Marilyn: A Biography (7 page)

Finally she complained to Grace McKee, who
got her into a second foster home. Norma Jean disliked this place
even more and asked to be sent back to the orphanage. In what could
not have been an easy choice, Grace took Norma Jean to live with
her in Van Nuys. The difficulty was that she had just gotten
married to a man ten years younger than herself, who had three
children of his own, Erwin “Doc” Goddard, a research engineer, an
inventor with dreams. He drank. In later years he might not only
drink, but cast an eye at Norma Jean.

Still, the girl was established at last at
Grace’s house. She went to Emerson Junior High School, then to Van
Nuys High School, a C student except for English, and very weak in
arithmetic. (She would never have any sense of money, or time.)
Writing poetry appealed to her, and essays. She won a fountain pen
for “Dog, Man’s Best Friend” — homage to Tippy — and claims to have
been interested in Abraham Lincoln. At Van Nuys High was a
well-established Dramatic Society, and Norma Jean tried out for
Art and Mrs. Bottle
by Benn W. Levy, but was not chosen. Her
acting life was more intense at home. She was ready to do all the
parts of films she saw, playing Marie Antoinette (
Norma
Shearer) and Jezebel (Bette Davis) in her bedroom over and over.
Mrs. Esther Matthews, secretary to the principal, would tell
Zolotow eighteen years later, “We are proud to claim Jane Russell,
but we do not claim Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t learn anything about
acting while she was at Van Nuys High.” No, she was not forward. A
year or two earlier, when she first came to live with them, Grace
and Doc had called her “The Mouse,” for she would sit and listen,
too timid to make a sound. Her laughter was hardly more than a
squeak, not so different from the high-pitched whimper a mouse will
make when it bursts for liberty and a cat is on it. In later years,
she would continue to laugh in that squeak — it was the least
impressive sound she could make, and there are no scenes of her
laughing at length in her films.

During these years, however, her relation
with Grace Goddard’s aunt, Ana Lower, was begun, and it was
probably the happiest association of her life, and the longest — it
lasted from 1938 until Aunt Ana died in 1948. It was certainly her
first relation with someone who was not only concerned about her,
but adored her. Even in the factoid which follows is some sense of
feeling. Marilyn is speaking.

“
She changed my whole life. She was the
first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She
was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her and I
showed it to somebody once and they cried when I read it to them.
It was called, ‘I Love Her.’ It was written about how I felt when
she died. She was the only one who loved me and understood me. She
showed me the path to the higher things of life and she gave me
more confidence in myself. She never hurt me, not once. She
couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love. She was good to
me.”

The quality of Ana Lower can be seen in the
inscription she wrote in the book she gave to Norma Jean before she
died in her early seventies. “Norma dear, read this book. I do not
leave you much except my love, but not even death can diminish
that; nor will death ever take me far away from you.” The book is
Mary Baker Eddy’s
Science and Health with Key to the
Scriptures
. Ana made her living as a working practitioner of
Christian Science, and even produced a bit of religious dedication
in Norma Jean, who would spend every Sunday with Aunt Ana and go
with her to a Christian Science church. Later, in 1941, after Doc
Goddard came once when drunk into Norma Jean’s room and embraced
her, she moved over to live in Aunt Ana’s house, and thereby began
the most secure year of her life. Before it was over she would be
in her first sexual bloom, and this for a variety of reasons, of
which the least was not necessarily Ana Lower’s Christian Science.
If that was a religion which every sophisticated taste had always
found unendurable (since the language is of an unrelenting
fulsomeness: “imbibe the spirit,” and “cast our evil as unreal” for
“the full diapason of secret tones” will reveal “the power of Truth
demonstrated”), and if the brain of Mary Baker Eddy is livid, a
fever of sugars and strictures, still, back of the language is the
same American passion to slash a way through the great spaces and
overwhelming tangle of American life so that the working of one’s
own individual Mind can
prevail
. That same passion would yet
produce a thousand LSD guides through the Himalayas of psychosis.
So Marilyn would respond to Christian Science. Her mind, muddy,
drifting, fevered, possessed of unconnected desires and
extraordinary fillips of vision, could of course not help but
respond to the thought that “Divine Love always has met and always
will meet every human need.” That offered the possibility of a
future success that was not to be measured by aptitude but by need.
The more she needed, the more she would get, if only she could
trust the voice of her instinct which was the manifestation of
Mind. So she was close to an early Hippie, there in Van Nuys and
West Los Angeles in 1940 and 1941, almost saintly in her newfound
Christian Science, and yet the sex object of every neighborhood
through which she passed. For the metamorphosis had come. She lived
in a sudden coronation of sex, a sainthood of sex. If there was a
Goddess of Sex, Norma Jean might as well have been anointed by
her.

