knowledge of her mother while growing up. Her father Jasper Baker—after having snatched the infant Berniece away from his ex-wife and having forbidden the woman even to be spoken of in his home—had somehow thought it proper to give his child at least a picture of her lost parent. Berniece had kept it—a small but exquisitely beautiful framed photograph—on her dresser top all through high school. Upon it she’d lavished the nimbus of her adolescent yearnings and around it built up a ponderous store of unanswered questions. What she knew factually of the maternal half of her parentage had seemed to her so pitifully insubstantial that the whole of her ancestral memory on that side of the family came to be represented in her mind by the image of a few torn cobwebs.

  Norma Jeane broke away from her three companions, ran forward to embrace Berniece, and then bent down to hug Mona Rae.

  “Aunt Norma Jeane, your hair is blonde now!” blurted out the child, correctly remembering that two years earlier, the two sisters’ hair had been of an identical chestnut brown—richly highlighted with reds and ambers to be sure, but nowhere in shades so strikingly golden as this.

  Norma Jeane acknowledged Mona Rae’s remark by a warm flash of her eyes, but right now she had thoughts only for speeding her sister and her niece over to where the others stood. “Well, Mother, here is Berniece,” announced Norma Jeane. “And this is Mona Rae.”

  Suddenly Berniece discovered herself to be smiling joyously. She squeezed her estranged mother’s shoulders tightly while resting a cheek against her graying curls, causing the small woman finally to stir and place her arms—which till then had hung at her sides in a manner eerily like the broken cobwebs of Berniece’s earlier fantasy—limply around her daughter’s waist for a few seconds before bending down to give her newfound granddaughter a languid hug followed by several listless pats on the back.

  Berniece’s eyes gravitated toward those of Aunt Ana, the one whose letters of invitation it had been which provided the needed catalyst for Berniece to make this trip. The wise old woman, in waiting her turn to be introduced to Berniece, had not missed an uneasy expression fleeting across the newcomer’s face during her embrace with Gladys. In response to it, Ana silently lifted one index finger skyward while lowering her broad, square forehead in a serene nod to give ample assurance, as the Christian Science practitioner she was, that Heaven was there to meet every felt need.

  Finishing their introductions, the five women and the child then all turned, linked arms, and headed into the wind toward the baggage claim area. Meanwhile, it took little effort for Berniece to recover her hopeful smile, so likely did it seem that the tattered filaments of their shared family past were about to be transformed into something whole and lasting according to her fondest desires.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hypnotist’s Watch

  “That’s so ridiculous!” came a sudden and unexpected pronouncement from Gladys Baker in one of the very first weeks of Berniece Miracle’s stay in Los Angeles—from which, years afterward, her memoir was to record many of the conversations that took place.

  This judgment of Gladys’ fell upon the younger of her two daughters—on Norma Jeane—and its effect was to totally deflate her proud and earnest work in front of Aunt Ana’s hallway mirror. The girl had been attending her classes at the studio with the utmost diligence and had been bringing home exercises in drama, singing, speech, movement, and dance, which she practiced each and every day. Today it was her diction that she was improving by closely observing the reflection of her lips as she carefully rounded them to expel the classic formulation, “How—now—brown—cow?”

  “You sound silly,” pursued the mother, who’d stolen into Ana’s upstairs apartment with some articles of clothing draped over one arm. “If you don’t have anything else to do, you can come out here and help me dry-clean these.”

  Berniece listened from Ana’s kitchen, stunned as much by the discovery of her mother’s unsuspected powers of articulation as by the scathing purport of what she’d said. Gladys had scarcely spoken as many words at one time to Berniece in all the days since they and little Mona Rae had begun sharing the downstairs apartment.

  “Mm-Mm-Mother,” came the voice of Norma Jeane, who was only the more taken aback, “I have to improve mm-mm-my enunciation—mm-mm-my vowels…”

  “Well, I have to improve these dirty blouses,” retorted Gladys, “because I can’t afford to pay the dry cleaners!” She wheeled around and headed for the back door where, this time with much clatter, she disappeared once more down the outside stairs.

