The Genius and the Goddess (5 page)

In 1941
Robert Mitchum, not yet a movie star, worked with
Dougherty in the sheet metal department of Lockheed Aircraft in
Burbank. He said that his co-worker "looked like a large brick, red-haired,
square-shouldered and [like Mitchum himself] solid all the
way down." Norma Jeane liked the man Grace had chosen, but had
to adjust to yet another radical change in her life. She later told her
New York maid, with becoming modesty, that "Jim was handsome,
well-mannered, and had a good job – and a car. What I couldn't
figure out was what a guy like Jim would want with me." Dougherty
– who later remarried, became a Los Angeles policeman and wrote
a memoir of Norma Jeane – admitted that she was sometimes a little
naïve, a little dumb.

Dougherty gave a positive, even idealized account of their conventional
and essentially happy marriage. He stated, for example, that
Norma Jeane liked to prepare meals and was a good cook, though
she favored peas and carrots because she liked their color combination.
But
Shelley Winters, who roomed with her in 1950, revealed
(perhaps with some comic exaggeration) that Marilyn was absolutely
hopeless in the kitchen: "Not only could Marilyn not cook, if you
handed her a leg of lamb, she just stared at it. Once I asked her to
wash the salad while I went to the store. When I came back an hour
later, she was still scrubbing each leaf. Her idea of making a salad was
to scrub each lettuce leaf with a Brillo pad."
¹⁰

Norma Jeane was certainly naïve, at least in the beginning, about
sex. The first time she used a diaphragm, Jim had to get down on his
knees to help her extract it. But he insisted that their sexual life was
passionate and satisfying: "Norma Jeane loved sex. It was as natural
to her as breakfast in the morning. There were never any problems
with it. . . . Never had I encountered a girl who so thoroughly enjoyed
sexual union. It made our lovemaking pure joy." Sometimes, overcome
by desire, she'd even insist they pull off the road and make love
in the car.

Norma Jeane loved children but, nearly a child herself, never wanted
to have them with Dougherty. When she thought she was pregnant,
she became frightened by the pain of childbirth. The screenwriter
Nunnally Johnson recalled that when Marilyn played a young mother
in
We're Not Married
(1952), she held a baby on camera, but – remaining
strangely remote – paid absolutely no attention to it when it cried.
She suffered severe menstrual pains, which would plague her
throughout her life. But, according to Dougherty, she had no other
physical or psychological problems: "There were no pills needed to
put Norma Jeane to sleep at night. Mom never heard her complain
about her nerves or even about being depressed." Her sexual problems
came when years of psychoanalysis dredged up painful memories and
made her acutely conscious of her childhood traumas. Later on, when
Marilyn became famous, she wanted to obliterate her marriage to a
pleasant but commonplace husband. Rewriting her past, she unconvincingly
claimed that she'd been emotionally and sexually
estranged from Dougherty: "We hardly spoke to each other. . . . We
had nothing to say. . . . The first effect marriage had on me was to
increase my lack of interest in sex."

One source of contention, which became a major theme in
Miller's
The Misfits
, concerned Norma Jeane's outrage at Dougherty's
cruelty to animals. She hated to go on hunting trips and had to
close her eyes when he killed rabbits. Once, when he'd shot a deer
and put it in the back seat of the car, it suddenly "came to life and
lifted its head. Jim stopped the car and began strangling the deer.
She tried to stop him," but couldn't do so. Nevertheless, he said,
she was affectionate and never held a grudge: "When we had an
argument – and there were plenty – I'd often say, 'Just shut up!'
and go out to sleep on the couch. An hour later, I woke up to
find her sleeping alongside me, or sitting nearby on the floor. She
was very forgiving."
¹¹

Dougherty, with an essential wartime job at Lockheed, would not
have been drafted, but for patriotic reasons chose to enlist in the
merchant marine. His first, pleasantly soft job, late in 1943, was on
Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, where he trained
Marine recruits. On that nearly all-male post, he became upset when
his sexy wife attracted enthusiastic attention on the beach and at
dances by wearing tight-fitting, provocative clothes. He knew the men
were swarming around Norma Jeane, but six months later, in the
spring of 1944, he sailed to Asia. Norma Jeane, yet again, felt abandoned
and deeply hurt.

