Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

  It must have been just weeks after those memories, around the start of Norma Jeane’s school year that fall, that the terrible thing had first begun coming over her mother. In truth, lined up and awaiting turns to strike the poor woman out of a clear blue sky had been a row of thunderbolts, an array of misfortunes so exquisitely timed as if meant purposely to destroy her, this unholy assault lasting four or five months during which time not even Aunt Grace had fully comprehended what manner of war her friend was waging. Norma Jeane of course had understood far less, seeing only its very end result.

  That result, those four or five months later, had come shortly after Christmas. The child had been sitting in the kitchen at her breakfast with an English couple who’d been sharing the house on Arbol Street, when Gladys had suddenly begun shrieking from the living room couch that someone was coming down the stairs to kill her. The couple had restrained Norma Jeane from running out to her mother. What had come next was the most frightful noise the child had ever heard—unforgettable crashing and thuds that, together with Gladys’ screaming and laughter, had kept up so long and so violently that the Englishman had finally called for the police. A short while later, an ambulance had come to take Gladys away.

  Little noted at the time—little noted, that is, by anyone out loud—was that Gladys’ fears of bodily harm hadn’t been totally unfounded. Union strikes plaguing movieland during several previous months had engulfed her film-cutting jobs for a long enough time to threaten Gladys literally with the loss of her home. The hapless young mother, facing in this the collapse of a life’s plan which she deemed almost akin to sacred, had recently been caught by a photographer in the act of climbing over a fence to evade the picket lines and get back to her work at RKO. The result had been her picture in the newspaper’s city pages, and her identity potentially made as clear as day to union goons not known for dealing tenderly with strikebreaking members.

  But during those same intervening months and equally unbeknownst to Norma Jeane, other thunderbolts too had helped unhinge her mother’s mind. One of them traced to a grandfather back in Missouri, namely Della Monroe’s kind and sensitive father Tilford Hogan, who in the spring of that worst and deepest year of the Great Depression had succumbed to despair at the loss of his health and of his farm and had thrown a rope over a high rafter in the barn and hung himself. This was a shock Gladys might well have worked her way through in safety if only the news of it hadn’t been delayed in reaching her until the fall—for by then other news had reached her too which had struck a thousand times closer to her heart. Her dear and firstborn child, her only son Jackie, who had been stolen from her ten years before along with little Berniece and carried off by their father to Kentucky—that boy who’d secretly stood centermost in her dreams for the house on Arbol Street—was suddenly revealed to be lost to Gladys forever, having perished half a continent away in extreme agony from a kidney infection at the age of fifteen.

  For as long a time as it was a question of her son Jackie’s death and Jackie’s alone, Gladys Baker had handled her situation with remarkable self-containment. Many weeks had passed after her getting word the boy was gone during which she’d allowed nothing in her outward life to change. With Flying Down to Rio in front of the cameras at RKO and It Happened One Night just swinging into production at Columbia in the fall of 1933, she’d continued to hold down her positions at both studios, throwing herself upon the sympathies of no one and keeping always to the same aloof distance from acquaintances and co-workers that they’d long taken to be a sovereign mark of her subtly attractive persona. In view of her recent loss, they could only judge her to be a tower of strength.

  Among these admiring colleagues, Aunt Grace had been alone in realizing that her dearest friend was in fact groping desperately within herself for some stratagem not to sink into a pit of frank despair. This was knowledge that the intensely private Gladys wouldn’t and couldn’t have imparted by word of mouth to any living soul, but it was there plainly to be discerned by the woman who for more than ten years had stood as an avid diplomat between Gladys’ cryptic reserve and the flashier abandon of most of their compeers—by the woman who might even have been called Gladys Baker’s creator. For it was Grace McKee who’d in large part engineered the smarter styles, the bolder coloration, and the foxier bearing that had transformed a slightly haughty note about Gladys’ manner into a full-blown mystique credible in the eyes of Hollywood’s beau monde. Thus it was now Aunt Grace alone who’d known how to read a subtle change in the language of Gladys’ slender torso as she sat poised at her cutting-room table. Who’d known how to gauge a certain slackening in the deftness with which Gladys’ cotton-gloved hands regulated the reels of film unwinding from her left-hand side and rewinding to her right. Who’d observed an altered cast about Gladys’ finely made features in the glow of the table’s well-light as she quietly calculated her frames of precious negative. Hence too, when that device of survival desperately sought after by Gladys had at last fallen into her agonized grasp, it was for Aunt Grace alone, finding out what that device was, to recoil in horror like a doting connoisseur upon discovering that some priceless and much-beloved work of art had been hideously and atrociously disfigured.

