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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Blonde of the Day

“I was strolling down Gower Avenue in Hollywood one August afternoon in 1951”— so might a peerless observer of the passing Hollywood scene, Charles Williams, be coaxed to reveal to some carefully chosen listener many years afterward—“when a glamorously dressed blonde drove up in a convertible and parked at the opposite curb. She got out in a big hurry and crossed diagonally toward me, heading for the back entrance to RKO Studios.

“Now, see how your mind does things to you?” Charles would ask with the scene materializing before his eyes as though it had just happened yesterday. “Looking more closely at this bosomy, wide-hipped girl, I was very unimpressed. Her makeup was too heavy. She had a rather puggish nose. The outer corners of her large eyes slanted downward toward her cheekbones with an effect I didn’t care for. I noticed a tacky wrinkle across the front of her skirt below a prominent tummy. She was pigeon-toed in one foot. And she was a little on the frantic side—everything about her seemed exaggerated. I said to myself,
This girl’s obviously trying to be the next Lana Turner, but she’s of a lesser vintage
.”

On saying this, Charles might lean in to you confidentially and add a momentary aside laughingly as if from one star-worshiper to another: “Lana was the blonde of the day, you know, and
how dare
anyone try to imitate her!

“Well,” he would then say in redoubling his concentration on the scene, “she got to the RKO entrance just as I approached. And stepping up on the platform, she looked in my direction and said, very sweetly, ‘Hello!’”

At this point it was again necessary for Charles to lean in toward you, but this time altogether seriously. “Now, being black,” he would confide, “with Jim Crow still in full sway, I got overlooked
a lot
in those days. And here was this nice woman greeting me so politely! Of course I didn’t let on what I’d been thinking but spoke back to her just as pleasantly.

“She continued to look at me,” Charles would tell. “Then she pressed the buzzer—a loud one even from the outside—BOOOP!— and stood there waiting, still watching me. I’d gotten just a few feet past her when I heard the studio door open behind me. Two men’s voices cried out ‘Marilyn!’ I whirled around. Instantly everything fell into place: ‘My God,’ I said to myself, ‘It’s Marilyn Monroe!’”

“In 1951?” Charles’s listener, if an extremely astute one, might here break in to ask skeptically.

Charles would raise a finger. “Remember, stargazing was my vocation in life. I’d come out to LA from Wichita, Kansas, just to hang around the studios in hopes of seeing an Ava Gardner or an Errol Flynn. I read the
LA Times’
theatrical section every day, knew who everybody was, went to all the movies. Two years earlier I’d seen Marilyn’s hottest piece of work to date,
The Asphalt Jungle
, and thought she was definitely on the rise. Then I’d seen the great
All About Eve
, plus each of those lesser-featured bits as they came out—
Love Nest
,
As Young as You Feel
, and the rest. So all this was what swept through my mind on hearing her first name.”

Charles would take in an impressive breath and then continue his story.

“Well, all of a sudden, this awkward blonde who was trying to imitate Lana Turner
completely disappeared
for me. And into focus—came Marilyn Monroe! My God, she totally came alive! The reason for it being partly too that she’d recognized these two handsome, young executive types who were stepping out the door in their high-fashion suits and ties, both carrying briefcases. Fox attorneys perhaps? I didn’t know who they were, but right away the two were all over her, drinking her in and trying to hold her there in conversation. She kept saying, ‘But I’m late! I’m late!’ and pushing at the door, trying to go in. Yet she was charmed enough by these two gentlemen to give them, for one moment, what they expected of Marilyn Monroe—throwing her head back, smiling wide, eyes half-closed, and pivoting from one foot to the other as she spoke to them in that little-girl voice.

“I stood there transfixed,” Charles was to say. “Just staring while, relentingly, she continued to chat with them.

