The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  “My name is Norma Jeane,” she said. “Are you Mr. d-de Di-Dienes?”

  He wasn’t prepared for what stood on the threshold. “In one fell swoop I was intrigued, moved and attracted by her,” de Dienes recalled, “the firm, well-rounded breasts, a trim waist set off by the perfect curve of her hip, long, lithe legs.”

  He picked her up early the next morning at Aunt Ana’s home. It was a bright November morning in 1945 on a beach in Malibu that Norma Jeane, without makeup, danced in the golden freshness of the dawn—whirling, prancing, sinking to the sand, jumping to her feet, brimming over with the joy of life in a ballet with the camera choreographed by Andre de Dienes.

  What had been captured on film that day was developed that night in the photographer’s darkroom. “As I watched the prints appear in the developing bath, I became more convinced of her great future, and more determined to do some extended location work with her,” de Dienes remembered.

  Mrs. Snively observed, “She still seemed a scared, pretty lonely little kid who wore mostly fresh white cotton dresses, and wanted somebody somewhere to think she was worth something.” De Dienes made her feel special, buying her clothes and jewelry to be used in the photo sessions. His energetic liberating spirit took Norma Jeane out of her pit of loneliness. To de Dienes she could reveal her wild heart and share her tumultuous daydreams.

  Driving off in de Dienes’s black Buick convertible early one morning in the first week of December, they headed for the Mojave Desert and Death Valley. That first night they stayed at Furnace Creek, and much to de Dienes’s disappointment, Norma Jeane insisted on her own room. When he knocked on her door in the middle of the night, she smiled and calmly asked him to be good and go back to bed.

  It was well past daybreak when he awoke, and de Dienes’s favorite time for shooting was eluding him as the sun rose in the cloudless sky. He found Norma Jeane was already up and dressed, looking as bright as the dawn. “There she was fresh as a daisy, wearing a polo-neck sweater, slacks, and a smile,” de Dienes remembered. “I felt I could not photograph her too often that day.”

  “Run!” click “Leap!” click and he talks to her of wild things and daydreams click of mountains of gold and riches click fame click click “Turn! Arch your back!” click The firm, well-rounded breasts click and tousled hair in the golden sun click “Jump!” click the perfect curve of the hips click click and the eagles soar against the cobalt sky as she laughs and kisses the sunshine amid the endless vistas and infinite freedom of youth click and nature click and beauty click click click!

  It was dark when they arrived in Portland. Norma Jeane had spoken to Grace Goddard on the phone and learned that her mother, who had been released from the institution in Agnew, was living alone in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon. Annoyed with himself for allowing Norma Jeane to persuade him to drive so far north, de Dienes accompanied her to the hotel in the center of town, where they found Gladys in a stark, depressing room on the top floor. He recalls that the meeting was awkward, and that they had nothing to say to each other. Norma Jeane unpacked the presents she had bought and put on a cheerful front. She tried to engage her mother in conversation but Gladys didn’t respond. “Mrs. Baker buried her face in her hands and seemed to forget all about us,” de Dienes recalled. “It was distressing. She had obviously been released from the hospital too soon.”

  When they left, they headed south again. It was raining and growing dark, and de Dienes could see that Norma Jeane was depressed. It was again the holiday season, eleven Christmases since Gladys had been taken away, and it was seven years since Norma Jeane had last visited her mother. According to de Dienes, a veil of sadness seemed to envelop her, and there was nothing he could say or do to lift her spirits.

  Soon the icy rain turned to snow and the dark road was becoming impassable. Not far from Mt. Hood they made out some lights shining from an old brick hotel called Government Lodge. According to de Dienes there was only one vacancy—a room with a double bed.

  When de Dienes and Norma Jeane returned to Los Angeles there was a message waiting from Jim Dougherty. His ship had docked on the East Coast. He was heading home by train and wired the time of his arrival. Learning of her husband’s return, Andre de Dienes informed Norma Jeane that a friend in New York had died unexpectedly, and he suddenly left town, having added another shapely model to his portfolio.

