Casting Norma Jeane

by James Glaeg

  Now to be fair—Catherine had to consider—the girl sitting across from her was barefoot and in shorts and wearing little if any makeup. Too, objectivity required Catherine to put out of her mind the niggling recollection that Marilyn had done most of her growing up in the famously rural confines of the San Fernando Valley. Catherine must also beware of overreacting to the recent absurd news of Marilyn’s having been crowned California Artichoke Queen by the city fathers of the remote agricultural hub called Salinas. But despite all Catherine’s striving to discount these strong impressions, she couldn’t shake off her initial snap judgment: “Marilyn simply looked to me,” as she would clearly remember a decade later, “for all the world like some awkward kid just in from the country who was taking in the bright lights of the big city for the first time and dreaming about getting into pictures!”

  “Now mind you,” Catherine would hasten to add, “she was a pretty girl. And also, I was to find, a very sweet one. Terribly, innocently sweet. Yes indeed, I did come to like her. But beautiful, no. Hers was only that just-scrubbed, wholesome kind of prettiness which had about it something too commonplace, too raw for Hollywood. Her whole manner of speaking and of moving was altogether undistinguished. In addition to which she came off to me as absolutely naive, entirely lacking in what you’d call preparation. Her very asking me the question ‘How can I become a star?’ showed me she possessed not a fraction of the sophistication needed to make a success in pictures—certainly to become a star. True, she’d already played a couple of very small parts on the screen when I met her—minor things at Fox that nobody in Hollywood had even noticed before the studio had dropped her again after only a year. And keep in mind that at this time she was doing lots of modeling, so of course I realized she had something to offer. But as a movie star? Oh dear me, no!”

  All in good time, while Catherine made these considerations, the talk at Enid’s kitchen table worked its way onto the fascinating subject of Rita Hayworth—to the troubles the sultry, red-haired queen of the Columbia lot had been giving that studio’s boss Harry Cohn…how she was now planning, despite her contract with him, to embark on a grand tour of Europe as soon as filming on The Loves of Carmen was completed…how things had even gotten so bad that word was going around town that Harry Cohen wanted to groom some other girl to take her place…and that Marilyn’s agent had sent her Fox screen test over to Columbia’s Max Arnow…

  OK, there it was. Now Catherine understood why Enid had called her over on this particular afternoon. For it happened that over the course of her son Bobby’s work for Columbia Pictures, she—Catherine—had become quite friendly with Max Arnow, Columbia’s Director of Casting. No doubt Enid was hoping her friend would offer to put in good word with him for Marilyn. Quickly and painfully, Catherine thought through this question and came to her decision: Well, maybe I could try to say something nice about Marilyn without compromising myself. Obviously, keeping credibility with Max is my first responsibility for as long as Bobby keeps having such a tough time of it making his transition into adult roles…

  Not two weeks later—to Catherine Larson’s utter amazement—Marilyn was signed for a starring role in Columbia’s Ladies of the Chorus. Of course it was only a B picture in black and white, a cheapie destined for nothing more conspicuous than the lower half of a double bill in a decidedly secondary tier of hinterland movie theaters. And in actual fact, the little picture ended up playing almost nowhere upon its release the following October, by which time Marilyn had already been dropped by Columbia after only six months on the payroll. So Catherine Larson, whose confidence in herself had been momentarily shaken, came to feel fully vindicated once again in her earlier judgment of Marilyn’s prospects on the screen.

