Chapter Five
I’M THE CAPTAIN and my wife is first mate,” Dougherty said of marriage; accordingly, his wife should be “content to stay on board and let me steer the ship.” But from the beginning of the arranged marriage between the insecure, virginal Norma Jeane and the confident, experienced Jim, there were signs of occasional mutiny, and eventually the subaltern jumped ship.
Much later, the captain’s two logs appeared: selective, biased, abounding with clarifications of chronology and intimate details but teeming with improvised dialogue and imaginative reconstructions of events. For years they provided the only available chart of the matrimonial voyage—until the discovery of transcribed conversations during which both captain and first mate confided very different accounts of a journey that was headed for shipwreck from the first day.1
James Dougherty always publicly insisted that “there were never any problems with our marriage . . . until I wanted a family and she wanted a career.” Such comments for the record reflected his conventional understanding of marriage as dominated by the husband and his wish to present a rosy picture of the first of the three marriages each of them contracted. But in remarks excised from later interviews prior to their publication, he was often more forthright about the thornier aspects of the union. “I wouldn’t be married to another movie actress for anything in the world,” he said. “She had only one thing on her mind—to be a star—and she gave up everything for it. I think Grace had a lot to do with it.”
As for Norma Jeane, she later said, “My marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy, either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.”
For about six months, from June to December 1942, the Doughertys lived in their one-room rented cabin in Sherman Oaks. Here, sixteen-year-old Norma Jeane tried to rise to the unrealistic demands of being a suitable housewife for a twenty-one-year-old independent man. She asked few questions, accepting the role of sexual companion and housekeeper enjoined on her by Grace and now expected of her by Dougherty. But this seemed to her very different from the earlier plan proposed—for her to replace Jean Harlow—and the shift in her prospects confused Norma Jean. “I really didn’t know where I was, or what I was supposed to be doing,” she said later.
Later, Dougherty had to admit,
She was so sensitive and insecure I realized I wasn’t prepared to handle her. I knew she was too young, and that her feelings were very easily hurt. She thought I was mad at her if I didn’t kiss her good-bye every time I left the house. When we had an argument—and there were plenty—I’d often say, “Just shut up!” and go out to sleep on the couch. An hour later, I woke up to find her sleeping alongside me, or sitting nearby on the floor. She was very forgiving. She never held a grudge in her life. I thought I knew what she wanted, but what I thought was never what she wanted. She seemed to be playing some kind of a part, rehearsing for a future I couldn’t figure out.
Transcribed in 1952 but not included in the final published version of the 1953 article “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” this forthright statement provides a clue to the basic psychological gap that separated the couple. It is also an important corrective to the image of a delightful, carefree, passionate young bride artfully but somewhat disingenuously presented in Dougherty’s short book.
For one thing, he realized at once that he was more her father and protector than husband. “She called me ‘Daddy.’ When she packed my lunch for work, there was often a note inside: ‘Dearest Daddy—When you read this, I’ll be asleep and dreaming of you. Love and kisses, Your Baby.’ ”
But Dougherty was a gregarious chap who had many friends, played games, loved to go out and thought that flirting with pretty girls at dances and parties was harmless and permissible. Norma Jeane, on the other hand, was friendless, had few social skills, was nervous about embarrassing them both in public and became jealous, angry and frightened of being abandoned if he paid attention to any other woman. He preferred to save a portion of his income, but she asked for extra cash and spent it prodigally—especially on gifts for him such as expensive Van Dyke cigars and new shirts, as if from his own paycheck she could buy his devotion.
Crucial differences in their sensibilities were immediately evident that summer. Since the shooting of her beloved dog Tippy a decade earlier, Norma Jeane had been extremely sensitive about the mistreatment of animals. “She loved them all and was always trying to pick up strays,” according to Eleanor Goddard; as Grace had pointed out, the same was true of Jean Harlow, who throughout her life had a menagerie of dogs, cats and ducks. Hence when Jim returned one evening with a dead rabbit ready for skinning, she was unable to bear the sight and became almost hysterical. The consequent idea of eating the poor animal was repugnant beyond description.
Related to this, he complained that “she couldn’t cook for ducks.” Deficient in the kitchen and lacking any preparation for ordinary household tasks, Norma Jeane was constantly anxious, terrified of displeasing her husband and therefore perhaps of being sent away—to where, she knew not. No wonder she clung to his arm so insistently on her wedding day.
