“He brought Norma Jeane to my house because he said he wanted a quiet place to talk to her. His mother was always around, or Aunt Ana or Gladys. So I said yes. When they showed up, I could see that she was miserable and didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She had on a floral-print dress, I remember, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. To me, she looked beautiful. Jim kept saying, ‘Look at her, Martin. She hasn’t slept in days she’s so upset.’ Didn’t seem that way to me, though. They sat in my living room and I was ready to leave when Jim said, ‘No, stay. Maybe you can help me talk some sense into her.’ I felt very awkward about it, but stayed.”
Once the three were seated, Norma Jeane said, “I think you two are going to gang up on me now. And I don’t like it one bit, Jimmie.”
“We’re not doing that, Norma Jeane,” he said, according to Martin Evans’s memory. “We just want you to know that acting is a tough business. You don’t have the strength for it. I don’t know who you have been talking to at that modeling agency, but they’re filling your head with stupid ideas, Norma Jeane. This isn’t for you.”
Norma Jeane let his words sink in for a moment. Then, before she could respond, Jimmie verbally attacked her. He was angry, he said, because he felt she had used him to stay out of the orphanage and was now finished with him. She then asked him how many times she would have to thank him before they could just go on with their lives. He said she was unstable and, worse, that she had a lot in common with Gladys—suggesting, of course, that they were both mentally ill. With that, Jim stormed out the door leaving Norma Jeane with his friend, Martin. “She sat down and just started crying,” Martin Evans recalled. He said he watched her for a bit, noting how beautiful she was, even in tears.
Finally, she turned to him. “Take me away from here,” Norma Jeane said, standing tall. “Take me away from this place, and take me away from this time.”
Norma Jeane Signs with 20th Century-Fox
She’d heard it from so many photographers, she had to wonder if it was possibly true: “You are made for the movies, Norma Jeane.” Indeed, every man who ever took her picture seemed to want to encourage her into the film industry. It wasn’t so far-fetched a notion, actually. After all, she was stunning in photographs, her unique essence easily captured by the camera lens. The thought of how her look might translate onto the big screen was a tantalizing one. Still, it was a daunting proposition, especially since she had virtually no acting experience—not even in school plays, where so many professional actresses are able to at least claim some minor experience.
“I don’t even know if I can act,” she told her Aunt Ana when the two of them discussed the possibility. “Honey, you have been acting your entire life,” Ana, who was always very intuitive, told her. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” It was true. She had spent her whole life trying to fit in, trying to be better—hoping to be someone who would be accepted. “You can do whatever you set your mind to,” Ana had repeatedly told her. “You know, the initials for Christian Science—C.S.—also mean something else.” Norma Jeane had to laugh. She had heard this from Ana a thousand times. “Common sense,” she said, finishing the woman’s thought. “That’s right,” Ana told her, “and my common sense tells me that if you want to act, you’ll act.”
Inspired by Ana and the enthusiastic approval of so many others she’d talked to about it during the early months of 1946, Norma Jeane Mortensen began to envision a future for herself in Hollywood. Years later, she would say, “I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‘There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.’ ”
Prior to Norma Jeane’s final decision to divorce Jim, her modeling agent, the very efficient Emmeline Snively, had already begun to look into the possibility of film opportunities for her client. One thing led to another and soon Norma Jeane had an appointment to meet with Ben Lyon, who worked as a recruiter for new talent and director of casting at 20th Century-Fox Studios. Of course, Norma Jeane was extremely nervous, but she managed to screw up the courage to meet with the movie executive on July 17, 1946. He gave her a few pages of the script to Winged Victory, a 1944 film based on a successful Moss Hart Broadway play. Norma Jeane managed to get through the reading. Not much is known about it, but she must have been fairly good because Lyon arranged for her to have a film test.
Two days later, Norma Jeane found herself on the 20th Century-Fox lot, on the set of a new Betty Grable movie called Mother Wore Tights, where she would make her screen test. In 1946, Fox boasted an impressive list of actresses and actors already under contract. A short list of these luminaries on the lot at that time would include Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Tyrone Power, Betty Grable, Anne Baxter, Rex Harrison, Maureen O’Hara, and Vivian Blaine.