  “We’d meet occasionally for coffee at Enid’s over the next two or three years,” she was later to recall. “During all that time, Marilyn’s heart kept right on burning with the same question, ‘How can I become a star?’ Well, as I say, she was a very sweet girl. But such a naive thing—looking at me with those big innocent eyes exactly the way a very small child would. It was very strange, but you almost wanted to put her on your knee and cuddle her just as you would do with a little daughter of your own. You wanted to protect her. You wanted to tell her life was OK, that everything was going to be all right. Most of all, what I really felt like doing was taking her aside somewhere—on account of Enid’s being there, who had such abundant faith in Marilyn’s future on the screen—and saying to her, ‘Look, kid, why don’t you try something else? It’s just not going to be worth it. You’ll never make it in Hollywood.’ Yes, I felt so very strongly I ought to tell her that. But of course I never did it because of Enid.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Blonde of the Day

  “I was strolling down Gower Avenue in Hollywood one August afternoon in 1951”— so might a peerless observer of the passing Hollywood scene, Charles Williams, be coaxed to reveal to some carefully chosen listener many years afterward—“when a glamorously dressed blonde drove up in a convertible and parked at the opposite curb. She got out in a big hurry and crossed diagonally toward me, heading for the back entrance to RKO Studios.

  “Now, see how your mind does things to you?” Charles would ask with the scene materializing before his eyes as though it had just happened yesterday. “Looking more closely at this bosomy, wide-hipped girl, I was very unimpressed. Her makeup was too heavy. She had a rather puggish nose. The outer corners of her large eyes slanted downward toward her cheekbones with an effect I didn’t care for. I noticed a tacky wrinkle across the front of her skirt below a prominent tummy. She was pigeon-toed in one foot. And she was a little on the frantic side—everything about her seemed exaggerated. I said to myself, This girl’s obviously trying to be the next Lana Turner, but she’s of a lesser vintage.”

  On saying this, Charles might lean in to you confidentially and add a momentary aside laughingly as if from one star-worshiper to another: “Lana was the blonde of the day, you know, and how dare anyone try to imitate her!

  “Well,” he would then say in redoubling his concentration on the scene, “she got to the RKO entrance just as I approached. And stepping up on the platform, she looked in my direction and said, very sweetly, ‘Hello!’”

  At this point it was again necessary for Charles to lean in toward you, but this time altogether seriously. “Now, being black,” he would confide, “with Jim Crow still in full sway, I got overlooked a lot in those days. And here was this nice woman greeting me so politely! Of course I didn’t let on what I’d been thinking but spoke back to her just as pleasantly.

  “She continued to look at me,” Charles would tell. “Then she pressed the buzzer—a loud one even from the outside—BOOOP!— and stood there waiting, still watching me. I’d gotten just a few feet past her when I heard the studio door open behind me. Two men’s voices cried out ‘Marilyn!’ I whirled around. Instantly everything fell into place: ‘My God,’ I said to myself, ‘It’s Marilyn Monroe!’”

  “In 1951?” Charles’s listener, if an extremely astute one, might here break in to ask skeptically.

  Charles would raise a finger. “Remember, stargazing was my vocation in life. I’d come out to LA from Wichita, Kansas, just to hang around the studios in hopes of seeing an Ava Gardner or an Errol Flynn. I read the LA Times’ theatrical section every day, knew who everybody was, went to all the movies. Two years earlier I’d seen Marilyn’s hottest piece of work to date, The Asphalt Jungle, and thought she was definitely on the rise. Then I’d seen the great All About Eve, plus each of those lesser-featured bits as they came out—Love Nest, As Young as You Feel, and the rest. So all this was what swept through my mind on hearing her first name.”

  Charles would take in an impressive breath and then continue his story.

  “Well, all of a sudden, this awkward blonde who was trying to imitate Lana Turner completely disappeared for me. And into focus—came Marilyn Monroe! My God, she totally came alive! The reason for it being
partly too that she’d recognized these two handsome, young executive types who were stepping out the door in their high-fashion suits and ties, both carrying briefcases. Fox attorneys perhaps? I didn’t know who they were, but right away the two were all over her, drinking her in and trying to hold her there in conversation. She kept saying, ‘But I’m late! I’m late!’ and pushing at the door, trying to go in. Yet she was charmed enough by these two gentlemen to give them, for one moment, what they expected of Marilyn Monroe—throwing her head back, smiling wide, eyes half-closed, and pivoting from one foot to the other as she spoke to them in that little-girl voice.

