Marilyn: A Biography (9 page)

Uneasy at being out of uniform, however, Jim
Dougherty joined the Maritime Service and they moved to a training
base on Catalina Island where he became a physical instructor. It
is like early adolescence all over again. She is one of the few
women on the base. When she goes out for a walk, it is a theatrical
happening. Men are on their knees along these service streets
pretending to talk to Muggsie. The tight sweaters come back on her
and the tight skirts, the shorts and the small bathing suits. She
takes lessons once a week in weight lifting with little dumbbells.
Her plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here! and
now! and when she bends over, our view is into the Vale! She is
still that classic American girl who will attract all men and yet
have all her close relations with older women: Della, Ida, Gladys,
Grace, the Directress of the Home, Ana Lower — it is the beginning
of a long line. Dougherty does not begin to know where his real
trouble exists. He is tempted to scold her — this dress too short,
that lipstick too bright — but keeps silent. Of course, their sex,
as he will hint later, is at its peak on Catalina — it could not
fail to be when she comes back from every walk with the sexual
waves of a hundred men still washing in on her, but Jim is feeling
the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of
getting him into murderous fights if she persists in scattering
moonlight every time she walks the midday streets. At the open-air
training-base dances on Saturday night she is a sensation in a
white dress as she does the Lindy, her hips bobbing under each
man’s nose, and a hint of a hard look she does not often show (that
hard look which doubles the ante of sex) is in her eyes and her
mouth. She may not know it, but her unconscious is ready to take on
the biggest bidder — a survivor triumphant is standing in that
face.

“Come on,” he says, “let’s go home.”

“Why?”

“I’m tired.”

Now when she sleeps she may not be dreaming
of him so much as of the day he leaves.

* * *

His sinecure as an instructor is lost. In
1944, he goes to sea on a ship that will take him to Australia.
Norma Jean and he have been together for two years. She moves in
with the Doughertys, who are out all day working, and takes care of
the house. Before long she is working at a defense plant with her
mother-in-law, packing parachutes and spraying dope on target
planes. Like Gladys at the film studio, she is a hard worker. As if
she senses that she is entering a period of great change for her,
she is thriving with energy, gets an “E” for excellence from her
employers, but is disliked by her fellow workers in return. She
will be disliked even more when a photographer from the Army, David
Conover, comes by one day looking for an attractive defense worker.
Conover’s assignment for
Yank
magazine is to show some young
woman doing war work, and as Marilyn will comment later, “putting a
girl in overalls is like having her work in tights — if a girl
knows how to wear overalls.”

Norma Jean has found the first focus of her
life, and it is in a camera lens. She has much to learn about
posing for a camera, but she does not have to learn how to pose.
She has learned already what a hundred little moves of her figure
will do for workers, servicemen, sailors, truck drivers, Marines.
She knows how to offer the restrained gift of a smile. She is Lady
Girl of the working class, and our own Rubens of the 4 x 5 Speed
Graphic. Click! For if the photographer is usually seen as the
artist, and his model as a species of still life, she becomes the
artist when she takes a pose: she paints the picture into the
camera, and few photographers will fail to pay her homage. At the
moment, however, it must have been enough for Conover that he had
found a promising model on that unpromising job, and he went beyond
the limits he needed, posing her in sweaters, breaking out color
film, taking her telephone number. Her career had begun:
Click,
Pic, See, Salute, Laff
, and
Sir
were getting ready to
greet her. A friend of Conover’s named Potter Hueth saw the
Yank
contacts and was sufficiently enthusiastic to pose her
several nights a week after work, then was so pleased with the
results that in gratitude — she was working on spec — he made an
appointment for her with Emmeline Snively of the Blue Book Model
Agency. Miss Snively (who was introduced, we may hope, once at
least to William Faulkner) had a course she required of all her
models, and it cost a hundred dollars. Norma Jean passed inspection
— on reflection we are not surprised — and was told she could pay
the fee out of her earnings. That did not take long. She was hired
at once for ten dollars a day for ten days by a salesman for Holga
Steel who needed a hostess for the company at an industrial show at
Pan-Pacific Auditorium. We can picture her as she sits at this
exhibition. Her hair is a dark blonde, almost brown, and long and
too heavy in its ringlets which are thick in a permanent’s curls,
her little nose is not yet little — in fact it is near to bulbous —
and her upper lip is too short. She smiles, and there is a tendency
for her nose to look too long (Emmeline will yet teach her to cash
that smile with her upper lip pulled down — and the future Marilyn
will quiver then subtly as a result), but these flaws are not
nearly so significant as her aura. She now realizes that men — not
boys nor service personnel, but men — are flocking around her
booth, executive businessmen full of financial
deeds
actually seem to like her. Deeds rather than dudes now like her!
The clear sense of ambition is taking on its edge. In the ten days
she works for Holga Steel, she also takes lessons at night in the
Blue Book Model Agency School (fashion modeling, posing, makeup,
and grooming) and calls in sick at Radio Plant where she has been
working with Mrs. Dougherty. She has already come a distance from
the girl who barely passed her classes and left high school in
junior year. But soon she will even quit defense work: she can
sometimes make as much in an hour of modeling as in a day of
spraying dope. Since she is out all the time, Muggsie, her dog,
begins to pine. When tension with her in-laws increases over her
new work at night, she moves back to Ana Lower’s house,
and does
not bring the dog with her
. Muggsie will die before too long.
It is “of a broken heart,” Jim Dougherty will later say.

