Chapter Six
WE GOT ALONG REAL WELL as long as she was dependent on me.” Thus did Jim Dougherty summarize his first marriage.
When he had first left for military service, his last sight of Norma Jeane could have been a scene from a sentimental wartime movie. His devoted child-bride had clung to him at the harbor; she then waited tearfully, waving a pink scarf as his ship glided slowly from shore and out into San Pedro Bay before slipping over the horizon.
But when Dougherty returned eighteen months later in December 1945, anticipating a joyful Christmas reunion with her and his family, there was no emotional greeting at dockside. Years later he recalled:
She was an hour late. 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 two nights together during that time. She was busy modeling, earning good money. It was my first inkling of her ambition.
Speaking of the same time, he added without conviction, “It never occurred to me that she was unfaithful.” That statement, in light of what he soon learned, is incredible. Dougherty was surely canny enough to see the danger signals: his wife’s emotional distance, her evident career aspirations—and, the day after his arrival, her departure for the Christmas holidays to work with a handsome stranger.
André de Dienes was thirty-two, a blue-eyed, muscular Transylvanian immigrant. After sojourns as a darling of café society in Rome, Paris and London, de Dienes arrived in Hollywood; there, he was much in demand because of his talent with a camera, his burly attractiveness and both a manner and an accent that seemed to unite the sinister allure of Bela Lugosi with the Byronic charm of Charles Boyer. That autumn, Emmeline Snively had arranged a meeting between de Dienes and Norma Jeane. According to Snively, “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 began simply. He positioned her, shoeless and smiling, along a stretch of Route 101 outside North Hollywood: despite the blinding sun, she gazed unblinkingly into the shutter. The results of this session were more than encouraging, for there was Norma Jeane, pert in pigtails, a red skirt dotted with white stars and a striped jersey—like a sporty hitchhiker, heedless of traffic, sunburn and a photographer who knew how to get what he wanted. He then took her into a grassy field, removed the ribbons from her hair, exchanged the tight shirt for a frilly white apron and borrowed a newborn lamb from a nearby field: now she was the farmer’s daughter, unworldly but somehow ripe with what de Dienes called “naive but disturbing charm.”1 There followed another quick change of clothes, her hair was tied back of the neck, she donned a pair of blue jeans and a red blouse was knotted just under the bosom for a peekaboo midriff: she perched on a fence and smiled at the camera as she was about to enter a barn. Daisy Mae was beckoning to every Li’l Abner in America.
When Norma Jeane showed these photographs to Jim, he manifested frank indifference: “So far as I was concerned, she was turning into another human being. She showed me the pictures, her new dresses and shoes—as if I cared about such things. She was proud of her magazine covers and her new popularity at Blue Book, and she expected me to be, too. She wanted a career.” She was, in other words, no longer the dependent castaway; she was now a young woman with ambition, and this was unacceptable to the sturdy, macho marine.
Just before Christmas, to the horror of Ana Lower and Ethel Dougherty (not to say the simmering indignation of the abandoned husband), Norma Jeane left for another, longer journey with de Dienes. “The truth is,” she said years later, “that I began the trip with only business in mind [de Dienes paid her a flat fee of two hundred dollars]. But André had other ideas.” By this time, due no doubt to Dougherty’s apathy, Norma Jeane’s zeal and de Dienes’s ardor (“I longed to make her my mistress”), she was hurled again into romantic jeopardy. “The plain truth is that she was exploited by André,” according to actor Alex D’Arcy, who knew the photographer. “He was a thoroughly crazy creature who let her think he was indispensable to her.”
André and Norma Jeane first stopped at Zuma Beach, where he clicked away as she tossed a volleyball, waded into the surf, sported a two-piece bathing suit and ran along the shore. Then they headed for the Mojave Desert, where only the simplest outfit was needed to suggest the link between two types of natural beauty. From there they proceeded north through Yosemite, then on to Nevada and Washington. André’s ardor was not cooled as he photographed his model on the snowy slopes near Mount Hood, but when they stopped at a cabin or motel at night, Norma Jeane at first kept the relationship platonic and insisted on separate rooms: “She needed a really good night’s sleep to look her best the next day [and so] she asked me to be good.” For the present he endured, affecting the gloomy dissatisfaction of a rejected suitor even as he slid notes under her door. “Come to me,” he scrawled. “We’ll make love. You won’t be disappointed.”
