Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

  Della Hogan had been powerfully swayed. As much by the fine cut of his manly frame as by what she called his “wanderlust charm.” Never mind that Otis was ten years her senior and was still earning his survival by digging postholes, patching roofs, and painting houses. His genteel appearance while at his leisure spoke for itself. He was “neat as a pin,” she would later write, “always turned out like a gentleman—or at least a gentleman’s gentleman.” Furthermore, adorning the fair complexion of his left cheek was a large scar that added a dashing final touch to the robust, worldly appearance he made. This expressive mark, though actually received in a bad fall, accorded perfectly with Della’s romantic notion of Otis Monroe as man well acquainted with danger.

  The projected foreign adventures had seemed about to get underway when Otis went to work for the Mexican National Railway soon after they were married. But the squalid conditions they encountered in Mexico had soon propelled them back across the border and westward to the burgeoning new El Dorado called Los Angeles, where he’d found a similar job with the Pacific Electric Railway. Thus had it happened that the rest of Otis’ life, instead of being about steamships plying the bright blue waters of the world, had turned out to be about train cars clanging over the parched desert clays of Southern California. His working hours, instead of climaxing in luminous flights of pigment from palette to canvas amid throes of solitary inspiration, had devolved into a sloshing on of bucketfuls of paint alongside whole crews of laboring men. And his advancement in the world, instead of bathing his small family in the perquisites and possessions of an onrushing fame, had amounted to a slogging climb from the obscurity of rented rooms to that of rented flats and then of rented houses.

  Within a few years, Otis Monroe had stopped mentioning his vast artistic dreams altogether. Whether or not he still cherished them, Della did not know. That had been the worst part of it for her—the rest wouldn’t even have mattered, but she’d never really come to know her husband. Yes, she could still, after six or seven years, look into his hazel eyes and truthfully say she still loved him. And despite his frequent drinking bouts, she still considered him to be a good man. But marriage to Otis Monroe, she wrote, was “like living with a shadow of someone.” His mind and his heart had never become any more accessible to her than if he’d been the sole inhabitant of some distant planet’s icy moon.

  Barely had a job promotion come along allowing the Monroes to purchase their own home in still-fashionable Boyle Heights, when Otis had been seized by a horrifying illness. Both physical and mental in nature, it was ascribed within the family to “paint poisoning.” The astonishingly abrupt decline which ensued had turned him into someone in whom Della could no longer recognize anything of the man she’d married. And at the age of forty-three, Otis Elmer Monroe had died in the Patton State Hospital a howling madman.

  That had been in 1909. Strangely now, thirty-seven years later in the late summer of 1946—and perhaps this was all in Aunt Grace’s way of presenting the story—the appalling details of Otis’ demise slipped with wonderful ease into the background. And it was as if the artist perpetually out of reach to Della were finally speaking out across the generations to Berniece and Norma Jeane. That he should choose to do so through a certain house on Folsom Street was the whimsical part of the matter, since it was the property around the corner at 2440 Boulder Street that he and Della had actually bought and owned. Exactly how the Folsom Street place had once fit into the family’s scheme of things was now forgotten, except for one fact which Berniece was later to record. Here, she would write, stood “a house built piece by piece” by their grandfather Otis Monroe. Gazing upon it, they felt as if in some mysterious way this particular dwelling, lavished upon in such a variety of crafts at the hands of this one man alone, had been waiting all these years to be seen and appreciated by this one small audience alone.

  The group in the Dougherty Ford saw much else on their day’s excursion. Enough, in the tracing of Gladys Monroe Baker’s life from those shaky beginnings, for Berniece and Norma Jeane to be assured above all that their mother had not always been what she was now. That once Gladys’ most precious dream had been to bring her three children together into the home they deserved. So that in her bed that night Berniece Baker Miracle, for one, could extract nothing but hope and promise from all she’d seen and learned on this eventful day. Didn’t it mean that some tiny portion of Gladys’ dream was coming true at last? For although their brother Jackie was gone—long dead—here all the rest of them were, safely together. Berniece and her child Mona Rae sharing Aunt Ana’s downstairs room with Gladys. And Norma Jeane upstairs with Aunt Ana. Didn’t this day go to show that the ancestral stock once planted by Otis Monroe in Los Angeles—the living and breathing House of Monroe as it were—was not vanquished and gone but was still substantial and thriving under the good Ana’s roof on Nebraska Street in Sawtelle? Along with one of Otis Monroe’s landscape oils which still hung over the couch in Ana’s living room upstairs!