The war is over. Grace Goddard comes back
with Doc from West Virginia and brings the news — since she is the
only one to have been in touch — that Gladys, Norma Jean’s lost
mother, is feeling well enough to come out of the sanitarium. At
the same time, Dougherty comes back on leave, his skin a dark
yellow from Atabrine taken in the tropics, and goes immediately to
visit Norma Jean at Aunt Ana’s. Guiles gives Dougherty’s version of
the scene.

Norma Jean sat on his lap and they kissed
unashamedly with Ana rocking in a nearby chair. . . . It was later,
Jim remembers, that he saw the small pile of unpaid bills for
dresses, shoes, sweaters and blouses from Bullocks. . . . “What
happened to my allotment?” he wanted to know.

“
It always goes,” she said airily. “All
that is an investment in myself. I’ve got to have these things when
I go out on a job. If you’re dressed well, they pay higher fees. If
you’re in a hand-me-down, they’ll try to take advantage of
you.”

“
Sure, Norma,” he told her . . . “Sure,
that makes sense.” There was something over three hundred dollars
in his wallet . . . winnings from gambling, savings from beer and
women he’d declined to have. It was intended for one long blast
with his wife, even a new outfit for her. He had imagined handing
her a fifty-dollar bill.

When she took the money she wept a little. .
. . “I know it’s a lot . . . I’ll make it up to you some way.”

Grace comes back from San Francisco with
Gladys, who is dressed all in white, even white shoes, but the
meeting is uncomfortable and distant between mother and daughter —
Dougherty remembers Gladys as beautiful and close in appearance to
Norma Jean except that she was not young at all. Soon Norma Jean is
off with Jim on furlough, yet still modeling some of the time, and
therefore not able “to make it up to you some way,” for he looks on
her modeling as a “cruel dedication.” It is not too great a demand
on our voyeurism to see a young husband in bed, while his wife,
Mind all out in the electric field of her career, feels like a
piece of insulation to his touch. He goes back to sea “certain he
was losing Norma Jean and disgusted that he seemed to have tried to
buy her back with his savings.” In turn, Norma Jean takes the
opportunity to rent an empty two-room apartment below Ana Lower’s,
moves Gladys in with her. The mother and daughter will live
together for seven months into the summer of 1946 before Gladys
decides (with what whole depression we can hardly conceive) that
she wants to go back to her sanitarium home. According to
Dougherty, Gladys was hardly cured. “She wasn’t right, even then,
way over the hill on religion. Always quoting the Scriptures.” But
then Scriptures are always totem and taboo to any Christian filled
with dread. Of course, it is in the period she has been living with
her daughter that Norma Jean would go away for a month with the
photographer André de Dienes, and would also write to Jim and ask
for a divorce. There has also been the first discussion of a movie
career with Emmeline, who promises to find her an agent. So it has
been a sea with more than a few new currents for Gladys, and
patients just out of mental hospitals look upon new currents like
sailors who do not swim. Gladys will alternate between enthusiasm
and fright, pride in her daughter’s career and foreboding. Lonely
nights. Norma Jean is out most evenings. Photographers take her to
dinner, and illustrators. She is even meeting actors. Her career as
a model has not been unsuccessful. Emeline Snively gives the
recommendation:

