Besides the speed of her success, what was also fascinating about Norma Jeane’s first photo sessions was how quickly she seemed to understand the business of modeling. She was very inquisitive about the process and also highly critical of her appearance. For instance, she asked David Conover questions about lighting, about different camera lenses, about how he coaxed his models into giving their best performances. In meetings with him after the sessions, she would study the contact sheets with the kind of careful scrutiny one might expect from a professional model. She wanted to know what she’d done wrong if an exposure didn’t meet with her approval. If her appearance didn’t meet her high standards, the picture was rejected. Every single shot had to be perfect, or she would not be happy with it.
Maybe it’s not that surprising that Norma Jeane was so intuitive about her appearance on film. After all, from a very early age, she had been attempting to win the favor of others. If Ida loved her enough, maybe she would allow her to call her mother. If she was good enough, maybe Gladys would want her too. If she was pretty enough, maybe she would be praised by Grace. The whole concept of how she was being received by others had always been foremost on her mind, fueled by her insecurity. She had been studying other people for years—those with whom she trafficked in her life, to see what they had to do to gain acceptance in the world, as well as those she didn’t know in movie magazines, to see what made them so special. Now, at the age of eighteen, she could step outside of herself and view herself as if she were a separate entity. Without even realizing it, she was making an art of communicating human emotion in photographs.
At the same time Norma Jeane’s exciting new modeling career was unfolding, Jim Dougherty was overseas on duty. He would have preferred it if she had been home alone, pining for him. In fact, he wrote her a very stern letter telling her that modeling was fine and good temporarily, but that as soon as he got home he expected her to get pregnant and have a family, “and you’re going to settle down. You can only have one career, and a woman can’t be two places at once.” It was interesting that now that she had found something she enjoyed, he had unilaterally decided that they were going to have a baby.
Jim’s mother, Ethel, who had always been an ally for Norma Jeane, also disapproved of her modeling. Not only did she keep her son up to date on Norma Jeane’s activities (and in a way that probably made them seem like trouble in the making), but she also made it clear to her daughter-in-law that what she was doing was unseemly and could create problems in her marriage. Norma Jeane responded by moving out of the Dougherty house and back into the lower half of her aunt Ana Lower’s duplex. Now more than ever, she was proving herself to be the strong, self-reliant girl Ida Bolender had tried to mold. She knew what she had to do, and she was going to do it. When Jim returned on leave in the spring of 1945, he found that he was no longer the center of Norma Jeane’s world. She was busy. She didn’t need him. She still loved him—maybe—but she no longer felt that she needed him to survive. The dynamic had changed between them, and he didn’t like it at all.
Gladys Is Released
Gladys Baker had tried everything she could to be released from Agnews State Hospital in San Jose. Finally, in August of 1945, doctors decided that she could be discharged. The condition was that she spend a year with her aunt Dora Graham in Oregon. Norma Jeane didn’t know what to make of her mother’s release. She knew that Gladys still wasn’t well. Her few visits with her—one at the hospital and one over lunch with Aunt Ana—had been not at all good. Berniece was much more excited about Gladys’s return to the outside world. She equated it with the good news that the war had ended that same month and called Gladys’s release her “personal miracle.” Of course, Berniece didn’t know Gladys at all. She had romanticized about her over the years and hoped to have a relationship with her. Norma Jeane had actually gone through the troubling experience that was Gladys Baker, so she was more realistic.
Soon after Gladys was released, she became completely immersed in Christian Science, which had been recommended to her by Aunt Ana, a practitioner of the faith. Christian Scientists believe in the power of prayer as the cure for emotional and physical ailments. The sect is controversial and has been so ever since it was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1908. Gladys could not stop reading the many books given her by Ana about the faith. It seemed to be the only thing in which she was truly interested.
Gladys’s fascination with the Christian Science doctrine made sense. After all, she had known for years that no matter what people said or did, they couldn’t fix her—doctors couldn’t, friends couldn’t, even her own mother couldn’t. Perhaps she thought that by poring over Christian Science books, she might discover a certain secret or fact and then finally she would be happy.
Also at this time, Gladys began wearing a white uniform, white stockings, and white shoes every day as if she were a nurse. She never explained why, and her family could never figure it out. Perhaps she had idealized the nurses she’d known at the sanitarium and thought they led good lives. After all, they were free to leave at the end of the day and be with their loved ones while she and the rest of the patients had to remain locked up. Or maybe she just viewed the nurses as powerful and in command—as she never had been in her own life. As soon as she was out, she began taking temporary jobs in convalescent homes. Norma Jeane found it disconcerting that her mother was tending to people in any kind of medical setting. Others, like Dora, actually hoped Gladys would become a practical nurse, now that she had finally gotten the freedom she so longed for.
Gladys’s Plea to Norma Jeane
In December 1945, Jim Dougherty returned from his tour of duty for the Christmas holidays. He had been gone for eighteen months. In that time, things between him and Norma Jeane had definitely changed, and he knew it as soon as she greeted him at the train station. “She was an hour late,” he recalled. “She told me she had a modeling job, and that was her excuse, which didn’t exactly make me happy. She embraced me and kissed me, but it was a little cool. I had two weeks off before resuming shipboard duties along the California coast, but I don’t think we had more than three or four nights together during that time. She was busy modeling, earning good money. It was my first inkling of her ambition.”
