Casting Norma Jeane (7 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Black Lace

Someone much closer to Norma Jeane than was suspected by even her family—a winsome and fast-rising personality in the world of glamor photography called André de Dienes—was at this moment right in the middle of posing ten ravishingly beautiful fashion models in New York’s finest hotels and most spectacular seaside mansions for Montgomery-Ward’s winter catalogue, when something inside him snapped.

Suddenly de Dienes realized he was fed up with waiting forever for bad telephone connections to Los Angeles. All he wanted to do was get in his car, drive straight to the West Coast, and marry Norma Jeane. Summarily, therefore, the photographer quit his posh assignment to the astonishment of friends and associates who concluded that the impetuous thirty-two-year-old had been driven by overwork into a nervous breakdown.

“But André,” came a tortured admission from Norma Jeane over the crackling long-distance line after a struggle within herself when pressed by de Dienes to meet him in Las Vegas, “I don’t want to get mm-mm-married. I want to get into the mm-mm-movies.”

Six days later nonetheless, the strapping blond Transylvanian was waiting at the corner of Sunset and Vine at exactly the hour of the afternoon when Norma Jeane had promised over the phone to meet him. But Norma Jeane did not appear. He waited there for two more hours and then drove to her apartment in Santa Monica with a certain possibility of mischief lurking in his heart.

It was a little one-room pied-à-terre she’d taken on the side—strictly a secret from the family on Nebraska Street till her Nevada divorce became final and the two of them should be free to marry. Or so at least she’d allowed the love-struck photographer to view her peculiar living arrangement. He was just parking there when, sure enough, out of her building came a nicely dressed gentleman, perhaps in his late forties, whose discreet manner immediately suggested to de Dienes that he’d been there to visit Norma Jeane. The man strode coolly over to an expensive car, got in, and drove away.

De Dienes went up to her door.

Opening unsuspectingly to his knock, Norma Jeane turned pale. She clutched a negligée more tightly around herself, precipitating glimpses of black lace sliding over the curves of her otherwise naked body which set loose in de Dienes’ rattled mind the singular phantasm of a sleek young panther freshly sprung out of its cage and peering dangerously about after prey—a conceit totally at odds, however, with the stunned look on her face as sputteringly and stutteringly she tried to explain why she hadn’t been there to meet him on the corner of Sunset and Vine. Either she’d forgotten or she hadn’t believed he was really coming. He himself was too stunned to decipher which.

De Dienes could scarcely speak. Slamming through his head came a host of denials,
Absolutely not a hooker!
being the first of them to solidify into a distinct thought—as in his memory he flashed on how she’d appeared at his hotel door at the Garden of Allah less than a year before, a brand-new girl sent to him by Emmeline Snively. She’d worn an immaculate pink sweater, her curly brown hair tied with a ribbon to match, and checkered gray slacks.
Unsure of herself,
de Dienes had observed at once,
Awkward and young…
They’d spoken for only another minute or two before he’d further noted,
Childlike smile…Strikingly clear gaze…Particularly clean!..
For he was only too personally aware that unbeknownst to Miss Snively, a few of her Blue Book girls were hustling.
Absolutely not a whore!
he’d concluded of Norma Jeane without a shadow of a doubt. He’d been enchanted.

Now at her own apartment door, the fact of her having gone golden blonde in the meantime lent in de Dienes’ eyes, if anything, a certain enhancement to that freshness and innocence foremost in his memory. His shock lay purely in what the black lace telegraphed, as reinforced by a single instant of frightened recognition fleeting across her face. She was exposed.

“I made my way into a cluttered room,” de Dienes would write many years afterward of the scene before him. “Very untidy. Records, photos, and stockings lay on the floor, a crumpled dress on a chair. There were dirty glasses and an empty bottle on the table. And a bed, rumpled.”