  When Dougherty arrived at Union Station, his wife wasn’t there to greet him. “She was an hour late,” Dougherty remembers. “When she did show up—with my car—she said she had been at a modeling job and it had taken longer than she figured. Before, I always had received a warm homecoming, a genuine feeling of love and a sense that she had missed me terribly. Now it was a little cool. There was an embrace and a kiss, but it was different.”

  Though he was home for two weeks, Dougherty recalls that they had only two or three evenings together during his leave. “She was busy modeling, earning good money. It was my first inkling of her ambition, and instead of me being the center of her attention the way it had been on my first trip home, now I was incidental. I was squeezed into her busy day, and resentment set in early. Norma Jeane wasn’t talking about our future anymore either. It was her career nearly all the time.”

  When Dougherty looked at his bankbook, he noted that all the savings had been drawn out—most of it spent on clothes for modeling. “She would show me her new dresses and shoes as though I cared about such things,” Dougherty reflected. “She had a collection of all these magazines she’d appeared in. She was beginning to appear on a number of covers and was very proud of that. She expected me to be, too, but all I was, was queasy. I had a sinking feeling in my gut.”

  Apparently Grace Goddard and Norma Jeane had discussed the distressing visit with her mother in Portland, and it was arranged for Gladys to stay with the Goddards in Van Nuys until Norma Jeane could find a place for her mother to stay. Dougherty has a vivid memory of going with Norma Jeane to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Los Angeles to pick up Gladys. Dougherty had never seen Gladys before, and it was something of a shock. “She was wearing an all-white outfit and looked more like a nurse,” Dougherty said. “She was polite enough, but she didn’t seem to connect with me at all. Her mind was out in left field somewhere. I never saw her angry, and I never saw her laugh.”

  Recalling the showdown he had with Norma Jeane in January, shortly before he was to report back for sea duty, Dougherty said, “I saw myself losing out, little by little, and I thought, ‘Hell, this is no way to live!’…I thought I’d given her modeling career a fair trial, well over a year, and she was letting our home life slide more and more. So I just told her that she would have to choose between a modeling career or a home life with me like we had in Catalina. Then she got very emotional. She said I was gone too much. How could I expect her to be a housewife when I was at sea more than half the time? ‘Catalina was wonderful,’ she said, ‘but when are you coming home to stay?’ I knew I was losing the fight to keep us together,” Dougherty acknowledged. “She knew what she wanted, and I couldn’t offer her anything except promises. When I shipped out again, she must have figured that the most important one had been broken.”

  Jim was gone again, and not knowing when he would return, Norma Jeane concentrated on her career. With the de Dienes photos, Emmeline Snively had an exceptional portfolio of pictures to circulate, and Norma Jeane became very much in demand. In February and March 1946 she posed for photographer Joe Jasgur and artist Earl Moran. Moran took snapshots of her in a variety of poses, and would then do pastels of them for Brown and Bigelow, a major calendar-art and postcard company. She became Moran’s favorite model, and he paid her ten dollars an hour for posing on numerous occasions over the course of the next four erratic and hungry years. Commenting on her talent, Moran later stated, “She knew exactly what to do; her movements, her hands, her body were just perfect. She was the sexiest. Better than anyone else.”

  By February 1946, Norma Jeane was earning enough mone
y to rent Ana Lower’s downstairs apartment on Nebraska Avenue, and have her mother move in with her. The expediency of the move may have had its origins in problems enveloping the Goddard household. According to Bebe, by the time Grace and Doc Goddard had moved back to Van Nuys they had both succumbed to alcoholism, and their life was at times chaotic.

  Though living with Gladys presented emotional and practical difficulties, Norma Jeane had a real desire to know her mother and mend their estrangement. On most Sunday mornings Aunt Ana, Gladys, and her daughter attended Christian Science services together in Westwood Village. Emmeline Snively had a vivid recollection of an unexpected visit by Norma Jeane’s mother at the Blue Book Modeling Agency. An apparition in white, Gladys suddenly appeared at Miss Snively’s door wearing her white dress, white shoes, white stockings, and white hat. The two ladies spent an hour discussing Norma Jeane’s career. When Gladys got up to leave she took Emmeline’s hand and said, “I only came so I could thank you personally for what you’ve been doing for Norma Jeane. You’ve given her a whole new life!”

