Casting Norma Jeane (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Particles of Light

Adjusting his lights on the three phony walls of the test stage, cameraman Leon Shamroy half expected to look up and find the giant figure of Darryl F. Zanuck towering overhead, topped by a giant, squat, mustachioed, cigar-chomping face that grinned down over his giant fingers as they artfully worked everybody’s strings. For what were the persons down below but puppets in Mr. Zanuck’s giant puppet show?

That included Miss Betty Grable, even though right now she was off in New York having the time of her life while under suspension from the studio for refusing to play the offbeat role of Sophie in Zanuck’s dark
The Razor’s Edge
. But Zanuck was still pulling Betty’s strings. He knew her gambling habits exactly, and he knew that in two to three months he would have Hollywood’s highest-paid star right back on the payroll just in time to start work on
Mother Wore Tights
.

Meanwhile, that’s what screen tests like this one were all about. There always had to be some blonde waiting in the wings to keep Grable guessing.

A commotion rose nearby as the latest blonde reemerged from the dressing room, properly made up for Technicolor at last. Shamroy turned to look. Teetering on spiked heels while lifting up the hem of her floor-length gown, the girl had managed to trip over a mass of huge electrical cables snaking across her path and had nearly gone sprawling across the floor. Cameraman Shamroy went back to his work on the lights reasonably sure that Miss Dougherty represented no serious threat to Betty Grable.

Minutes later the girl reappeared to his view, flattened out in the glass eye of the camera’s viewfinder. Despite a terrible case of nerves, she looked, in her solid-sequin gown, very pretty of course. Yet Shamroy took note that she was far from the paragon of glamor being touted by talent scout Ben Lyon. Her posture was less than perfect. Her profile was weak, especially on the right side. She also had an unusually shaped nose.

Mr. Lyon himself now stepped into the frame, and Shamroy, seated behind his view-finder, practiced following with the camera as the executive began running the girl through her desired paces. The two stopped at a stool Lyon had just placed in the center of the stage. They turned and hovered over the small table next to it. Then they crossed to a window off to the right. The cameraman, establishing his planes of focus on the test’s subject, observed that whereas Betty Grable would have been smartly hitting her marks while cracking jokes with everyone in sight, this poor girl stumbled alongside Lyon, intermittently sighing, clutching at her stomach with both arms, and emitting the beginnings of words which she appeared unable to finish. “Mm-mm-mo…Di-di-di…Buh-buh-buh…”

Miss Dougherty’s dreadful case of stage fright wasn’t helped by Lyon’s news that the screen test as they’d originally planned it was wholly out of the question. She could forget all about the lines she’d memorized, because there was no actor here to read them with her. Nor would Mr. Lyon feed her the lines, since no sound recordist was on the job to capture them. The all-powerful Mr. Zanuck had been too frenzied with wrapping up his beloved
Razor’s Edge
even to glance at Lyon’s requisitions for a test. As a result, they had no budget. What vestiges of crew were present Ben Lyon had talked into virtually working on their own time. Everything—the set, the lights, the camera, even their illustrious cameraman Mr. Shamroy himself—had been wheedled and cadged at considerable effort by Mr. Lyon from the interminable tinkering still going on with Miss Grable’s still unreleased
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim
.

Not that there was a single thing to worry about, Lyon assured the distraught blonde as he handed her a glittering purse into which he’d inserted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter—because of this wonderful idea he’d had.

“All I want you to do,” he said, bringing his face nearer hers and trying to connect with her frightened eyes, “is to come in that door and then do what I tell you. I just want you to project yourself the very same way you’ve been doing in your still pictures.”

He quickly strode away and called out, “Lights!” Instantly, the make-believe room became as bright as day. The cringing girl disappeared around a wall to take up her position offstage. Lyon nodded to Shamroy as he backed into the sidelines. Shamroy trained his camera on the door and at length signaled to Ben Lyon that he was ready. And Lyon called out, “Action!”

The door opened. Miss Dougherty took one step into the dazzling room and then paused with her hand still on the door handle. Her posture in the shimmering gown had become, unaccountably, as erect as a statue. Her breast rose and fell with excitement.

“Walk across to the stool…” coached Lyon softly.

For a second, the girl responded only by shifting her head slightly to catch a changed gradation of the light while an intriguing expression of doubt passed over her face. Then, as if irresistibly drawn to someone halfway across the room, she stepped forward with an unfolding motion of her entire body that was like the graceful step of a sleek young gazelle. Simultaneously, a smile stole into her face that grew with a sudden force until its unexpected radiance shattered every other thought that had been building in the two men’s minds.

Ben Lyon glowed back at her with surprise and delight. “Now sit down…” he said in a hushed voice.

The blonde insinuated herself onto the stool in a single movement that left the sequined folds of her gown in a striking cascade over the contours of her legs while neatly exposing the extended toes of her spiked shoes.

“Take a cigarette out of your purse and light it…” continued the hushed voice of Lyon.

