Marilyn: Norma Jeane (3 page)

During her marriage to Arthur Miller, Marilyn had tried to have a child—but suffered an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage—and could not. Letters poured in from women who also suffered from this inability and from a definition of womanhood so tied to the accident of the physical ability to bear a child—preferably a son, as Marilyn often said, though later she also talked of a daughter—that their whole sense of self had been undermined. “Manhood means many things,” as one reader explained, “but womanhood means only one.” And where is the self-respect of a woman who wants to give birth only to a male child, someone different from herself?

Most of all, women readers mourned that Marilyn had lived and died in an era when there were so few ways for her to know that these experiences were shared with other women, that she was not alone.

Now women and men bring the past quarter century of change and understanding to these poignant photographs taken in the days just before her death. It makes them all the more haunting.

I still see the self-consciousness with which she posed for a camera. It makes me remember my own teenage discomfort at seeing her on the screen, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into love and approval. By holding a mirror to the exaggerated ways in which female human beings are trained to act, she could be as embarrassing—and as sad and revealing—as a female impersonator.

Yet now I also see the why of it, and the woman behind the mask that her self-consciousness creates.

I still feel worried about her, just as I did then. There is something especially vulnerable about big-breasted women in this world concerned with such bodies, but unconcerned with the real person within. We may envy these women a little, yet we feel protective of them, too.

But in these photographs, the body emphasis seems more the habit of some former self. It’s her face we look at. Now that we know the end of her story, it’s the real woman we hope to find—looking out of the eyes of Marilyn.

In the last interview before her death, close to the time of these photographs, Patricia Newcomb, her friend and press secretary, remembers that Marilyn pleaded unsuccessfully with the reporter to end his article like this:

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.

You could buy a sackful of old Bread… for twenty-five cents. Aunt Grace and I would stand in line for hours waiting to fill our sack. When I looked up at her, she would grin at me and say, “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane. You’re going to be a beautiful gal when you grow up. I can feel it in my bones.”

—from the unfinished autobiography of Marilyn Monroe

O
NE CLOUDY SUNDAY IN
1962, Marilyn Monroe sat down for an interview with photojournalist George Barris in the patio of her house in Brentwood, California.

Wrapped in a light blue terry-cloth robe and sipping champagne, she was about to supply the personal text for the photographic book that was to be their mutual project that summer. She wanted to set the record straight.

“Lies, lies, lies, everything they’ve been saying about me is lies,” she said sadly. “This is the first true story; you’re the first one I’ve told it to,” she insisted to Barris, as she had to others. “I’ll tell you all about my childhood, career, marriages and divorces, and what I want out of life.” Just as Marilyn seemed to have told more than one man that her first sexual pleasure had been with him, she also offered her life to reporters whom she liked. It was one of the many small ways she sought approval.

But on this day, there was an added motive. The “lies” she referred to were news reports that she was depressed, suffering from deep feelings of inferiority, and incapable of working. Having been fired from a Hollywood sex comedy called
Something’s Got to Give
for lateness, absence, illness, and a spaciness that rendered unusable even some of the footage she did finish, she was now fighting for her professional life. “My work is the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on,” she had told a magazine writer that final summer. “To put it bluntly, I seem to be a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.”

Now Marilyn was using this interview to tell Hollywood she was not “unemployable.” She was putting up a cheerful front. “I am not a victim of emotional conflicts,” she protested to Barris. “I’m human, we all have our areas, we all feel a little inferior, but who ever admits it?”

Settling into a wicker chair with her champagne glass in hand, she began to respond to questions—and also to tell a familiar story.

“Yes, it’s true I was born an illegitimate child,” she began, tucking her bare feet underneath her. To Barris, she looked amazingly young and beautiful; a decade younger than the thirty-sixth birthday she had just celebrated. “I also spent most of my childhood in and out of foster homes, and to top it off I landed in an orphanage, even though my mother was and still is alive.

“My father never married my mother,” she went on. “I guess that’s what broke her heart… When you love a man and tell him you’re going to have his child and he runs out on you, it’s something a woman never gets over. I don’t think my mother ever did…

“You know, my mother was a very attractive woman when she was young,” she said proudly, digressing from a chronology that seemed to depress her. “But she used to tell me her mother—that was my grandmother Delia Monroe—was the real beauty in the family. She came from Dublin, Ireland, where all the girls are pretty. My grandfather came from Scotland. I remember my mother spoke with a slight Scotch brogue, but it sounded nice, sort of musical…

“No, I never knew my father. My mother once told me he died in an accident when I was quite young. In fact, he left my mother when he heard from her that I was on the way. It must have hurt my mother very, very much. It could even drive some women out of their mind… My mother had a nervous breakdown and had to be sent to the hospital for a rest when I was only five years old. That’s what caused me to spend my childhood in and out of foster homes.”

Marilyn put her champagne glass down and was silent. However familiar the story she was telling, the emotion of it was getting to her.

“What happened next in my life, I don’t think I can ever forget,” she said as if to herself. “My mother’s best girlfriend at this time, Aunt Grace, was my legal guardian, and I was living in her home. But when she remarried all of a sudden, the house became too small, and someone had to go… One day she packed my clothes and took me with her in her car. We drove and drove without her ever saying a word.

“When we came to a three-story red-brick building, she stopped the car and we walked up the stairs to the entrance. I saw this sign, and the emptiness that came over me, I’ll never forget. The sign read:
LOS ANGELES ORPHANS’ HOME.

“I began to cry. ‘Please, please don’t make me go inside. I’m not an orphan, my mother’s not dead. I’m not an orphan—it’s just that she’s sick in the hospital and can’t take care of me. Please don’t make me live in an orphans’ home!’

“I was crying and protesting—I still remember they had to use force to drag me inside that place.