“She wasn’t especially tall,” he would remember of his observations as he looked on the three from close by, “but somehow she gave the impression of being both willowy and broad at the same time. She was wearing a loose-fitting, long-sleeved white silk blouse with a collar, and a very tight-fitting plaid skirt. Her hips, though wide, now seemed just right for a body as voluptuous as hers. I still wasn’t sure whether I liked the eyes, but I noted that she had exceptionally beautiful white skin, perfect for a blonde. I could literally see it reflecting though the makeup, so clear and tight-pored and flawless—I’d never seen a woman with anything like it before. Her nose, on examining it now, no longer seemed so pugged. I thought,
It’s not Lana’s nose, but it’s a beautiful nose, perfectly in sync with the rest of her features.

“Most sensuous of all,” Charles would tell, “were her lips. I know now these weren’t actually as full as they appeared and that she achieved that effect with several shades of lipstick. But my God, such glossy, full lips! She must have been a Rembrandt!

“Not only was hers a beautiful, childlike face,” Charles would continue, “but it was a perpetually mobile one, constantly going from one expression to the next. Add to this the animation of her hands and her way of dancing from one foot to the other, and—well, here was a girl who just couldn’t stand still!

“I must say,” he would add, “that I continued to sense something
heightened
about her as she spoke with these two men. Not that she wasn’t smooth as silk—no, she had this act of hers down perfectly. But there was a nervousness about her that wasn’t natural. Inwardly, I felt, she lacked poise. She was exaggerated. Sweetly exaggerated. Absolutely captivatingly exaggerated. But exaggerated.”

From that thought, Charles Williams’ brow would at length unknit until at last he fairly beamed.

“But do you know,” he would say, “that in the middle of all those maneuvers as the three of them talked, she took time to look at
me
?! Yes, right in the middle of that conversation she glanced swiftly across at me—only once, but it was a distinct look that said, ‘I’m recognizing you. I know you’re still there. And—aha! You finally see who I am, don’t you?!’

“Isn’t that amazing?!” Charles would ask his listener emphatically.

The rapt listener’s answer would probably be a slow swing of the head from side to side in wondering agreement.

“She was aware of my presence,” Charles would marvel. “Unmistakably aware, all that time!” And on making this point, Charles might bring his words to an involuntary halt and with his listener silently ponder for an instant the meaning of that scene.

“Well,” he would then go on, “There was no place in this world those two guys would rather have been than right there with her! But finally they turned away, letting her go, and came on down the steps. They never once looked at me, you know—never so much as glanced in my direction all this time. It was almost as if they made a point not to look at me. But
she
looked back at me again! My mouth might as well have been hanging open, my expression was one of such awe. She recognized this—and gave me a very warm farewell smile. And then she went inside. I just stood there rooted to the spot, watching the door even after she had gone. I thought, ‘I’ve just seen Marilyn Monroe!’

“A day or two later,” he would continue, “I read in the
LA Times
that she’d been at RKO to interview with producers Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna for a part in
Clash by Night
. That proved to be her first costarring role. She was twenty-five years old. It seemed just weeks later that the story of her nude calendar broke, and immediately of course there she was right on the cover of
Life
magazine! In fact, one of the pictures for that story showed her wearing exactly what she had on the day I saw her. And later that year, 20th Century-Fox featured the same outfit in their ads for her first starring vehicle. Remember the slogan? ‘Marilyn Monroe—every inch a woman in
Don’t Bother to Knock
!’

“Watching those films,” Charles was to recall, “not only did I feel I knew her as no one else in the theater did, but I was confirmed in my belief in her talent and even came to love those sensuously down-slanted eyes! Still, I could never shake the impression that she was a little on the frantic side. Exaggerated. Reaching out from somewhere very deep and desperate within.

“Of course I had no idea then,” he would say, “that she’d go on to become one of the greatest screen legends of all time. When that happened, and when the past she sprang from became known to the whole world, I felt all the closer to her for realizing she too was truly of the downtrodden and dispossessed. It explained our one small, sweet encounter. Why she’d stayed aware of me when those two studio hotshots came along. Why she’d smiled to me when they left. To me and me only. Charles Williams, the black kid from Wichita!