Norma Jeane wasn’t totally finished with her marriage. She still hoped that she would wake up one day to find that Jim had had a sudden change of heart. “Yes, yes, yes,” he would tell her in her fantasy. “I get it now. I understand. And yes, I approve of your career!” Perhaps she hoped for just such a reaction when she showed him her recent photos taken by a rather famous photographer named André de Dienes. She hoped he would like them—she knew they were very good—and perhaps they might convince him that she had found her calling. She also displayed some of the many magazine covers on which she had appeared of late. She was keeping a scrapbook, which she also proudly displayed, thumbing through the pages and explaining where each photo was taken and for what purpose. By this time, she had even been doing pinup modeling in bathing suits—which she must have known wouldn’t make him very happy. The cumulative effect of all of this accomplishment was impressive even to her, as perhaps it would have been to most people, considering how many covers she had racked up in such a short time—how could her husband not be amazed at her achievements? How could he not want her to continue? How could he not want her… to be happy?
“So far as I was concerned, she was turning into another human being,” he later recalled. “She showed me the pictures, her new dresses and shoes—as if I cared about such things. She was proud of her new popularity at Blue Book [the modeling agency with which she had signed] and she expected me to be, too.” Jim’s lackluster reaction did not bode well for him or his marriage. Norma Jeane was disappointed and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t at least try to act as if he were happy for her.
Jim felt that he needed time alone with his wife so that he could talk to her and try to resolve some of their issues—in other words, get her to acquiesce to h
is desire that she quit her career. He decided that the two of them should drive to Oregon and visit Gladys at her Aunt Dora’s home. Norma Jeane agreed, though reluctantly. She knew she had to see her mother, but she also knew that every time she had done so in the past she had regretted it. She also probably had ambivalent feelings about being alone in a car with her husband for so many days, especially since they were not getting along.
The visit did not go well, according to Jim. “My first encounter with Gladys was a little of a shock,” he later recalled. “She didn’t seem to connect with me at all. Her mind was out in left field somewhere.” Jim also was surprised at how much Gladys and Norma Jeane resembled each other. “You could almost see what Norma Jeane was going to look like when she got to be that age. Gladys was a pretty woman. With proper makeup and her hair done, she would have been a gorgeous person.”
Gladys sat upright in a wicker chair and was completely unresponsive when he and Norma Jeane walked into the room. She was wearing a white nylon dress and blouse and white stockings and shoes—her “nurse’s uniform.” Norma Jeane knelt at her mother’s feet and held her delicate hands, gazing into her vacant eyes, trying to divine what it was she was thinking, how she felt about seeing her.
“How are you, Mother? Are you happy to finally be out?” she asked her, somewhat tentatively.
Gladys smiled absently.
Still on her knees in front of her mother, Norma Jeane tried to fill the void by talking about her recent trip to see Berniece. “She can’t wait to come and see you, Mother,” she told Gladys. However, it didn’t matter what anecdote Norma Jeane relayed, nothing seemed to interest her mother. “Mother, please,” Norma Jeane said, a searching expression on her face. Gladys answered her plea with total silence. But then, suddenly, Gladys tightened her grip on Norma Jeane’s hands, leaned in, and whispered in her ear that she wanted to come and live with her.
Norma Jeane looked at her, a startled expression lingering on her face. She didn’t know how to respond. Truly, that was the last thing she’d expected, or even wanted. She was getting ready to leave an old life—her marriage—behind, and, hopefully, begin a new one—her career. Gladys represented a huge responsibility. No doubt, if the two had enjoyed a warm relationship over the years, she would have been much more inclined to take on such a burden. However, this woman before her was one she didn’t know at all, and was also unstable and unpredictable. Yet, still, she was her mother. Quick tears came to Norma Jeane’s eyes. She let go of Gladys’s hands and stood up. “We have to go now, Mother,” she said, gathering her coat while shooting Jim a desperate look. “I’m going to leave you Aunt Ana’s address and phone number, so you know where I am. Call me anytime.” Then, with tears by now streaming down her face, she bent down and kissed Gladys on the forehead. Gladys had no reaction. Norma Jeane and Jim turned and walked away.
The days driving back to Los Angeles were spent quietly, Norma Jeane deep in thought and terribly unhappy. The trip certainly did not go as Jim had planned. He didn’t have the chance to really talk to Norma Jeane about his concerns relating to their marriage and her career. However, when they got back to Aunt Ana’s, it all came out. “I’ve had enough of this modeling business,” he told Norma Jeane, putting his foot down. “I’m not going to put up with it another moment. Here’s what’s going to happen. When I get back here in April on my next leave, I want you back in our own house. And I want you to have made up your mind that you’re finished with this silliness, and then we’re going to have children. Do you understand, Norma Jeane?” She nodded, but didn’t say a word. She would later recall her heart pounding so much that evening, she couldn’t sleep. A photographer had given her a bottle of prescription sleeping pills in case she was unable to get a good night’s sleep before a session, but she was afraid to take them.