But a telephone call Norma Jeane put through to Grace Goddard set in motion a chain of events that eventually brought the model to her photographer’s bed. Gladys was then living in Portland, Oregon, and Grace arranged for mother and daughter to meet.
The reunion between the two women after more than six years was predictably awkward; it was also unbearably sad for Norma Jeane. After the San Francisco clinic found that she was no danger to herself or others, Gladys had been given two hundred dollars and two dresses, and after nearly a year of wandering alone around the Pacific Northwest (often finding shelter with the Salvation Army), the poor woman took a room in a seedy hotel in downtown Portland. Long accustomed to being treated like a mentally ill incompetent, Gladys had lost the ability of normal socializing; anorexic and impassive, she gave an appearance that terrified her daughter, who had arrived with gifts and who gave, that afternoon, a sterling performance.
She embraced her mother, who was completely withdrawn as she sat rigidly in a wicker chair; she then showed Gladys some of André’s photos and gave her a bag of candy. But Gladys displayed neither gratitude nor pleasure. She could not even manage to reach out and touch her daughter, and after a long and awkward silence (during which de Dienes paced nervously nearby) Norma Jeane knelt at her mother’s feet.
And then for a moment the cloud of separation seemed to part. “I’d like to come and live with you, Norma Jeane,” Gladys whispered. This frightened Norma Jeane, who scarcely knew her mother and, foreseeing the end of her own marriage, shrank from the thought of being burdened with Gladys’s care. Just then, André spoke up, saying that he was going to marry Norma Jeane after she divorced, and that they were going to move to New York. Norma Jeane tried to interrupt him, to correct his expectations, but he announced abruptly that they had to leave the hotel. “I’ll see you soon, Mama,” Norma Jeane said. Fighting tears, she kissed her mother, left her address and telephone number on the table with the gifts and quietly withdrew. Back in André’s car as they headed south toward home, she wept inconsolably.
Throughout her life, Norma Jeane was haunted by the thought of Gladys, who outlived her by twenty-two years. As she later said, there had never been a chance for a normal mother-daughter relationship, and the fear of sharing a family mental illness compounded the pointed resentment her childhood memories evoked. The actress Marilyn Monroe never took the risk of permitting a situation in which Gladys could again reject or withdraw from her. But this engendered a pattern with motherly women in her life: need clashed with fear, and to forestall pain she often rejected others first. Ashamed and avoiding reminders of her past, she tried in vain to forget her mother, although from afar she covered Gladys’s material needs when she could.
* * *
That evening Norma Jeane and André stopped at a country inn. There, just as she had sought comfort in Jim’s arms after the (real or feigned) rejection by her father, so now she reached out to another strong, older man. “In my dreams I had explored her body,” de Dienes wrote tremulously years later; “reality far surpassed my imagination. . . . [And then] I realized she was crying.” The tears, he saw, bespoke only Norma Jeane’s happiness, her pleasure, her relief after the tensions with Dougherty and the difficult reunion with Gladys. She was not mired in remorse, for throughout the rest of the journey she was “playful and provocative” (thus de Dienes), an energetic, eager lover who played peekaboo with sheets and nightgowns and who teased before satisfying. Of that night, and of this brief affair in early 1946, Norma Jeane later said nothing.
But the romance with de Dienes marked a turning point. He was her first sexual partner outside marriage (or the second, if David Conover’s dubious account is accepted). But apart from his obvious physical attractions and the fact that he was an older man (like Dougherty, a kind of surrogate father), he had—like Conover—won her over simply because he was a photographer. The men behind the still cameras in these early years were like the later cinematographers, producers and agents. They could present her to the world in literally the best light; she needed them, was grateful to them, felt she owed them and repaid them with herself, the reality whose image they were promoting and capturing for anonymous others.