  Emmeline Snively felt that Norma Jeane could be more successful as a blonde, and she frequently suggested lightening her hair, but Norma Jeane protested that she wouldn’t look natural. Miss Snively pointed out to her, “If you intend to go places, you’ve got to bleach, dear. The biggest demand is for blondes. A blonde can be photographed light, medium, or dark by controlling the light. The way your hair is now you’ll always come out more dark than light.” Nevertheless, Norma Jeane remained stubborn about not changing her hair.

  In the spring of 1946 commercial photographer Raphael Wolff called Emmeline Snively to say that he wanted to use Norma Jeane for a series of Lustre Creme shampoo ads at ten dollars an hour, but he wouldn’t hire her unless she became a blonde. He added that he would pay for the bleach job himself. Norma Jeane gave in and was sent to the Hollywood hairstyling salon of Frank and Joseph, where her hair was bleached golden blond and styled in a sophisticated upsweep.

  At first she thought it looked artificial. “It wasn’t the ‘real me,’” she said, and she had difficulty getting used to the other woman whose strange, exotic image stared back at her from the looking glass. But she soon recognized the image as the same friend who had disrupted the math class at Emerson and caused incidents of whiplash on the beaches of Southern California. As a blonde she noted that heads turned a little faster and wolf whistles were a little shriller.

  But to be a blonde demanded a certain commitment. Blondes are different. Shapely blondes fall into a mythological morphology. They dress differently, think differently, act differently. Studying the reflection of the blonde in the mirror, she must have recognized something that was true to herself—something that was blond inside.

  And as she stared at the strange, exotic image of the other woman, Norma Jeane stepped through the looking glass and became a blonde forever.

  25

  “MM…”

  The patient stated that he felt a constant pleasant humming sensation in his lips. He felt as though he were making the sound “Mm…” The “Mm” sound was a pleasantly toned auto-erotic expression.

  —Dr. Ralph R. Greenson, 1953

  Hollywood, it has been said, is a state of mind, a celluloid city that extends from the back lots of the dream factories and has no boundaries—its false fronts and plaster streets wending endlessly through Oz, Shangri-la, the Casbah, and Jurassic Park to the darkened cinema palaces, multiplexes, and living rooms around the globe.

  A visitor to the real Hollywood of today is often shocked by the dichotomy between the dream and the reality. Hollywood Boulevard, once a magical mecca, has become the street of busted dreams where panhandlers, grifters, psychos, and life’s disenfranchised gather to commiserate in the silent scream of social rejection. The day of the locusts has come and gone, leaving the few vestiges of Hollywood’s glory days in ruin and decay.

  But there was a day and an arc-lit night when Hollywood was in a better state of mindlessness—the plaster was fresh, the tinsel was real tinsel, and the unrecycled dream was an honest simulation of genuine illusion. There were real stories, and there were real stars. Legendary stars such as Valentino, Gable, Harlow, Pickford, Fairbanks, and Garbo had an aura unknown to the stars of today. The star system and the stars’ distinctive larger-than-life individuality placed them in an outer orbit where they burned stronger, burned brighter.

  To Norma Jeane, they were the beacons of a promised land—the land of Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gene Tierney, and Jennifer Jones—and she thought,

  All actors and actresses were geniuses sitting on the front porch of Paradise—the movies. Acting became something golden and beautiful. It wasn’t an art. It was like the bright colors I used to see in my daydreams—like a game that enabled me to step out of a dark and dull world, into worlds so bright they made my heart leap just to think of them. From time to time I took drama lessons, when I had enough money. They were expensive. I paid ten dollars an hour, and I often used to say my speech lesson out loud:

  Ariadne arose from her couch in the snows in the Akrakaronian mountains…. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ne-never wert.

  I got to know a lot of people, people different from those I’d known, both good and bad. Sometimes when I was waiting for a bus a car would stop and the man at the wheel would roll down the window and say, “What are you doing here? You should be in pictures.” Then he’d ask me to drive home with him. I’d always say, “No, thank you. I’d rather take the bus.” But all the same, the idea of the movies kept going through my mind.