We have to reflect back on the boredom of the
orphanage. That torpor was not unlike a storage cell in which
resentment could build up potential, that nihilistic potential of
the highest human voltage. Deep inside her must have developed a
blank eye for power unattached to any notion of the moral. A
manifest of Yeats’ beast slinking to the marketplace, the
unconscious pressure toward finding power was so great that of
course she could not speak with ease and squeaked when she laughed
— other orphans, survivors, psychopaths, and delinquents have taken
up rifles on rooftops to shoot down on the streets. It is in fact
the “blank and pitiless gaze” of twentieth-century power that sits
in their eyes.

But she encountered Ana Lower, and somewhere
in the mills of her psyche, libido was commenced. Had a libido ever
been concocted before out of such tender love mixed into the high
voltage of such blank hate? A product issued forth from her pores.
She emanated sex, a simple sweet girl on still another back street,
emanated sex like few girls ever did. It was as if her adolescence
had come forth out of so many broken starts and fragmented pieces
of personality forcibly begun and more quickly interrupted that
libido seemed to ooze through her, and ooze out of her like a dew
through the cracks in a vase. Long before other adolescents could
even begin to comprehend what relation might exist between this
first rush of sex to their parts and the still unflexed structure
of their young character, she was already without character. So she
gave off a skin-glow of sex while others her age were still cramped
and passionate and private; she had learned by Mind to move sex
forward — sex was not unlike an advance of little infantrymen of
libido sent up to the surface of her skin. She was a general of sex
before she knew anything of sexual war.

And in this time she also began her
exploration of the arts of makeup, a skill at which she would
become sufficiently superb to be respected by the best makeup men
in Hollywood. When girls were jealous and gossiped about her, she
looked to wear her bathing suits smaller and was delighted at the
result. She was a center of attention. If libido was always flowing
out to her surfaces, then she would require that it also pour in,
and whenever she was the center of attention, energy would come
back to her from others. So her sex appeal is always a reflection
of her surroundings. She is a mirror of the pleasures of those who
stare at her. Like an animal, she is never in a photograph just as
herself — rather, is herself plus the sum of her surroundings. In
her high school yearbook, they do not place her under A for
Ability, or B for Beauty. She has the M’s all to herself.
MMMMMMMMMM — Norma Jean Baker. MMMMM. The initials of Marilyn
Monroe are on their way.

There is not a tight sweater she does not
employ nor a beauty aid she would ignore. She will wash her face as
often as fifteen times a day, and Grace or Ana give her permanents
to curl her straight hair. Horns will honk as she walks to school.
“Even the girls,” she says, “paid a little attention. Hmm!
She’s
to be dealt with.” And this will be told with a laugh
to Dick Meryman of
Life
not two months before her death.
“The world became friendly . . . it opened up to me.” Boys would
come visiting like a swarm over the honey. Suddenly there are
twelve or fifteen boys on a quiet street all milling around her
yard, hanging upside down from tree limbs to catch up her
attention. MMMMMM. Yet . . . “the truth was that with all my
lipstick and mascara and precocious curves I was as unresponsive as
a fossil . . . I used to lie awake at night wondering why the boys
came after me.” She is the general of sex, but like other generals
she does not feel the excitement and fear of the infantryman.

