Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

In reality, Sam didn’t care one bit about her agent. Right now he only wanted to watch how his onetime charge was comporting herself, this in light of doubts which had been plaguing his mind all day but which he certainly hadn’t intended to share with anyone here tonight except his wife. For as a man employed in a supervisory capacity by a telephone company with its tentacles reaching into every office in town including those of the movie studios, he heard things. And earlier today he’d happened upon some unsettling information—rumors from one of the studios about a thoroughly bad set known as the Five O’Clock Girls as well as about the men in power who used them. Not that Sam Knebelkamp or anyone else taking one look into Norma Jeane’s innocent eyes could believe she’d ever turn into that kind of woman. What in fact bothered Sam was that she was entirely too innocent. She had no understanding of the way men looked at her body, of how profoundly even its subtlest movements underneath her clothing had the power to disturb their thoughts. It was obvious, given the atmosphere in which she was working, that demands were going to be made on her. All this studio business, Sam had reluctantly become convinced, wasn’t going to end well for Norma Jeane.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” replied Norma Jeane to his question about her agent. “I mean, it wasn’t anything I shouldn’t expect. He was on the phone with me, wanting an increase in his percentage, that’s all.”

  Calmly and gravely, Sam Knebelkamp continued to listen and probe. He observed that Norma Jeane had begun pitching her voice up a notch as she went on explaining, but to Sam she sounded too full of high spirits for anything terrible or even anything very troubling to have been happening to her recently. More likely she’d simply gotten wind of what Sam had grumbled to Aunt Enid at the restaurant door.

  “It was nothing!” emphasized Norma Jeane again of her altercation with the agent.

  The bird-like voice of Aunt Grace piped up in assuagement of the concerns she clearly read on Sam Knebelkamp’s face. “They got it worked out. It simply means our girl is getting more important.”

  This opinion caused the eyes of all the others to turn instinctively to Aunt Ana Lower as the family’s ultimate seer into what any event might portend. Indeed, Sam himself gave much credence to Ana’s opinion on all weighty issues, if only because of the great goodness in her which had never been known to fail. But—Sam now had to consider—in the mind of the sainted Aunt Ana, creatures like the Five O’Clock Girls did not even have existence, at least not as such, since nothing evil had for her any trace or token of reality by reason of her profound moorings in Christian Science. In that respect she could be of no more help to Norma Jeane than could any of this Atchinson family into which Sam had married. Such had been the maiden name of the girl’s Aunts Enid and Grace, who were sisters, as well as of Aunt Ana who was in turn their aunt. There was about all three of these redoubtable women a rich streak of the dreamer that needed close monitoring—a proclivity for fantasizing away dangers that had been anything but lost on Norma Jeane. For while it was technically true that the Atchinson women constituted only a surrogate family whose bond with the girl rested solely on the inscrutable ties of friendship between her mother and Aunt Grace, despite the absence of any blood ties, Norma Jeane took after these aunts with a vengeance. In her mind she jumped over any and all inconvenient facts with the effortlessness of a cat jumping over a fence, and nothing, reckoned Sam Knebelkamp, attested to this fact better than the present occasion. What, really, were these three supposed triumphs the family were celebrating here with Norma Jeane? Firstly, yes, she’d won a movie contract—but one which now appeared to be fraught with moral dangers. Secondly, yes, she’d gained the companionship of a sister—but one whose husband was showing no desire to move to LA, so that Berniece and Mona Rae would soon have to go back home to Tennessee. And thirdly, yes, Norma Jeane had obtained her Nevada divorce—but in so doing she was throwing away not only a kinder and fitter husband than she was ever likely meet again but also the man she still claimed to love!