De Dienes looked for a place to sit, with Norma Jeane hovering behind him and uttering shards of confession through sniffles and tears, seemingly to the effect that the gentleman visitor she’d just entertained was someone of influence at the studio. Was she ashamed? Or was she afraid? Possibly both, the photographer surmised. Meanwhile, however—the whole project of talking her into marrying him now appearing in a garish new light—his mind was in full process of whirling like a calculating machine, adding up increments for each week and month he’d invested in creating their rapport as photographer and model…subtracting ruthlessly for his six days’ drive across the country, not to mention for an anger and jealousy fully aroused in him but no longer having any useful place…multiplying by the inestimable factor of his recurring and often powerful hunch that a splendid future lay ahead for Norma Jeane…then dividing by the grave advice of peers who said that de Dienes, being infatuated, was vastly overestimating the starlet’s salability and strengths.

All this arithmetic and much more he achieved in seconds, arriving at a total reliable enough to slap a wry smile on his face by the time he and Norma Jeane were seated face-to-face.

He didn’t really care who the man was, he told her. After all, what kind of celebrity photographer would he be if he didn’t understand the role of the casting couch in her chosen line of work? She wanted to be free? OK, she was free. In fact, he said, he didn’t blame her one bit for not wanting to marry a crazy—if supremely talented—Middle European such as himself. And he’d harbor no hard feelings either—
so long as he was still her favorite photographer!

This was all Norma Jean had wanted to hear. Soon she was laughing with him as though nothing had happened. And why, the photographer cynically asked himself, shouldn’t she laugh? She’d just managed to retain her access to André de Dienes, whose mere signature was a recommendation to the editors of
Vogue
. It was he who’d recently put her on the cover of
Family Circle
and who in fact had top contacts with all the right magazines, both American and foreign.

“What do you think of this name—?” Norma Jeane soon asked him.

She picked up a pencil and tried out her signature on a notepad which he’d already spotted on her coffee table. Its open page had been covered with the same two words over and over again, each of them starting the large, swirling capital letter M.

“
—Marilyn Monroe
,” she announced, holding up the notepad for him to see.

De Dienes’ eyes for a second time rested thoughtfully on its handwritten flourishes.

“Well, don’t you like it?” asked Norma Jeane.

“It isn’t that,” he responded slowly. In fact, the name sounded perfect. But momentarily he was allowing his shaken senses to take refuge in a memory undreamed of by anyone like Norma Jeane living in a world so far removed from his own childhood homeland.

For what he was hearing wasn’t a movie star’s name at all, but the clear sound of a bell arising from the thickness of the Turia forest and resonating outward with the message of the angel to the Virgin Mary, upon the hearing of which many of the devout among the neighboring farmers and villagers were still known to stop everything they were doing and to repeat their Angelus prayers. That serene picture made a poor match, to be sure, with the one actually before him of Norma Jeane sitting across the coffee table, naked underneath her black lace negligée. Yet spontaneously the memory of it had rushed over him as soon as he’d noticed her notepad lying there covered with the swirling M’s. The sight of it had put him in mind of the white-whiskered, long-haired old bell-ringer who lived in his tower in the forest, surrounded by many curious old books among which there’d been one featuring an ornate illumination of the letters MM—for the Latin “Memento Mori,” meaning “Remember that you must die.”

That somber thought, joined to the intoning in his memory of Turia’s ancient bell, brought to André de Dienes’ mind a picture of Norma Jeane and her Aunt Ana bowing their heads in prayer at lunchtime. That fine old lady had invited André to share a meal with them before she would consent to her niece’s going away with him on a month’s journey to pose against a backdrop of the California wilds for his camera. It was to be her first truly professional assignment.

Subsequently on the road with André, Norma Jeane had gone right on bowing her head in prayer every time they’d stopped for a meal. All about her, no matter in what circumstances, there continued to cling a certain demure and proper air that never once verged on prudery. De Dienes had delighted in this. It underlay, he’d discovered, all her expressions of face and all her postures of body. Especially, in their work, it had added an unexpected zest to the inborn knack she had of sporting before the camera a fanny which had proven to be of uncannily compact excellence when encased in the blue jeans he’d newly purchased for her, her very first pair.

Of course the photographer had explored every part of her body in his imagination before he’d ever touched her. On one particularly hot and dusty day when he’d gotten all sweaty and frustrated trying to fix a flat tire at the roadside, he’d happened to look up and see Norma Jeane sitting at a distance on a large stone—her makeup perfect, her clothes spotless, the very picture of pristine calmness and composure. He’d dropped his tire iron right then and there, and the next minute he’d been at her side thanking her for simply coming along with him and begging her to marry him! In the surprise of the moment she’d only turned her face away and said nothing.