She was, therefore, prone to culinary miscalculations. She overseasoned percolated coffee with salt; whiskey was served undiluted, in twelve-ounce tumblers; there were endless helpings of mixed peas and carrots, because she had once been told foods should have a pleasing color combination; and she did not know how to cook fish when her husband returned with a Sunday catch. When Norma Jeane once inadvertently brought a trout to the table virtually raw, her husband muttered sarcastically, “You ought to cookdinner once in a while,” which elicited her tearful reply, “You’re nothing but a brute.” There followed a terrific argument that ended only when he pushed her, fully clothed, under a cold shower. “I went out for a walk, and when I came back she’d cooled off.” Such treatment quite naturally increased her feelings of incompetence and her fear of abandonment.
As for their intimate life, Dougherty was often publicly rhapsodic: “Our life was idyllic, sexually and otherwise.” Consistent with this, there is attributed to him the description of Norma Jeane as an insatiable nymphette who, while riding in a car, would suddenly shout to her husband, “Pull off the road here! Pull off here!” Demanding instant sexual intercourse, she forthwith redefined the term autoeroticism. Neatly concocted by imaginative editors at the Playboy Press eager to serve the later tabloid image of the eternally sexy Marilyn Monroe, such anecdotes are not to be found in Dougherty’s more discreet notes for his memoir.
More significantly, this sort of assertion is wildly variant from her private conversations with friends. To director Elia Kazan she later confided that she did not enjoy “anything Jim did to me—except when he kissed me here,” whereupon she gently touched her breasts; after he was satisfied, Jim usually fell asleep, leaving her awake, confused and discontent. She spoke frankly with other friends, too, about her marriage with Dougherty—in artless but thoughtful recollections, unconcerned with self-justification, much less retribution:
Of course I wasn’t very well informed about sex. Let’s just say that some things seemed more natural to me than others. I just wanted to please him, and at first I found it all a little strange. I didn’t know if I was doing it right. So after a while, the marriage itself left me cold.
To be sure, Dougherty was never cruel; but in his youthful ardor, manly egoism and spirit of independence, he was perhaps equally unprepared for the demands of marriage. As he admitted in his franker moments,
I used to stay out and shoot pool a lot with my buddies, and this hurt her feelings. I shouldn’t have done that, I know. She cried easily when I left her alone, which maybe I did too much.
Far from finding security with a “daddy” during the first year of her marriage, Norma Jeane quickly learned that in a crucial way her new relationship to this man bore a familiar pattern: she again felt nonessential.
“Her mentality was certainly above average,” Dougherty added privately. “She thought more maturely than I did, because of her rough life.” But given his attitude toward marriage in general (and this marriage in particular), he may have resented Norma Jeane’s maturity: thus his distance from her, and his occasional unwittingly callous attitude. He had considered the union as a favor to a sweet and attractive girl—and “an enchanting idea” for himself; it was also undertaken as a gesture by which he could give her a home with his mother when he went to war.
But however innocent and even benevolent, these are not the best motives for matrimony—a commitment for which he, as well, was apparently too emotionally callow. They both seem to have been aware of this complex of issues, for they mutually and firmly agreed on a crucial matter: they would not have children. In any case, Norma Jeane, little more than a child herself, was “terrified of the thought that I would become pregnant. . . . Women in my family had always made such a mess of mothering, and I was still getting used to being a wife. Becoming a mother was something I thought of as far off in the future.” Aware of the problems in their union (and of his eventual departure for military service) as well as their increasingly different perspectives, Dougherty was blunter: “I insisted on birth control.”
* * *
For a few months in early 1943, they lived at 14747 Archwood Street, Van Nuys—the home of Dougherty’s parents, who were living for a time outside Los Angeles. Jim continued to work at Lockheed, where his co-worker, the future actor Robert Mitchum, noticed that Dougherty brought the same lunch to work each day: a cold egg sandwich.
“Your old lady makes you the same sandwich every day?” Mitchum asked.
“You ought to see my old lady!” Dougherty replied.
The response was pure Mitchum: “I hope she looks better than your egg sandwich.”
A few days later, Dougherty brought a snapshot of his wife. Mitchum allowed that she bore no resemblance to the lunch. When Marilyn and Mitchum met a few days later, he thought she was “very shy and sweet, but not very comfortable around people.”
When Dougherty’s parents returned to Archwood Street in mid-1943, the young couple moved for several months into a house on Bessemer Street, Van Nuys. Here for the first time they enjoyed some social life with other couples: a young artist and his fiancée, an accountant, two medical students and their wives. Norma Jeane asked these friends to add their own phonograph recordings to hers for several evenings of dancing. And then, to Jim Dougherty’s astonishment, there was an almost instantaneous transformation of Norma Jeane, from demure housewife to natural performer. She loved to dance, she cut in to go from man to man, she giggled and gyrated tirelessly. Jim grew jealous as the male guests became transfixed by her energetic allure, for as Jim’s sister Elyda recalled, “She was just too beautiful. She couldn’t help it that men’s wives looked at her and got so jealous they wanted to throw rocks!” That summer of 1943, as Dougherty recalled, they often went on weekends to the beach at Santa Monica or Venice, where Norma Jeane attracted attention “because [said Jim] she wore a bikini that was two sizes too small!”
