The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (18 page)

The Doughertys had a mutual understanding that they would practice birth control. Dougherty admits that he was the one who insisted on it and talked her into the decision. There were the insecurities of the war to consider, and Dougherty felt that Norma Jeane was too young to be a mother. He described Norma Jeane as a girl who “thoroughly enjoyed sexual union,” and that their lovemaking was pure joy. “We both had trim bodies and the sight of hers and mine nude excited both of us. Getting undressed for bed was almost unfailingly erotic and almost before the light was out we were locked together. If I took a shower and she opened the door, it was the same thing all over again—instant sex.”

He once confided to a friend that Norma Jeane's sexual appetite at times seemed insatiable. “The most vivid memory I have of Norma Jeane is of her hand reaching over as we were driving along a country road, and I knew it meant that she wanted me to stop wherever we were and make love. Sometimes I'd say, ‘Honey, we've got a home and a beautiful bed,' but she would lean against my chest and look up at me and sigh, ‘It's more romantic out here.' So we'd park right there and do it…. Sometimes this impulse came over her while we were driving through a built-up section of the San Fernando Valley, which was well populated. And Norma Jeane would say urgently, ‘Pull off here! Pull off here!' And away we went.”

But Norma Jeane's emotional demands could also be insatiable.

“She was so sensitive and insecure, and I realized I wasn't prepared to handle her,” Dougherty admitted. “Her feelings were very easily hurt. She thought I was mad at her if I didn't kiss her good-bye every time I left
the house. When we had an argument—and there were plenty—I'd often say, ‘Just shut up!' and go out and sleep on the couch…. I thought I knew what she wanted, but what I thought was never what she wanted.”

Though the Selective Service had called in many of Dougherty's friends and former classmates, he was exempt from the draft as long as he held his strategic employment at Lockheed. But without saying anything to Norma Jeane, Dougherty admits, “I went out and began the process of enlisting in the navy.” When Norma Jeane heard of Dougherty's plans she became distraught.

“Oh, honey,” Dougherty recalls her crying, “Please don't do this! Your job at Lockheed is important! Please don't!”

Disturbed by her hysteria, Dougherty asked the enlistment officer to tear up his application papers, and he continued working at Lockheed.

Dougherty claims that he “felt guilty about not being more involved with the fighting and taking the risks nearly all my schoolmates were taking.” But his next attempt at seeking sanctuary from Norma Jeane's demands had little relationship to the war: “I went down to the local fire department and asked if there were any openings. There were, and I filled out an application.”

Fighting fires instead of the Axis powers offered the best of both possible worlds. Lucky Jim would spend several days a week at home with the wife he loved but “wasn't prepared to handle,” and he would spend several sequential days and nights on duty at the fire department—where all he might have to fight were infernos. But when Norma Jeane learned about the application at the fire department, she was burning mad.

“She was angry about it,” Dougherty said, “She seemed to think we'd got all that settled when I applied for the navy.”

“You'll lose your deferment!” she bitterly complained, and he asked the fire department to tear up that application as well.

Dougherty has memories of Norma Jeane's unpredictable mood swings. Sometimes she would be quiet and withdrawn; at other times she would be aggressive and extroverted. “With friends she was often quiet and more of a listener, far more of an introvert than I could ever be,” he recalls. But Dougherty would see another aspect of his wife when they had friends over and Norma Jeane asked them to bring dance records. After dinner the carpet would be rolled back, and Dougherty would be amazed to see the instant metamorphosis that would take place. As soon as the needle hit the shellac she'd be transformed into an erotic bombshell of rhythmic grace. Dougherty would grow increasingly jealous as she cut in and danced
with all the male guests, giggling and obviously enjoying the attention she received.

Buddies told Dougherty about the merchant marine. He had learned that there were frequent home leaves between trips, and in midsummer of 1943, a little more than a year after their wedding, Dougherty told Norma Jeane that he had definitely made up his mind—he was joining the merchant marine. That night there was a terrible scene. “It was a bad one, the worst I could remember since we were married,” Dougherty reluctantly recalled. “Norma Jeane threw herself frantically at me, begging me to make her pregnant so that she ‘would have a piece of me, in case something happened.' She seemed to fear, now that she had me and her life had a direction for the first time, that it would end suddenly—that she would be cheated again by life the way she had been so many times before. I explained to her that if anything did happen, the child might end up like she did—with a mother who couldn't support it because of the pressures, and it would wind up in an institution. But she wouldn't agree, and she cried and wept all night. Perhaps I was too harsh—too insensitive to her needs….”