Weeks later, however, after he’d grown so vilely exasperated and petulant with her standoffishness that she’d finally submitted to his advances, he’d reveled in an experience of love exceeding all his expectations. Until morning, that is, when he’d found the twenty-year-old sobbing quietly into her pillow. It hadn’t been, he’d found, what
she’d
wanted to do at all. Only something she’d allowed
him
to do. Stabbed by the feeling that he’d practically kidnapped Norma Jeane, André de Dienes immediately knew just how he would make everything right. It was a fact that he adored her. He would make her his own the minute she was free to marry!

Now as the two spoke in her little one-room pied-à-terre, the black lace negligée made it clear she’d been stringing him along about marriage all this time only because of what he could do for her career. He’d known that kind of girl—and used them—plenty of times before in Rome, Paris, New York. But finding that Norma Jeane had become one of them was a thing hardly possible for him to accept.

For some reason, when he left her at her door, their embrace felt like one between a brother and sister. About that and about everything else Norma Jeane appeared relieved, pleased with the outcome of a sticky situation.

It was only for André de Dienes to feel otherwise. Yes, he prided himself on how swiftly he’d always adapted to crises, and his sangfroid in the handling of this one had been professionally for the best. But now he was going to have to awaken like one of the white owls in the dark shadows of the Turia forest at the ringing of the Angelus bell. Now he was going to have to come to terms in his heart with his discovery that he’d been living in a dream about Norma Jeane. How was it possible to say that nothing here had been lost to him?
His dream, after all, was his dream!
Therefore, he was anything but through with this nervous breakdown his friends said he was having. He was definitely going to get drunk tonight. And very seriously he felt he might just go drive his car off a cliff and kill himself.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Scroll of Life

Within a breathless period of barely more than a month, Norma Jeane had achieved three of her paramount goals. She’d won herself a movie contract. She’d gained the companionship of a sister. And now by mid-September, after motoring across the Mojave desert to Las Vegas with just enough time having elapsed for Jim Dougherty’s formal consent no longer to be required on the legal papers, she’d obtained her Nevada divorce.

“I’m a free woman!” she exulted to Berniece upon returning to Los Angeles, “Oh, I feel like celebrating!”

Accordingly, telephone lines began buzzing in and out of the Nebraska Street house, and soon the oddly-assorted collection of souls who remained her closest family in the world joined the freshly divorced twenty-year-old at the most elegant restaurant their severely war-tested means could afford. There, not even the presence of Gladys Baker was expected to restrain the tide of jubilation sweeping round their luxuriously appointed table. For although it was old news that Gladys had tasked herself with serving as a wet blanket over her daughter’s fondest hopes and dreams, thankfully the mother seldom made any great show of this in public, preferring smaller and more intimate occasions instead. She waited, perhaps, for the girl to come home in a transport of joy over some little stroke of professional success, the more deeply to sting her with a half-dozen curt words of scorn over what Gladys called her “business.” Or she might chance to overhear as the girl received a phone call quoting some well-placed person in praise of her work—and afterward fix on her only a grim funereal stare. One had to presume Gladys acted from some motive loftier than that of gratuitously wounding Norma Jeane, yet it was clear that these moments fell like hammer blows on a wedge of iron irretrievably cleaving the daughter from the mother. Not even the wonder-working Aunt Ana seemed able to heal the widening breach between the two, except in keeping dear Norma Jeane’s heart perfectly unembittered and her plans and ambitions not one whit less keen and alive.

So matters had stood when, shockingly, another voice was heard to speak in the same tones as Gladys’ just inside the restaurant door. It belonged to no less trusted a figure than one of her uncles, Sam Knebelkamp, who immediately upon meeting up with his wife Enid in the vestibule muttered to her that any pretty young thing going into the movies was like a child playing with fire. And this from the gentle, balding Sam who’d never said a word against her career before!