This was the beginning of an important pattern in her life, for she was excited by the act of being photographed. “Making love” to the camera is both satisfying and safe: one may fantasize anyone or everyone, but the moment is unthreatening. This is not so uncommon among models and actors, whose desire to be seen, recognized, approved and accepted, whose longing to please and to gratify others, is at the foundation of their craft.
In this regard, she was very like Jean Harlow, who flirted (sometimes outrageously) with photographers. At an outdoor session with photographer Ted Allan, for example, Harlow was once handed a fishnet to throw over a white dress. She promptly stripped naked and stood wearing only the fishnet. “Isn’t this better?” she asked Allan, who later thought that Harlow “figured that if I were turned on, I’d take better pictures. I realized then that she always needed something personal—that feeling of being liked. It made her feel secure.” Norma Jeane was not so different from the woman who had been constantly set before her as an idol.
Observed and admired for her body, each wished to please the gazer, to gratify those who desired her. Sex for Norma Jeane became the logical extension of a character trait within her from childhood and throughout her school years: it was a simple attempt to win approval. The girl who dreamed of worshipers before her nakedness could now give herself in the flesh, could gratify their adoration. To Norma Jeane this was not a matter of immodesty or immorality, nor did she ever seem to feel guilty. She was indeed, as David Conover had said, “doing what came naturally.”
Norma Jeane returned to Los Angeles a more experienced young woman, and this must have been evident in her manner. She found a furious husband who demanded that she make a choice between him and her career. She argued that she had no reason to be a housewife when there had been no husband around for two years; besides, she insisted, what was wrong with modeling? The answer to that was twofold: Dougherty wanted a sedate housewife, not a glamour-queen-in-the-making; he also wanted children. A new cold war infected the Dougherty household that spring of 1946, especially when (thus Jim) his wife “nearly went berserk—she thought she was pregnant.” Perhaps they both thought to question the paternity; in any case, the onset of her period resolved the matter.
In late January, Jim was recalled to duty in the Pacific, where the Merchant Marines helped to retransport men and supplies back to Europe and America after the Allied victory; he said that he expected her to have become wiser by the time he returned later that year.
When she heard that Norma Jeane was alone, Grace occasionally invited her to Van Nuys for a meal or a weekend visit. But Norma Jeane invariably declined. This may have been partly a desire to further her independence from the past, but there was another, more ominous, reason for her distance. By 1946, Grace was a seasoned alcoholic, sometimes inappropriately giddy and verbose, frequently gloomy and remote. Like Gladys, Grace too was now unpredictable.
From her small apartment beneath Ana Lower’s, Norma Jeane went out to work as a model. Emmeline Snively now had a wide variety of photographs to circulate round the offices of Los Angeles artists and photographers, and her telephone rang almost daily with offers.
In February, Norma Jeane posed for the Scottish photographer William Burnside, who was struck by “the lost look in the middle of a smile” and, like Conover and de Dienes, was charmed by her cooperation and her alacrity to please. “A kiss took weeks to achieve,” Burnside said years later; from there it was a short route to closer intimacy. First she loved the camera, according to Burnside: “it soothed her;” then she loved the man who held it. But Norma Jeane was no rapacious starlet offering sex as barter to advance her career: Burnside remembered “her shyness and sense of insecurity. She did not like to be touched too soon. One could not even think of sexual conquest by force.”
Norma Jeane herself was undergoing a rapid transformation. The awkwardness, the concern for acceptance, the occasional stutter and the hesitation were still there, but now she was giving herself—simply visually, to the camera, or frankly sexually, to the photographer. In the case of Burnside and perhaps others, a professional’s talent secured her gratitude, and her gratitude was expressed with her body. But Burnside soon ended their romance. She sent him a lyric:
I could have loved you once, and even said it
But you went away,
A long way away.
When you came back it was too late
And love was a forgotten word.
Remember?