  Berniece stepped to the kitchen doorway and looked soulfully over at her younger sister. Norma Jeane did not move from her spot. Her eyes only dropped to the chest below the mirro
r. The expression of disheartenment on her stricken face seemed so uncharacteristic of Norma Jeane that Berniece felt embarrassed even to witness it. Well, this is terrible, she thought. Just when such exciting things are happening in Norma Jeane’s life! Wasn’t the girl earning a more than reasonable seventy-five dollars a week from the studio for the very purpose of readying herself for the future in this way? Who could have dreamed that Gladys was not proud of her?

  Berniece strode to the end of the hall and stood at the back door with one hand on her hip and her head tilted quizzically as she looked down into the yard. Gladys was, as Berniece would later remember, “seated on the stoop beside the garage, savagely sloshing a blouse in a pail of cleaning fluid.”

  “Mother, you ought to encourage Norma Jeane,” Berniece called down the back stairs. “She’s trying so hard to make a go of it, and you’re being so ugly about it.”

  Gladys looked over her shoulder and muttered something back to Berniece under her breath.

  “What did you say, Mother?”

  “I said I don’t like her business.”

  Now here, truly, was one for the books! was all Berniece could say to herself in wonderment. In the brief time she’d known her mother, however, she’d learned that it was no use trying to tease out more of her thoughts on the subject. Gladys would be saying nothing more about this or about anything else perhaps for the rest of the day. All she was going do was to sulk, which was what she seemed to spend most of her time doing.

  Yet here was a new piece of information, come to light at a time when every tidbit of communication from her long-estranged mother felt hard-won and precious to Berniece. So Gladys didn’t like the film business? Notwithstanding the fact, of course, that it was she herself who’d brought Norma Jeane into the world as the very child and offspring of the glittering movie trade! That particular part of the sketchy family story had already been known to Berniece for several years, its luridly tinged particulars having been literally among the very first facts about her missing parent ever to come to her knowledge back home in Kentucky. For Gladys Baker, upon divorcing Berniece’s father at the age of twenty-one, had freely chosen to enter the film industry during the roaring twenties, as a negative cutter for a concern called Consolidated Film Industries. There she’d met up with her friend of a lifetime, Grace McKee, the pint-sized human dynamo who’d transformed Gladys into a flaming redhead and who’d initiated her into the fast, bohemian ways of the city of celluloid dreams. It was probably at Consolidated too, following a second unlucky fling at marriage, that Gladys had struck up her relationship with Norma Jeane’s father. Whatever his name might have been, not even Aunt Grace seemed to know. Very possibly—or so it seemed to Berniece—Gladys herself couldn’t even say which of several co-workers was the actual gentleman.

  In any case now, twenty years later, their mother was barely managing to hold down a job in a downtown department store, putting tags on clothes. The work had been procured for her by the good Aunt Ana after none of Gladys’ long-past movie employers had proven willing to rehire her.

  Coming back down the hallway, Berniece found Norma Jeane still looking down at the chest beneath the mirror. The girl’s lips, Berniece would later write, were pressed together in silence. She seemed to have retreated deeply within herself. Her forefinger, poised atop the chest, was moving from side to side over the polished surface in a rhythmical, weaving motion. It was like a hypnotist’s watch swaying back and forth on its chain before his subject’s spellbound eyes. Or it was as if Norma Jeane were methodically canceling out a mark left by Gladys’ words upon her mind.

  Berniece clearly sensed that now was not a time for the two of them to speak. They had spoken at length before about the problem of their mother. About how deeply they’d longed—separately, each sister unbeknownst to the other and for a period measuring now in years—for a time when Gladys might confer upon them some undefined but treasured thing which only a mother is able to give. But Gladys Baker’s heart, they’d had to acknowledge, was a lock to which she alone possessed the key. Only the aunts, as of yet, had on rare occasions been vouchsafed fair glimpses of what lay within this strange woman, and in vain had Berniece and Norma Jeane waited for similar moments of their own. So that now they began wondering if theirs from Gladys Baker were never to be more than these casually tossed-out verbal missiles of petulance and gloom like “That’s so ridiculous!” and “I don’t like her business.”