Enid simply laughed. What on earth possessed Sam, she’d wondered, to say anything so ill-suited to this night’s celebration?! To be sure, there was in his normally benign face an evil portent which suggested that her fine humor might be spoiled if she found out. But Enid, reckless in her access of joy, obeyed an impulse to exorcize the moment of any such prompting by parroting her husband’s words with a jocund show to Doc Goddard. The inevitable result was that by the time the family were seated, some version of the Sam’s jarring utterance had reached the incredulous ears of nearly everyone there—quite possibly including Norma Jeane.

Later, as the waiter cleared away the soup course, a lull in the chattering of the family’s voices allowed Sam Knebelkamp to reach out and gloss over as best he could the incident at the door.

“Everything really seems to be working out the way you’ve hoped,” he spoke up in a kindly voice to his sometime foster daughter. No one, after all, doubted that he thought the world of her, having in his day probably put in fully as many hours looking after her as Gladys Baker ever had done. “We’re really happy for you, honey.”

There was a soft general sigh of relief. Automatically the eyes of everyone around the massive table turned warmly upon Norma Jeane in the lively hope that with all her new training from the studio, she might deliver some witty and icebreaking response to Sam’s gracious words. But no—her face wore only a certain slightly stunned expression well familiar to most of them ever since she’d been seven or eight years old. This would quickly pass, they knew, being caused only by that peculiar species of panic she’d always felt when more than a certain number of people looked at her all at one time. It was the family’s custom to nudge Norma Jeane pleasantly but firmly right past these fleeting little episodes, and the girl’s solicitous Aunt Enid now thought to do so by voicing the very question her husband’s earlier remark had put uppermost in everyone’s minds.

“No flies in the ointment, Marilyn?” she ventured, pointedly speaking out the musical first name that her niece was newly insisting the family use from now on.

At first the girl only shook her head in reply. She then found her voice and stammered out, “N-N-None!”

“What about the problem the other day with your agent?” essayed Doc Goddard, who like Sam had put in his own share of time as a foster father to Norma Jeane by virtue of his being married to the twenty-year-old’s legal guardian, Aunt Grace.

Sam Knebelkamp again leaned assiduously forward. “What was that? Or am I prying?”

In reality, Sam didn’t care one bit about her agent. Right now he only wanted to watch how his onetime charge was comporting herself, this in light of doubts which had been plaguing his mind all day but which he certainly hadn’t intended to share with anyone here tonight except his wife. For as a man employed in a supervisory capacity by a telephone company with its tentacles reaching into every office in town including those of the movie studios, he heard things. And earlier today he’d happened upon some unsettling information—rumors from one of the studios about a thoroughly bad set known as the Five O’Clock Girls as well as about the men in power who used them. Not that Sam Knebelkamp or anyone else taking one look into Norma Jeane’s innocent eyes could believe she’d ever turn into that kind of woman. What in fact bothered Sam was that she was entirely
too
innocent. She had no understanding of the way men looked at her body, of how profoundly even its subtlest movements underneath her clothing had the power to disturb their thoughts. It was obvious, given the atmosphere in which she was working, that demands were going to be made on her. All this studio business, Sam had reluctantly become convinced, wasn’t going to end well for Norma Jeane.

“Oh, it was nothing,” replied Norma Jeane to his question about her agent. “I mean, it wasn’t anything I shouldn’t expect. He was on the phone with me, wanting an increase in his percentage, that’s all.”

Calmly and gravely, Sam Knebelkamp continued to listen and probe. He observed that Norma Jeane had begun pitching her voice up a notch as she went on explaining, but to Sam she sounded too full of high spirits for anything terrible or even anything very troubling to have been happening to her recently. More likely she’d simply gotten wind of what Sam had grumbled to Aunt Enid at the restaurant door.

“It was
nothing
!” emphasized Norma Jeane again of her altercation with the agent.

The bird-like voice of Aunt Grace piped up in assuagement of the concerns she clearly read on Sam Knebelkamp’s face. “They got it worked out. It simply means our girl is getting more important.”