To that smile Charles, after a second’s reflection, would then return with a blissful afterthought:

“You see, she may have given those guys Marilyn Monroe. But she gave me
herself
. She gave me Norma Jeane!”

Notes and Sources

I have been led to
Casting Norma Jeane
by a string of chance interviews which began even as Marilyn Monroe’s career soared atop its meteoric trajectory with the filming of
Some Like It Hot
. The exchanges I had, however, were not directly with her. They centered instead around two of her closest relatives—a married couple somewhat past middle age, living modest lives so divorced from the media fanfare surrounding their niece that today one would suppose it to have been humanly impossible.

In that late fall of 1958 through the unique offices of a college friend named Robert Larson, I found myself seated in the living room of Marilyn Monroe’s sometime foster mother Enid Knebelkamp, raptly taking in what we now know to be the only interview ever granted to a writer by any of the star’s three Atchinson “aunts”—that vital trio of ladies comprised of Mrs Knebelkamp, Marilyn’s childhood legal guardian Grace Goddard, and the storied and beloved Aunt Ana Lower. Present with Mrs. Knebelkamp on the one evening we spoke was her husband Sam. In
Casting Norma Jeane
this pair appears along with all of the twenty-year-old starlet’s other closest relatives in my chapter entitled “Scroll of Life.”

During several subsequent months in 1958 and 1959, I also had three lengthy interviews with Enid Knebelkamp’s close neighbor and trusted friend, who was indeed my colleague Robert Larson’s mother, the sophisticated and discerning Catherine Larson. Mrs. Larson joins Mrs. Knebelkamp in my chapter called “Artichoke Queen.”

Not least, on innumerable occasions between the fall of 1958 and the spring of 1963, I interviewed Robert Larson himself (who happened once to have been the successful child movie actor billed in his heyday as
Bobby
Larson). Mr. Larson never met Marilyn Monroe, but at home he had always taken a lively, bemused, and wondering interest in everything his mother had to say about her, which he now repeated to me as one thoroughly under the famed actress’s spell.

In connection with these four sources—Enid and Sam Knebelkamp, Catherine Larson, and Robert Larson—I use the word “interview.” Alas, as the saying goes, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. My great ambition, then, as a budding film auteur of nineteen, was to write
for
Marilyn Monroe, not
about
her. It hardly crossed my mind to take any but the most incidental and cursory notes of the fascinating things these invaluable witnesses told me. Therefore, although it seems to me that almost every anecdote I heard from them has remained in my memory word for word to this day, in the absence of conventional documentation my rule throughout
Casting Norma Jeane
has been to rely strictly on other firsthand sources for any actual speech appearing between quotation marks in the text, as hereinbelow noted. In this regard I am particularly indebted to Berniece Miracle and Mona Rae Miracle, whose indispensable
My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir of Marilyn Monroe
preserves the sequence in which words were spoken on four different occasions that figured importantly in the story as it was passed on to me.

Of course no story in the world ever suffered less than this one did from a scarcity of source material. The bibliography that follows represents only a tiny fraction of the veritable library of Marilyn Monroe research, biography and memoir that has arisen over the past half century—an accumulation as remarkable as anything of its kind in existence. From this repository, to be sure, works bearing upon the late summer and early fall of 1946 have provided
Casting Norma Jeane
with a wealth of factual corroboration, descriptive detail and chronological context, as additionally cited below. Nonetheless I must say that I owe the kernel and thrust of almost every scene in this book rather to the accounts of the four uniquely placed witnesses whom I have named.
J.G.

1.
Planes and Angles
, Pages 1-3.

“
What can I do for you?
et al.: Guiles/Norma Jean, 69-70.

“
You can tell with some faces
: Parsons, 172.

See also: Gilmore, 86. Guiles/Legend, 99. Spoto, 110.

2.
Looking Glass
, Pages 5-14.

“
What the hell is that?
et al.: Crown, 31.

“
We can’t photograph her that way
, et al: Spoto, 110, 119.