Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

  During that moment’s revelation, each of the sisters had taken a giant step toward the other in a spirit of sisterhood. But suddenly each had seen an abyss yawning between them. And each had cautiously stepped backward again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Voice from Olympus

  “Please, could I keep my mother’s maiden name?!” blurted out Norma Jeane on stepping into Ben Lyon’s office one afternoon in late November. He’d asked her to come by. She would be making a public appearance for the studio tonight, so the last possible minute had come to write an end to their charade over her screen name.

  Lyon deliberated Norma Jeane’s plea—or appeared to do so, for he’d known all along that he was going to give her what she wanted. And Monroe was the perfect last name anyway. That had been abundantly clear to him for months, ever since the day Hugh Harrison, upstairs in Publicity, had dreamed up the melodious first name of Marilyn to go along with it. The first and last names went together like a pair of silken gloves, and together they set the starlet off as becomingly as had the solid-sequined gown she’d worn for her screen test. The surname Monroe—were Lyon to now try and rationalize what one can really only divine by happy instinct—added just the sober and dignified note needed to counterweight the childlikeness of her face and expression. Ironically the elevation and propriety of Monroe was also needed to offset a certain sheer physicality always playing dangerously close to the surface in the way she moved her body. This latter characteristic in fact had been pronounced too downright raw by no less an authority than Darryl F. Zanuck, whom Lyon could foresee having to coax at option time merely to keep Norma Jeane under contract. The capricious studio boss, initially impressed by her silent screen test, had turned skeptical upon sizing her up in person. Everything about her manner and even about her voice had struck the all-powerful head of production as too unsophisticated for the Fox roster.

  Marilyn Monroe. Maybe the name would help, reasoned Ben Lyon, who on the contrary and quite aside from any personal grounds he might have for being excited about the girl, considered her to be no run-of-the-mill stock player. Whatever her qualities off-camera, the screen test had shown her capable of an on-camera allure that might even take her as far as stardom—depending of course on a host of other things—on her improvement under coaching, on the story properties coming their way for production, on how he might contrive to get her cast in them, on whether or not producers liked her, even on the future career whims of Betty Grable, whose replacement Norma Jeane might in time conceivably become. And not least under the mysterious laws of the game, casting Norma Jeane in the role of a star depended on selecting the right name. But this, curiously, the girl had already managed to do for herself.

  Not that Ben Lyon needed to tell her so right away. He rather enjoyed the way she leaned toward him from a chair opposite his desk, a look of desperate entreaty filling her wide blue eyes. He wondered, What a thing of urgency this is to her! It makes the situation appear almost comedic. Has she no appreciation for how many other girls—girls far prettier, far more poised and more prepared than she, although possibly less talented than she in her one special way—come and go within the great walls of 20th Century-Fox in the course of a single month or year? Nevertheless, Ben Lyon carefully suppressed any show of mirth. It appealed to the actor in him to play all his interviews with pretty young screen hopefuls for the big scenes the girls themselves imagined them to be. With immense gravity, therefore, he now sat back in his chair, leaned his chin on one hand, and studied every part of Norma Jeane’s anatomy while secretly savoring the profound excitement this scrutiny aroused in her. It was obvious she’d poured not just hours but days and weeks into planning for, into daydreaming of, this one crucial exchange between them. For several long moments he said nothing, and her quickened breathing was the only sound in the room. Then suddenly, with an air of momentous decision, he spoke out in his large voice still well-known to millions of movie and radio fans, as if he were thundering down a wondrous new appellation from the heights of Mount Olympus. “All right, Monroe’s in,” he announced. “It was good enough for a president. We’ll use it.”

  A tiny murmur of inarticulate relief escaped from Norma Jeane.

  But Lyon, lest she say some word to break his concentration, quickly raised the forfending palm of his hand and knitted his brow with magisterial concern to pursue in a zinging voice, “Now for a first name.”