Jim Gets a Surprise: Gladys
The first four months of 1946 were busy. Norma Jeane, now almost twenty, had never worked so hard. All of the photographers who took her picture were amazed at how well they came out, and it was clear that she was no longer a novice. She’d known what she wanted in terms of results from the very beginning. Now she was getting those results. She was working nonstop—so much so that one friend, Jacquelyn Cooper, wondered if perhaps she was sleeping with the photographers. “I said she could tell me because I won’t breathe a word of it if you’re having affairs with these fellows,” she recalled. “She said, ‘Absolutely not!’ And what did I think she was? Very bothered, like that, like I’d hurt her feelings even wondering if she was sleeping with these fellows. In fact, she was so bothered she didn’t pay attention to me for days.”
“Men who tried to buy me with money made me sick,” Marilyn recalled years later. “There were plenty of them. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up.”
She was working a great deal. But she confided in one photographer that she would sometimes, as she put it, “get down in the dumps.” She said that she would have “dark moods that came from nowhere.” In those times, she said, it was as if she “didn’t have the answers to anything.” These particular comments from her are interesting because they call to mind what her grandmother, Della, and mother, Gladys, used to call “the doldrums.” But perhaps the following terribly prophetic statement says it best about Marilyn’s dark mood swings during this time in her life: “Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.”
During this time, while Jim was away and she was working with a series of different photographers, something else happened that would change things for Norma Jeane and, in a lot of ways, for future generations of admirers. It occurred in February 1946. At the suggestion of her agent, Emmeline Snively, Norma Jeane had her hair first straightened and then stripped of its chestnut brown color and changed to a shade of golden blonde. It was all in preparation for a shampoo print advertisement. Now, more than ever, Norma Jeane Baker Mortensen Dougherty was starting to look very much like Jean Harlow. But more important, she began to look like another great screen star, one of the greatest, in fact, of all time. She began to look like Marilyn Monroe. The transformation was almost complete. Norma Jeane Mortensen was almost a woman of the past, certainly as far as her husband was concerned.
In April, Jim returned from duty—as he had promised. However, Norma Jeane did not meet him at San Pedro Bay—as she had promised. Upset, he jumped into a taxi and went straight to the small house that the couple shared in Van Nuys. After paying the cabbie, he walked toward the home and noticed the drapes open. He peeked in. All of the furniture seemed to be in place. He caught a glimpse of Norma Jeane walking by. Apparently, she had done what he had demanded. She was there, at least. Now he might have a chance to talk some sense into her, and perhaps save his marriage. He must have been relieved. However, any sense of relief was to be short-lived. Jim Dougherty put his key into the lock and opened the door. And there she stood.
Not Norma Jeane.
Gladys.
How Gladys Lost Her Children
She’s been through so much in her life,” Norma Jeane told Jim. “I can’t put her out on the street.”
“But she’s crazy,” Jim said in protest.
“If you’d been through what she’s been through, maybe you’d be crazy, too.”
Norma Jeane had a great deal of empathy for her mother because she was privy to a story only those closest to the family knew. It was the story of how Gladys’s children—Norma Jeane’s half brother and sister—were kidnapped.
Back in 1922, Gladys Baker—who was twenty-two, just two years older than Norma Jeane was in 1946—had already married and divorced Jasper, her first husband. She now had custody of their children, Berniece and little Jackie. However, Jasper was concerned about his ex-wife’s behavio
r, claiming that she was unfit due to her overactive social life and her heavy drinking. Despite his concerns, Jasper left Los Angeles and headed for his native Kentucky, vowing to return to check in on his children.
Months later, he arrived unexpectedly at his mother-in-law Della’s home and found the children alone with her. He easily tracked Gladys down at a speakeasy a few blocks away. Gladys didn’t see him, though, when he arrived at and then left the smoke-filled “diner.” A few minutes later, one of the other revelers mentioned to Gladys that he had just seen her ex-husband. It was impossible, Gladys said, because Jasper wasn’t even in town. “But I could’ve sworn I just saw him,” her friend said. The moment hung awkwardly. Gladys shrugged and returned to her tipsy afternoon with the fellows. To hear her later recall the incident to relatives, she had convinced herself, at least for a short time, that her friend was mistaken. Yet, as she sipped on her drink, she grew concerned that maybe Jasper had been skulking around. As she sat thinking, her mind became flooded with terrible memories of their troubled relationship. He had told her on more occasions than she could count that she wasn’t fit to be a mother. It didn’t take long before Gladys’s worry built to the point where she simply had to leave the diner and return home to make sure her children were safe.
As she reached her block, she began sprinting toward her home, her youth apparent as she flew down the street. When she finally got to the house, she stopped dead in her tracks. On the front steps stood her mother, Della, smoking a cigarette and weeping. Gladys bolted up the steps and burst through the front door. Her children were gone.
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 11