In February and March 1946 she posed for the artist Earl Moran and for the photographer Joseph Jasgur, and in both cases her relationship was very warm but strictly platonic. Moran paid her ten dollars an hour, photographing her in a variety of dress and semidress: as a bathing beauty in skimpy two-piece swimsuits; drying herself after a bath; bare-breasted, hanging up her lingerie to dry. From these snapshots he then drew charcoal and chalk pictures he sold to Brown & Bigelow, the major calendar-art company in America. “She liked to pose,” Moran said years later. “For her it was acting, and emotionally she did everything right.”
Jasgur, a celebrity photographer known for his contributions to Silver Screen, Photoplay and the Hollywood Citizen-News, agreed to Emmeline Snively’s request for test photos of Norma Jeane. One afternoon, he opened the door of his Hollywood studio apartment to find “a shy girl, nothing like a typical model, all breathless and anxious.” She was also over an hour late, which surprised him, for it seemed incompatible with her obvious earnestness about her career; he later thought her tardiness was related to “her uncertainty that she was presentable or acceptable.”
Norma Jeane told Jasgur that she had no money to pay for the photographs and that she lacked even the price of a good meal—surely an exaggeration given her full work schedule that winter. But Jasgur was a friend of Snively, and while the first negatives dried that March 10 evening, he bought her supper. Their sessions continued throughout that month—atop the Hollywood sign and at Zuma Beach, where he took color as well as black-and-white photos, capturing her friskiness as she drew hearts on the wet sand.
Laszlo Willinger also made some extraordinary photos of Norma Jeane that year.
When she saw a camera—any camera, she lit up and was totally different. The moment the shot was over, she fell back into her not very interesting position. But she had a talent to make people feel sorry for her, and she exploited it to the best of her ability—even people who had been around and knew models fell for this “Help me” pose.
With her husband away and the circle of her acquaintances widening, it would not have been surprising to find this pretty, lonely nineteen-year-old available to a sharp admirer. But the situation was quite different. The actor Ken DuMain, as well as Norma Jeane’s colleague Lydia Bodrero, remembered that Snively’s models often double- and triple-dated with friends in the spring of 1946. Evenings with Norma Jeane might include a movie and a ride out to the beach, or a few hours dancing at a club. She did not have a reputation for easy virtue, although she did go out with several young men more than once. DuMain recalled escorting her to a Sunset Strip nightclub she especially liked, “where a female impersonator named Ray Bourbon attracted crowds of admirers. She loved this sort of thing and was great fun to be with. There was also an innate sweetness and decency about her that no atmosphere or joke could alter.”
Even had she been so inclined, the opportunities would have been short-circuited by a new and awkward circumstance in her life. Piteous letters arrived almost daily in Norma Jeane’s mailbox that spring, for Gladys begged to come and live with her. She would be no trouble, Gladys promised; she would find a job. In April, Norma Jeane sent cash to cover the journey, and soon they were sharing the one bed and two small rooms on Nebraska Avenue. This would be Norma Jeane’s last brief and ineffective attempt to establish a relationship with her mother.
Such was the domestic situation Jim found when he returned on a brief furlough in April. Arriving at the apartment, he found Gladys staring at him blankly: it was clear, as he recalled years later, that Gladys by this time was not a woman who could care for herself. But neither could her daughter assume such a responsibility.
The precise nature of Gladys’s mental and emotional problems remains vague, for the few medical reports remaining among family records are inconclusive. On the one hand, she was alert, aware of her surroundings and her identity, and she was not violent; she did not suffer from hallucinations, paranoia or frank schizophrenia. Contrariwise, there was a retreat from the ordinary business of living; she seemed, in other words, unable or unwilling to maintain ordinary human relations, much less steady employment: in general terms, she seems to have suffered a loss of affect. “She wandered,” Eleanor Goddard recalled, “and she was unpredictable. She was docile, but she was not ‘there.’ ” Years later, more sophisticated medical examinations might have located a biochemical imbalance or even a benign tumor; psychological counseling might have disclosed chronic, treatable phobias or a guilt complex; and drug treatment might have provided help. But in 1946 there were no human or financial resources for Gladys.