  The valiant Norma Jeane stirred not a muscle, but Lyon saw the blood draining out of her face. She’d calculated the rest of the battle as already won, he perceived, given that she’d been beguiling him privately into calling her Marilyn for months. Thus secure in having reduced the starlet to utter defeat, Lyon now mercifully deigned to raise her up again by spinning impulsively round in his chair, springing to his feet, and pacing back and forth behind his desk in order to probe the farthest reaches of his fertile memory in search of the two choicest and most dazzling among all the possible options for a first name. There were, he finally told the increasingly suspense-wracked starlet, two women of whom she reminded him. He’d known them both extremely well. One was the luminous Jean Harlow, his costar in Howard Hughes’ illustrious and landmark 1930 talkie Hell’s Angels. The other was Broadway’s dazzling singer, dancer, and comedienne Marilyn Miller, whom he’d romanced on screen in her starring vehicle of 1931, Her Majesty, Love.

  Jean? Or Marilyn? Which name did she prefer? The choice was hers.

  Norma Jeane cast her eyes downward while pressing a forefinger against her lips, hesitating in the way she frequently did before voicing any important thought. Lyon’s gaze fell on her long, glistening golden hair so like Marilyn Miller’s. Truth be told, from the first moment that the name Marilyn had been broached for Norma Jeane, she’d become in his eyes a virtual reincarnation of Marilyn Miller, whom Lyon had passionately loved before marrying his present wife. Perhaps the twenty-year-old Norma Jeane had divined something of this. Or perhaps it was simply that he’d endearingly called her Marilyn one too many times, so that she no longer had any doubts about which name he himself liked best. At any rate, thought Lyon, here was why Darryl F. Zanuck might be wrong in his assessment of Norma Jeane Dougherty. At this moment—even if it would have killed her not to come into possession of the name Marilyn—she hesitated because there was a chance of upping her ante. She saw this chance and threw the dice. Yes, Lyon had found Norma Jeane to be an awkward and peculiar girl in many ways, a loner, a dreamer, difficult to read, difficult to connect with, someone having a long hard road ahead of her to travel. But there was a mettle to this girl that he’d never seen in any aspirant her age before. Instead of desperately seizing on the clear opportunity being dangled in front of her, in her shrewdness she recognized that it never looked good for an ingénue to do all the plumping for herself. She wanted the record to show it was the studio that had named her Marilyn Monroe.

  Norma Jeane glanced trustfully at Lyon, who said to himself: OK, this is the way it works in Hollywood. Norma Jeane has done plenty for me. Now it’s my turn to do for her.

  “You are to me a Marilyn,” he prompted her in his low and mellifluous voice.

  The reassurance contained in these words emboldened the starlet to pull out all the rest of the stops in her embellishment of the scene to be played.

  It was a lovely name, she agreed. Yet she wasn’t totally convinced. It still had a strange ring to it. Would Marilyn perhaps sound too artificial? Maybe she’d better just take the name Jean, which, after all, was one of her own given names?

  “Marilyn goes better with Monroe than Jean,” countermanded Lyon without hesitation. “It’s got a nicer flow—with the two M’s. Marilyn Monroe. Say it.”

  “Mm-mm—” Norma Jeane began, suddenly evincing the slight stutter that now and then came upon her rather appealingly out of nowhere.

  They both began to laugh. She tried again.

  “That’s it!” Lyon clapped his hands when she succeeded in pronouncing the name. “What do you
think, sweetheart?”

  “Well,” sighed the starlet, “I guess I’m Marilyn Monroe.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Parade of the Stars

  Under the magic of night several hours later, the studio’s float pulled onto a Hollywood Boulevard illuminated like fairyland for the opening of the Christmas shopping season.

  “This is the end of Norma Jeane,” would write Marilyn years afterward of this epochal moment in her life. For there was only one all-important community left in which she’d had no choice but to allow the old name still to cling to her, and that had been at the studio. But tonight it was the powers that be of no less prestigious an entity than 20th Century-Fox Pictures itself who were sending word out to the entire world in the form of a glittering sign which somebody in the art department had hastily hand-painted and jauntily affixed next to the seat now holding the starlet aloft in one of America’s most dazzling parades. Tonight it was official. She was Marilyn Monroe.