  Aunt Ana, to whom everyone had looked, said nothing. But her eyes—glistening with kindness above an immense but wilting lace ruffle at the collar of her freshly ironed though well-worn dress—turned to Sam with a look that pierced his conscience slightly by the utterly selfless example it offered. She had no need of saying any words in front of Norma Jeane, having said them so many times to the others, about why this precious fatherless child had been thrust into their hands in the hour of Gladys Baker’s defeat. The wise Aunt Ana, in her silence and without at all intending it, could cause Sam to scan his own ebbing past and wonder where amidst the crush of its countless hard decisions he might have failed in playing some vital part for Norma Jeane. Too, by her mere untroubled gaze, Ana could reinforce on the minds of everyone present this thing which she’d always foretold: that in the end, all was going to be well with Norma Jeane. More than just well—she was going to become famous. She was going to become beautiful. She was going to become a star. And not for nothing was this so, for beautiful creatures attracted attention, and attention gave one the power to work in the world for the good. Her beauty would open a pathway to the Divine. Make no mistake about it, the great Aunt Ana had averred, Norma Jeane’s light was meant to shine to the ends of the earth—and in so doing it would touch, for the good and in no small way, the hearts of even the world’s downtrodden and dispossessed.

  Norma Jeane heard none of all this but only saw written in the faces of all three of her Atchinson aunts a starry-eyed force which nothing coming from Sam Knebelkamp could ever question or gainsay. She was going to be a star. This was no mere dream or fantasy on the women’s part. It was a fact to which they happened to be privy—a destiny inscribed with absolute certainty on the Scroll of Life.

  “Oh, I feel so good!” cooed Norma Jeane as the waiter brought in the first of the entrees to the quietly listening Berniece and Mona Rae. “Things like a little hassle with an agent are just part of the business—”

  Pausing with delight upon that thought, Norma Jeane then saucily added, “—my business.”

  This last emphasis was meant for the skeptical ears of her mother Gladys—whose business indeed it had once also been—who with Aunt Grace had once not only held her own at the skilled and exacting craft of negative film cutting, but on the side had also pored over fan magazines for hours on end, and with Aunt Grace had stood entranced in the thickest of the crowds at Hollywood premieres. But all that had happened in a time before the disastrous metaphysical hurricane had passed directly over her head and left her the changed woman she was today whose job was to pin tags on clothes in a department store downtown for a pittance of her former pay.

  Perfectly oblivious to her daughter’s gibe, Gladys Baker only continued to wait impassively for her dinner plate.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Arcing Wave

  It might be just fine for a Jane Russell or a Bob Mitchum. Both those earlier close acquaintances of Jim Dougherty’s had hides thick enough to fend off Hollywood’s nastiest tricks and blows. But Norma Jeane had no such protection. Anyone who wanted to crush her could do so with the slightest rudeness. During their marriage Jim had needed to be constantly on the lookout for it, whether coming from himself or from others.

  His deepening conviction on the subject had bothered the twenty-four-year-old sailor as he disembarked at the San Francisco harbor and had continued to bother him as he took the train southward to Los Angeles. Arriving there, he sought out Aunt Ana, whom he arranged to meet at an hour when she was alone at the Nebraska Street house. But in pouring out his fears to her, he discovered a woeful blind spot in the dear old woman’s otherwise lofty thinking. “She seemed awestruck,” he would later write, “by the very notion that Norma Jeane might become a movie star.” No argument on Jim’s part could shake the deep presentiments Aunt Ana seemed to harbor in this regard, nor cure her of a naive assumption that stardom—should anyone as unprepared as Norma Jeane ever manage to attain such a goal—spelled automatic happiness for the girl.

/>   Similarly, when a dispirited Dougherty brought his signed divorce documents over to Norma Jeane a day or two later, he found her in extraordinarily high if, he thought, illusionary spirits. Mercifully for Jim, her state of elation had nothing to do with the papers he held out to her at her front door. She barely even glanced down at these. Instead there was news she was bursting to tell him—two things left unmentioned by Aunt Ana in order that her niece might break them to Jim herself. 20th Century-Fox, she gushed, had now made it official. In the weeks since he’d been away at sea, her contract—the one that had been pending the last time they’d spoken—had been signed by the studio! She was in training to become a movie star! Furthermore, they’d even given her a new name!

  Jim’s first reaction was to scornfully say in his own mind, So what the hell does she think I care about all that?! But clearly he did care about it, because it felt as if a bar of red-hot iron were burning a hole from his heart down to his belly. And what seemed damned remarkable to him was that Norma Jeane could stand there without the slightest inkling of what he felt—that she actually expected him to rejoice with her about this news!

