Casting Norma Jeane (4 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hypnotist’s Watch

“That’s so ridiculous!” came a sudden and unexpected pronouncement from Gladys Baker in one of the very first weeks of Berniece Miracle’s stay in Los Angeles—from which, years afterward, her memoir was to record many of the conversations that took place.

This judgment of Gladys’ fell upon the younger of her two daughters—on Norma Jeane—and its effect was to totally deflate her proud and earnest work in front of Aunt Ana’s hallway mirror. The girl had been attending her classes at the studio with the utmost diligence and had been bringing home exercises in drama, singing, speech, movement, and dance, which she practiced each and every day. Today it was her diction that she was improving by closely observing the reflection of her lips as she carefully rounded them to expel the classic formulation, “How—now—brown—cow?”

“You sound silly,” pursued the mother, who’d stolen into Ana’s upstairs apartment with some articles of clothing draped over one arm. “If you don’t have anything else to do, you can come out here and help me dry-clean these.”

Berniece listened from Ana’s kitchen, stunned as much by the discovery of her mother’s unsuspected powers of articulation as by the scathing purport of what she’d said. Gladys had scarcely spoken as many words at one time to Berniece in all the days since they and little Mona Rae had begun sharing the downstairs apartment.

“Mm-Mm-Mother,” came the voice of Norma Jeane, who was only the more taken aback, “I have to improve mm-mm-my enunciation—mm-mm-my vowels…”

“Well,
I
have to improve these dirty blouses,” retorted Gladys, “because I can’t afford to pay the dry cleaners!” She wheeled around and headed for the back door where, this time with much clatter, she disappeared once more down the outside stairs.

Berniece stepped to the kitchen doorway and looked soulfully over at her younger sister. Norma Jeane did not move from her spot. Her eyes only dropped to the chest below the mirror. The expression of disheartenment on her stricken face seemed so uncharacteristic of Norma Jeane that Berniece felt embarrassed even to witness it.
Well, this is terrible
, she thought. Just when such exciting things are happening in Norma Jeane’s life! Wasn’t the girl earning a more than reasonable seventy-five dollars a week from the studio for the very purpose of readying herself for the future in this way? Who could have dreamed that Gladys was not proud of her?

Berniece strode to the end of the hall and stood at the back door with one hand on her hip and her head tilted quizzically as she looked down into the yard. Gladys was, as Berniece would later remember, “seated on the stoop beside the garage, savagely sloshing a blouse in a pail of cleaning fluid.”

“Mother, you ought to
encourage
Norma Jeane,” Berniece called down the back stairs. “She’s trying so hard to make a go of it, and you’re being so ugly about it.”

Gladys looked over her shoulder and muttered something back to Berniece under her breath.

“What did you say, Mother?”

“I said I don’t like her business.”

Now here, truly, was one for the books!
was all Berniece could say to herself in wonderment. In the brief time she’d known her mother, however, she’d learned that it was no use trying to tease out more of her thoughts on the subject. Gladys would be saying nothing more about this or about anything else perhaps for the rest of the day. All she was going do was to sulk, which was what she seemed to spend most of her time doing.

Yet here was a new piece of information, come to light at a time when every tidbit of communication from her long-estranged mother felt hard-won and precious to Berniece. So Gladys didn’t like the film business? Notwithstanding the fact, of course, that it was she herself who’d brought Norma Jeane into the world as the very child and offspring of the glittering movie trade! That particular part of the sketchy family story had already been known to Berniece for several years, its luridly tinged particulars having been literally among the very first facts about her missing parent ever to come to her knowledge back home in Kentucky. For Gladys Baker, upon divorcing Berniece’s father at the age of twenty-one, had freely chosen to enter the film industry during the roaring twenties, as a negative cutter for a concern called Consolidated Film Industries. There she’d met up with her friend of a lifetime, Grace McKee, the pint-sized human dynamo who’d transformed Gladys into a flaming redhead and who’d initiated her into the fast, bohemian ways of the city of celluloid dreams. It was probably at Consolidated too, following a second unlucky fling at marriage, that Gladys had struck up her relationship with Norma Jeane’s father. Whatever his name might have been, not even Aunt Grace seemed to know. Very possibly—or so it seemed to Berniece—Gladys herself couldn’t even say which of several co-workers was the actual gentleman.

In any case now, twenty years later, their mother was barely managing to hold down a job in a downtown department store, putting tags on clothes. The work had been procured for her by the good Aunt Ana after none of Gladys’ long-past movie employers had proven willing to rehire her.

Coming back down the hallway, Berniece found Norma Jeane still looking down at the chest beneath the mirror. The girl’s lips, Berniece would later write, were pressed together in silence. She seemed to have retreated deeply within herself. Her forefinger, poised atop the chest, was moving from side to side over the polished surface in a rhythmical, weaving motion. It was like a hypnotist’s watch swaying back and forth on its chain before his subject’s spellbound eyes. Or it was as if Norma Jeane were methodically canceling out a mark left by Gladys’ words upon her mind.