She was the hardest worker I ever handled.
She never missed a class. She had confidence in herself. Quit her
job at the factory without anything except confidence and my belief
in her. She did something I’ve never seen any other model do. She
would study every print a photographer did of her. I mean she’d
take them home and study them for hours. Then she’d go back and ask
the photographer, “What did I do wrong in this one?” or “Why didn’t
this come out better?” They would tell her. And she never repeated
a mistake…Models ask me how they can be like Marilyn Monroe and I
say to them, honey, I say to them, if you can show half the
gumption, just half, that little girl showed, you’ll be a success
too. But there’ll never be another like her.”

On a winter afternoon, Gladys goes over to
visit Emmeline in her white dress and white shoes. Two small ladies
sit in the palms of the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel and talk
about Norma Jean’s career. “You’ve given her a whole new life,”
Gladys assures her. We are frustratingly short, however, of other
episodes or evidence on Marilyn’s life with her mother – nothing
further in Guiles nor anything in Zolotow, no interesting
references by Marilyn to her mother. We cannot even begin to know
whether Gladys feels terror of the future, lack of affection from
Norma Jean (does the mother hear the whining of Muggsie’s ghost?),
or some stirring of hopeless old ambitions for a career herself.
She is still only forty-five. We only know she goes back to the
sanitarium that summer. It is Dougherty’s impression that Norma
Jean had to let her go back because the mother had a few hopeless
habits. Gladys would go on wild shopping sprees the daughter could
not afford, and was always ready to go off for a short walk and
neglect to come back for days. But Dougherty was probably all but
finally separated from Norma Jean by the time Gladys was
re-committed, so he may not know the exact reason. In any case,
Norma Jean says goodbye to her mother some time after she has gone
off with André de Dienes in the spring. But since Dienes offers one
of the few clear pictures of Norma Jean in this period, and his
relationship to her has not been described by other writers, it may
be fitting to open a new chapter for him.

* * *

He is a young Hungarian, who came to America
in the move of émigrés who were fleeing Hitler, and he has made his
living in New York as a fashion photographer. Like other young
Europeans before him, he is vastly romantic in a strange land and
wants to go West because he has read about cowboys and old mining
towns ever since he was a child in Hungary. He also wishes to
photograph beautiful young girls in the nude, and ideally
photograph them in natural western scenes. Then he wants to make
love to them. It is all part of his idea about America and the
boundless promise of the West. His ambition is common enough today,
but in the Forties, right after the war, not that many young men
staked out so simple and precise a set of goals, and photography,
still a relatively new profession, had a set of proprieties. If the
secret itch of the artist was once to paint his mistress naked, the
core of writing may be to describe the sexual act and the core of
acting to display fornication on a stage. As a corollary, the
buried secret in a male photographer was once to photograph his
woman nude, ideally her vagina, open and nude. It is a rule of
thumb today: one cannot buy a Polaroid in a drugstore without
announcing to the world, one chance in two, the camera will be used
to record a copulation of family or friends. Everything
technological now has the impulse to enter the act of creation, as
much as art used to. Right after the war, however, a talented
photographer did not rush to announce his desire to do nudes.
Indeed, there was no market then. All magazines designed for
fingering in small-town drugstore racks were filled with sweater
girls — cheesecake! So Dienes, while able to content himself in
romances with Ruth Roman and Linda Christian, had to delay his trip
with a lovely woman through the West because he could not get one
to go along. One day he called Emmeline Snively for a model. She
did not know it, but according to Dienes, a few of her girls were
hustling. He was in an open Hungarian mood. If a good model came,
he would photograph her, and if a whore arrived he would give her
ten or twenty dollars and take the afternoon off. Instead, the
future Marilyn Monroe arrived. On the phone Emmeline had said,
“André, you’re in luck today, a brand-new girl, and she’s
lovely.”