Marilyn: Norma Jeane (4 page)

“It was in nineteen forty-four that Jim enlisted in the merchant marine. After he had boot training, he was stationed at Catalina Island as a physical training instructor, and I was permitted to join him there. It was a world of men… Besides sailors and their families, there were Marines, SeaBees, Coast Guardsmen, and not too many girls… My husband always seemed jealous and annoyed when the men would whistle at me. He used to lecture me about the type of clothes I was wearing. Actually, I wore the same clothes the other girls wore I just couldn’t understand him acting that way.

“When Jim was sent to Shanghai, I went back to Van Nuys and lived with his family. I was working then at the Radio Plane Company in Burbank. I had started there as a parachute inspector and now was promoted to the ‘dope room.’ I used to spray this liquid dope, which is made by mixing banana oil and glue, on the plane fuselages.

“Well, one day a photographer came to our plant from the Army’s Pictorial Center in Hollywood to take some pictures of people—he called them morale-booster types—showing how they were doing their part, working in defense plants, too. When this photographer, David Conover, passed by where I was at work, he said, ‘You’re a real morale booster. I’m going to take your picture for the boys in the Army to keep their morale high.’

“First he took pictures of me in my overalls. When he discovered I had a sweater in my locker, he asked if I would mind wearing it for more pictures. ‘I want to show the boys what you really look like,’ he said.

“Those pictures he took of me were the first that ever appeared in a publication. They were used in hundreds of Army camp newspapers, including
Yank
and
Stars and Stripes.
When this Army photographer called me a few weeks later, he had shown them to a commercial photographer in Los Angeles.

“The photographer was Potter Hueth, and he told me I had that ‘natural look.’… If I wanted to speculate with him, he would take pictures of me and when he sold them to the magazines, he would then pay me. The fee usually was five to ten dollars—a lot of money in those days. What did I have to lose? I agreed, providing I could do it at night and not lose time at the defense plant.

“Some of these pictures he showed to Miss Snively, who ran the largest modeling agency in Los Angeles. She told me I had the makings of a model, but that I would have to attend the modeling school she also operated so I could be properly groomed. The tuition was one hundred dollars. I told her, ‘Well, that lets me out—I don’t have the money.’ She told me not to worry; I could pay this out of the modeling jobs she would get for me.

“I remember the first modeling job I ever had. I was hostess at an aluminum exhibit at the Los Angeles Home Show… I received ten dollars a day for nine days, but all of it went for my modeling lessons. My second job turned out quite bad. A group of models went on location to Malibu Beach to model sports clothes for a famous American catalogue. After two days, they sent me home. They wouldn’t tell me why, and I was upset—here I was, the only model fired.

“Later, I found out the reason. They said no one would ever look at the clothes in their catalogue. ‘It’s just that you have more than the usual amount of sex appeal. Too much to make a fashion model,’ Miss Snively explained to me.

“They started to put me into bathing suits, and all of a sudden I became popular. Photographers liked working with me. They said I knew how to take direction… I was a brunette then, and Miss Snively kept insisting I bleach my hair. I kept refusing. ‘If you expect to go places, you’ve got to be a blonde,’ she said. ‘Photographers can photograph a blonde differently, light or dark and those in-between shades, by their control of lighting.’”

Norma Jeane stopped resisting this symbol of her changing self when a six-hour assignment for shampoo ads depended on it. “I couldn’t get used to myself,” Marilyn remembered, her platinum hair now turned to cotton candy by years of bleachings, “but it did bring me more modeling work. I was getting more and more assignments for glamour poses and cheesecake.”

The refuge once offered by her young husband had disappeared. In spite of her pleadings and her fear of being abandoned, even for a year or two, Jim Dougherty had joined the merchant marine. Now the sensual body that had brought a shy, frightened little girl such unexpected notice was becoming her only security and passport into another world. Her young husband had never understood her dreams. “Jim used to discourage me by saying, ‘There are plenty of beautiful girls who can act and Hollywood’s full of them; they’re all looking for work. What makes you think you’re any better than them?’ I don’t think he really knew how I felt inside.

