Marilyn: A Biography (8 page)

We need no more than suppose Mrs. Dougherty
is a determined woman anxious for her children to better
themselves, and we see her soon placing the full weight of her
opinion in favor of the marriage. To this we need only disbelieve
that the future groom was simply what he later claimed to be — a
good-looking
practical
adolescent who was playing the field.
Perhaps he thought he was being forced to go along. We need only
remember it is
Marilyn
we are talking about. So we know he
has to be — more than he will ever admit — has to be secretly and
hopelessly entangled in the insane sexual musk which comes off a
fifteen-year-old who talks to him with eyes as soft and luminous as
a deer’s and then become eyes that have just gone dead in a pouted
painted mouth, a presence that comes down upon his own mouth like
velvet, then withdraws into a veil of mist and tears tender as a
warm and rainy fog.

He has never been near such luxury of mood,
such emoluments of future sex, and such longing in a girl for the
strength he can offer. His relations with other girls have been
more even. She, however, is hopeless and incommensurate. To kiss
her is to drift in a canoe. She does not neck — she floats. He has
passed unwittingly into the drug of female sex. What also attracts
the good athlete in him is that no girl in the neighborhood is so
desired; what frightens the good athlete in him is that there are
better athletes in the world.

And she in turn has to be off on the initial
exercise of star status. Jim Dougherty is her first leading man –
he goes with the Santa Barbara beauty queen and owns a car; in her
near field of high school sophomores, he is a luminary. So she is
discovering the first laws of the actor’s creation. Pumped high on
the premise that she is in love, the premise has become more real
than whatever reality is left once the premise is removed. Why not
assume she is playing her role with such invention she is ready to
enter an actor’s arena where reality can be measured only by the
intensity of emotion. That is all that is real. So she adventures
out for the first time into that psychic territory where fantasy
can reach into terrors never confessed before to anyone alive, and
she confesses to him, her first actor, that she lives in terror of
doing away with herself, yes, she knows she will kill herself some
day.

There is no record of such a conversation, no
particle of evidence to underwrite it, except that she is forever
ready to tell him in their marriage that if he were to die or go
away she would jump off the Santa Monica pier. It must have been
said with enough seriousness to have brought forth the remark from
Dougherty after her death that even if Norma Jean had remained with
him she might have broken down.

So at the least, we can guess she is more
attracted to the idea of marriage than she will later confess. How
to ignore that it will be her first thoroughgoing role? Already she
must sense that the best route to her identity may be found by
running simulations of experience through real situations.
Dougherty, in turn, could easily have been overcome by the size of
the mystery he was purchasing. While it is true he continues to
date his other girl friends for weeks after the engagement is
announced, there is no reason not to assume he is, like Norma Jean,
experiencing the sensation of inhabiting two lives at once. In any
case, they pass through their courtship, and are married in 1942,
three weeks after her sixteenth birthday. She wears a white wedding
gown, the gift of Ana Lower. Jim is in a rented tuxedo with a white
jacket, the precise rental garment on which the Italian waiter at
the Florentine Gardens will spill the bowl of tomato sauce. Norma
Jean, shades of Marilyn to come, bursts out of the role of a demure
bride when the floor show at the Florentine Gardens invites the
drinking customers to come on stage and join the conga line. We can
conceive of the future Monroe picking up a new role at her wedding
party. We close our eyes, and see the movement of her hips — they
are not floating. Her wedding peels off like a stripper kicking a
gown — she is playing hoofer with real professionals.

Back to the table. The husband, brand-new
husband, is livid. “You made a monkey of yourself,” he tells
her.

Being married to Jim, she would later remark,
was like being retired to a zoo.