The immediate corollary of her living with Norma Jeane was clear: there was no room for three, and so after only a few moments Jim departed to spend the two-day leave with his mother. In light of their earlier disputes over her career and his plans for their future, he interpreted Gladys’s presence as a convenient way for Norma Jeane to prepare for a separation. She was “calculating,” it seemed to him. “She had made sure that Gladys would be living there on Nebraska Avenue, that her mother would have my place in the only bed in the apartment.” But this assessment may have been too harsh: unaware of Gladys’s earlier request in Portland, he felt resentful, summarily excluded from contact or conversation with his wife about their marriage. To him, Gladys seemed simply “a woman without much emotion,” not to say an unwelcome intrusion. He returned to Merchant Marine duty without seeing Norma Jeane again.
In late April, Gladys entered a Northern California clinic, where her daughter struggled to send money to provide supplements for her mother’s basic care. Such contributions never ceased, although Norma Jeane’s primary concern was now her career.
During early 1946, she spoke several times with Emmeline Snively about the possibility of working in the movies. Conover, de Dienes, Burnside and Moran had told her that this was not a vain hope, that she was a natural for the studio “stables” of starlets. Annually, hundreds were tested and signed low-paying contracts. Sometimes they were cast in bit parts, a handful were trained and groomed for small speaking roles and, for the very few fortunate, there was eventual graduation to supporting-player status.
Among these aspirants, only a minority became stars. The studios knew that public taste was fickle and that great success rarely endured. Apprentices had to be available, a pool of “talent” from which producers could select the new starlets. Among the accepted norms, one was unwritten but taken for granted. An unmarried young woman was more favorably regarded for possible advancement in the system: pregnancy, after all, could cost a studio enormous sums if a picture had to be canceled or recast during production. Eager starlets had to be ready for a variety of sacrifices.
These facts of studio life were impressed on her not only by Snively and photographers but also by Grace, with whom Norma Jeane met at least once in April. The Dougherty marriage would have to be formally terminated if Norma Jeane hoped to be groomed for stardom. Grace had arranged Gladys’s initial hospitalization; she maneuvered her guardianship of Norma Jeane; she decided the girl’s sojourn at the orphanage. She had planned the marriage to Jim Dougherty, and now she could abet its dissolution. Indeed, as Jim had said, “Grace had a lot to do with everything.” And so, on May 14, Norma Jeane was shipped from Ana Lower to another of Grace’s aunts—a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Minnie Willette, who lived most conveniently at 604 South 3rd Street in Las Vegas, where divorces could be obtained almost as easily as entrance to the local gambling casinos.
Two weeks later, on duty near Shanghai, Dougherty received a letter with a Nevada postmark: a lawyer named C. Norman Cornwall announced that Norma Jeane Dougherty had filed for divorce. “First she thought she had security with me,” Dougherty recalled thinking at that time, “and now she figures a studio contract can provide it better. There are a thousand-and-one girls who can sing and dance and look good, and she wants to be in the movies. Well, good luck to her.” Jim at once wired the appropriate government office in Los Angeles to cease sending monthly payments to his wife.
By the end of June, he was back in California, where Ana Lower gave him a telephone number. But Norma Jeane was not with Minnie: she was in a Las Vegas hospital, under treatment for a mouth infection.
At first Dougherty did not recognize her deep voice on the telephone—a tone due not to her medical condition, as he learned at once. “They tell me I have to lower my tone if I’m going to be in the movies,” she said candidly, adding at once: “The nurse brought me a letter a few days ago. Why did you cut off my allowance?”
“Look, kid,” Dougherty replied with equal candor, “this is the way it goes. You don’t pay for anything unless you’re getting it.” When she went on to say that she did not want to lose Jim, that they could still “date”—and that she was merely being practical about her career—he was adamant. “She thought we could live together without being married,” Dougherty said years later, “that we could go on just as before.” Unsure of her future, she was attempting a safe middle ground.
“Are you crazy?” Jim asked. “I want a wife and kids. You want a divorce, we’ll get a divorce. Then it’s over.”