  The truth of it had come to light quite casually, amidst bits and strands of other, more trivial conversation. Perhaps it was all a consequence of Gladys’ having clung too fixedly to her much-imperiled dream for the house on Arbol Street. Which indeed was all she’d now continued to do—however, not with just her two daughters in mind but also, still, her son! Somewhere in time, Gladys had slipped noiselessly into a state of abject denial of the cruel truth clattering at her door. She seemed honestly to believe that Jackie Baker was still alive. Hardly had it mattered if Aunt Grace might conjecture that all this was nothing more than a grandiose stunt being perpetrated by Gladys upon herself. The result, within the woman’s own distracted mind, was exactly the same. A powerful vacuum had been created there—and just in time, as it now happened, to suck in the onrushing news of Tilford Hogan’s act of self-destruction. Incomprehensibly it was only her grandfather’s death—albeit one so belatedly learned about and one so much less relevant than Jackie’s death to her immediate world—that could crack the stubborn shell of Gladys’ self-deception. Accordingly, now all her faculties, heretofore forcibly idled, were set free to feed on that suicide’s every unwholesome detail. Until an idea began pressing itself on her that Tilford Hogan’s last troubles signaled some hereditary affliction and that she too might now be losing her mind.

  At length this idea had hardened into conviction, conviction had begotten alarm, and alarm had degenerated into panic. Aunt Grace had at last sprung into action. Thinking only to head off disaster by the means most in vogue with her industry’s smart set, she’d called in a Santa Monica neurologist. But, alas, that doctor’s fashionable nostrums had proven just another in the line of thunderbolts waiting to strike Gladys out of a clear blue sky. Her fragile system had rejected his pharmacological intrusion with the wildest violence.

  The ambulance clearly remembered by Norma Jeane had carried the ravaged woman off to a rest home in Santa Monica. From there she would soon be taken to Los Angeles General Hospital, and from there before long to Norwalk State Hospital—unluckily the very place where Gladys’ mother Della happened to have died insane. And for a total of twelve years at these and succeeding institutions, doctors would strive to make Gladys Monroe Baker whole using ever more powerful treatments whose ever more powerful effects the caregivers themselves seldom appeared to understand.

  Meanwhile, of course, the pretty white house on Arbol Street had been lost. Norma Jeane, in the process of its being sold, had been allowed to stay there under the care of the English couple and to finish out her second-grade year at the Selma Street school. Almost every day, Aunt Grace had come to the house on Arbol Street to see her. Their Sunday night walks to C.C. Brown’s had continued, and Gladys Baker had even followed along with them on certain weekends while
on temporary release from the hospital as a check for any improvement in her hold on reality. The three of them, just as always after ice cream at C.C. Browns, would stop at Grauman’s Chinese Theater to pay their respects in the forecourt where the testimonials of the stars lay inscribed immemorially in cement. Only by now, Aunt Grace had begun transmitting to Norma Jeane the second of that year’s two great revelations—the first of them having been Gladys’ disclosure that the man of the enshrined photograph was the girl’s own father. Aunt Grace’s only thought at first, in making her own revelation, had been somehow to fill in for the lost mother who was after all her own longtime dearest friend, quite apart from any reckoning of what Grace might owe both mother and daughter for her heavy if unwitting role in Gladys’ medical fiasco. Yet in amazingly short order and quite mysteriously surpassing herself, Grace had already come firmly to believe every word she was saying: “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane,” she would whisper to the tow-headed child crouching to fit her palm over a freshly minted handprint of the dazzling Jean Harlow while the mother stood several steps behind them, looking on with an expression like a ghost. “You’re going to be a great movie star!” thrilled Aunt Grace. “Oh, I can feel it in my bones!”