Cinematographer Leon Shamroy would film Norma Jeane’s silent screen test. After being fitted into a floor-length crinoline gown, she was told to stand on a set in front of a camera and execute a few simple moves: saunter back and forth, sit on a stool, walk toward a window on the stage set. While she stood before a movie camera for the first time, as nervous and embarrassed as she was, Norma Jeane was suddenly transformed into a woman completely at ease, enormously self-assured, and, more important, radiant in her unrestrained beauty. “I thought, this girl will be another Harlow,” Leon Shamroy once recalled of the test. “Her natural beauty plus her inferiority complex gave her a look of mystery. I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson, and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow. Every frame of the test radiated sex. She didn’t need a sound track, she was creating effects visually. She was showing us she could sell emotions in pictures.” It became clear that the studio was interested in her when they asked her to do another screen test, this time in Technicolor. It was just a matter of paperwork before she would sign a deal.
Darryl Zanuck, head honcho at Fox, was not quite as effusive as everyone else who saw Norma Jeane’s test, though. (Interestingly, this man would never be a fan of hers—even when she was making a fortune for his company.) However, at the beginning, he decided she had enough potential to be signed to a contract—seventy-five dollars a week for six months with an option for the studio to renew at that point for another six, but at double the salary. She would be paid this amount whether she worked or not. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and Norma Jeane was thrilled.
Of course, no one was happier about this sudden turn of events in Norma Jeane’s life than her “Aunt” Grace, always Norma Jeane’s protector and encourager. She wasn’t a star yet, but she’d come far in a short time. At this time, she was just twenty—a year too young to sign a legal contract in California. Therefore, it seemed only fitting that the woman who would cosign the contract with her, on August 24, 1946, would be—Grace Goddard.
Just before the contract with 20th Century-Fox was finalized, Norma Jeane Dougherty was called into Ben Lyon’s office. There was a problem: her name. Lyon explained that, in his opinion, her last name was too difficult to pronounce. “People are going to wonder if it’s doe-herty, or do-gerty… or, I don’t know,” he said, “but it has to be changed. It’s too much like a child’s,” he told her. “We need something that will offset your vulnerability but will have some class to it.” How did she feel about that? Norma Jeane didn’t really know how to respond. She knew she was divorcing Jim anyway, so she certainly saw no reason to stay wedded to his last name. She agreed. Eventually, she and Lyon settled on Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn after 1920s Broadway actress Marilyn Miller, an actress he said Norma Jeane reminded him of, and also someone he had dated; and Monroe after her mother’s family name.
Norma Jeane wasn’t sure about the proposed name. However, Lyon was so enthusiastic, she couldn’t disagree. “Well,” she finally concluded with an amused glint in her eyes, “I guess I’m Marilyn Monroe.” *
PAR
T THREE
Marilyn
Marilyn Trying to Understand Gladys
By the summer of 1946, Marilyn’s half sister, Berniece Baker Miracle, could wait no longer—she had to meet her mother, Gladys Baker. She had no memory of her at all. She had been just a little girl when Gladys left her in Kentucky all of those years ago. Now that Gladys was out of the hospital, Berniece felt the time had come for a mother-daughter reunion. Marilyn wasn’t so sure about it. Gladys had been living with her and Aunt Ana since her release, so Marilyn knew that she really was not well. She seemed totally incapable of expressing love or even warmth, let alone maternal feelings. She was also quite defensive and argumentative. Marilyn didn’t want to take the chance that Gladys would say or do something that would hurt Berniece’s feelings. “The image in your mind of our mother is much better than the reality of her,” she told Berniece. “Maybe you should just leave it be.” She didn’t want her half sister to be disappointed. However, there was no stopping Berniece. She wanted to see her mother and intended to stay at Aunt Ana’s for an extended three-month visit. She would be bringing her small daughter, Mona Rae, along with her. Her husband would stay behind since he would not be able to leave his job for such a long time.