And so it was. Charging Dougherty with the typical generic assertion of “extreme mental cruelty that has impaired the plaintiff’s health,” Norma Jeane filed a suit for divorce and was uncontested by her husband. At two o’clock on the afternoon of September 13, 1946, Norma Jeane and Minnie appeared for a final hearing before District Judge A. S. Henderson in Las Vegas. After stating her name and Nevada address, the plaintiff answered a few questions put to her by her attorney:
“Is it your intention to make [Nevada] your home and permanent place of residence?”
“Yes.”
“Has that been your intention since your arrival in May?”
“Yes.”
“You intend to remain here for an indefinite period of time?”
“Yes.”
“You have stated that your husband treated you with extreme cruelty without just cause or provocation on your part. Will you tell the Court some of the acts upon which you base this cruelty charge?”
“Well, in the first place, my husband didn’t support me and he objected to my working, criticized me for it and he also had a bad temper and would fly into rages and he left me on three different occasions and criticized me and embarrassed me in front of my friends and he didn’t try to make a home for me.”
“What effect did this have on your health?”
“It upset me and made me nervous.”
“So much so that you cannot live with him under the conditions and enjoy good health?”
“Yes.”
“Is a reconciliation possible?”
“No.”
After less than five minutes in court, Judge Henderson slammed his gavel, saying, “A decree of divorce is granted,” even as he rose from his chair. The marriage was dissolved at that moment. James Edward Dougherty countersigned the decree two weeks later, giving Norma Jeane Dougherty her freedom and his 1935 Ford coupe. They neither met nor spoke again. “I married and was divorced,” she told a reporter four years later. “It was a mistake and he has since remarried.” That was her last public statement on the matter.
Considering her testimony, the State of Nevada might have charged Norma Jeane with perjury, for she had not in fact lived there without interruption from May 14 to September 13, as the divorce law required. During the summer, she had slipped quietly back to Los Angeles, where Emmeline Snively had contacted her friend Helen Ainsworth. A severe, two-hundred-pound agent familiarly known as “Cupid,” Ainsworth managed the West Coast office of a talent agency known as the National Concert Artists Corporation. As a favor to her old friend Snively, Ainsworth arranged an introduction for Norma Jeane with an executive at the Twentieth Century–Fox Studios on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.2
Precisely at the appointed hour, ten-thirty on the morning of Wednesday, July 17, 1946, Norma Jeane arrived at Ben Lyon’s office. Then forty-five, Lyon had a long stage and screen career behind him, most notably as the hero of the picture firmly establishing Jean Harlow’s career—Howard Hughes’s production of Hell’s Angels in 1930. Lyon and his wife, actress Bebe Daniels, had lived in England during World War II (during which he served with distinction in the Royal Air Force), and on their return to America he was instantly engaged by Fox as recruiter of new talent and director of casting. He handed Norma Jeane a section of the script for Winged Victory and asked her to read a few lines; in Fox’s 1944 wartime melodrama, the words had been spoken by Judy Holliday, another slightly breathless blonde with great potential for comedy. Nothing is known of this first meeting, nor of Norma Jeane’s reading, but Lyon asked her to return for a film test.
And so on July 19, 1946, Norma Jeane was led to one of the sets being built for a new Betty Grable picture, Mother Wore Tights. There she was introduced to the great cinematographer Leon Shamroy (who had won Academy Awards for The Black Swan, Wilsonand Leave Her to Heaven); to veteran makeup artist Allan Snyder (who supervised the cosmetics for, among others, Fox’s major stars Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell and Alice Faye); to director Walter Lang (known for glossy, popular entertainments); and to wardrobe designer Charles LeMaire. Lyon had summoned four of the studio’s best technicians for the test scene.
But contrary to popular belief, this was no simple task. “She’d been modeling,” recalled Snyder, “and so she came to us knowing everything about everything, or so she believed. I remember thinking that here was a very determined and ambitious girl, despite her obvious nervousness.” Norma Jeane demanded that Snyder apply heavy makeup, which was entirely inappropriate for a Technicolor test, and when Shamroy saw this he put down his large cigar and bellowed Snyder’s nickname: “Whitey, what the hell have you got on that face? We can’t photograph her that way! Take this girl downstairs, wash the damn stuff off, do her face the way you know it ought to be and bring her back up!”