The day Dougherty left to report to the merchant marine in San Pedro, California, Norma Jeane was hysterical. She was so distressed that Dougherty feels he wouldn't have been able to leave her had she not been left in the care of his mother, Ethel. After a couple of days at the Maritime Training Base on nearby Catalina Island, Dougherty was allowed to phone home, and Norma Jeane was thrilled to hear the sound of his voice. “You would have thought I'd been gone for a year,” he vividly remembered.

When he called Norma Jeane to tell her that he was to be stationed with a training unit on Catalina and she could live with him in Avalon, he recalled that she let out a shout of joy that could have been heard from Van Nuys to Catalina without the aid of a telephone.

In September of 1943 they found an apartment in Avalon, on the side of the bay that overlooks the harbor. Dougherty had been assigned as a physical instructor to new recruits, and he worked regular hours and was able to return to the apartment in the evenings. The wartime population on the island was predominantly male. The merchant marine, the OSS, and the marines had virtually commandeered Catalina as a training ground, and the few women who lived there were either old ladies who remained in their homes for the duration, or the few wives of officers and instructors in permanent training companies. Ninety percent of the wartime population consisted of virile males isolated on an island where the
few women were mostly old, plain, and married. “Those hordes of sex-starved marines and sailors crowded onto that small island with us suddenly loomed as a major threat,” Dougherty said.

He remembers the Saturday night Stan Kenton and his band came over to play at a dance for the servicemen in the Avalon Casino Ballroom. “Norma Jeane was very excited and got into a tight white summer dress and spent hours over her hair. This drawn-out getting-ready ritual had begun soon after we were married. She could spend an hour deciding what to wear and just as long bathing. Norma Jeane would drive me crazy getting ready. I don't think she really knew how long a minute was, or an hour. She thought time was a rubber band. Well, when we finally got to the dance, I swung into a few steps of a swing version of ‘The Peanut Vendor' with Norma Jeane, and almost immediately felt a tap on my shoulder. A marine cut in and I lost sight of Norma Jeane for more than an hour. She was having a ball, of course. Hell, she was the belle of the ball.

“I couldn't be sure, but Norma Jeane must have danced with every one of those guys at the dance during the three or four hours we were there, because they were all cutting in on each other. It was the first taste I'd had of her appeal to a large group, and I must admit I was shaken by the experience. I'll even grant I got a bit jealous…. I felt threatened.”

But for Norma Jeane it was a dream come true, and there was no way that Lucky Jim could have fully comprehended his young bride's cache of daydreams—dreams she scarcely understood herself.

Eighteen months after their wedding, Jim Dougherty shipped out. Though he could have stayed on as a physical trainer at Catalina, he admits that he requested sea duty. He would like to believe that Norma Jeane never learned that it was his decision and not the merchant marine's. In December he sailed for the South Pacific on the freighter
Julia S. DuMont
. He had signed up for over a year at sea.

In the winter, when the damp fog rolls in and enshrouds Catalina, the island takes on a surreal sense of separation from time and circumstance, even in the best of times and circumstances. But the Christmas season was always a difficult time for Norma Jeane, who was left alone in the apartment overlooking Avalon Bay. The mournful wail of the foghorn must have echoed her resounding sense of rejection by the man she had once given her heart to. In a letter that was postmarked in Avalon six weeks before Dougherty received it in Townsville, Australia, Norma Jeane
told him she couldn't bear the thought of him being so far away, and that she could “see nothing from the porch at Avalon but fog.”

Norma Jeane from the orphanage belonged to nobody again, and she couldn't see her way. But on a clear day, when the sun shimmered on the ocean and the seas danced with gold and lavender colors, she could see the nearby mainland's glimmering shore. When the fog lifted she could see that it was on the mainland's golden strand that the other person belonged, that other person whose name she still didn't know.

T
hough his back condition and a history of unstable health should have disqualified him from military service, Jack Kennedy's father used his influence to have his son granted a commission as an ensign in the naval reserve. Ensign Jack Kennedy's first active duty assignment was at ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C.

When her brother arrived in the capital in October 1941, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy was a reporter for the
Washington Times-Herald
, and it was “Kick” who introduced Jack to the
Times-Herald
columnist Inga Arvad. Arvad's column “Did You Happen to See…?” was a gossipy interview piece with varied Washington personalities. When Arvad happened to see Ensign Jack Kennedy of ONI, she recalled being enthralled: “He had the charm that makes birds come out of the trees. And when he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering, but exuding animal magnetism…. His bestseller
Why England Slept
had been published and my boss Cissy Patterson said, ‘Get an interview for your column with young Jack Kennedy'—I did!”

The “Did You Happen to See Jack Kennedy?” column appeared in the
Washington Times-Herald
of November 27, 1941. It read:

Another good listener was J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief suspected that Inga Arvad had been sent to Washington as a Nazi spy. “We had microphones planted in her apartment and a tap on her telephone,” Hoover's assistant, William Sullivan, stated.