  “What’ll they be calling you?” he asked her, adopting out of pride the most neutral and detached attitude he could muster as he placed the ignored papers down atop the little table just inside her door.

  “From now on, Jimmie,” she beamed, “I’ll be called Marilyn Monroe.”

  “What?” In no way did this bizarre concoction of syllables correspond with his idea of Norma Jeane Dougherty.

  She repeated, “Marilyn Monroe,” and kept looking up at him expectantly.

  “Where’d they dream that name up—Marilyn Monroe?”

  Norma Jeane hastily proffered a story to the effect that the first name had come from one of her grandmothers and the last name from the other one. Jim could easily recall having heard about her grandmother Della Monroe before, but it was news to him that she now claimed to have a second grandmother by any name sounding so recently coined as Marilyn. Asked Norma Jeane, “What do you think of it?”

  Jim turned the strange sounds over in his mind for a moment before hesitantly conceding, “It’s—beautiful…” Which was a thing he could probably say honestly if he considered the name apart from anyone he knew. At the word “beautiful,” Norma Jeane’s expression changed to her broadest grin. “Isn’t it the most beautiful name you ever heard?!” she cried. “It’s just so, so beautiful!” Breaking into a dance of joy, she sang out the name, “Marilyn Monroe!—Marilyn Monroe!” Momentarily she stopped and looked back up at him. “Oh Jimmie, please, tell me you like the name! It’s important to me that you like it. Please! What do you think of it?”

  All Jim could wonder was, Here she is, having dumped our marriage, having dumped me in effect. Why should it matter to her now what I think of her crazy new name? Yet without question it matters to her! And dutifully he repeated aloud, “It’s just beautiful.”

  Norma Jeane lifted her arms over her head and began twirling about the room. Her face beamed with happiness as she sang out the name over and over again in her clear, sweet voice, “Marilyn Monroe! Marilyn Monroe! Isn’t it just too perfect?!” In so doing, she glided past stacks of magazines lying on various counters and tables, all of them bearing pictures of her, either on their covers or—as Jim had found out on his earlier stay in her apartment—filling their inside pages. “Marilyn Monroe! Oh, isn’t it lovely?!”

  Jim had seen Norma Jeane carried away by joy before, but never like this. The scene was becoming, in fact, surreal. Before him was a whirling, swaying, chanting, blonde-haired creature in whom he no longer recognized any trace of the shy, chestnut-haired, prematurely sensible sixteen-year-old Norma Jeane he’d once married. It called to mind a certain image he’d been entertaining on shipboard during the past few weeks, which today seemed to be coming true right in front of his eyes. What he’d visualized, there on the ship, was the whole arc of their relationship in the form of a giant ocean wave that had crashed ashore and engulfed the two of them in passionate love for three or four delirious years—but was now sliding back out to sea again and with it was taking her away from him forever. In real life, at this moment, his darling Norma Jeane seemed to him, for the first time now, truly and utterly gone.

  Jim turned to leave. Norma Jeane’s dancing stopped, and they walked out onto the porch together. She continued to beam with delight. He looked down at her and, with effort, smiled too. He wanted to reach out for her, but for a second all he could manage was the smile. Then suddenly he did reach out for her—only just as suddenly to pull back again. He thought he could feel tears wetting his cheeks. He hoped his voice would sound normal when he said goodbye. What came out was just a rough growl as he walked away.

  To be sure, Norma Jeane had offered to still live with him even while divorced. And of course that offer had been very tempting to Jim Dougherty. However, his pride, his morals, his plans, and his decision of mind were such that she could only be a memory to him now—albeit a memory he still loved so much that sometimes he felt his heart would burst asunder.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mimosa Blossoms

  Berniece Miracle could detect no reason for holding Jim Dougherty in anything less than the highest esteem. And for that matter, neither did Norma Jeane claim to love him any less now than she’d ever done before. Yet despite everything Berniece kept hearing about her personable ex-brother-in-law, somehow she never got to meet the young sailor when he was known to be home on leave between his troop-hauling stints from the Far East. Exactly why Norma Jeane—or Marilyn, as she now insisted on being called—made no real effort to bring the two of them together, considering how amicable were the terms still in place between her and Jim, only some lapse in her normally good manners could quite explain. But Berniece adjusted to this oversight without complaint. It only brought home to her how thoroughly Marilyn was distracted by the career hopes smoldering beneath her deceptively quiet exterior like so much red-hot magma about to blow the top off a long-dormant volcano.