While living in Van Nuys, Norma Jeane adopted a stray collie to whom she became much attached, naming him Muggsy and devoting hours each day to grooming and bathing the dog and training him. Otherwise, she spent much of the day taking similar care of herself, trying out new cosmetics, taking long baths and scrubbing her face many times with soap and water to prevent blemishes and (she believed) to improve the circulation. It seemed that in her constant effort to improve her appearance she was attempting to achieve the impossible ideal of universal acceptance—to be noticed as beautiful, even more so than she had worked toward that goal in high school. “She was a perfectionist about her appearance,” Dougherty recalled. “If anything, she was too critical of herself.”
This is not surprising, for Norma Jeane still had no close women friends. The only companions with whom she felt comfortable were her husband’s young nieces and nephews, toddlers for whom she loved to baby-sit, bathing them, cleaning their clothes, playing with them, reading to them. “Just her presence in a room seemed to keep them content,” Dougherty observed. On the other hand, he remembered that he often saw a forlorn and distracted gaze on her face when he returned home—as if she had feared he would not.
Although Dougherty’s job at Lockheed was considered essential for defense and could have maintained his deferment from active service, he longed for overseas duty with his buddies. But Norma Jeane, praying for an end to the war, implored him to wait a while longer—not to leave her in 1943, but to join the Merchant Marines at home. After a few weeks of boot camp on Santa Catalina Island, he was ordered to supervise a company of rookies at its Maritime Service Training Base, where his wife and Muggsy joined him before the end of 1943.
Twenty-seven miles offshore in San Pedro Bay, Catalina is a mile longer than that distance, and eight miles across at its widest point. In 1919, the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley began to develop the island as a resort, and there he built a great casino and promoted deep-sea fishing and other recreational activities. A popular tourist spot since the 1930s, Catalina remained largely undeveloped in 1943, when its year-round population consisted solely of several hundred retired folk. Connected by schooner, ferry and helicopter to the mainland, Catalina had only one inhabited town, Avalon; the rest of the island—with its roaming bison and goats, its mountains, canyons and inlets—offered a view of unspoiled California. Primitive though it has always been, Catalina was nevertheless the place chosen by movie moguls Cecil B. De Mille, Joseph Schenck, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn for the first theater acoustically engineered for sound films. Across the channel they came in their luxurious yachts, to preview and to discuss their various achievements.
But with the outbreak of World War II, Catalina was closed to the public and became a military training ground. The Hotel St. Catherine (named for the same saint as is the island) was used as a cooking school for service chefs; the Yacht Club was converted into classroom space; the Coast Guard trained at Two Harbors; the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency) set up shop at Toyon Bay; and the Signal Corps built radar posts at Camp Cactus. The Merchant Marine Corps, to which Jim Dougherty reported, was headquartered in Avalon, whence recruits went forth to exercises, scaling the seacliffs and mountain summits and cutting through the dense forest underbrush in preparation for more hostile conditions overseas. On Catalina Island during 1943 and 1944, the Dougherty marriage, too, became an often tangled conflict to be warily negotiated.
“We got along real well as long as she was dependent on me,” Dougherty said significantly years later. But that year, at seventeen, his wife slowly began to revaluate both her husband’s dominance and her own contingency.
Spending half his monthly salary for rent, Dougherty moved his gear, his wife and their dog into an apartment set on a hillside in Avalon, where his job was to train Marine Corps recruits. “There was a scarcity of women, of course,” he recalled,
and that’s where the trouble with men began. She was jealous whenever I ever talked about my old girlfriends, but I had more reason to be jealous of her that year on Catalina. Norma Jeane realized very well that she had a beautiful body and knew men liked it. She took Muggsy for walks wearing a tight white blouse and tight white shorts, with a ribbon in her hair for a touch of color. It was just like a dream walking down the street.
And so it appeared to the scores of military men, for whom Norma Jeane enjoyed disporting herself in “skimpy bathing suits,” according to Dougherty: “Every guy on the beach is mentally raping you!” he complained. But she could not understand his attitude: she did not wear bikinis by day and tight sweaters at night to seduce men, but simply because (as Dougherty had to admit later) “she realized what she had, didn’t think it was bad, and didn’t mind showing it off.” She also intended to keep it, and so from a military instructor named Howard Carrington (a former weight-lifting champion), she began to use barbells and dumbbells to improve her figure and posture. Just as no other female on the base was quite so natural and unashamed in displaying her body, so was Norma Jeane eager to undertake a rigorous program of physical fitness with gymnasium equipment routinely used only by men.