“I may have been only nine years old, but something like this, you never forget. The whole world around me just crumbled.

“I later learned that the day Aunt Grace had taken me to the orphans’ home, she cried all morning. She also did promise me that as soon as she could, she would take me out of that place. She used to come and visit me often, but when a little girl feels lost and lonely and that nobody wants her, it’s something she never can forget as long as she lives.”

Marilyn had been in her own world, but now she suddenly returned. “I let him out so he could feel free to run around… but he’s been so quiet, it’s not like him…,” she said, looking around her.

It took Barris a few moments to understand that she was talking about her white poodle, Maf, a gift given to her by a woman friend so that Marilyn would have company when she emerged from hospital psychiatric treatment in New York a year before. Only when the small dog had been called from a corner of the garden and hugged with great affection did Marilyn settle down again.

“They say you soon forget the bad things in your life, and only remember the good ones,” she continued, picking up her champagne glass again. “Well, maybe for others it’s that way, but not for me…

“When I was about eight years old, I lived in this foster home that took in boarders. There was this old man they all would cater to, he was the star boarder. One day I was upstairs on the first floor where his room was, putting some towels in the hall linen closet. His door was open and he called me into the room. I went into the room, and he immediately bolted the door. He asked me to sit on his lap and he kissed me and started doing other things to me. He said, ‘It’s only a game!’

“He let me go when the game was over.

“When he unlocked the door, I ran to my foster mother and told her what he did to me. She looked at me, shocked… then slapped me across the mouth and shouted at me, ‘I don’t believe you! Don’t you dare say such things about that nice man!’

“I was so hurt, I began to stammer. She didn’t believe me! I cried that night in bed all night, I just wanted to die…

“This was the first time I can ever remember stammering… Once afterward when I was in the orphanage, I started to stutter out of the clear blue… There were odd times when I couldn’t get a word out.” And indeed, movie directors who worked with Marilyn had been surprised to find that she sometimes stuttered when she felt frightened or criticized.

Whatever Marilyn’s intention of using this interview to show her control and good cheer, it was dissolving in the flood of childhood memories that seemed to wash away the years and turn her into Norma Jeane again. The two most painful and often told scenes—the eight-year-old Norma Jeane who was sexually attacked and then disbelieved, her abandonment to an orphanage a year or so later—had been reversed in the telling today, but they clearly were wounds that had not healed.

“My mother was committed to the Norwalk State Hospital,” Marilyn said, resuming her narrative, “and she stayed there until I was nineteen. But Aunt Grace had made me a promise that someday she would take me out of the orphanage. When I was eleven, she kept her word. She had me released, but this time, I didn’t go to live with her. She took me to a very poor neighborhood in an outlying section of Los Angeles. I was to live there with her aunt, a sixty-two-year-old spinster. The house was a run-down bungalow. The people in the neighborhood were mostly poor and on relief.

“I’ll never forget living there, because she became my Aunt Ana. Her name was Miss Ana Lower, and she was the greatest influence on my whole life. She was the only person I ever loved with such a deep love that one can only have for someone so good, so kind, and so full of love for me.

“One of the many reasons I loved her so much was because of her philosophy… her understanding of what really mattered in life. Like the time when I was going to Emerson Junior High and one of the girls in my class made fun of a dress I was wearing… I ran home crying as if my heart would break. My loving Aunt Ana just held me in her arms and rocked me to and fro like a baby and said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference if other children make fun of you, or of your clothes, or where you live. Always remember, dear: it’s what you are that really counts. Just keep being yourself, honey, that’s all that matters.’

“She didn’t believe in sickness, disease, or death,” Marilyn remembered of this gentle Christian Scientist who had been her protector. “She didn’t believe in a person being a failure, either. She believed the mind could achieve anything it wished to achieve. I loved her with all my heart.

“When I was married just after my sixteenth birthday, it was Aunt Ana who designed and made my wedding gown. I was so proud to be called her niece on my marriage certificate.”

If this description of marriage seemed to come in the midst of childhood, that was also the way it had happened for Norma Jeane.

For one thing, her body had matured early. “I always looked older than my age,” Marilyn explained. “When I was just ten years old, I shot up to my present height of five feet, five inches—except then I was skinny; I looked very boyish. When I was twelve years old, I may still have been a baby inside, but outside I had the body of a woman.”

For another, Aunt Grace was moving away from Los Angeles with her new husband; Aunt Ana was considered too old to take her place as Norma Jeane’s legal guardian; and an arranged marriage seemed the only alternative to another foster home or a return to the orphanage. “Again it was the case of not being wanted,” Marilyn said slowly. “I remember Aunt Grace saying something about really being quite a mature woman, and it was time I thought of marriage. Of course, this frightened me. I protested, ‘But I’m too young,’ and her answer was, ‘Only in years, only in years.’ When I told Aunt Grace I was frightened of what a husband might do, she seemed quite surprised at my innocence.”

The bridegroom Aunt Grace had in mind for Norma Jeane as soon as she could legally marry was Jim Dougherty, the almost twenty-one-year-old son of a neighbor family, and she suggested the match to his parents. “After we had gone out for several months, we got married on June nineteenth, nineteen forty-two,” Marilyn said, remembering the exact date after all these years. “I was sweet sixteen on June first. We had a double-ring ceremony. My Aunt Ana bought me a book that contained the hints a bride-to-be should know…

I guess that even by today’s standards, I’d be considered a child bride. You know, I had six mothers weeping when I marched down the aisle? I guess they all considered me their daughter, and in a way I was. They all were my foster mothers.

“Being married to Jim brought me escape at the time. It was that or being sent off to another foster home… I’ve been told Jim has said I was a most responsive bride, a perfect bride in every respect except the cooking department.