When the day came for Berniece and Mona Rae to arrive from Michigan, Marilyn drove Ana, Grace, and Gladys to the Burbank airport to greet them. The women waited anxiously on the tarmac for the plane to land, anticipating the sight of their relatives. There must have also been a certain amount of apprehension from Marilyn, Ana, and Grace as to how Gladys might react when she saw her long-lost daughter. As soon as Berniece and Mona Rae appeared at the top of the jet plane’s metal stairs, Marilyn ran toward them. By the time they were at the bottom of the stairs, Marilyn was embracing them both. When she introduced the two of them to Aunt Ana, the three embraced. Then, of course, Grace hugged Berniece and her daughter. “And this is Mother, Berniece,” Marilyn finally said. Turning to Gladys, she said, “And Mother, this is Berniece.” Berniece would later say she first noticed Gladys’s gray hair, which was cut at this time in short curls. She also noted that Gladys stood rigid, her arms downward, and exhibited no emotion. Berniece was completely overwhelmed anyway, and hugged her mother. In response, Gladys placed her arms tentatively around Berniece’s waist for a moment and patted her back. The moment hung awkwardly. Of Gladys’s meeting with her daughter, Grace Goddard would later write to a cousin, “It looked to me like she was thinking to herself, why is everyone here sharing something and feeling something that I’m not sharing… and I’m not feeling.”
Once they were back at Ana’s, it was decided that Marilyn would sleep upstairs with Ana while Berniece and Mona Rae would sleep in the downstairs apartment with Gladys. That meant that Berniece and Gladys would be sleeping in the same bed, while Mona Rae slept on a small roll-away cot in the corner. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how these arrangements would have been difficult for Gladys. However, it was Marilyn’s idea. “She set it up that way specifically because she hoped her mother would bond with Berniece, on some level,” one relative explained. “She wanted nothing more than for her mother to feel something. She kept waiting for some kind of emotional process to take place in Gladys—and the heartbreaking truth was that it simply was not going to happen.”
As the days turned into weeks, Berniece became distressed by how often Gladys was critical of Marilyn’s new career. She recalled one incident during which Marilyn was practicing the enunciation of certain words in front of a mirror. “Oh, that’s just ridiculous,” Gladys told her daughter. “You should be doing something worthwhile with your life. Not this.” Marilyn tried to explain that she had to improve the elocution of certain words for her acting classes at the studio, but Gladys just didn’t want to hear it.
After witnessing that particular scene, Berniece cornered her mother. “You should be more encouraging to Norma Jeane,” she told her. “She’s trying so hard to make a go of it, and you’re being so difficult.” In response, Gladys said something under her breath. Berniece decided to just leave her alone.
Shortly after, Norma Jeane got a scare when she got a call from her agent, Emmeline Snively, telling her, “I just wanted you to know that your mother was here.” As it happened, Gladys had woken up that morning, put on her nurse’s uniform, called a cab, and was taken to the Ambassador Hotel where Snively’s company, the Blue Book Agency, was located. She marched into Snively’s office and told her that she was very unhappy about her daughter’s career and wanted her to convince Norma Jeane not to continue with it. Snively was a little surprised, but she handled it well. She said that it was a matter between a mother and daughter, not an agent and client, and that Gladys should take it up with Norma Jeane. Gladys left, but not before telling Snively, “It’s very wrong for you to allow young girls to come in here and ruin their lives with picture-taking.” When Snively later explained all of this to Norma Jeane, the young lady was, of course, embarrassed and upset. Gladys had asked her who was helping her with her career and Norma Jeane had mentioned Snively, but she couldn’t believe that Gladys had had the presence of mind to track her down and then talk to her. That evening, she and Gladys had a contentious exchange about it, ending with Norma Jeane telling her mother to “never interfere with my career again.” Gladys said, “Fine, if that’s the way you want it. Do what you want to do. See if I care.” She then went to her room and slammed the door so loud it echoed throughout the household. “Why is she so angry all the time?” Berniece wondered.