  “I keep telling myself that Mother will act better when she’s been on the outside longer,” Norma Jeane had said of the seven months she’d already spent sharing the lower apartment with Gladys—an arrangement which had come about in the first place only because of Gladys’ begging to come and live with Norma Jeane after her release from the hospital. “But I still feel as if we’re strangers,” Norma Jeane had concluded.

  Berniece had given Norma Jean a long, tight hug. And since the doctors had said it would take plenty of time, they’d agreed that for now they would remain patient.

  CHAPTER NINE

  House of Monroe

  Sometimes, however, on Saturdays or on weekdays when Norma Jeane had time off from her work and training, the sisters jumped into the Dougherty Ford together with Mona Rae and approached the mysteries of their common parentage from an entirely different direction. For while it was true that Berniece had never in her life had a thing to do with the movie business—she and her brother Jackie having been spirited away to Kentucky by their father before that part of Gladys’ adventure had ever begun—Los Angeles remained her heritage. She’d been born here and in that sense together with Norma Jeane represented the third generation of Angelinos on their mother’s side of the family. Few activities during Berniece’s Southern California sojourn afforded her more stimulation than exploring these roots.

  One day Aunt Grace came along to act as guide. Their goal, this day, wasn’t any of the giant walled enclaves wherein the precious, newly minted images of fabulous film stars had once passed daily through the carefully gloved hands of negative cutters Gladys and Grace. Nor was today’s destination outside those studios’ gates, where a surplus of set designers’ fantasies seemed to have spilled forth into the animated streets and picturesque hillside roadways of surrounding Hollywood, making there an Alhambresque backdrop against which the two flappers had lived and laughed and loved away the halcyon days and nights of their flaming youth. No, bypassing all this, the Dougherty sports coupe skirted bustling downtown, coursed beyond the sleepy Los Angeles River with its plethora of railroad tracks along both banks, and climbed gently upward to the comparatively ancient neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

  This place possessed for them, as Berniece would later express it, “the aura of a trip in a time machine.” Dissolved before their eyes was the present-day fastness of synagogues and delicatessens beloved for more than a generation by Jewish folk arriving in successive waves from New York and eastern Europe. Instead, in imagination, the occupants of the Dougherty Ford peered deeper into the past, at a wholly different era closer to the turn of the twentieth century. They fixed on that charmed time before the astonishing rise of automobiles had revolutionized everything. When Southern California’s movers and shakers had still inhabited the fashionable Queen Anne mansions dotting all this higher ground just a quick trolley ride from their power bases of downtown. When in identical pattern, all these same streets had still comprised a booming preserve for the heirs, culturally if not literally, of the Yankee tradesmen and lawyers and real estate brokers who’d first bargained the happily situated little pueblo of Los Angeles out of Mexican hands.

  Into this earlier Boyle Heights, the two sisters learned, Otis Monroe had fit reasonably well—Otis having been their grandfather, Gladys’ father. Aunt Grace had told each of them before about certain papers she held as Gladys’ conservator, showing exactly how Otis Monroe was descended from no less a family than that of James Monroe of Virginia, the chestnut-haired fifth president of the United States. Not that in the
sandy-haired Otis’ own brief life, with its swift and calamitous end, there was to be found anything to outwardly match the status of such a vaunted ancestry. But inwardly he’d evinced one trait suggestive of something of that exalted kind. Otis Monroe had once dreamed with exceptionally bold freedom.

  He’d aspired to the world of high art. He would soon be studying painting in Europe—so he’d confidently told Della Hogan, whom he’d courted in Missouri upon appearing there rather mysteriously out of Indiana while in his midthirties. Then perhaps the two of them might unmoor themselves from all the pestilent restrictions of time and space by floating down the River Seine in a houseboat, while Otis executed watercolors of the French countryside which might well be the securing of his artistic reputation. There was, he’d told the rapt Della, the whole of the Old World to see and to portray in landscapes perhaps rivaling those of the glorious Cézanne. Then, aboard steamships, they’d circle the rest of the globe while he added luster to his creative standing via depictions of Earth’s farthest and most exotic climes. For if any of the details along his life’s planned trajectory had been left fuzzy, Otis Monroe had made its end point crystal clear. Here was a man destined to be respected, to be looked up to for as long as he lived, and to be remembered long after he was gone.