Yet Norma Jeane's letters of June 15 and December 3, 1944, to
Grace Goddard in West Virginia, express her admiration and affection
for Dougherty, and confirm his belief that they were happily married:

I love Jimmie just more than anyone (in a different way I
suppose than anyone) and I know I shall never be happy with
anyone else as long as I live, and I know he feels the same
towards me. So you see we are really very happy together. That
is, of course, when we can be together. We both miss each other
terribly. We will be married two years June 19th. And we really
have had quite a happy life together. . . . I love him so very
much. Honestly. I don't think there is another man alive like
him. He really is awfully sweet.

With Dougherty gone and nothing to do at home, Norma Jeane
looked for wartime work. His mother, who worked as a nurse at the
Radio Plane plant in Burbank, got her a job there. She started by
packing the parachutes which were attached to miniature target-practice
planes, operated by remote control. The chutes brought the
planes down safely so that they could be used again. She was then
"promoted" to the dope room, where she sprayed foul-smelling liquid
varnish, made of banana oil and glue, onto the fabric of the fuselage.
In this extremely unpleasant job, she earned the minimum wage of
twenty dollars a week for sixty hours of work. The varnish was pretty
strong stuff, and there was constant danger from sniffing glue. But the
noxious fumes also provided her first high and introduced her to the
attraction of drugs. After a year of this taxing work, the exhausted
Norma Jeane complained to Grace that she had to be on her feet
for ten hours a day. On June 4, 1945, she wrote that she'd finally
found a way to escape from this dead-end job in a noxious
factory:
"I haven't worked at Radio Plane Company since January. They keep
asking me to come back but I don't really want to do that kind of
work any more because it makes me so darn tired."

Norma Jeane escaped from this drudgery when the photographer
David Conover "discovered" her. He was working for the Army's
Motion Picture Unit, commanded by the actor Ronald Reagan. To
boost the morale of soldiers in combat, he'd been sent to the factory
to get still photos of beautiful girls toiling on the home front. On
June 4 she enthusiastically told Grace about the promising new life
that had suddenly beckoned:

The first I know the photographers had me out there, taking
pictures of me. . . . They all asked where in the H— I had been
hiding. . . . They took a lot of moving pictures of me, and some
of them asked for dates, etc. (Naturally I refused). . . . After they
finished with some of the pictures, an army corporal by the
name of David
Conover told me he would be interested in
getting some color still shots of me. He used to have a studio
on the Strip on Sunset. He said he would make arrangements
with the plant superintendent if I would agree, so I said okay.
He told me what to wear and what shade of lipstick, etc., so
the next couple of weeks I posed for him at different times. . . .
He said that all the pictures came out perfect. Also, he said that
I should by all means go into the modeling profession . . . that
I photographed very well and that he wants to take a lot more.
Also he said he had a lot of contacts he wanted me to look
into.

I told him I would rather not work when Jimmie was here,
so he said he would wait, so I'm expecting to hear from him
most any time again.

He is awfully nice and is married and is strictly business,
which is the way I like it. Jimmie seems to like the idea of me
modeling, so I'm glad about that.
¹²

But Jimmie, fearing the worst, did
not
like the idea of his wife modeling,
and Conover became her first lover. She later confessed that the
anguish of solitude rather than the desire for sex made her succumb
to other men: "I didn't sleep around when I was married until [after
one year] my husband went into the service, and then it was just that
I was so damn lonesome, and I had to have some kind of company,
so once in a while I'd give in, mainly because I didn't want to be
alone."