This opinion caused the eyes of all the others to turn instinctively to Aunt Ana Lower as the family’s ultimate seer into what any event might portend. Indeed, Sam himself gave much credence to Ana’s opinion on all weighty issues, if only because of the great goodness in her which had never been known to fail. But—Sam now had to consider—in the mind of the sainted Aunt Ana, creatures like the Five O’Clock Girls did not even have existence, at least not as such, since nothing evil had for her any trace or token of reality by reason of her profound moorings in Christian Science. In that respect she could be of no more help to Norma Jeane than could any of this Atchinson family into which Sam had married. Such had been the maiden name of the girl’s Aunts Enid and Grace, who were sisters, as well as of Aunt Ana who was in turn
their
aunt. There was about all three of these redoubtable women a rich streak of the dreamer that needed close monitoring—a proclivity for fantasizing away dangers that had been anything but lost on Norma Jeane. For while it was technically true that the Atchinson women constituted only a surrogate family whose bond with the girl rested solely on the inscrutable ties of friendship between her mother and Aunt Grace, despite the absence of any blood ties, Norma Jeane took after these aunts with a vengeance. In her mind she jumped over any and all inconvenient facts with the effortlessness of a cat jumping over a fence, and nothing, reckoned Sam Knebelkamp, attested to this fact better than the present occasion. What, really, were these three supposed triumphs the family were celebrating here with Norma Jeane? Firstly, yes, she’d won a movie contract—but one which now appeared to be fraught with moral dangers. Secondly, yes, she’d gained the companionship of a sister—but one whose husband was showing no desire to move to LA, so that Berniece and Mona Rae would soon have to go back home to Tennessee. And thirdly, yes, Norma Jeane had obtained her Nevada divorce—but in so doing she was throwing away not only a kinder and fitter husband than she was ever likely meet again but also the man she still claimed to love!

Aunt Ana, to whom everyone had looked, said nothing. But her eyes—glistening with kindness above an immense but wilting lace ruffle at the collar of her freshly ironed though well-worn dress—turned to Sam with a look that pierced his conscience slightly by the utterly selfless example it offered. She had no need of saying any words in front of Norma Jeane, having said them so many times to the others, about why this precious fatherless child had been thrust into their hands in the hour of Gladys Baker’s defeat. The wise Aunt Ana, in her silence and without at all intending it, could cause Sam to scan his own ebbing past and wonder where amidst the crush of its countless hard decisions he might have failed in playing some vital part for Norma Jeane. Too, by her mere untroubled gaze, Ana could reinforce on the minds of everyone present this thing which she’d always foretold:
that in the end, all was going to be well with Norma Jeane.
More than just well—she was going to become famous. She was going to become beautiful. She was going to become a star. And not for nothing was this so, for beautiful creatures attracted attention, and attention gave one the power to work in the world for the good. Her beauty would open a pathway to the Divine. Make no mistake about it, the great Aunt Ana had averred, Norma Jeane’s light was meant to shine to the ends of the earth—and in so doing it would touch, for the good and in no small way, the hearts of even the world’s downtrodden and dispossessed.

Norma Jeane heard none of all this but only saw written in the faces of all three of her Atchinson aunts a starry-eyed force which nothing coming from Sam Knebelkamp could ever question or gainsay. She was going to be a star. This was no mere dream or fantasy on the women’s part. It was a
fact
to which they happened to be privy—a destiny inscribed with absolute certainty on the Scroll of Life.

“Oh, I feel so good!” cooed Norma Jeane as the waiter brought in the first of the entrees to the quietly listening Berniece and Mona Rae. “Things like a little hassle with an agent are just part of the business—”

Pausing with delight upon that thought, Norma Jeane then saucily added, “—
my
business.”

This last emphasis was meant for the skeptical ears of her mother Gladys—whose business indeed it had once also been—who with Aunt Grace had once not only held her own at the skilled and exacting craft of negative film cutting, but on the side had also pored over fan magazines for hours on end, and with Aunt Grace had stood entranced in the thickest of the crowds at Hollywood premieres. But all that had happened in a time before the disastrous metaphysical hurricane had passed directly over her head and left her the changed woman she was today whose job was to pin tags on clothes in a department store downtown for a pittance of her former pay.

Perfectly oblivious to her daughter’s gibe, Gladys Baker only continued to wait impassively for her dinner plate.