Her anxiety, and what Norma Jeane knew was her tactical error, at once caused her to stutter and perspire, and (as often throughout her life) embarrassment and fear of failure caused red blotches to emerge on her face. To her great relief, she was then told this would be a silent test: only the merits of her appearance would be presented for the approval of production chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Norma Jeane was given a series of simple commands, the small crew of miracle workers set to their task, a hundred-foot roll of Technicolor stock was put in the camera and Lang cried “Action!”
There was silence on the set. Wearing a floor-length crinoline gown, Norma Jeane walked back and forth. She sat on a high stool. She lit a cigarette, stubbed it out, rose and walked toward a stage window. A remarkable transformation occurred: while the camera was in operation, she showed not a trace of distress; her hands were steady, her movement unhurried, poised; she seemed the most confident woman in the world. Most memorable, her radiant smile evoked smiles from the bystanders.
“When I first watched her,” Leon Shamroy said five years later,
I thought, “This girl will be another Harlow!” 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.
Either during that weekend or the following Monday, the film was screened for Zanuck, whose approval was necessary if a contract were to be offered. As it happened, he was not particularly zealous about Norma Jeane. For one thing, she had never acted anywhere—not a single role, even on an amateur night, nor had she ever had an acting lesson. Zanuck, who personally preferred brunettes like Linda Darnell, also felt that Betty Grable supplied enough blond sex appeal for the studio. In any case, he did not see the same radiance that excited his colleagues. But there was no financial risk in deferring to Lyon and Shamroy. The studio’s legal department was instructed to draw up an agreement, and on Tuesday afternoon, July 23, Helen Ainsworth appointed her colleague Harry Lipton to represent the new client on behalf of National Concert Artists.
Norma Jeane was offered a standard contract without exclusions, exceptions or emendations. Her guaranteed salary, paid whether she worked or did not, was to be seventy-five dollars a week for six months, with the studio’s option to renew for another half-year at twice that amount. Her fate would be determined not so much by her talent as by the interest she might evoke from the ninety-person press and publicity staff at the studio. These “flacks,” as they were called, aroused public curiosity about players, planted stories in newspapers and fan magazines and kept the attention of the most influential columnists of the day: Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky. They, along with Photoplay, Modern Screen, Silver Screen and other slick publications, were courted and cajoled to advance the careers of certain actors. Their power was literally unlimited.
However modest the deal and uncertain the future, Norma Jeane was thrilled—as she was at the first mention of her name in a Hollywood gossip column, on July 29. Hedda Hopper’s syndicated roundup of movie news included this item:
Howard Hughes is on the mend.3 Picking up a magazine, he was attracted by the cover girl and promptly instructed an aide to sign her for pictures. She’s Norma Jean [sic] Dougherty, a model.
Hughes was too late. On September 5, Variety printed her name for the first time, reporting under the “New Contracts” column that she was one of two young women signed by Fox.
At the age of twenty, the new potential starlet was a year too young to sign a binding contract in the State of California. Grace was still her legal guardian, and so, despite the awkwardness and irregularities in their relationship, Norma Jeane again had to turn to her. Grace McKee Goddard had been at the center of every major moment in Norma Jeane’s life: her departure from the Bolenders to live with Gladys; Gladys’s subsequent confinement in asylums; the details of Norma Jeane’s material welfare and her sojourn at the Orphans Home; her time with cousins in Compton; her return to the Goddards and the shock of being left behind when they moved East; her marriage to Dougherty and the arrangements for her divorce. Sometimes the girl had felt like an unnecessary adjunct, a dispensable if charming object in her guardian’s life. But just as often, she had been infused with a sense that she bore within her an idealized self, a lustrous new Harlow to whom professionals now also favorably compared her. Grace had indeed been the great manager of Norma Jeane’s life, and dependence on Grace had been the pattern of that management (as it had been with Dougherty). But subordination wearies human relations, and the long history of subordination must have rankled a young woman who was quickly learning how much she could achieve on her own, with energy, a certain coy, girlish expertise—and with her body.