One evening that winter, Stan Kenton’s famous band came to entertain on the island. Girlfriends, volunteers and wives were ferried over from the mainland, and the vast Catalina Casino ballroom was alive with gaiety, couples crowding onto the dance floor with an encircling outdoor loggia affording splendid moonlit views of the sea and the town. Beer and cocktails were available, but Norma Jeane drank only ginger ale and root beer; she was still in a way Aunt Ana’s nontippling Christian Scientist “niece.”
But during the seven-hour gala, Dougherty had only one dance with his wife, who was by far the most popular partner of the evening. He recalled standing on the sidelines, hearing the men remark about his wife’s charms. “I’ll admit I was jealous, not proud of her,” he said years after they divorced.
And then, with the music and dancing still in full swing, Dougherty suddenly announced to his wife that they were departing.
“I’ll go home with you, but I have a mind to come back,” she said. “I’m having a good time!”
“But where will you sleep, Norma Jeane?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you leave me at home to come back here, you don’t have to bother coming home again!”
He won this round, but his wife had an amusing and potent riposte. Soon after the dance, he returned early one afternoon from headquarters to find the apartment door uncustomarily locked. When he knocked and called to her, Norma Jeane answered, “Is that you, Bill? Oh, just a minute!” Dougherty then announced himself. “Oh, sorry!” she replied. “I didn’t think you were coming over so soon, Tommy!” From within, there was much thumping, the apparent sounds of furniture being moved, and (so Dougherty was convinced) muted conversation. With no rear door for a lover’s swift escape, he thought he had caught her in a compromising situation, all his worst fears finally confirmed, his jealousy justified.
Almost crazed with rage, he shouted again—and then his wife opened to admit him, a wide grin on her face. She was alone, wrapped in a bath towel because he had interrupted her shower. His unwarranted anger had demonstrated that he could be unreasonably, childishly suspicious—that Dougherty did not trust his wife. And it was trust that she required more than anything to guide her securely through the shoals of young adulthood. Her retaliatory joke may also have unwittingly revealed more serious feelings: it is not hard to imagine that she would indeed have wished to be with another man, even if “Bill” and “Tommy” were only momentary fantasies.
But in a way Dougherty was right when he said that his wife was dependent on him; whatever her inchoate longings, she had no one else on whom to rely, and she was miserable when, in spring 1944, he was sent to the Pacific and Southeast Asian war zones. “She begged me not to go,” he recalled,
and when I said I had no choice, she begged to have a baby—a child would be her way of having me with her. But I knew that a baby would be very hard for her, and not only financially. She really wasn’t up to being a mother. I said we would have children later, after the war.
Whatever her mixed feelings about him and their marriage, Dougherty’s departure revived the old feelings of abandonment. “She wanted something, someone she could hold onto all the time,” Dougherty remembered—as he did her tears and anguish the day he left.
Now the wife of a soldier overseas, Norma Jeane went to live with her mother-in-law at 5254 Hermitage Street, North Hollywood. Ethel Dougherty worked in nearby Burbank, as a nurse at the Radioplane Company, a plant owned by the English actor Reginald Denny, who developed the first successful radio-controlled, pilotless aircraft for target training and antiaircraft. By April 1944, Ethel had found a job there for Norma Jeane, too—the unpleasant task of spraying a foul-smelling varnish on fuselage fabric (working in the “dope room,” as it was called), but it provided a steady income. With major footholds in both aircraft and defense industries, the Southern California economy was booming during the war; there were, therefore, jobs for thousands of women.
Life with her mother-in-law was reasonably comfortable and undemanding, but Norma Jeane longed for the companionship of her husband. Paradoxically, it must be admitted that she may have missed him because he was not always the most attentive and sensitive companion. Norma Jeane, in other words, was one of many who often continually seek a neglectful or even unwittingly hurtful mate, in an effort to find the earlier situation of rejection and to correct it by reversal. It was a pattern that would deepen and be repeated in the years to come.
Norma Jeane wrote to Grace in West Virginia (on June 15, 1944), describing her life that season. Except for a few minor textual mistakes, her letter is remarkably expressive and succinct. Later, she allowed that she had sweetened the account of her marriage out of loyalty to her husband and a deeply rooted desire to please Grace Goddard:
. . . Jimmie has been gone for seven weeks and the first word I received from him was the day before my birthday. He sent a cable night letter by Western Union saying, “Darling, on your birthday I send you a whole world of love.” I was simply thrilled to death to hear from him.