  No, there had been nothing about today to blemish Berniece’s hopes. Rather, she’d found it rich with family legacy. So rich, she would later record, that it overflowed into her night’s dreams.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Carole Lind

  For Norma Jeane’s part, the stirrings of the day had had everything to do with a riddle still vexing her at the studio. The thought occurred to her now of applying to the sprightly minds of her new acquaintances in the Publicity Department for help in finding a solution. “The casting directors want me to change my name,” she was soon telling three of them. “They don’t like Norma Jeane Dougherty.”

  In publicist Jet Fore’s workday, being interrupted by Norma Jeane was coming to be no rare thing. “I shared an office at Fox with two other guys,” he would later remember. “We were the ‘planters’ who handled the main contacts between the studio and the press. Sort of the hub of the department. So Norma Jeane would come in there all the time—every day. Often she’d be wearing this low-cut, polkadot dress, and she’d bend over our desks on purpose with those beautiful breasts of hers. Sure, she was selling herself, so to speak. And it was a great sell.” The three men, in fact, couldn’t bring themselves to take her to task for consuming too much of their valuable time.

  As to her name, Jet Fore agreed with the folks downstairs in Casting. Norma Jeane made her sound too much like some kid fresh off the farm back in Indiana. The man in charge of new talent, Ben Lyon, had already dreamed up a more professional-sounding designation for her: Carole Lind. But they’d been trying this out, and the consensus was that something about this new name too still missed the mark.

  “Do you have any ideas?” Jet Fore now asked Norma Jeane.

  “Well,” she essayed in a sweetly hesitant tone, “my grandfather Monroe was related to the president—James Monroe. I’d like to keep that for a last name, and they sort of like it downstairs. But now they want me to come up with a first name.”

  Wheels started churning inside the publicity men’s heads. One of the three, Hugh Harrison, was muttering, “Hmmm, lemme see, uh—” when in a flash he struck upon a near rhyme with Carole Lind. “Marilyn! How about Marilyn Monroe?”

  Norma Jeane went suddenly still. “Oh, I like that.” She paused over it another instant before saying again, “I like that!”

  Immediately, as Jet Fore would remember, Norma Jeane took the idea downstairs to Casting. In about an hour she came back, her mood exhilarated. “Hey, they loved it!” she told the three. “They thought it was great.”

  “She liked it herself,” Jet would add. “It was catchy. Marilyn Monroe.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sacred Space

  To Aunt Grace too, Norma Jeane came directly with the heretofore-missing piece of the puzzle.

  “Marilyn,” pronounced Grace in her piping voice. The choice made here had to be the absolutely correct one. A world depended on it. Yet the small woman hardly paused before reacting, “That’s a nice first name.”

 
Merely voicing its three sprightly syllables produced an effect of catapulting Grace’s mind forward and setting her aglow with an idea for a last name. As for the one already being discussed at the studio, it hadn’t been mentioned yet by Norma Jeane, who was later to write, “I tried the name out in my mind, but kept silent. My aunt was smiling at me. I felt she knew what I was thinking.”

  At last Grace spoke for both of them. “It fits with your mother’s maiden name.”

  Norma Jeane pretended to consider the idea for the first time.

  Grace rolled the full name over her tongue. “Marilyn Monroe. That sounds real pretty.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” hesitated Norma Jeane.

  “Why not use Monroe?!” insisted Grace. “It would make your mother so proud.”

  Bursting into laughter, Norma Jeane fairly shouted to Aunt Grace, “I thought so too! It’s a wonderful name!” Grace also began laughing, and the two hugged.