Only her periods are a clue to this early
distortion of herself. They were unendurable then, and excruciating
later. Zolotow gives a description of fourteen Schwab pharmacy
prescription boxes on a shelf in her dressing room in 1954 — they
have all been ordered to relieve the pain of menstruation; she will
yet make the poorest Christian Scientist in the history of the
religion, for there was no pain she cared to bear if a drug could
be found.

It is only if we conceive of the importance
Ana Lower would be obliged to place upon menstrual pains that we
can comprehend her acquiescence to a plan conceived by Grace
Goddard to marry off Norma Jean, and marry her early. As a
Christian Scientist, Ana might not only believe in the fundamental
non-existence of pain but also have to recognize its significance
when present — Norma Jean was in the grip of some most unchristian
desires. Ana must have had a sense of an imbalance that could crack
Norma Jean overnight, even as Gladys had cracked. Perhaps Ana Lower
felt she could never offer what Norma Jean might need in a crisis.
This seems the only explanation why Ana Lower does not offer to
become her guardian once Doc has been offered a better job in West
Virginia, which means — since Grace will move out of California —
that Norma Jean will have to go back to the orphanage. Ana looks to
marriage as the best solution to the problem. Or, at least, she
does not resist Grace in her plan.

A most curious courtship is arranged. Some
former neighbors of the Goddards named Dougherty have a son named
Jim, pleasant, well-built, interested in sports, and already making
good wages at Lockheed. He owns his own car, a blue Ford coupe. He
is four years older than Norma Jean and is perfectly set up with
girls to date — he is even going with the Queen of the Santa
Barbara Festival. Yet Grace asks him,
as a favor to her
, to
take Norma Jean to the dance that Doc’s company is giving for its
employees. Already, at her request, he has been driving Norma Jean
from Dougherty’s house to the Goddards often enough to inspire his
girl friend, the Santa Barbara queen, to ask him why he is “hauling
a little sexpot like that around in his car.” Now, maneuvered into
a date with a fifteen-year-old, he feels “until the evening got
started, I thought I was robbing the cradle.”

The evening, however, turned out otherwise.
Zolotow provides Dougherty’s sensations:

Staring up at him with liquescent blue-gray
eyes, her lips tremulously parted, this girl made him feel, he has
said, “like a big shot.” When they danced he discovered a soft
helplessness in her body. . . . By March they were going steady . .
. by May they were engaged.

The process had been accelerated by Grace
Goddard. With Ana Lower she paid a call on Mrs. Dougherty to
suggest that her son and Norma Jean would do well to be married,
for in the words of Christian Science, they could “happify
existence.” Now something contradictory begins to appear in all
accounts. Marilyn will say in later years that she had no interest
in her first husband and only got married at Grace’s prodding in
order to escape the orphanage. Doc Goddard will defend his wife by
saying Norma Jean was in love and “sought Grace’s aid in getting
Jim to propose.” Dougherty will claim it was a “loveless courtship”
and an arranged marriage of convenience. If true, it can hardly be
to
his
convenience — why would he want to accept?

Since all the motives for the marriage are so
far on Marilyn’s or Grace’s side, we must look to the Dougherty
family for a clue. At Malibu, in 1961, Marilyn will run into a
brother, Tom Dougherty, with whom she had been friendly during her
marriage. Invited by him to come over for a visit, she bites him
off with the remark, “How much is it going to cost?” The echo of
having lived with an Irish family, hard, practical, and grudged to
the bite on money is in the remark. So we may as well have the
imaginary pleasure of putting ourselves into the early discussion
between Mrs. Dougherty on one side and Grace and Ana on the other.
Since the Doughertys are working class and Grace is a film
librarian and presumably, by the measure of the early Forties, a
stylish and educated woman, married to an engineer, the fundamental
offer, which we may be certain was never suggested, is that Jim is
going to marry up! If he is getting a fifteen-year-old who wears
too much makeup, Ana Lower is there to suggest by way of her own
good manners that this is a passing phase and Norma Jean will yet
become more of a lady than any girl in the neighborhood.