  Norma Jeane had to some extent understood what this meant. Sometimes at these moments—Marilyn could remember—a vague dismay would ripple through her little frame at a prospect opening before her of something too boundless and grave and lonely to be endured. But over the span of twelve years since those evening strolls, how completely her feelings about it had changed!

  A band stopped playing somewhere in front of the Fox float—or perhaps behind it. From the separated place in Marilyn’s mind, she was jolted back to the present. It was November the 22nd of 1946. A raw crunching of marching feet sounded on the chilly asphalt, and far up ahead of them a thunderous cheering and applause kept going up where Roy Rogers, the King of the Cowboys, was leading off the Parade of the Stars to the clip-clopping of his horse Trigger’s hooves. Meanwhile, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, C. C. Brown’s Ice Cream Parlor, and the Hollywood Hotel were receding into the distance behind them. Never, never, never a word! Marilyn vowed, looking back on the two diminutive figures of Gladys and Aunt Grace, paralyzed in her memory over the cement of the Grauman’s forecourt. Never—if Gladys had failed miserably in life and been proven hopelessly unmotherlike in everything having to do with Norma Jeane—would Marilyn utter a word against her, if only because she’d strived so valiantly, once, to make everything happen otherwise.

  But thank God for Aunt Grace!

  By no means had this past faded from Marilyn’s mind when the Parade of the Stars came to an end on the same Hollywood side street where it had begun. There, radio favorites Fibber McGee and Molly were scrambling down from the sleigh on which they’d soared with Santa Claus over mock-European rooftops high atop a float that had passed continually through its own self-generated snowstorm. Elsewhere up and down the little avenue, other stars were dismounting from the backs of brilliantly polished convertibles and gathering to saunter round the corner for a soiree to be held at the Brown Derby on Vine Street. Mingling with them en route to the legendary eatery were the starlets of 20th Century-Fox—for in truth, Marilyn was only one of several pretty stock players whom Ben Lyon had picked at the last minute to sit on the studio’s float and wave to the crowds. The girls automatically struck up charming little exchanges with the stars among whom they passed. And speaking back to them might be a Red Skelton now all finished up with twisting his face from one madcap contortion to the next. Or a Frank Morgan no longer affecting the voice of the Wizard of Oz. Or a Judy Canova with no reason to bare her flaring buck teeth as the Ozark Nightingale. Or a Jack Benny who’d effortlessly cast off all semblance of his miserly practitioner of the farcical slow burn. Seeing these masters up close after everything she’d just remembered might easily have had the effect of dampening Marilyn’s mood for the rest of the night. It was a certain aplomb they exuded from underneath that she most feared she’d never be able to emulate when her time came. Whether plying their craft or not—so her self-doubts ran at such moments—there was always somebody there whom they felt happy to be. Whereas who was she when you took away the wizardry of her makeup but an utterly unexceptional, plain-vanilla type of a girl with nothing whatever to distinguish her even from these other stock players except possibly her larger-than-average hat size!

  So she might have felt this morning. But not tonight. Tonight she had a talisman to hold up against the dark comparisons assailing her from within. Tonight there was a rescue to lift and animate her mind, a reason for throwing herself with more force than ever against the bold trajectory of her future. “I had a new name, Marilyn Monroe,” she would later write of this fresh idea which thrilled and captivated her by the very hugeness of its scope. “Now I had to get born! And this time better than before.”

  Minutes later, fans were rushing forward from the Brown Derby’s canopied entrance and flocking round the approaching stars for their autographs. Of course Marilyn was well aware she was far from being a star. Yet often she’d found that the mere circumstance of being in full makeup—provided both its application and her feelings of the moment happened to be just right—evinced from her a capricious flair for attracting attention in public from the members of both sexes. Hence she was not altogether surprised when several adolescent boys now zeroed eagerly in on her with articles of paper to be signed. And hardly seconds had elapsed before there began to be enacted, once again, a scene straight out of her daydreams.