I have never really written and told you of our married life together. Of course I know that if it hadn’t been for you we might not have never been married and I know I owe you a lot for that fact alone, besides countless others. . . . I love Jimmie in a different way I suppose than anyone, and I know I shall never be happy with anyone else as long as I live, and I know he feels the same towards me. So you see we are really very happy together, that is of course, when we can be together. We both miss each other terribly. We shall be married two years June 19th. And we really have had quite a happy life together.
I am working 10 hrs. a day at Radioplane Co., at Metropolitan [later Burbank] Airport. I am saving almost everything I earn (to help pay for our future home after the war). The work isn’t easy at all for I am on my feet all day and walking quite a bit.
I was all set to get a Civil Service Job with the army, all my papers filled out and everything set to go, and then I found out I would be working with ALL army fellows. I was over there one day, there are just too many wolves to be working with, there are enough of those at Radioplane Co. without a whole army full of them. The Personnel Officer said that he would hire me but that he wouldn’t advise it for my own sake, so I am back at Radioplane Co. and pretty content. . . .2
With much love,
Norma Jeane
During a summer holiday in 1944, Norma Jeane (then eighteen) took her first journey out of California, visiting Grace at her temporary job at a Chicago film lab. Grace’s departure from West Virginia had been necessary, according to Bebe, because although Grace was working regularly, “she had developed a drinking problem, [which was] not surprising. All my father’s wives had that, probably because one of his own chief occupations was whooping it up every day, and they joined him.”
Norma Jeane also visited Bebe in West Virginia, and then she proceeded to Tennessee for a brief stay with her half-sister, Berniece Baker, now married and a mother. Of this last sojourn nothing is known: the daughters of Gladys scarcely knew each other, and although they had hoped to become friends, their desires were inhibited by long absences; reunions were invariably somewhat awkward, despite mutual goodwill.
Returning to California, Norma Jeane resumed her work at Radioplane, where her new assignment was inspecting and folding parachutes, which she found not much more interesting than spraying glue. Her salary was still the national minimum wage: she was paid twenty dollars a week for sixty hours of work. Belatedly, Norma Jeane wrote to thank Grace for the gift of a new dress and for her hospitality during the Chicago visit; the letter, dated December 3, 1944, and posted just before Dougherty was due home for Christmas leave, included an important reference to the fact that Norma Jeane was sending Grace money from her paycheck:
I certainly hope Jimmie will be home for Christmas, it just won’t seem right without him. I love him so very much, honestly I don’t think there is another man alive like him. He really is awfully sweet.
I shall send you more money a little later.
I can’t ever tell you how much the trip did for me, I shall be grateful to you Grace forever. I love you and Daddy [i.e., Doc Goddard] so much. I sure miss you Grace.
With love,
Norma Jeane
P.S. Tell everyone at the studio “hello.”
Dougherty’s time at home during the Christmas—New Year holiday of 1944/45 was a happy break from her routine. Norma Jeane continued to cling to him, and as the time drew near for him to leave, an odd thing occurred.
According to Dougherty, Norma Jeane suddenly announced that she was going to telephone her father, a man she had neither met nor ever contacted. She placed a call, announcing her name and the fact that she was Gladys’s daughter. But very quickly she replaced the receiver and told Jim that the man had simply hung up on her. Was he Norma Jeane’s father? Had she reached the right man?
For years, the call was believed by everyone to have happened just as she described it. But even if one is quick to believe the appalling, heartless apathy of a man for his daughter, there are several problems. First, she admitted it was not a Mr. Mortensen she called, but she never told Jim the man’s name or where he lived. Second, there is no evidence that Gladys (if she knew) ever discussed her daughter’s paternity, and Grace never openly speculated. Third, Dougherty never heard the man’s voice, nor did Norma Jeane provide details of the call’s destination. In every respect, the episode was repeated identically at least twice in the ensuing seven years: each time Norma Jeane attempted to contact her father, the gesture was made in the presence of someone on whose sympathy and support she greatly relied: in this case, she asked Dougherty to hold her in his arms for several hours.
There is the strong possibility that this was one of Norma Jeane’s “pretend games” to evoke pity and to elicit comfort. Just as later, so now: whenever she feared being abandoned, she presented herself as a lost, rejected child. In fact, she was misbegotten, at a time when society still imputed to this status a considerable stigma. To the end of her life, even after she had long admitted the bastardy, she bore her illegitimacy with dignified humiliation. In the final analysis, it matters not whether she ever made honest attempts to contact a man she said was her father; indeed, this may have been one of her most convincing performances. But it is significant that at certain moments when she was frightened of being abandoned, she “called her father.” Bona fide or not, the moment had its effect: she needed to remind others of a primary childhood loss, of a frightful void in her life, a desertion that had left her forever wounded. “Comfort me,” her actions said.