  Spectators by the thousands upon thousands lined the route of Hollywood’s Parade of the Stars. Her stomach pounded. Her head felt dizzy. Her voice completely left her. Such was the reaction she’d always experienced when faced with an audience—any audience, even if only that of her own little family poised around a large restaurant table, directing smiles at her that were meant to be encouraging but which seemed edged with an uneasy formality and expectation. Whereas here was an audience stretching visibly for more than a mile in front of her, a veritable sea of faces on both sides of the boulevard, punctuated by myriads of glistening eyes that turned toward her in waves out of the shadows as Fox’s float proceeded from one shining Hollywood landmark to the next. And yet the first of the grand movie palaces which they passed, the magnificent Pantages, had barely disappeared behind them as the gigantic old Warner Brothers Theater rolled into view two blocks further down, when she perceived that these countless eyes belonged not to strangers at all but to a warm presence already quite familiar to her from her daydreams. Far from threatening, they comforted her. They were a million anonymous human cameras clicking away contentedly in the semidarkness. And Marilyn, having recently put in two years as a photographer’s model, could say unequivocally there was no place in the world she’d rather be than in front of cameras.

  So lulled, somewhere in the twenty-year-old starlet’s mind, a door opened through which she easily glided to find herself alone with the secret child of her past.

  Who in all this audience guessed how she’d come to this moment only through a terrible year spent just one short block away from this spot—in a school building unseen behind the stores now passing her on the left-hand side? Not that her little second-grade classroom at the Selma Street School had been in itself so terrible, since it had given her some of the few kindly hours of human anchoring she’d managed to know that entire year. Nor could she ever forget that it was during that same year’s sojourn in Hollywood that certain facts had been made known to her—that certain revelations had been passed down to her as it were, one through her mother Gladys and the other through her Aunt Grace—which she still treasured as heirlooms beyond any price. No, it was the saving peculiarity of the memories slipping so readily into place in her mind tonight that it had taken her twelve years of hindsight to assemble them in their true and terrible light.

  Luckily shielding the seven-year-old Norma Jeane from the brunt of such reflections had been the fabulous refuge coming up next along that same left-hand side of the boulevard. From her perch aboard the Fox float, Marilyn could glimpse the Egyptian Theater’s colorfully muraled walls at the far end of its long, jungle-like forecourt. How many Saturday afternoons had she spent under the splendid sunburst ceiling inside, sitting all alone at the exact center of the very front row? So totally would every image up on the screen seize her attention that she’d sit here through the same movie two and three times over. Until finally, stabbed by a reawakening consciousness of a parallel reality awaiting her elsewhere, she’d be forced to emerge from that wonderful temple of the imagination, sometimes only after dark.

  And just here too along Hollywood Boulevard, but on the opposite side of Fox’s float in the second story over the sidewalk, rose the palazzo windows of a place she’d only heard talked about at the age of seven, but which today she recognized as virtually the soil out of which Norma Jeane had sprung—the once-jumping Montmartre Café. It had been, during her mother Gladys’ and her Aunt Grace’s heyday, the in spot for wild nights on the town. Here, more than once no doubt, the two flirtatious film cutters had dined and danced and sought to rub elbows with the stars. How improbable was it then for Marilyn to speculate as to whether her own first alighting onto the human scene might not have been signaled here by a proverbial twinkle in Stanley Gifford’s eye?

  For that was the name of the gentleman who still haunted her in a thousand daydreams. She’d known him principally by means of an enormously appealing photograph which that year Gladys had kept enshrined on Norma Jeane’s bedroom wall. To reach the hallowed spot where it had hung, her frequent way home from school had lain via a path that diverged from tonight’s parade route at the large and busy intersection coming up next just ahead. Tonight Marilyn’s view in the direction little Norma Jeane had taken home was going to be obscured by choking crowds, by wintertime’s darkness overhead, and by an unprecedented glare of holiday lights from the Boulevard. But amidst the everyday bustle at Highland Avenue’s crossing, the child would turn right and trudge uphill a short curving distance to tiny Arbol Street at the foot of Cahuenga Pass. The house they’d once owned there was still standing—Marilyn had just been back to see it in the past month or two with Berniece and Aunt Grace—a pretty white place with a Greek portico front and a white picket fence surrounding the yard.