Berniece clearly sensed that now was not a time for the two of them to speak. They had spoken at length before about the problem of their mother. About how deeply they’d longed—separately, each sister unbeknownst to the other and for a period measuring now in years—for a time when Gladys might confer upon them some undefined but treasured thing which only a mother is able to give. But Gladys Baker’s heart, they’d had to acknowledge, was a lock to which she alone possessed the key. Only the aunts, as of yet, had on rare occasions been vouchsafed fair glimpses of what lay within this strange woman, and in vain had Berniece and Norma Jeane waited for similar moments of their own. So that now they began wondering if theirs from Gladys Baker were never to be more than these casually tossed-out verbal missiles of petulance and gloom like “That’s so ridiculous!” and “I don’t like her business.”

“I keep telling myself that Mother will act better when she’s been on the outside longer,” Norma Jeane had said of the seven months she’d already spent sharing the lower apartment with Gladys—an arrangement which had come about in the first place only because of Gladys’ begging to come and live with Norma Jeane after her release from the hospital. “But I still feel as if we’re strangers,” Norma Jeane had concluded.

Berniece had given Norma Jean a long, tight hug. And since the doctors had said it would take plenty of time, they’d agreed that for now they would remain patient.

CHAPTER NINE

House of Monroe

Sometimes, however, on Saturdays or on weekdays when Norma Jeane had time off from her work and training, the sisters jumped into the Dougherty Ford together with Mona Rae and approached the mysteries of their common parentage from an entirely different direction. For while it was true that Berniece had never in her life had a thing to do with the movie business—she and her brother Jackie having been spirited away to Kentucky by their father before that part of Gladys’ adventure had ever begun—Los Angeles remained her heritage. She’d been born here and in that sense together with Norma Jeane represented the third generation of Angelinos on their mother’s side of the family. Few activities during Berniece’s Southern California sojourn afforded her more stimulation than exploring these roots.

One day Aunt Grace came along to act as guide. Their goal, this day, wasn’t any of the giant walled enclaves wherein the precious, newly minted images of fabulous film stars had once passed daily through the carefully gloved hands of negative cutters Gladys and Grace. Nor was today’s destination outside those studios’ gates, where a surplus of set designers’ fantasies seemed to have spilled forth into the animated streets and picturesque hillside roadways of surrounding Hollywood, making there an Alhambresque backdrop against which the two flappers had lived and laughed and loved away the halcyon days and nights of their flaming youth. No, bypassing all this, the Dougherty sports coupe skirted bustling downtown, coursed beyond the sleepy Los Angeles River with its plethora of railroad tracks along both banks, and climbed gently upward to the comparatively ancient neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

This place possessed for them, as Berniece would later express it, “the aura of a trip in a time machine.” Dissolved before their eyes was the present-day fastness of synagogues and delicatessens beloved for more than a generation by Jewish folk arriving in successive waves from New York and eastern Europe. Instead, in imagination, the occupants of the Dougherty Ford peered deeper into the past, at a wholly different era closer to the turn of the twentieth century. They fixed on that charmed time before the astonishing rise of automobiles had revolutionized everything. When Southern California’s movers and shakers had still inhabited the fashionable Queen Anne mansions dotting all this higher ground just a quick trolley ride from their power bases of downtown. When in identical pattern, all these same streets had still comprised a booming preserve for the heirs, culturally if not literally, of the Yankee tradesmen and lawyers and real estate brokers who’d first bargained the happily situated little pueblo of Los Angeles out of Mexican hands.

Into this earlier Boyle Heights, the two sisters learned, Otis Monroe had fit reasonably well—Otis having been their grandfather, Gladys’ father. Aunt Grace had told each of them before about certain papers she held as Gladys’ conservator, showing exactly how Otis Monroe was descended from no less a family than that of James Monroe of Virginia, the chestnut-haired fifth president of the United States. Not that in the sandy-haired Otis’ own brief life, with its swift and calamitous end, there was to be found anything to outwardly match the status of such a vaunted ancestry. But inwardly he’d evinced one trait suggestive of something of that exalted kind. Otis Monroe had once
dreame
d with exceptionally bold freedom.

He’d aspired to the world of high art. He would soon be studying painting in Europe—so he’d confidently told Della Hogan, whom he’d courted in Missouri upon appearing there rather mysteriously out of Indiana while in his midthirties. Then perhaps the two of them might unmoor themselves from all the pestilent restrictions of time and space by floating down the River Seine in a houseboat, while Otis executed watercolors of the French countryside which might well be the securing of his artistic reputation. There was, he’d told the rapt Della, the whole of the Old World to see and to portray in landscapes perhaps rivaling those of the glorious Cézanne. Then, aboard steamships, they’d circle the rest of the globe while he added luster to his creative standing via depictions of Earth’s farthest and most exotic climes. For if any of the details along his life’s planned trajectory had been left fuzzy, Otis Monroe had made its end point crystal clear. Here was a man destined to be respected, to be looked up to for as long as he lived, and to be remembered long after he was gone.