“In her rational mind,” as Dougherty said, “she knew I had to go back to overseas duty . . . but she considered my shipping out as another rejection.” Her feelings of loneliness and dismay did not endure, however, and not long after his departure for the Pacific again in January 1945, Norma Jeane quit Radioplane. She had seen the possibility of a very different life.
The previous autumn, after returning from her cross-country journey, she was on the job inspecting parachutes when a crew of photographers from the army’s First Motion Picture Unit arrived at the factory. Their task was to photograph women on the assembly line, contributing to the war effort in various strategic capacities. But these were to be no typical documentary shots of weary girls in overalls. The “shutter-bugs,” as the photographers were called, were to return with snapshots for commercial as well as military magazines: good prints and some silent movie shots of the most attractive ladies, carefully posing to show that the country’s loveliest were busy patriots.
Among the camera crewmen was twenty-five-year-old David Conover, whose first meeting with Norma Jeane, late in 1944, was described in her letter to Grace dated June 4, 1945.3
. . . The first thing I knew [the photographers] had me out there, taking pictures of me. . . . They all asked where in the H———I had been hiding. . . . They took a lot of moving pictures of me, and some of them asked for dates, etc. (Naturally I refused!) . . . After they finished with some of the pictures, an army corporal by the name of David Conover told me he would be interested in getting some color still shots of me. He used to have a studio on “the Strip” on Sunset [Boulevard]. He said he would make arrangements with the plant superintendent if I would agree, so I said okay. He told me what to wear and what shade of lipstick, etc., so the next couple of weeks I posed for him at different times. . . . He said all the pictures came out perfect. Also, he said that I should by all means go into the modeling profession . . . that I photographed very well and that he wants to take a lot more. Also he said he had a lot of contacts he wanted me to look into.
I told him I would rather not work when Jimmie was here, so he said he would wait, so I’m expecting to hear from him most any time again.
He is awfully nice and is married and is strictly business, which is the way I like it. Jimmie seems to like the idea of me modeling, so I’m glad about that.
By the spring of 1945, Norma Jeane was quickly becoming known as a photographer’s dream. Cooperative, eager and good-humored, she tossed her curly, chestnut-colored hair, flashed her blue-green eyes, smiled brightly and gazed unblinkingly at the camera, holding even an awkward stance with no display of impatience or discomfort. For Conover as for other cameramen, something fresh and lively in Norma Jeane seemed to spring to life just before the shutter clicked or the film rolled. It was as if she were flirting with the camera, connecting to anonymous admirers, offering herself as fully as she knew how, and winning new adorers, just as in her childhood dream. With the lens aimed at her, she was learning how to fix its glance on herself.
“There was a luminous quality to her face,” Conover said years later, “a fragility combined with astonishing vibrancy.” And he could not recall any other model so self-critical, nor one who so acutely scrutinized every contact sheet, every negative and print for the tiniest fault: “What happened to me here?” she asked repeatedly, or “This is awful, where did I go wrong?” Dissatisfied with anything less than perfection, she was in a way logically extending to the presentation of herself the Bolenders’ injunctions to excellence and Grace’s preparations for her to become a heroically famous star. Earnest, grave about her appearance, ready with detailed questions about the camera, lighting and the various types of film stock, Norma Jeane Dougherty wanted every image of herself to be brilliant. And alluring, too, for she also wore a sweater that was a size or two small for her ample proportions (36–24–34 as of August 1945), and tightened a pair of suspenders across a horizontal-striped shirt, the better to emphasize her firm breasts (which she also uplifted in a half-brassiere).
From June to midsummer 1945, David Conover continued to photograph Norma Jeane Dougherty in California, from Barstow to Riverside, from Death Valley to Bakersfield. Some of the results were used for army literature, some he gave to his model. By early autumn, two more major developments had occurred.
First, Ethel disapproved of her daughter-in-law’s conduct: the girl, Mrs. Dougherty said, was simply idling around with young photographers like Conover. “Mom froze a bit when she began to figure my wife was throwing me a curve,” Jim said later. Ethel complained that Norma Jeane’s aspirations to be a professional model were inappropriate for a married woman, soon to be a mother when Jim returned from service. Mother Dougherty also disliked the girl’s independent social life. A Hungarian actor named Eric Feldari escorted Norma Jeane to a Hollywood swim party that summer at the home of actor Robert Stack, who recalled her wearing “a white bathing suit, which she filled beautifully. . . . I remember that she appeared to be shy and somehow on the outside of everything taking place at the party. I tried to be a good host, and every time I asked if she wanted anything, she said, ‘No, everything is fine.’ ”
Eventually, Norma Jeane had a surfeit of Ethel’s disapproving stares, and so she moved back to Nebraska Avenue, West Los Angeles, where she lived in the lower half of Ana Lower’s duplex. From his mother, Jim must have received bulletins of his wife’s new interests, for he wrote to Norma Jeane that “all this business of modeling is fine, but when I get out of the service we’re going to 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.” That season, her letters to Jim, formerly so frequent, ceased; she regarded the marriage as virtually dissolved, his temperament and expectations of her detrimental to her blossoming career and his attitude distasteful. “As far as I was concerned,” she told friends a decade later,
this meant the marriage was in trouble. If you love someone, don’t you want them to be happy? to do something they like and they’re good at? All I wanted was to find out what I was. Jim thought he knew, and that I should’ve been satisfied. But I wasn’t. That marriage was over long before the war ended.