As she followed each of Lyon’s whispered cues, it seemed that within two or three minutes’ time her very physical presence had changed before the two men’s amazed eyes. Her hands were steady now. All her movements were unhurried. No trace of her earlier distress could be seen anywhere in her face or body. She brimmed with confidence. And yes, thought cameraman Shamroy, she was now every bit as stunning as Ben Lyon had promised after all.

“Put the cigarette out…” continued Lyon. “Get up…Walk forward toward the camera…”

As she advanced nearer to Shamroy’s view-finder, a cobalt-hued mistiness about her eyes and a garnet-hued luminosity about her lips seemed to intermingle with the scintillations of her gown. For a moment it appeared to him that millions of particles of colored light were clustering around her from all directions in a field of energy, which she in turn channeled straight into the all-consuming mechanical eye that he held trained upon her. Shamroy cocked his head above the viewfinder to better see what was happening. Perhaps, he had to conclude, it was only a freakish effect generated by a spotlight’s glare on the viewfinder in combination with the glittering of her sequined gown.

But many times throughout the day, his thoughts returned to the test. He wondered intensely how it was going to turn out. And late in the afternoon, when he viewed the newly processed film on the flickering screen of the Moviola, he got a cold chill.

“This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures,” Leon Shamroy was to recall several years afterward of the impression it made on him. “She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson. Like one of those lush stars of the silent era.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Ford Sports Coupe

From a taxi rounding the corner onto Nebraska Street not many mornings later, Jim Dougherty spotted his 1935 Ford sports coupe parked in Aunt Ana’s driveway. It told the twenty-five-year-old sailor that this time he’d caught his wife at home. And that so far his plan was working.

Seconds later he rang the doorbell and waited, his mind flashing down to his newly bought suit and to all the trouble he’d had finding a decent fit after docking yesterday because of wartime shortages still going on everywhere…

…When the door opened and there stood Norma Jeane.

Jim Dougherty took in a breath. She’d become a blonde. And missing now seemed to be half of the adorable chubbiness about her cheeks. Neither in body was she quite his solid old Norma Jeane, as though the shedding of the darker coloration had shifted some weight off her feet and lifted her partway up into the air.

Nor was anything else the same when their eyes met. There was no sending forth her rollicking laugh or throwing her arms up to hug him as in the wonderful days of the past. Too much had happened since then. Instead she chose to avert her look and stick out her lower lip like a sulking child.

“Why did you cut off my allowance, Jimmie?” were her first words as she drew a flimsy wrapper around herself against the chilly air. Her face was devoid of makeup. She’d come to the door straight out of bed, where obviously she hadn’t been sleeping too well.

“Look, kid, you don’t pay for anything unless you’re getting it,” replied Jim, affecting an unfeeling face.

Norma Jeane gave him a sharply pained look as if her ears had just heard something too unbelievably crass. Now here, thought Jim with delight—despite all this new blondness and sleekness—here was his same old Norma Jeane! So very proper. So easily shocked. He felt a constriction in the area of his chest and throat before the reappearing sparks of her old life and loveliness. Notwithstanding that now she had the nerve to launch into a sob story about being in the hospital in Las Vegas with a terrible mouth infection just when the government letter arrived telling her the allotment money was ending.

Jim laughed out loud as sarcastically as he could. “Well gee, Norma Jeane,” he broke in, “I’m so sorry I had that money cut off when you were sick! How thoughtless of me! Umm—I wonder, since we happen to be on the subject of surprise letters…”

This was the amazing thing, he was thinking. Here was this girl, so quick-witted and perceptive in every other way—who’d proven herself, in fact, even as far back as the day she’d married him at the age of sixteen, to be more levelheaded and adult than Jim himself had been then at the age of twenty-one. Yet at certain times, he was always having to spell out the most basic things to her.

“…I wonder,” he went on, “if you maybe gave any thought to
my
feelings when you had that letter sent to me on board ship?”

Norma Jeane stared at him blankly for a moment and then just looked away. She couldn’t answer.

“From a lawyer, for God’s sake!” he pursued, his already-big voice growing louder. “You couldn’t even have the decency to let me know in your own words that you were going to dump me!”

The booming of his voice caused her to tilt her head to one side and indicate behind her in the direction of their old bedroom. “I think my mother’s getting sort of upset,” she said softly.

Jim leaned inside the door to take a look. Staring up at him apprehensively from the one bed in the apartment was Norma Jeane’s mother—the strange, petite Gladys who only a few months before had been released from a mental hospital. He immediately said to himself,
There go my hopes of settling everything in bed.
Which was a shame because, no matter what, everything between them always turned out perfectly in bed.

Norma Jeane seized on the distraction to start looking him over carefully while allowing a bit of the old twinkle to come into her eyes. This was a look that he loved above everything else. Never had it failed to melt his heart.

“Your suit doesn’t fit,” she said.

“I know. But I wanted out of that sailor suit,” admitted Jim.