  So this was the glorious step. Marilyn Monroe. It was a little like the moment of magic in a photographer’s darkroom when a long-sought-after image stirs to breathtaking life in the tray of developing fluid where there’d only been a rectangle of white paper before. Likewise, here was a magnificent name to fill what for so long had been only an impenetrable empty space. Never in her life in fact had Norma Jeane really had a surname of her own. At different stages she’d been called by the names of Gladys’ two former husbands, but neither Jasper Baker nor Edward Mortensen was legally her father. Even Jim Dougherty’s name, Norma Jeane felt, would very soon no longer really be hers when their divorce became final. It was one of those things—and there had been many of them—that she’d always had to wait for. How many times had she and Aunt Grace verged on the matter in their conversation but lacked for any actual name to say? In the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, for instance, ever since Norma Jeane had been eight years old. Whenever they’d “pay their respects,” as Grace put it, by touching the imprints left in the concrete by the delicate hands and tiny high heels of Jean Harlow. Over Norma Jeane’s shoulder Aunt Grace would be whispering, “Someday it’ll be you putting your handprints and footprints in the cement. Do you know that? Can you believe that in the way that I can see it happening?” Surrounding Jean Harlow’s square of cement would be those of all the other great stars about whom Grace overflowed with stories culled largely from the fan magazines she devoured. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Norma Talmadge. Charlie Chaplin. Fay Wray. Gloria Swanson. Each of whom on some brilliant past occasion had adorned his or her sacred space with the final flourish of a unique and personal signature. That someday Norma Jeane would take her place among these shining immortals was one of the few certainties of the child’s life. But precisely what the name would be that she’d inscribe there in the wet cement had always—being unknown—needed to be left unspoken.

  Until now. “Now I’m Marilyn Monroe!”

  “That’s my girl!” cheered Aunt Grace.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Cat and Mouse

  Breathlessly one of the next mornings, Norma Jeane swept up to the studio gate and distracted the guard by stopping to fish out her pass while Berniece strode straight onto the lot without one.

  “Hurry up or we’ll be late,” called Berniece over her shoulder. “They’re going to be furious with me!”

  Quite well done! thought Norma Jeane at her sister’s handling of the little ruse, which had required some careful coaching from herself. More and more her eyes were opening to Berniece’s possibilities as a sister, an ally, and a friend.

  The game was a slightly different one an hour or two later when she introduced Berniece to Ben Lyon, who cordially invited them to take seats by his desk. Norma Jeane had prepared her sister for this encounter too, albeit not so explicitly.

  “Norma Jeane—” commenced Berniece nervously before quickly correcting herself, “—Marilyn—has been telling me how you helped her decide on her screen name.”

  The words had a slightly rehearsed ring which the suave Mr. Lyon allowed to hang in the air for a telling second before he indulged in a knowing private glance toward Norma Jeane that said, Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, sweetheart.

  At this look Norma Jeane felt instantly crestfallen. Not that she’s wasn’t aware that the studio—in other words that Mr. Lyon as director of new talent—had every bit as much say-so as she herself did in the picking of her new professional name. If for that reason alone, she’d been quite prepared to tread softly with the executive whose brainchild in this process had been the less than thrilling appellation of Carole Lind. However, several days ago Lyon had appeared nothing less than delighted when in her excitement she’d brought him the name of Marilyn Monroe. As a result she’d dared hope the question was now all settled. Of course it was no use simply asking him if it were settled. She’d tried that, only to have him study her strangely and not answer. For 20th Century-Fox Pictures, she’d found, was just an exaggerated version of every other human community she’d ever dealt with since childhood. You could never be direct, honest, and clear with people. That only caused them to misunderstand. You had to speak in sign language. To communicate in riddles. To read people’s lips. You had to bring your sister into the studio and hope to stumble on the truth of the matter secondhand.