Like Dougherty, Conover found sex with Norma Jeane more than
satisfactory. In fact, he recalled that she exhausted him and that "her
sexual appetite far exceeded my capacity to give her pleasure." But
the photographic sessions, rather than their affair, changed her attitude
to life and to her husband. When Dougherty returned from the war,
she greeted him coolly, seemed completely self-absorbed and informed
him that their marriage was over. Dougherty, still in love with her,
was surprised to discover that "Norma Jeane wasn't talking about our
future anymore. It was her career nearly all of the time. In the year
and a half I had been at sea, she had changed into almost another
human being."
¹³

In her autobiography Marilyn said, with some exaggeration, that
during her childhood and early adult life, "the Hollywood I knew
was the Hollywood of failure. Nearly everybody I met suffered from
malnutrition or suicidal impulses." Thinking of the English actors
who'd lived in her mother's house, she contrasted their unreal hopes
with the grim reality of their lives: "Among the phonies and failures
were also a set of has-beens. These were mostly actors and actresses
who had been dropped by the movies – nobody knew why, least of
all themselves." By the end of the war Norma Jeane was ready to
pursue the same difficult goal, and aspired to be a model, singer,
dancer and actress. She had learned to live without her husband, had
no desire to go back to housework and was sick of the factory.
Photogenic, with blue eyes and fine skin, she was five feet five inches
tall, weighed 117 pounds, and had a voluptuous 36-24-34 figure. She'd
earned twenty dollars a week at the plane factory; her first job as a
model paid ten dollars a
day
.

In 1945 David Conover introduced her to
Emmeline Snively, owner
of the Blue Book
Modeling Agency. A formal woman in her late
forties, she ran a successful business that supplied young models for
scores of popular photo magazines. She made the most of her
respectable image, always wore a hat and spoke with an English accent,
which had considerable snob value in Hollywood. She signed up
Norma Jeane for one of her courses and advanced her the money to
pay for it. Her initial assessment emphasized her new client's eagerness
to learn, willingness to work and tremendous ambition:

She was a clean-cut, American, wholesome girl – too plump,
but beautiful in a way. We tried to teach her how to pose, how
to handle her body. She always tried to lower her smile because
she smiled too high, and it made her nose look a little too long.
At first she knew nothing about carriage, posture, walking, sitting
or posing. She started out with less than any girl I ever knew,
but she worked the hardest. . . . She wanted to learn, wanted to
be somebody, more than anybody I ever saw before in my life.

In May 1946 Norma Jeane went to Las Vegas for several weeks to
get her divorce. While there she wrote a girlish, star-struck letter to
Miss Snively about her first contact with a movie crew:

I'm having lots of rest and I'm getting a tan. It's very warm and
honestly the sun shines all the time.

Las Vegas is really a colorful town with the Helldorado celebration
and all. It lasted for five days, they had rodeos and parades
every day.

Roy Rogers was in town making a picture. I met him and
rode his horse "Trigger" (cross my heart I did!). What a horse!

I was walking down the street one day last week and noticed
they were shooting a movie so like everyone else I stood and
watched. In between shootings a couple of fellows from
Republic Studio walked over to me and asked me if I would
please come over and meet some actor (I don't remember his
name. I think his last name was Cristy or something like that).
Anyway he wanted to meet me so I did and I met most of
the studio people including Roy Rogers and I rode his horse,
gee he is nice.

They asked me to have dinner with them at the Last Frontier
and then we went to the rodeo. What a day! Ever since I've
been signing autograph books and cowboy hats. When I try to
tell these kids I'm not in pictures they think I'm just trying to
avoid signing their books, so I sign them.

They're gone now. It's quite lonely here in Las Vegas. This is
certainly a wild town.
¹

She loved being young, pretty and desirable, and enjoyed her brief
moment of behaving like a film star.

In her years as a model Norma Jeane learned how to use makeup
skillfully, including a special foundation to disguise the fuzz on
her fair skin. She had plastic surgery to lift her nose slightly, which
gave her more upper lip and improved her smile, and had some cartilage
put into her jaw to improve the line of her chin. The results
were splendid and she became a popular pin-up. The war was over,
but many young Americans, the major market for these magazines,
were still in the armed services. "Soldiers in the Aleutians voted her
the girl most likely to thaw Alaska, and the Seventh Division Medical
Corps elected her the girl they would most like to examine." Despite
her success and financial independence, she felt as conflicted about
modeling for girlie magazines as she would, later on, about playing
dumb parts in third-rate movies. She craved respectability. "When I
was a model," she said, "I wanted more than anything in the world
for my picture to be on the cover of the
Ladies' Home Journal
. Instead,
I was always on magazines with names like
Peek
and
See
and
Whiz
Bang
. Those were the kind of movies I made, too."