Saying so was tantamount to offering her a white flag of surrender after the terrific row they’d had in January. The truth of it was that since then, he’d spent most of seven months at sea in deep reflection. And now he saw that Norma Jeane—however far off the track she may have gotten in this madness of hers about modeling—had been right about something else. That purely for the sake of a little financial security in shaky times, Jim had been stretching his wartime stint with the Merchant Marine too far beyond the end of the war for the good of their marriage. It had brought her to the point where, here at the door, she was now uttering the most outlandish proposals.

“Jimmie, we can still be close,” he heard Norma Jeane saying in her sweetest voice. “We can still date. We can go on just like before…” And incredibly to Jim’s ears, she went on babbling about how this divorce of hers was just a career move—how she was trying to land a movie contract, how the studios only hired single girls, and so on.

“Are you crazy?!” he broke in, his mind suddenly awhirl. “I want a wife and kids. You want a divorce? We’ll get a divorce! Then it’s over.”

“Let’s talk tomorrow,” suggested Norma Jeane softly. “Maybe a little later in the day, OK? Can we do it then, Jimmie? Please?”

“OK,” Jim said, shoving his long arm past her and grabbing the set of keys he’d been noticing on her small table just inside the door. “I’ll take the car. I’m gonna need it to get around during my leave.”

“Oh!” came a little surprised cry from Norma Jeane. “Well, I really do need it to—umm…” She drew her words out, waiting for him to change his mind, because of course she wanted the car to make more of her confounded modeling rounds. But Jim had no intention of giving up the keys, and they both knew that the car was registered in his name. “…Well, all right, Jimmie.”

He spun angrily around, sprang down to the walk, and strode off toward his sports coupe, finding means to congratulate himself only at the cost of wild irrelevancy,
“Good, at least I’ve rescued my car from her! She’s a terrible driver anyway—an actual menace behind the wheel!”

Jimmie,” Norma Jeane called after him.

At the car, he turned and glowered back at her. She was standing very still in the doorway. He’d been speaking to her in a certain contemptuous tone of voice that he’d very rarely ever used before because of how deeply he knew it was capable of hurting her.

“I think…soon…I’ll be making a lot mm-more mm-money,” she said mysteriously.

“That’s nice, Norma Jeane,” sneered Jim. “I’m very glad for you.”

“Bye, Jimmie,” she called, her voice small. “Sorry about this mm-morning.”

Even in his anger, Jim’s conscience rebuked him for hurting her the way he had, but he told himself,
That’s OK, she doesn’t even know the meaning of hurt!
The tailspin of agonies he’d felt upon receiving her lawyer’s letter aboard ship in Shanghai was rushing back on him so vividly that he choked back a sob as, without answering her, he got into the sports coupe.

Sorry about this morning! What about the divorce? What about our whole life?!

Certainly his pride had been stung by her suggesting he take a demotion from the rank of husband to that of a favorite beau while she replaced him in their bed—replaced Jim, who knew and loved her far better than anyone else in the world—with that nutty, floating-in-and-out mother Gladys whom Norma Jeane had never once gone to see in the mental hospital during the almost four years of their marriage. But worse than anything else was the aching in his heart because he hadn’t even been able to embrace her this morning.

As he headed for his folks’ place in Thousand Oaks, Jim took consolation in one thing. He’d been right about her so-called career. It looked no less like a failure now than it had looked to him seven months ago. Her very first words to Jim this morning about the allotment money had said it all. She was still broke. Sure, maybe she’d gotten her face on a few magazine covers around the country, but who had paid for it?
He
had! She’d emptied out their bank account. It was drained—finding that out was a big part of what had so angered him in January. She’d pawned everything except the radio. She’d even sold their silver. All this just to cover the costs of her makeup and clothes, items which were considered quite incomprehensibly by the photographers to be her responsibility. Well, if she wasn’t going to be his wife, he certainly wasn’t going to be her meal ticket for one more day.

But something still mystified Jim. It came to him suddenly as he drove, after he’d considered everything else, and it stopped him dead in his thoughts.

Wait a minute. Did she say she’d decided to become an actress?

An
actress
? Jim was sure he’d heard her say that. Whereas here he’d always assumed that
he
was the ham in the family, once having gone as far as to win top honors playing Shylock in a big interschool competition. It was Jim who’d rubbed elbows with the stars, having been active in the Van Nuys High School Masquers’ Club with Jane Russell, who was now making a nationwide sensation in
The Outlaw—
and having been close working buddies at the Lockheed factory with Bob Mitchum, who just that past April had been up for an Academy Award for his supporting role in
The Story of G.I. Joe
. It was Jim who in the past had found occasion to introduce an overawed Norma Jeane to these old friends of his, not the other way around. So where on earth was all this coming from?—this ambition of hers, first to become a model and now all of a sudden to act, to get into the movies? Certainly she’d never spoken a word about the movies to him before! Not a word.