* * *

It is not, however, often that bad.
(According to Dougherty, it is even a good marriage until the war
comes along and takes him to sea.) It must be remembered that if
the role she is playing is notoriously unhappy for an actress,
since all emotional colors are obliged to run into the quiet gray
of the housewife, Norma Jean is nonetheless ready for her first
full assignment in acting — she throws herself into the part of the
loving wife, and works at keeping an immaculate apartment in much
the way Joseph Conrad must once have immersed himself in the study
of English. It is as if she senses that it is the basic part out of
which all the more interesting female roles react against. Besides,
the condition of being a housewife may actually possess attraction
for her.
Speaking as a human being
(the precise phrase
actors employ when referring to that small part of themselves which
is without a role), nothing in Norma Jean’s previous life has ever
been so centrally established. Naturally, “the human being” is
looking for security, but then she will never have a relationship
where such a motive is not present.

Soon, like ambitious newlyweds, they will
move from a one-room studio apartment in Sherman Oaks to a
furnished bungalow in Van Nuys, and in both places she will darn
his socks, sew buttons, prove impeccably neat — which she most
certainly will not be later — although the essential tinsel of such
a performance stands out in her impulse to take into her living
room a neighbor’s cow who is shivering forlornly in the yard across
the street on a rainy day. It is a tale by Zolotow, and one wants
the story to be true. Only a particularly crazy young housewife
will wish to take in a cow when she is also very neat. Of course,
the habits and properties of animals are hardly clear to her. Once
on a trip with Dougherty, who loves to camp out, they are riding
along a trail at dusk. “How can this horse see in the dark?” she
questions her husband, and he tells her to turn on the headlights.
“Where are they?” she asks. No, the relations between man, animal
and the machine are not clear to her. She is one dizzy and newlywed
dish. Her mind, at its worst, is in ways analogous to a basket-case
who seethes with desires to move but has no limbs. Since she is
also the kind of cook who could only have come out of a convent, it
was allowed in an interview by Dougherty after her separation from
Joe DiMaggio that the reason for the split, in his opinion, was
Marilyn’s inability to give a man a good meal, and he recounted
evenings when all Norma Jean served were peas and carrots. She
liked the colors. She has that displacement of the senses which
others take drugs to find. So she is like a lover of rock who sees
vibrations when he hears sounds, and it is this displacement which
will keep her innocent and intolerable to people who hold to
schedule. It also provides her natural wit. Ten years later, when
reporters will ask her about the nude calendar pictures, she will
reply to the question, “Did you have anything on?” with the answer,
“Oh, yes, the radio,” a quip quickly telegraphed around the world,
but just as likely she was not trying to be funny. To lie nude
before a photographer in a state of silence was a different
condition, and much more naked, than to be nude with the protection
of sound. She did not have a skin like others.

Perhaps she was nearer to animals than most.
She would not know about headlights on a horse because she would
assume that after the barbarity of the saddle and the cinch, all
other accessories were possible. Not only her libido but her
intelligence lived on the surface of her skin. Like an animal, she
was ready to collect any new omen in a shift of wind.

If she were animal, however, it did not mean
that she was simple in her sex. The word from Hollywood over the
years (where prowess in sex becomes as ticketed in men and women as
batting averages) was that she was not to be celebrated as a
fireball, and indeed was sometimes described — in the omnibus
category of the disappointed male — as frigid. She was certainly,
by more civilized report, pleasant in bed, but receptive rather
than innovative, and somewhat ceremonious — like a geisha, as
though the act was a tender turn in a longer passage, and food and
conversation and easy laughter was also part of it, a tender
description of her by a lover who had not been in love. “Of course,
I cannot say how she was with other men,” he remarked, “but she was
always just a little remote with me. And very friendly. I liked
her.”

Descriptions by other men are similar. But we
must not assume we know too much about her. She was secretive in
the extreme, and if she had lovers in later life for which her body
felt unruly desire we are not likely to find out easily. She was
the measure of her surroundings. There is hardly a posed photograph
in which she does not appropriate something of the background by
the curve of her limbs — she is the mirror of the mood about her
and may have had a tendency to return each man his own sexual
goods, tenderness and detachment with a friend, but something else
on a one-night stand for which she felt some blood. We will not
ever know about the one-night stand.