Though she had steady work and a decent income, Norma Jeane
remained as transient as an adult as she'd been as a child. In this
respect, she was a typically rootless resident of Los Angeles. "This
lack of a sense of permanency," wrote two social historians, "accounts
for the unreal appearance of the region and the restless character of
its population. . . . The houses have no earthly relation to the environment.
They are unreal, as unreal as motion-picture sets." She had
very few possessions, and lived at more than sixty addresses in her
thirty-six years.

She owned a car, essential for seeking work in Los Angeles, getting
to her agents and to auditions at the studios. Early on, the photographer
Philippe Halsman was surprised to find his glamorous model
living in a cheap one-room apartment on the edge of the city and
driving about in a beat-up old sedan. She cemented her friendship
with the neurotic columnist Sidney Skolsky, who was afraid to drive,
by chauffeuring him through the city. Her professional progress can
be measured from the decrepit Pontiac she drove at the beginning of
her career to the brand-new Cadillac she was given in September 1953
for appearing on the
Jack Benny show. In America the car had always
had social and (as Jim Dougherty noted) sexual implications. As the
California historians nicely observed, "to have a car meant being somebody;
to have to borrow a car meant knowing somebody; to have no
car at all, owned or borrowed, was to be left out – way out."
²

In 1946 Norma Jeane signed on with her first agent,
Harry Lipton,
who for the next two years helped her secure several short-term
contracts with Hollywood
studios. She signed a six-month contract
with Fox in July 1946, renewed it in January 1947 and was terminated
by Fox – who didn't know what to do with her – in August
of that year. She changed her name in 1947. She signed a six-month
contract with Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures, then a minor studio,
in March 1948, and was crushed when they dropped her in September.
Finally, she signed another six-month contract with Fox, which was
converted to a seven-year contract with incremental pay raises, in
May 1951.

In these early years Marilyn had tiny parts in five forgotten movies.
She was almost entirely cut out of her first two pictures. Just before
Fox dropped her in 1947, she appeared in
The
Dangerous Years
as a
waitress in a teenage hangout. She warned a relative not to blink or
she might miss her fleeting appearance. This was a common career
path for young film actresses like Marilyn: she worked as a model,
became a starlet under contract to a studio, posed for publicity photographs
and got small parts in movies, often by performing sexual
favors for influential men. Such tiny parts were barely a step away
from modeling: she was just a blank, pretty face in a sexy body. Very
few young women got the breakout part that made them stars.

As a starlet in the studio system, Marilyn was often treated with
contempt.
Orson Welles recalled that she was even humiliated in
public: "At a Hollywood party which Marilyn attended (circa 1946
or '47) while she was still a lowly starlet, he saw someone actually
pull down the top of her dress in front of people and fondle her. She
had laughed. 'Just about everyone in town had slept with her.'" Being
sexually available, Marilyn felt, was an essential if unpleasant part of
her job. It focused attention on her greatest asset and allowed her to
show off her body. Laughter in this situation was her only defense;
moral indignation would have been pointless. She was certainly sexually
exploited, but in her casual and carefree way she was also complicit.

Marilyn had many brief affairs, but quickly learned the difference
between one-night stands that assuaged her loneliness but achieved
nothing, and liaisons with powerful but unattractive men that advanced
her career. Her first "protector," the influential producer
Joseph
Schenck, whom she met in 1948, was fifty years older than Marilyn.
Like many Hollywood moguls, he was a self-made man with a colorful
past, born in eastern Europe and from a Jewish background. He came
from a Russian village on the Volga, where his father was a woodfuel
merchant, emigrated to America in his teens and worked his way
up from errand boy to owner of several New York drugstores. In 1912
he acquired the Palisades Amusement Park, across the Hudson River
from Manhattan, then built a chain of nickelodeons and movie theaters
with
Marcus Loew. In 1933, with
Darryl Zanuck and
William Goetz
he founded Twentieth Century Pictures, which two years later merged
with Fox. Schenck made movies with the director
D.W. Griffith, the
comedians Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, and the popular silent
film actress
Norma Talmadge, Norma Jeane's namesake. Schenck had
been married to Talmadge from 1917 (when she was twenty years
old) to 1934. In 1941 he was convicted for bribing union officials to
prevent strikes, and spent four months in a federal prison in Danbury,
Connecticut.