The only time Gladys seemed to really become invested in anything was when Ana would take all of the women in the household to Christian Science services on Sunday. Gladys’s intense interest in Christian Science had not wavered since her release from the sanitarium. The subject of mind over matter fascinated her; it was as if she knew she could not manage her life and wanted to do whatever she could to seize back some control over it. At the same time, Ana and Marilyn would stay up into the early morning hours reading from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, the most important Christian Science book. Marilyn had been interested in the belief system before her marriage to Jim Dougherty, and when the marriage collapsed she turned back to it. One person who would later know Gladys at a home in which she spent some time in the 1970s has an interesting theory about Marilyn’s devotion to Christian Science:
“She had always been a student of human interaction, if you think about it: how people reacted to her if she was one way, how they would be drawn to her if she was another way. What did she have to do to make people love her? She had made a study of all this. I think it was because she always knew her mother’s mind was not right. And I think she knew that she may very well have a predisposition for the same kinds of mental problems, too, because her grandmother and her mother both experienced similar fates. So the whole concept that there was a way of understanding the human brain and changing your life by changing your mind appealed to her. It was as if she was hoping to get in on the ground floor of something big, as if she was saying, ‘If I study this now and know all about this by the time I’m at the age when Mother started to flip out, maybe I’ll be able to control it better than she did.’ I think she always feared she had a ticking time bomb inside her.”
Interestingly, at this same time—the summer of 1946—Gladys sent a series of letters to Margaret Cohen in Kentucky, the woman whose child, Norma Jeane, she raised for one year in 1922. That child was now twenty-seven years old. Gladys wrote that she wanted to see the girl because, as she put it in one of the letters, “my own daughters do not understand me, nor are they willing to try.” The Cohen family found Gladys’s letters disturbing. First of all, they couldn’t imagine how she had tracked them down. They’d moved to a different town since she worked for them so many years earlier. Secondly, they received five letters in just one week, all rambling missives about wanting to see Norma Jeane. Then they were dismayed by all of the Christian Science literature Gladys included in her correspondence. In one of th
ese letters, she mentioned Marilyn’s career. “I am sorry to say that my own Norma Jean [sic] has decided on the moving picture business as a career. I am very much opposed to this. However, whenever I mention it to her, she raises her hand in my face and tells me that she doesn’t want to hear about it and that it is none of her mother’s business. I would love to have a child who values my opinion but that is not what I have in Norma Jean.” The Cohen family decided against responding to any of Gladys’s letters.
It wasn’t all angst in the household during Berniece’s long stay at Aunt Ana’s. There were some good times. For instance, Marilyn couldn’t wait to show her half sister the screen test she made for Fox. She arranged for her to have a private screening of it at the studio. There were other light moments as well. Sometimes the entire family would go out to dinner together. On weekends, Marilyn would drive them around Los Angeles on sightseeing excursions to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Farmer’s Market, the homes of certain celebrities (maps sold by youngsters on street corners were usually accurate in pinpointing these addresses, much to the chagrin of the stars), and other West Coast locales she thought they’d be interested in, including the beach. There are actually quite a few photographs of the women at Santa Monica beach. Marilyn and Berniece would chatter incessantly during these day trips; they got along famously. Meanwhile, Ana and Grace would try to engage Gladys in conversation. Sometimes, they were successful, but usually Gladys stayed in her shell. “Why can’t she just have a good time? I just don’t get it,” Marilyn is said to have wondered.
While living in the institution, Gladys Baker had become used to each day having structure. There were certain times for eating meals, engaging in outdoor activities, reading, and then going to sleep. She had been living with those circumstances for so many years that when she left and moved in with Ana and Marilyn, she still wanted that kind of structure in her life. She wanted to know that every day was to be the same. It made her feel safe, secure. However, Berniece’s arrival totally upset any routine she had been trying to establish at Ana’s. For three months, she never knew from one moment to the next where she was going or what she would be doing once she got there. Still, Marilyn wanted to at least come up with activities that her mother would enjoy, and also some that might elicit some emotional response from her.
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 13