  “I stood there transfixed,” Charles was to say. “Just staring while, relentingly, she continued to chat with them.

  “She wasn’t especially tall,” he would remember of his observations as he looked on the three from close by, “but somehow she gave the impression of being both willowy and broad at the same time. She was wearing a loose-fitting, long-sleeved white silk blouse with a collar, and a very tight-fitting plaid skirt. Her hips, though wide, now seemed just right for a body as voluptuous as hers. I still wasn’t sure whether I liked the eyes, but I noted that she had exceptionally beautiful white skin, perfect for a blonde. I could literally see it reflecting though the makeup, so clear and tight-pored and flawless—I’d never seen a woman with anything like it before. Her nose, on examining it now, no longer seemed so pugged. I thought, It’s not Lana’s nose, but it’s a beautiful nose, perfectly in sync with the rest of her features.

  “Most sensuous of all,” Charles would tell, “were her lips. I know now these weren’t actually as full as they appeared and that she achieved that effect with several shades of lipstick. But my God, such glossy, full lips! She must have been a Rembrandt!

  “Not only was hers a beautiful, childlike face,” Charles would continue, “but it was a perpetually mobile one, constantly going from one expression to the next. Add to this the animation of her hands and her way of dancing from one foot to the other, and—well, here was a girl who just couldn’t stand still!

  “I must say,” he would add, “that I continued to sense something heightened about her as she spoke with these two men. Not that she wasn’t smooth as silk—no, she had this act of hers down perfectly. But there was a nervousness about her that wasn’t natural. Inwardly, I felt, she lacked poise. She was exaggerated. Sweetly exaggerated. Absolutely captivatingly exaggerated. But exaggerated.”

  From that thought, Charles Williams’ brow would at length unknit until at last he fairly beamed.

  “But do you know,” he would say, “that in the middle of all those maneuvers as the three of them talked, she took time to look at me?! Yes, right in the middle of that conversation she glanced swiftly across at me—only once, but it was a distinct look that said, ‘I’m recognizing you. I know you’re still there. And—aha! You finally see who I am, don’t you?!’

  “Isn’t that amazing?!” Charles would ask his listener emphatically.

  The rapt listener’s answer would probably be a slow swing of the head from side to side in wondering agreement.

  “She was aware of my presence,” Charles would marvel. “Unmistakably aware, all that time!” And on making this point, Charles might bring his words to an involuntary halt and with his listener silently ponder for an instant the meaning of that scene.

  “Well,” he would then go on, “There was no place in this world those two guys would rather have been than right there with her! But finally they turned away, letting her go, and came on down the steps. They never once looked at me, you know—never so much as glanced in my direction all this time. It was almost as if they made a point not to look at me. But she looked back at me again! My mouth might as well have been hanging open, my expression was one of such awe. She recognized this—and gave me a very warm farewell smile. And then she went inside. I just stood there rooted to the spot, watching the door even after she had gone. I thought, ‘I’ve just seen Marilyn Monroe!’

  “A day or two later,” he would continue, “I read in the LA Times that she’d been at RKO to interview with producers Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna for a part in Clash by Night. That proved to be her first costarring role. She was twenty-five years old. It seemed just weeks later that the story of her nude calendar broke, and immediately of course there she was right on the cover of Life magazine! In fact, one of the pictures for that story showed her wearing exactly what she had on the day I saw her. And later that year, 20th Century-Fox featured the same outfit in their ads for her first starring vehicle. Remember the slogan? ‘Marilyn Monroe—every inch a woman in Don’t Bother to Knock!’

  “Watching those films,” Charles was to recall, “not only did I feel I knew her as no one else in the theater did, but I was confirmed in my belief in her talent and even came to love those sensuously down-slanted eyes! Still, I could never shake the impression that she was a little on the frantic side. Exaggerated. Reaching out from somewhere very deep and desperate within.