“When my lawyer wrote to Jim in Shanghai about my wanting a divorce, Jim asked if I would wait until he returned from overseas to see if we could make a go of our marriage. It was then I knew more than ever I wanted to become an actress. Perhaps through modeling I could get the break I needed.”

As Barris was scribbling in his notepad, dusk had fallen in the garden. Marilyn wrapped her blue terry-cloth robe more tightly around her and suggested they move indoors. She walked barefoot into the kitchen for more beer for him, more champagne for her, and was solicitous about his comfort in the small high-ceilinged living room with space for just a couch and two chairs. “Let’s drink a toast to the future and what it holds in store for us,” Marilyn proposed. They raised their glasses to each other before continuing.

“Things were really happening for me as a model,” Marilyn explained. “I was appearing in all of the magazines of the day, especially the men’s magazines. Howard Hughes, who was then the owner of RKO Studios, noticed me in those magazines, and asked his studio to do a screen test. Miss Snively called Ben Lyon, a talent scout at Twentieth Century-Fox. She called an agent named Helen Ainsworth to look after me, and the agent had also heard that Twentieth Century-Fox was looking for new faces.

“I’ll never forget that first meeting with Mr. Lyon. He didn’t ask if I had any experience, he didn’t ask me to read scripts, but the fact that Mr. Hughes was interested for
his
studio was reason enough for him to see me. He said he wanted to give me a color screen test, but all the color tests had to be approved by Darryl Zanuck, who was head of production. He was out of town for some time, and I would have to wait until he returned.

“Miss Ainsworth turned to Mr. Lyon and said, ‘If you don’t give this girl a screen test, I’m going to take her over to that other [Howard Hughes’s] studio right now.’ I just sat there praying that nothing would go wrong.

“Two days later, Mr. Lyon authorized a color screen test for me. Mr. Leon Shamroy, the motion-picture cameraman who was the best, was to photograph me. There was a picture in production then called
Mother Wore Tights,
starring Betty Grable. Secretly, at five-thirty one morning, Mr. Lyon, Mr. Shamroy, and myself sneaked on the set. I made up in a portable dressing room, Mr. Lyon sneaked a sequined evening gown out of wardrobe, and Mr. Shamroy lighted the set himself and loaded his motion-picture camera himself.

“This is what my scene consisted of: I walked across the stage set, sat down, then I had to light a cigarette, put it out, go upstage, cross, look out the window, sit down, come downstage, and then exit,” said Marilyn, remembering every detail of those first stage directions given to Norma Jeane sixteen years before. “Those bright lights were blinding. For some strange reason, instead of being nervous and scared, I just tried very hard because I knew Mr. Lyon and Mr. Shamroy were taking an awful chance. If it didn’t work out well, they might get in trouble.”

George Barris now told Marilyn something Shamroy had said about that session: “I got a cold chill. This girl had something I haven’t seen since the days of silent pictures; this girl had sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow had. Every frame of that film radiated sex…”

The more confident Marilyn—the one who had tried to reject Hollywood’s grade-B sex pictures and escape to acting lessons in New York—might have objected to that judgment. “I wanted to be an artist, not an erotic freak,” she protested once. She had even taken on the studio system by starting her own production company.

But this later Marilyn was fighting to work at all, even in
Something’s Got to Give,
the sex comedy in which she had little faith. She just accepted the description and walked around the room for a moment, lost in her own thoughts. “You know, it’s strange how it only seems yesterday,” she said, returning to her chair. “It’s amazing how much of the past a person’s mind has the capacity for recalling.

“I was twenty years old. In my mind, I was on the way to stardom. To the studio, I was just another starlet who, if she is lucky, gets small walk-on speaking parts you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t a very careful observer. In other words, it’s unusual for a starlet to become a star. This I found out the hard way.