  Early in 1946 Norma Jeane spoke with Emmeline Snively about her ambition to be a movie actress, and Miss Snively recommended that she see her friend Helen “Bunny” Ainsworth, the West Coast representative of the National Concert Artists talent agency. A huge woman, Bunny Ainsworth weighed in at well over two hundred pounds and jokingly referred to herself as the biggest agent in Hollywood. Impressed by Norma Jeane, Ainsworth signed her to the agency on March 11, 1946, and Harry Lipton was appointed as her motion-picture representative.

  But Norma Jeane was only one of thousands dreaming the same dream, following the same road sign, THIS WAY OUT. They packed up their hopes and hitchhiked, grabbed the bus, or jumped on the train for movieland, each one dreaming with all her heart that she would be the one who would make it to the top: hundreds and hundreds of smiles and capped teeth and dye jobs, fixed noses, electrolysis—all bumps and warts removed; thousands of brunettes, redheads, blondes with lithe legs, full firm breasts, and the perfect curve of the hip—or excellent falsies and bun pads; thousands and thousands of photos and head shots and résumés—“Broadway experience,” can sing, tap-dance, do the hula, play piano, double-jointed, “Miss Wyoming,” studied with Meisner, Abbey Players, Pocono Playhouse, slept with Zanuck (has special wink and walk), has large expressive eyes; “Bright as hell, Jack, studied in London—class, but look at those jugs!”…“exudes confidence, charm and allure!”…“and listen, Harry, get this—she’s J. Paul Getty’s sweetie pie”…Thousands and thousands of babes and dolls and lays and lookers, schemers and dreamers with gams and grins, boobs and kissers, and—and then there was Norma Jeane.

  She followed the prescribed trail from Schwab’s Drugstore to the studio casting offices, portfolio and resume in hand. She read big books to improve her mind while waiting long hours on hard benches, only to be told, “We can’t see you today.” She had heard through the grapevine at Schwab’s that no major studio would put her under contract, in any event, if she was married. Her agent, Harry Lipton, confirmed that the studios felt they would be wasting money and time in training a starlet who might get pregnant. According to Lipton, he spoke to Norma Jeane about her marriage of four years to Dougherty, and realizing that the marriage was in fact over, persuaded her to go to Nevada and obtain a quickie divorce.

  She filed for a divorce from James Dougherty in Las Vegas on May 14, 1946. Though she was legally required
to live in Nevada until the divorce was finalized, she frequently commuted between Hollywood and Vegas, gambling on the odds that she wouldn’t be caught.

  Dougherty recalls that his ship had docked in Shanghai when the mail arrived from the states. Norma Jeane hadn’t written for a long time, and he didn’t really expect a letter. But his name was called out and one of the sailors handed a letter back to him and said, “Hey, your old lady’s divorcing you!” It was from a Las Vegas attorney. “It was a Dear John,” Dougherty remembers, “and all kinds of crazy thoughts went through my mind. I thought about jumping over the side, about doing away with myself any way I could manage. But that feeling passed within minutes.” Despair quickly turned to anger as Dougherty saw that a movie contract meant more to his wife than a marriage contract. Instead of doing away with himself, Dougherty stated, “I immediately went to the captain and said, ‘I want my wife’s allotment cut off as of right now!’”

  In July, Norma Jeane appeared on the cover of four “girlie” magazines—Click, Pic, Laff, and Sir. Packing her bulging portfolio, she headed for 20th Century-Fox, determined to see the casting director, Ben Lyon.

  In the wartime boom years and pre-TV days, Fox had become the largest and most successful of the Hollywood majors. Invariably, the studio empires had been built on the vision of individuals rather than executive boards, agents, and Wall Street lawyers; and it was Darryl F. Zanuck, an idiosyncratic man of dauntless will and energy, who had turned the ailing William Fox Corporation into a vast empire encompassing the worldwide Fox theater chain and the Westwood Studio, with its sixteen soundstages, three hundred acres of lakes and forests, western towns, New York City streets, medieval castles, railway stations, jungles, and Oriental bazaars—all on prime real estate bordering Beverly Hills.