  “Of course I had no idea then,” he would say, “that she’d go on to become one of the greatest screen legends of all time. When that happened, and when the past she sprang from became known to the whole world, I felt all the closer to her for realizing she too was truly of the downtrodden and dispossessed. It explained our one small, sweet encounter. Why she’d stayed aware of me when those two studio hotshots came along. Why she’d smiled to me when they left. To me and me only. Charles Williams, the black kid from Wichita!

  To that smile Charles, after a second’s reflection, would then return with a blissful afterthought:

  “You see, she may have given those guys Marilyn Monroe. But she gave me herself. She gave me Norma Jeane!”

  Notes and Sources

  I have been led to Casting Norma Jeane by a string of chance interviews which began even as Marilyn Monroe’s career soared atop its meteoric trajectory with the filming of Some Like It Hot. The exchanges I had, however, were not directly with her. They centered instead around two of her closest relatives—a married couple somewhat past middle age, living modest lives so divorced from the media fanfare surrounding their niece that today one would suppose it to have been humanly impossible.

  In that late fall of 1958 through the unique offices of a college friend named Robert Larson, I found myself seated in the living room of Marilyn Monroe’s sometime foster mother Enid Knebelkamp, raptly taking in what we now know to be the only interview ever granted to a writer by any of the star’s three Atchinson “aunts”—that vital trio of ladies comprised of Mrs Knebelkamp, Marilyn’s childhood legal guardian Grace Goddard, and the storied and beloved Aunt Ana Lower. Present with Mrs. Knebelkamp on the one evening we spoke was her husband Sam. In Casting Norma Jeane this pair appears along with all of the twenty-year-old starlet’s other closest relatives in my chapter entitled “Scroll of Life.”

  During several subsequent months in 1958 and 1959, I also had three lengthy interviews with Enid Knebelkamp’s close neighbor and trusted friend, who was indeed my colleague Robert Larson’s mother, the sophisticated and discerning Catherine Larson. Mrs. Larson joins Mrs. Knebelkamp in my chapter called “Artichoke Queen.”

  Not least, on innumerable occasions between the fall of 1958 and the spring of 1963, I interviewed Robert Larson himself (who happened once to have been the successful child movie actor billed in his heyday as Bobby Larson). Mr. Larson never met Marilyn Monroe, but at home he had always taken a lively, bemused, and wondering interest in everything his mother had to say about her, which he now repeated to me as one thoroughly under the famed actress’s spell.

  In connection with these four sources—Enid and Sam Knebelkamp, Catherine Larson, and Robert Larson—I use the word “interview.” Alas, as the saying goes, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. My great ambition, then, as a budding film auteur of nineteen, was to write for Marilyn Monroe, not about her. It hardly crossed my mind to take any but the most incidental and cursory notes of the fascinating things
these invaluable witnesses told me. Therefore, although it seems to me that almost every anecdote I heard from them has remained in my memory word for word to this day, in the absence of conventional documentation my rule throughout Casting Norma Jeane has been to rely strictly on other firsthand sources for any actual speech appearing between quotation marks in the text, as hereinbelow noted. In this regard I am particularly indebted to Berniece Miracle and Mona Rae Miracle, whose indispensable My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir of Marilyn Monroe preserves the sequence in which words were spoken on four different occasions that figured importantly in the story as it was passed on to me.

  Of course no story in the world ever suffered less than this one did from a scarcity of source material. The bibliography that follows represents only a tiny fraction of the veritable library of Marilyn Monroe research, biography and memoir that has arisen over the past half century—an accumulation as remarkable as anything of its kind in existence. From this repository, to be sure, works bearing upon the late summer and early fall of 1946 have provided Casting Norma Jeane with a wealth of factual corroboration, descriptive detail and chronological context, as additionally cited below. Nonetheless I must say that I owe the kernel and thrust of almost every scene in this book rather to the accounts of the four uniquely placed witnesses whom I have named. J.G.