So it is that when we make a supposition or
two about her sexual nature in the time she was married to
Dougherty it is not impossible to put together their wholly
divergent versions of the marriage. She will call him in later
years a “kind man” and a “brother.” She will also state in the cold
tone of a maiden aunt, “My marriage brought me neither happiness
nor pain. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t
because we were angry. We had nothing to say.” Yet in Dougherty’s
account, her
only
flaw is the cooking. Years later, he would
still be able to recite the text of typical notes she would put
into his lunch pail for him to discover during coffee-break in the
early morning hours of the night shift. “Dearest Daddy, when you
read this,” the note would say, “I’ll be asleep and dreaming of
you. Love and Kisses. Your baby.” She is working twenty-four hours
a day at the marriage.

Of course, these words are furnished by the
memory of the abandoned husband years later, and his pride is hurt.
She has been telling her side of it to the world for many a year
and has left him measured as nugatory. So he will look to give
every hint in his interviews that she enjoyed him. Unless he is a
psychopathic liar, we may as well take some percentage of his word;
the discrepancy can still be comprehended if we believe she was
invariably the mirror of the man with whom she lived. Since he was
young and athletic, and not without appetite, she was, in
Dougherty’s tell-it-all phrase, a “most responsive bride,” and they
could easily have made love in real coordination with his heart
going over the hill in happiness and hers gone back to the numb
center of that psychic ship she sailed without a rudder. Love they
would make and love he would feel; but it was love in the middle of
her role, and may have reached no further into her than an actor’s
simulation, a ride on a horse where finally she dismounts, the
horse is gone, the ride is over. It is not a lack of grace that
offers sexual problems when actors make love but the lack of an
identity to give up to the act.

Meanwhile, her days as a housewife are
descending into a long afternoon pall. Small surprise. She listens
to the radio all day, goes on visits to Ana Lower, and serves Jim
coffee once with salt, not a pinch but a spoonful, because she read
somewhere that it brought out the taste. Highballs are offered to
friends he invites in but appear on the table with five inches of
whisky over the ice, and no water. Fish she tries to serve raw,
from a picture of Japanese
sashimi
; of course they have a
fight. Zolotow has it end by the husband throwing her into the
shower, and because she is wearing a shrinkproof dress, they laugh.
On Sunday they go to the Sherman Oaks Christian Science church.
They do not smoke and not often do they drink. When they move to
Van Nuys, there is a bath and she forms the habit of taking
mind-meandering soaks in the tub — in later years she will keep
newspapermen and studios waiting hours while she continues to
soak.

Sometimes on an oppressively hot day she
would throw together an improvised picnic lunch — a couple of cold
franks, a tomato, half a lettuce, and take a bus all the way to
Santa Monica and “Muscle Beach.” Jim had shown her where it was one
Sunday. He believed in keeping fit and did some calisthenics every
day, but told her “these muscle boys have gone around the bend.”
When one of the young men tried to make conversation, she raised
her hand with her wedding band, then smiled, just to show there
were no hard feelings.

Of course this has to be Dougherty’s memory
of what she told him after coming back from such a day, and it is
perfectly possible she had a secret flirtation, or the idea of one.
But we may as well accept her story as true, for it is likely she
would have been transfixed by the narcissism of the weight lifters.
Such shamelessness at slaving openly for one’s own beauty had to
suggest possibilities for herself.

Worried most likely about her restlessness,
Dougherty bought a collie, Muggsie, the first dog she had dared to
own since Tippy. When his parents moved into a bigger home, the
young couple gave up their own bungalow and moved into the vacated
apartment which was large enough to keep her cleaning all day. She
was also taking funds of care of Muggsie. Two baths a week went to
the dog, and it is not hard to picture her grooming him by the
hour.