  It was to be expected that the boys, in the act of crowding close to her with their eyes intently gathering in all the qualities of her face and body, immediately turned for her into an audience just like any other audience. She felt a thumping at her stomach. A lightness came to her head that was like a flash of light. And somewhere in her mind, a door opened onto a brightly lit place where she stood with this newly found little audience—but as far removed from the common sidewalk as if a split second had translated them all far up into one of the high, luminous corridors of the Hollywood Hotel. She stepped forward, as if toward that light. The door closed behind her once more, and altogether disappeared behind that door was the girl who since late last summer had been practicing on a notepad a signature which featured two great swirling initial M’s—who when alone had been pronouncing the words Marilyn Monroe again and again and tasting them on her tongue like some exquisite new kind of candy—who’d allowed neither family member, friend, nor acquaintance, except at the studio, to call her by any other name.

  Lost for the moment was that earlier girl in sublime forgetfulness.

  While on this side of the door, as if newly created in the great brightness generated by the intense gaze of the boys and other bystanders, shone the starlet upon whom just a few hours earlier Ben Lyon had conferred a brand-new name. From somewhere, there materialized a writing pen. She held it poised for a second over the piece of paper handed to her by the first of the boys. And suddenly, on blind impulse, she turned to one of the bystanders while straining mightily to find her voice.

  “How—how do you spell M-M-Marilyn?”

  The astonished bystanders looked at one another as if to ask, What circumstance could possibly explain why this lovely young thing doesn’t know how to spell her own name?!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Artichoke Queen

  Something big was astir at Enid Knebelkamp’s. Of this her neighbor Catherine Larson felt sure as she crossed the street to Enid’s for coffee one afternoon in February of 1948. A certain note in Enid’s voice over the telephone had made her think it involved one or both of their respective kin—in Catherine’s case her son, in Enid’s case her niece—each of whom had spent a dismal 1947 struggling to make it in the movies.

  “As I came up Enid’s front walk,” Catherine would later recall, “I noticed a pretty young blonde in shorts walking barefoot around the side of the house, looking at the plants and flowers. We didn’t
happen to speak just then, but as Enid and I sat chatting in the kitchen a few minutes later, this girl came in the back door, and Enid introduced her to me as her niece Marilyn.”

  That name, mentioned by her friend Enid in so many glamorous contexts on past afternoons, now gave Catherine a start when attached to the girl who sat down with them at the kitchen table. The Marilyn she’d been picturing was a photographer’s model and aspiring actress radiant with a sleek and cosmopolitan beauty.

  Oh dear, gasped Catherine to herself, she looks like some kid fresh off the farm!

  Marilyn immediately cast her large, sensitive eyes downward, giving Catherine a disconcerting feeling that the twenty-one-year-old blonde had read her mind. Reflexively by way of restoring the situation, Catherine leaned forward and began warmly plying the girl with questions about her challenging choice of a career. But Marilyn only compounded and magnified the strong soupçon of the dairymaid about herself by turning out to be terribly shy as well. It took all of Catherine’s considerable skills at small talk, along with Enid’s tactful insertion of a right word here and there into her niece’s frequent pauses, before conversation at the table began at last to buzz along again at anything like its former momentum.

  Meanwhile, Catherine took up the task of silently calculating Marilyn’s chances for stardom—for she was beginning to suspect that her own special perspective on that matter was the reason for Enid’s calling her over this afternoon. Catherine had, after all, spent ten years on movie sets all around town in the capacity of her son Bobby’s guardian as a juvenile actor. That experience had taught her a thing or two about what it takes to be a star. In her day she’d chatted for hours on end with a chain-smoking Vivien Leigh between setups for Gone with the Wind, for one example. For another, she’d thought nothing of having lunch with the multitalented Ida Lupino—who in Catherine’s opinion was easily Hollywood’s greatest beauty in person, despite the unfortunate fact that her flawlessly delicate complexion and exquisite eyes somehow came across as “hard” on film. It was comparisons on this high level that kept flying through Catherine’s mind in spite of herself today while the three women talked, as if to mock what she knew to be Enid Knebelkamp’s unbounded confidence in her niece’s future.