In witness whereof, according to David Conover, she offered herself to him in a brief affair that blazed throughout that hot summer of 1945. His is the sole testimony for it, and since almost the whole of Conover’s book consists of dialogue miraculously recalled (after three decades) in meticulous detail, it is difficult to accept at face value. This is made the more problematic by Conover’s inaccurate chronology and the arch misrepresentation of Norma Jeane’s voice in a tone of seduction: “Let’s do what comes naturally,” she whispers—and Conover coyly adds: “We did.”
The second development occurred on August 2, 1945, when (at the suggestion of Conover and another photographer) Norma Jeane applied for acceptance to the Blue Book Agency. In Hollywood there were thousands of girls who wanted to be models, and as many models yearning to be movie stars. One of dozens of agencies founded to nurture such aspirations, the Blue Book was owned and strictly supervised by the formidable Emmeline Snively. She was a short, proper Englishwoman in her late forties who always wore a hat and, with her septuagenarian mother, Emma, as a frequent visitor, ran the business with a peculiar combination of suspicion and humor, white-glove propriety and a clear-eyed, sometimes cynical realism about the moral and financial perils of a model’s life. With their Old World formalities unsuited to casual Los Angeles, Emma and Emmeline Snively were straight from the pages of Nicholas Nickleby.
From 1937 to 1943, Miss Snively had directed her so-called Village School in Westwood, which (as her catalogue testified) “specialized in training girls for photographic and fashion modeling.” In January 1944, she moved to quarters in the Ambassador Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where she expanded her operation and became the Blue Book Agency, a business that (in the words of her new brochure) “grooms girls for careers in motion pictures, photographic modeling and fashion modeling, [with] personalized instruction in charm and poise, success and beauty and personalized development”—exactly what Norma Jeane believed she required. At the time, there were about twenty models on Miss Snively’s roster; according to Lydia Bodrero (later Reed), also at Blue Book during 1945 and 1946, many of them longed to become film stars because models were not well paid in Los Angeles. Post-Snively success meant graduation to a movie contract or moving to New York, where models were more handsomely paid.
And so from August through the autumn of 1945, the Blue Book had a new student-client. The receptionist’s notes indicated Norma Jeane’s height (five feet five), weight (118), measurements (36–24–34, size 12), hair color (medium blond: “too curly to manage, recommend bleach and permanent”), eyes (blue)—and “perfect teeth” (at least for modeling: they were a pleasing white, but she also had a slight overbite that later required correction). Norma Jeane paid a twenty-five-dollar fee for her picture to be included in the Blue Book catalogue, and said she could “dance a little and sing.”
During the first few weeks, Norma Jeane was scrupulous in attending fashion modeling classes with Mrs. Gavin Beardsley, makeup and grooming with Maria Smith, and posing instructions with Miss Snively herself. The cost of the catalogue photo and the one-hundred-dollar fee for the courses were charged against an assignment obtained immediately for Norma Jeane. The Holga Steel Company had an industrial show at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium that September, and Norma Jeane was paid a total of one hundred dollars to work as a hostess for ten days.
“I don’t think that kid had ever been inside a first-class hotel before in her life,” Snively said years later.
She kept glancing around at things, like it was a new world. . . . But I thought I could make her into something quite marketable in a short period of time. She was a clean-cut, American, wholesome girl—too plump, but beautiful in a way. We tried to teach her how to pose, how to handle her body. She always tried to lower her smile because she smiled too high, and it made her nose look a little long. At first she knew nothing about carriage, posture, walking, sitting or posing. She started out with less than any girl I ever knew, but she worked the hardest. . . . She wanted to learn, wanted to be somebody, more than anybody I ever saw before in my life.