However much Grace’s protection, obsessions and manipulations evoked a tangle of conflicting feelings, Norma Jeane had known more critical history with her than with anyone. Grace knew her as no one did—and in a sense Grace, trapped in a bleak and loveless marriage from which alcohol was no escape, now depended on Norma Jeane to make something come out right, to realize her own dream. When Grace, with an unsteady signature, wrote her own name on the Fox contract below Norma Jeane Dougherty’s, she was simultaneously justifying her past authority and releasing the object of it into an unpredictable but inevitable autonomy. She was in effect signing a warranty for Norma Jeane’s maturity in a way she had not with the Dougherty marriage; she was permitting herself to become nonessential, a player in the past who might not be retained in the future.
* * *
Just days before the contract was countersigned (on August 24, 1946), Norma Jeane was summoned to Ben Lyon’s office. Only one detail remained to be adjudicated: the matter of her name. Dougherty, Lyon said bluntly, would have to be changed, for no one was sure whether it should be pronounced “Dok-er-tee” or “Dor-rit-tee” or “Doe-rit-tee” or perhaps even “Doff-er-tee.” Did she have any preference for a surname? Norma Jeane did not hesitate: Monroe was the name of her mother’s family, the only relatives of which she could be truly certain. (Like Jean Harlow, she was also choosing her mother’s maiden name for her own.) Lyon agreed: Monroe was a short, easy name, as American as the name of the president who bore it.
The matter of a first name was not so simple. “Norma Jeane Monroe” was awkward, and “Norma Monroe” was almost a tongue-twister. At first they decided on “Jean Monroe,” but she was unhappy with that. She wanted to change everything if they were going to change anything, and while Lyon thought, she spoke of her background. She had never known her father . . . her foster father was a demanding, abusive man . . . in high school she was called the “Mmmmm Girl.”
Lyon leaned forward in his chair:
“I know who you are, you’re Marilyn!” he cried, adding later, “I told her that once there was a lovely actress named Marilyn Miller and that she reminded me of her.”
The connection was a logical one for Lyon to make as Norma Jeane sat before him recounting her history, afraid she might lose this chance over their inability to find a suitable name. Lyon had thought of Marilyn Miller not only because, like the girl before him, she too had blond hair and blue-green eyes. Lyon had been in love with Marilyn Miller many years earlier, and he had been engaged to marry her before he met Bebe Daniels. He knew that as a child Miller had been deserted by her father and then had a stepfather who was a tyrant. She had become a Broadway musical comedy star during the 1920s (in such hits as the trio Sally [1920], Sunny [1925] and Rosalie [1928]); she also had enjoyed a brief success in films. Then, after three marriages, a failing career and increasingly wretched health, she died in 1936 at the age of thirty-seven. Ben Lyon said he was gazing at the virtual reincarnation of Marilyn Miller—and, he had to agree with Shamroy, of Jean Harlow.
Norma Jeane Dougherty was not immediately convinced: Marilyn (originally a contraction of Mary Lynn) sounded strange, artificial. Lyon reminded her that since World War I, it had been one of the most popular first names for American girls because of Marilyn Miller.
“Say it,” Lyon urged her quietly.
“Mmmmmm,” Norma Jeane tried, stuttering for just a moment.
And then they both had to laugh.
“That’s it—the ‘Mmmmmm Girl!’ ” Lyon cried, clapping his hands. “What do you think, sweetheart?”
She smiled. “Well, I guess I’m Marilyn Monroe.”
1. One of these shots appeared on the cover of The Family Circle magazine for April 1946.
2. Anticipating some kind of movie work for Norma Jeane, Snively had encouraged her to sign a contract at Ainsworth’s National Concert Artists Corporation, which she had already done on March 11, 1946.
3. On July 7, producer and aviator Hughes had crash-landed one of his planes in Beverly Hills and sustained severe injuries.