  Her mind returned to Berniece sitting next to her, waiting uneasily for Mr. Lyon to pick up the thread of conversation she’d opened. Clearly, Norma Jeane observed, Berniece was impressed by the man she saw. Lyon, in his midforties now, was no longer quite the household name he’d once been as an actor, yet certainly there were millions across the land who like Berniece and Norma Jeane still remembered him well. His screen romps over several decades had been opposite leading ladies ranging all the way from Pola Negri to Gloria Swanson to both of the Bennett sisters, Constance and Joan, not to mention Claudette Colbert and Jean Harlow. Therefore, when Lyon finally spoke, the deep resonance of his voice had—as specially modulated for the benefit of Norma Jeane’s sister from the hinterlands—both a pleasing familiarity and an authority conferred by fame that made it not unlike that of a god speaking down from Mount Olympus.

  “You two have very interesting resemblances,” he said.

  Lyon, in keeping with the charm for which he was famous, had hit on an icebreaker ideally calculated to pierce through Norma Jeane’s preoccupation of mind. At home the sisters had minutely examined their faces for every trait they held in common and which therefore could be traced to the Monroe side of the family. Now Norma Jeane and Berniece lost themselves in showing the executive their respective hairlines, featuring luxuriant strands that waved off the foreheads of each from an identically prominent widow’s peak. Next they compared for him their distinctively pretty mouths, each of which mirrored the other one’s perfectly, down to their large, exceptionally white front teeth which came to just a pleasing tad short of being protruding. However, as Lyon ushered their conversation forward, Norma Jeane began to feel him exercising a subtle discrimination between his two visitors. Toward Berniece he was cordial and forthright, pronouncing himself intrigued by her married name, Miracle—to which Berniece rejoined that it was more common in parts of Kentucky than Smith, although always with the first syllable pronounced so as to rhyme with “fire.” But when on the other hand their attention turned to Norma Jeane, Lyon spoke not to her but still to Berniece. He was pleased, he told her, with how well Norma Jeane had been settling into her classes and training. “Right now Marilyn is very cooperative,” Lyon said, giving that word a cryptic emphasis, “but one day she’ll probably become like most other movie queens—demanding.” And at the phrase “movie queens,” he laughed with what Norma Jeane took to be a faint note of disdain.

  By no means of course had Norma Jeane missed Mr. Lyon’s use of the name Marilyn. Berniece too had glanced over at her upon hearing it, for it seemed to indicate that the studio was at least going along with the first name passionately favored by Norma Jeane. Nor was there any doubt that in
voicing that name, Lyon was conceding to her something of value—but only in a kind of barter, as it were, for in the same breath he took something else away. Berniece wouldn’t have noticed this, being unaware of the significance held by the word “cooperative” for insiders at 20th Century-Fox. As Lyon said the word, his eyes had smoldered secretly at Norma Jeane as if to say, I’m the man who pulled out of you a crackerjack of a screen test, and now I want to become much more to you than merely Fox’s point man with respect to your screen name.

  Or so, at least, it had appeared to Norma Jeane.

  Until getting that look from Lyon, she’d felt reasonably resolved that any small and perfectly meaningless intimacy that may already have passed between the two of them was not going to be enlarged upon. Certainly the last thing in the world she ever intended to become was a Five O’Clock Girl.

  In this fashion, Ben Lyon—even as he courteously chatted with Berniece—kept his subduing glance on Norma Jeane until at last he’d found his own roundabout and teasing way back to the subject originally broached by Berniece on her sister’s behalf.

  He was aware, he explained to her, that Marilyn already had two names taken from the screen, since her mother had obviously named her after Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow. But now he wanted her to have a shorter and more glamorous name than Norma Jeane Dougherty. Something both catchy and fitting. Several months earlier, her modeling agent Miss Snively had hit on the idea of turning her two first names around and calling her Jean Norman. From there Lyon had altered it to Clare Norman, which before many days had metamorphosed into Carole Lind—the presageful designation in which Hugh Harrison had heard his inspired rhyme of Marilyn.

  Lyon glanced impishly from Berniece over to Norma Jeane. “Marilyn likes the sound of Adair,” he announced abruptly. “She wanted to be Jean Adair.”