Marilyn refused to marry the wealthy Schenck, but agreed to move
into his guest cottage. According to a Hollywood columnist, Schenck
needed medical assistance to get an erection, which did not last very
long. Marilyn was amusing about her role in their urgent arrangement:
"It's all very complicated. Sometimes when the doctor comes,
I have to synchronize my watch. That's why I'm living in the guest
house. This stuff can't wait for a studio limousine to drive me across
town." During these years she also spent a lot of time on her knees,
servicing movie executives like Harry Cohn in their offices, but this
phase of her life came to an end in 1951. After signing her first long-term
contract with Fox, she triumphantly declared: "I have sucked
my last cock."
³

In 1948, during her six-month contract with Columbia Pictures,
Marilyn was sent to their drama coach Natasha Lytess, and began the
acting lessons with a series of teachers that would continue until
the end of her life. A natural comedienne with a sexy face and figure,
Marilyn yearned to be a dramatic actress. She was utterly devoted to
all her mentors, most of them of them heavily influenced by
Konstantin
Stanislavsky's school of
"Method" acting, which emphasized the inner
truth of the actor's feelings, moods and expressions. Born into a Jewish
family in Austria and a former actress in Max Reinhardt's company
in Germany, Lytess claimed Franco-Russian descent to dissociate
herself from the wartime enemy and connect herself with the Russian
acting tradition. Tall, angular, even emaciated, with flashing eyes, short-cropped
gray hair, a strong accent and forbidding appearance, Lytess
was energetic, volatile and intense. Several biographers have suggested
(though there's no evidence for this) that Lytess was the mistress of
the German-Jewish émigré novelist
Bruno Frank and that he was the
father of her young daughter, Barbara.

Like most of her teachers, Lytess influenced Marilyn's personal as
well as her professional life. A devout and submissive disciple, Marilyn
became a close friend. When Lytess was desperate for money to pay
the mortgage, or risk losing her house, Marilyn sold the mink stole
that one of her admirers had given her – the only valuable thing she
owned – and gave Lytess $1,000. Marilyn had known real poverty in
her youth and was always
generous with money. Emphasizing her
characteristic openhandedness, Lytess said the self-absorbed actress
frequently gave material gifts because "she was unable to give of
herself." Marilyn admired her as a teacher, but complained that Lytess
was jealous of her boyfriends and behaved as if she were Marilyn's
husband. When Lytess wanted to have sex with her, Marilyn passively
agreed. "I'd let any guy, or girl," she insouciantly explained, "do what
they wanted if I thought they were my friend."

Like Snively, Lytess had to start from scratch. She recalled, Marilyn's
"voice, a piping sort of whimper, got on my nerves" – though Marilyn
developed this breathy whisper as her trademark. Lytess encouraged
her inhibited pupil "to let go, to say things freely, to walk freely, to
feel expansion, to know what it is like to speak with authority." Then,
using a sub-aqueous metaphor that would recur in descriptions of
Marilyn, she said she wanted her pupil to know "the difference between
existing under water and coming alive." She taught Marilyn how to
express character and reveal the meaning of a scene, and to understand
that acting was best when "the emotion shows, not the words."
⁴
Like Lee Strasberg later on, she urged her pupil to concentrate on
herself instead of on the writer's words, on the interpretation of her
own role instead of on relating to the other actors.

Lytess, like Strasberg, also exacerbated Marilyn's self-consciousness,
intensified her anxiety and increased her childlike dependence on her
teacher. In stressing the actor as an individual, rather than part of an
ensemble, she encouraged Marilyn's intense self-concentration, which
seemed to her co-workers like narcissism and selfishness. At the same
time, Lytess, like many others, was content to enjoy sex with Marilyn
without considering Marilyn's feelings. Despite her intense obsession
with herself, Marilyn curiously dissociated her body from her emotions
and allowed others to have their way with her in exchange for
emotional support.