Della Hogan had been powerfully swayed. As much by the fine cut of his manly frame as by what she called his “wanderlust charm.” Never mind that Otis was ten years her senior and was still earning his survival by digging postholes, patching roofs, and painting houses. His genteel appearance while at his leisure spoke for itself. He was “neat as a pin,” she would later write, “always turned out like a gentleman—or at least a gentleman’s gentleman.” Furthermore, adorning the fair complexion of his left cheek was a large scar that added a dashing final touch to the robust, worldly appearance he made. This expressive mark, though actually received in a bad fall, accorded perfectly with Della’s romantic notion of Otis Monroe as man well acquainted with danger.

The projected foreign adventures had seemed about to get underway when Otis went to work for the Mexican National Railway soon after they were married. But the squalid conditions they encountered in Mexico had soon propelled them back across the border and westward to the burgeoning new El Dorado called Los Angeles, where he’d found a similar job with the Pacific Electric Railway. Thus had it happened that the rest of Otis’ life, instead of being about steamships plying the bright blue waters of the world, had turned out to be about train cars clanging over the parched desert clays of Southern California. His working hours, instead of climaxing in luminous flights of pigment from palette to canvas amid throes of solitary inspiration, had devolved into a sloshing on of bucketfuls of paint alongside whole crews of laboring men. And his advancement in the world, instead of bathing his small family in the perquisites and possessions of an onrushing fame, had amounted to a slogging climb from the obscurity of rented rooms to that of rented flats and then of rented houses.

Within a few years, Otis Monroe had stopped mentioning his vast artistic dreams altogether. Whether or not he still cherished them, Della did not know. That had been the worst part of it for her—the rest wouldn’t even have mattered, but she’d never really come to
know
her husband. Yes, she could still, after six or seven years, look into his hazel eyes and truthfully say she still loved him. And despite his frequent drinking bouts, she still considered him to be a good man. But marriage to Otis Monroe, she wrote, was “like living with a shadow of someone.” His mind and his heart had never become any more accessible to her than if he’d been the sole inhabitant of some distant planet’s icy moon.

Barely had a job promotion come along allowing the Monroes to purchase their own home in still-fashionable Boyle Heights, when Otis had been seized by a horrifying illness. Both physical and mental in nature, it was ascribed within the family to “paint poisoning.” The astonishingly abrupt decline which ensued had turned him into someone in whom Della could no longer recognize anything of the man she’d married. And at the age of forty-three, Otis Elmer Monroe had died in the Patton State Hospital a howling madman.

That had been in 1909. Strangely now, thirty-seven years later in the late summer of 1946—and perhaps this was all in Aunt Grace’s way of presenting the story—the appalling details of Otis’ demise slipped with wonderful ease into the background. And it was as if the artist perpetually out of reach to Della were finally speaking out across the generations to Berniece and Norma Jeane. That he should choose to do so through a certain house on Folsom Street was the whimsical part of the matter, since it was the property around the corner at 2440 Boulder Street that he and Della had actually bought and owned. Exactly how the Folsom Street place had once fit into the family’s scheme of things was now forgotten, except for one fact which Berniece was later to record. Here, she would write, stood “a house built piece by piece” by their grandfather Otis Monroe. Gazing upon it, they felt as if in some mysterious way this particular dwelling, lavished upon in such a variety of crafts at the hands of this one man alone, had been waiting all these years to be seen and appreciated by this one small audience alone.

The group in the Dougherty Ford saw much else on their day’s excursion. Enough, in the tracing of Gladys Monroe Baker’s life from those shaky beginnings, for Berniece and Norma Jeane to be assured above all that their mother had not always been what she was now. That once Gladys’ most precious dream had been to bring her three children together into the home they deserved. So that in her bed that night Berniece Baker Miracle, for one, could extract nothing but hope and promise from all she’d seen and learned on this eventful day. Didn’t it mean that some tiny portion of Gladys’ dream was coming true at last? For although their brother Jackie was gone—long dead—here all the rest of them were, safely together. Berniece and her child Mona Rae sharing Aunt Ana’s downstairs room with Gladys. And Norma Jeane upstairs with Aunt Ana. Didn’t this day go to show that the ancestral stock once planted by Otis Monroe in Los Angeles—the living and breathing House of Monroe as it were—was not vanquished and gone but was still substantial and thriving under the good Ana’s roof on Nebraska Street in Sawtelle? Along with one of Otis Monroe’s landscape oils which still hung over the couch in Ana’s living room upstairs!

No, there had been nothing about today to blemish Berniece’s hopes. Rather, she’d found it rich with family legacy. So rich, she would later record, that it overflowed into her night’s dreams.