  More disquieting, however, was another lapse that came to light toward the end of Berniece’s several months’ stay in Los Angeles. The sisters were on a break during one of the last of their sightseeing jaunts, sipping Cokes in the chic coffee shop just off the Ambassador Hotel’s posh main lobby, when Marilyn announced, “I have something on mm-my mm-mm-mind I want you to know about.”

  Her slight stutter had momentarily reappeared.

  “What is it, honey?” Berniece asked.

  “I p-posed nude for a photographer.”

  The silence that followed—though an exceedingly brief one—carried an effect on Berniece not unlike the distant, low, crackling rumble lately being presented over the radio as the recorded sound of one of the actual atomic bombs that had brought a miraculous and horrific end to war in the Pacific.

  “Really?” Berniece said reflexively, not having any idea what she could possibly say next.

  Certainly this was news outlandish in the extreme. In a rush, walls and foundations were crumbling and collapsing all across the seemly tableau that until now had been serving in Berniece’s head to depict Marilyn’s professional world. Starting with a certain much-talked-of shrine which the two of them had just been strolling out over the palatial hotel’s lush lawns and gardens to see—the Blue Book Agency and Modeling School. There, hardly more than a year ago, in a bungalow of offices charmingly set amidst the lemon and orange and banana trees that clustered along walkways scented with jasmine and mimosa blossoms, Norma Jeane’s life had first undergone its daring transformation. In that time, to be sure, plenty of magazine covers had rolled off the presses bearing her growingly familiar image. But how quickly it had all come to this! Was it possible for Blue Book’s presiding genius, Miss Emmeline Snively, to be mixed up in anything sounding so gauche?—Miss Snively, with her discreet British accent and her exquisitely white-gloved hands?!

  Of course, it was all about money. Money being that troublesome
commodity Marilyn was constantly running out of. No one anywhere near the girl could ignore her woeful ineptitude at the handling of her finances, which until this present moment had been Berniece’s only serious worry regarding her younger sister’s fledgling career. Almost never could Marilyn give any credible accounting for where her money was going. Admittedly her seventy-five dollars a week from Fox was no star’s salary, but working girls her age all over America were living perfectly well on far less. And here was Marilyn, perpetually broke and always having to take these modeling jobs on the side to make ends meet. Probably now she’d gotten herself into some frightful new jam over another debt and had figured that her only way out of it was by compromising everything.

  Oh honey! thought Berniece.

  Marilyn’s large blue-gray eyes—the beautifully wide-set eyes that were perhaps what really made hers the face of a model and starlet—were leveled coolly on Berniece. It was as if she could see the thoughts running through her companion’s mind and had no respect for them.

  “I’m not ashamed,” Marilyn stated with confidence, her stutter now completely gone. “I did it, and that’s that. But I don’t want Aunt Ana to know. She wouldn’t approve.”

  Berniece quickly checked her dismay and managed to rejoin, “Well, maybe Aunt Ana won’t see the pictures. Why should she? Would someone show them to her? I really doubt that possibility. What—what magazine will they be in?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the photographer will let me know,” answered Marilyn. Then, exhaling a conclusive breath, she composed her face into an attractive smile. This was a signal that they wouldn’t be delving any further into the subject right now. And if Marilyn was like their mother Gladys in any one thing, it was that you couldn’t invade certain sectors of her mind when she’d decided to hold them private and apart. Everyone—all the aunts and uncles and even Gladys herself—knew and respected this. “You’re right,” continued Marilyn. “I shouldn’t worry. Ana may never see the pictures. I’ll decide what to do about it if it ever happens.”