  Photographically, C. Stanley Gifford’s warm presence suffusing that all-important house on Arbol Street had been rather like what emanated now from the sea of faces turning to regard Marilyn as her float entered the packed intersection of Hollywood and Highland. Moreover, like each of the persons making up tonight’s crowds, Gifford had been without any name to Norma Jeane at that early stage of her awareness. Nonetheless, his bright mysterious eyes, ironical yet hugely reassuring under the tipped brim of his fedora, had seemed to keep continual watch over her from his framed picture high on the wall. She’d always clearly understood that he was her father. That unspeakably precious fact had been among the few such treasures Gladys Baker had ever managed to confide to Norma Jeane.

  Immediately now on the starlet’s right-hand side, three more places whirled past in quick succession to tantalize her with her last remembered glimpses of the mother who’d shared with her that confidence, of the mother who later might have shared with her incalculably more had everything not changed and had Gladys not become instead a light extinguished, a sparkling presence permanently crushed out. This world-changing loss had all been accomplished within a single year, right here before her eyes as a small child. Yet such was the durability of hope that only in the past couple of months had she finally accepted that loss as a fully grown woman. With the result that tonight she passed these places making only one fervent prayer—that just because Hollywood and Highland had been the crossroads of Norma Jeane’s world for one year did not mean it had to be the crossroads of Marilyn Monroe’s mind forever—that by putting on her new name she was now putting off all the scars of that past.

  She could clearly recall their strolling round this corner during the lightsome summer of 1933, past the fancy entrance driveway to the first and mightiest of the three addresses, the massive old Hollywood Hotel. Gladys had still been talkative then—vibrantly and cleverly so, especially when animated by the presence of Aunt Grace, who most often came along on their Sunday evening walks to C.C. Brown’s for ice cream. On such evenings the two women had chattered much of the fabled hotel whose mission-style gables and churrigueresque bell towers had overlooked the surrounding lemon groves and barley fields as long ago as the very year when Gladys
’ own parents, the ill-starred Otis and Della Monroe, had first brought Gladys as a mere infant to southern California. However, it was the hostelry’s later and more citified decades that had most fascinated Gladys and Grace. Their heads were filled with stories about the many idols of the silent screen who’d wined and partied and honeymooned in the hotel well into the days and nights of the two women’s own vivid recollection as workers and players themselves on the frenzied Hollywood scene.

  Then, of course, right next door to the Hollywood Hotel was to rise the most famous theater in the world, the towering Grauman’s Chinese, which happened to have been a-building just while Gladys Baker had been pregnant with Norma Jeane and still preoccupied with the grief of Stanley Gifford’s choosing not to marry her. But by the time Norma Jeane herself came to know these places—seven years after that in 1933—the recovered Gladys had been able to laugh quite merrily as their little company of three had enjoyed sundaes and floats at the storied ice cream parlor located yet one further door down Hollywood Boulevard. Indeed good fortune, for the moment, had seemed to be smiling on them. Both Gladys and Grace, despite the horrendously hard times sweeping across America, were holding good jobs in a glamorous industry town that so far appeared to have outwitted the Great Depression. Gladys, in fact, was successfully juggling jobs at two studios in order keep up payments on her steeply mortgaged new home. The observant little Norma Jeane, it was true, hadn’t failed to notice that even on their most buoyant Sunday outings, her mother never embraced her nor even smiled at her in the solicitous, heartwarming way the girl had often seen other mothers do with their children. But sometimes, sitting in the pleasant wooden booths of C.C. Brown’s, Norma Jeane had been allowed to rest her head against the shoulder of the still young, delicately beautiful, red-haired Gladys while dreaming to the lilting cadence of the ladies’ rapid voices. And this at the time had felt like enough.