After the industrial show, two days of posing for a Montgomery Ward clothing catalogue and four days at a Hollywood fashion show, it was clear that Norma Jeane’s forte was not modeling clothes but rather appearing in glamour poses for advertisements: it was herself, not what she wore, that made the impression, that sold the goods. Later, she admitted the reason:
The problem, if you can call it that, was my figure. Miss Snively said nobody was paying attention to the clothes because my dresses or blouses or bathing suits were too tight. In other words, they were looking at me, and to hell with the clothes.
Snively sent Norma Jeane out to editors to pose for magazine covers and to photographers and advertising agencies. The results were immediate and stunning, and by spring 1946 Norma Jeane Dougherty (sometimes billed by Snively as “Jean Norman”) had appeared on no less than thirty-three covers of magazines like U.S. Camera, Parade, Glamorous Models, Personal Romances, Pageant, Laff, Peek and See.
Her mentor caught the slightly fey aspect of Norma Jeane’s personality—the girl who giggled easily, who took her work seriously but somehow gave the simultaneous impression that there was something vastly amusing about what she was doing.
“When you stop to think about it,” she said years later,
it’s kind of funny. You smile for the camera, you hold very still, you act as if you’re having a good time—but it’s a day when you’re really having terrible cramps. I guess I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes modeling seemed so phoney and fake I just had to laugh. They thought that was great, they had a great smile from you, and they just snapped away, thinking that, well, I was having a good time. Sure, sometimes it was fun. But modeling can also be a little crazy. I once asked why I had to wear a bathing suit for a toothpaste ad. He looked at me as if I was some kind of crazy!
Lydia Bodrero Reed recalled that Norma Jeane was “very serious, very ambitious and always pleasant to be with. There was only one problem for her. She did so many covers that for a while she was considered overexposed—the magazine and advertising people had seen so much of her that after a year she couldn’t get much work.” According to Bodrero, there was another danger for a model, a different kind of overexposure. “Miss Snively warned us never, ever to appear ‘undraped’ (as she called it)—nude photography, we were told, was the kiss of death for a model.
For Norma Jeane, Snively had an additional particular recommendation: that she lighten her brown hair. Whereas a brunette would always emerge darker in a photo (and, Snively believed, would bring a dusky hue to everything), a blonde could be photographed in any wardrobe and in any light. She reminded Norma Jeane that, in the words of the play, gentlemen prefer blondes; she also pointed to Betty Grable and, before her, to Jean Harlow.
Accordingly, that winter Snively dispatched her to a photographer named Raphael Wolff, who just happened to be an old friend of Doc Goddard. He agreed to use Norma Jeane in some shampoo print advertisements, but only (and almost certainly in collusion with Snively) if she would dye her brown hair. Soon she was sitting nervously at Frank and Joseph’s, a popular movie colony salon, where a beautician named Sylvia Barnhart supervised the straightening and bleaching to a golden blond. The maintenance of this coiffure would require regular repetitions and a lifetime of meticulous care—especially later, when the color was made even lighter, to glazed and haloed blond and eventually to shimmering platinum.
That winter the trio of Snively-Wolff-Barnhart brought closer to reality Grace’s long-cherished hope that in her precious Norma Jeane there would one day be completed the fantastic recreation of Jean Harlow. And when the Goddards moved back to California from West Virginia that summer, no one was more thrilled than Grace with Norma Jeane’s new image. But Jim Dougherty returned to California, too (from his overseas service), and he saw more changes than simply his wife’s hair color. She was particularly excited about a short silent film that the Blue Book Agency had just made of her. Smiling directly into the lens in medium-closeup shot, she modeled a swimsuit, walked in a summer sundress, smiled and waved at the camera. It had been, she told him, the most exciting day of her life thus far. Despite Norma Jeane’s earlier report that Jim had approved her modeling aspirations, he was now unimpressed with the results.
1. The two published accounts consist of a thirteen-page article, “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” which appeared in the March 1953 issue of Photoplay, pp. 47–85; and a later 142-page book that expanded that article—The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe (Chicago: The Playboy Press, 1976). Under the name of Dougherty’s sister Elyda Nelson, there also appeared “The True Life Story of Marilyn Monroe,” published in the December 1952 issue of Modern Screen. According to her brother, this ghostwritten article was based on anecdotes provided by him and was much dramatized by the editors.
2. Norma Jeane was in fact rated as “above average” by her supervisors at Radioplane.
3. Conover (who was dispatched to his task by his superior officer, Ronald Reagan) wrongly stated in his memoir Finding Marilyn that they were first introduced on June 26, 1945; in fact there had been at least a dozen meetings during the seven months before then, as Norma Jeane’s letters to Grace reveal. Alas, Finding Marilyn abounds with inaccuracies, unconscionable reams of fabricated dialogue and imaginatively concocted events. Conover (1919–1983) was a talented photographer but a patent fabulist, too.