“For the first six months, I worked very hard. I attended classes in acting, pantomime, singing, and dancing. When I found a deserted soundstage, I would recite lines I remembered from scripts to the bare walls. I felt very comfortable alone. I would take home scripts and study them all night I went to all the studio screenings to watch what the other actresses were doing, and why one scene was exciting and another one not. I wanted to know all I could about motion pictures.

“But the publicity people had me posing for endless still pictures. I rode in pageants wearing a costume with other starlets on the color floats, smiling, waving, and signing autographs. I did everything the studio asked me to, yet I hadn’t appeared in a motion picture.

“Shortly after the studio gave me the name Marilyn Monroe, I rode on one of those floats in a parade in Burbank. When someone asked me for my autograph, I had to ask, ‘How do you spell Marilyn Monroe?’

“To this day, I wonder what that person must have thought.”

She was quiet again. Perhaps the spelling incident expressed her feeling of distance from that artificial creation called Marilyn Monroe. The strong emotion of the earlier part of the day seemed to disappear along with an unknown twenty-year-old model and starlet named Norma Jeane.

When she continued the chronology of the newborn Marilyn, it was less the scenes that stood out than the summary:

“Listen, Hollywood can be a cruel place. Some of those men that take advantage of a starving and lonely girl trying to make the grade as an actress should be shot.”

“Someone said to me, ‘If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?’ My answer was then and still is, ‘If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.’”

“For me, self-respect is one’s greatest treasure. What does it all add up to if you don’t have that? If there was only one thing in my life I was to be proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.”

“Personally, I think the best performance I ever gave was in
The Asphalt Jungle
… The worst part I had to play was
Let’s Make Love
. I didn’t even have a part… It was part of an old contract; I had nothing to say.

Today, even her two famous and unhappy marriages were used only to show how cheerful she was, how ready to work. Of Joe DiMaggio she said briefly, “He started complaining about my working all the time—but we’re still the best of friends.” Arthur Miller was discussed in the context of his script for
The Misfits,
and her opinion that its director John Huston had interfered with Miller’s story. “Mr. Miller, at his best, is a great writer,” she said, referring to her husband of more than four years as if to a stranger. “He’s a brilliant man and a wonderful writer, but I think he is a better writer than a husband… Any good script, I would do.”

She summoned up memories of her career as Monroe that had mostly to do with strength and defiance; examples from the past that she seemed to need in her current crisis.

“I did everything they asked me to,” she insisted, when her narrative had caught up to her recent traumatic firing from
Something’s Got to Give,
just a week after her thirty-sixth birthday.

“When the director said the swimming-pool scene in the picture would look more realistic if I did the scene in the nude,” she explained, “I agreed—because I was told it would make the picture more of a success artistically and commercially. I worked very hard I wanted it to be a great picture, believe me.

“Then I got sick and, well, you know the rest of the story. The newspapers and magazines have been full of what happened. And now I’m waiting…” And indeed she was literally waiting in this semi-furnished house that she now called “a fortress where I can feel safe from the world.” After some talk of hiring Lee Remick because she fit Marilyn’s costumes, Twentieth Century-Fox had closed down the set of the unfinished film. Still, Marilyn was hoping that this studio, where Marilyn Monroe had been created all those years ago, would relent and call her back again.

“Everything they’ve been saying in the press is untrue,” she said, still trying to counter the industry rumors that she finally had become unemployable. “I hope we can continue… It can be a great picture—I know it can and so does everyone else. But all I can do is wait until they let me know.”

As the interview gradually drew to a close, she proudly described the Mexican furniture she had selected to fill this barren eight-room house. Even that small story led back to the ghost of Norma Jeane: while in Mexico buying furnishings for her home, Marilyn had visited an orphanage and written a check for a one-thousand-dollar contribution, then had torn it up and written another for ten thousand dollars. That night, she had slept without sleeping pills for one of the few times in her adult life.

Only with one of Barris’s last questions did the emotion of her childhood memories return. “The thing I want more than anything else?” she repeated. “I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another,” she added, as if hoping to help a child like the one who still lived inside her.