John White, Kick Kennedy's beau of the hour, said of Arvad, “She was very smart—certainly smart enough to be a spy—but also extremely loving…. She was adorable, just adorable. She looked adorable and was. She was totally woman. She was gorgeous, luscious—
luscious
is the word. Like a lot of icing on the cake…. What was it that attracted Jack? Oh…sex!”

Initially, the FBI had no idea of the identity of the Nordic beauty's mysterious lover, who was seen frequently staying the night in her apartment at 1600 Sixteenth Street. The surveillance agent described him as “a Naval Ensign who wore a gray overcoat with raglan sleeves and gray tweed trousers. He does not wear a hat, and has blonde curly hair which is always tousled…known only as ‘Jack'.” Bugs planted in the apartment revealed that he called her “Inga Binga,” and she called him “Jacko Tobacco.”

When it was discovered that the suspected Nazi spy's lover was Ensign Jack Kennedy of ONI, the FBI chief's alarm sounded. Jack's assignment at Naval Intelligence was decoding secret naval dispatches and preparing a daily update and position report of operations for Naval Command. J. Edgar Hoover sent out an urgent request for strict surveillance, which included interception of Inga Arvad's mail, twenty-four-hour visual surveillance, phone taps, room bugs, burglary, and the solicitation of information regarding her past.

According to the voluminous Arvad/JFK FBI files, it was during her acting and modeling days in Germany that Inga became socially involved with the Nazi hierarchy—becoming a close friend of Rudolf Hess and an acquaintance of Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels. It was at Hermann Göring's wedding that she met the best man—Adolf Hitler. Hitler, who referred to her as “the perfect Nordic beauty,” invited her to sit with him in his box at the 1936 Olympic Games.

When Rear Admiral Wilkinson, the director of Naval Intelligence, was
informed by the FBI that Ensign Jack Kennedy was having an affair with a suspected spy, he became “so upset over the situation that you might say he was really frantic,” revealed Captain Hunter, Jack's ONI section chief. “He wanted to get Kennedy out as quietly as possible…. He was very frightened at the time—very upset over the whole situation.”

Rear Admiral Wilkinson wanted to have Ensign Kennedy discharged from the Navy; however, it was ultimately decided to quickly transfer him to a less sensitive assignment, and he was told to report to a desk job at the navy base in Charleston, where he was restricted from traveling beyond a seventy-mile radius. Jack Kennedy later confided to
PT-109
author Robert Donovan, “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde, and they thought she was a spy!” But the move to Charleston didn't put an end to the relationship. Continued surveillance revealed that “Inga Binga” was visiting “Jacko Tobacco” in South Carolina. Using the alias “Barbara White,” she traveled to Charleston on February 6, 1942, and checked in at the Fort Sumter Hotel. Both the FBI and naval security were trailing them and reported that Ensign Kennedy arrived at the hotel at 5:30
P.M.
in his 1940 Buick convertible and went to Inga's room, where he remained until the next morning.

When J. Edgar Hoover learned that Jack Kennedy's transfer hadn't ended the affair, he called Joe Kennedy and warned him that his son was in serious trouble. According to Hoover's assistant William Sullivan, the FBI chief had Ensign Kennedy transferred to the South Pacific “for security reasons”; however, when Kennedy returned from the South Pacific as a war hero, it helped launch his political career—not exactly what Hoover had in mind.

In July 1942, Kathleen Kennedy took over Inga Arvad's column at the
Times-Herald
, and through the machinations of Joe Kennedy it was arranged for Inga to move to Southern California, where she became a ghostwriter for Sheilah Graham's syndicated
Los Angeles Times
gossip column about Hollywood—where secrets were more banal.

 

While Pearl Harbor had been a disaster for some, it was a boon for the movie industry. Gas rationing allowed the average American family to go little farther than the neighborhood theater for entertainment, and in the pre-TV era every movie was accompanied by a newsreel that rendered the war visually comprehensible to the home-front audience. In the 1940s
moviegoing was still cheap and had become an American habit, leading to big film grosses and big profits. Films affected morale, and the Roosevelt administration considered Hollywood film production as crucial to the war effort as some of the war production industries. “E for Effort” pennants proudly waved from the rooftops of the studio soundstages.

Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, once the home of the Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies, was invaded by the army's First Motion Picture Unit and became the center of production of public-information films. One of the commanding officers was Lieutenant Ronald Reagan, who while drilling the troops jokingly threatened to attack MGM and capture the Thalberg Building. Reagan referred to the studio as Fort Roach, and many of Hollywood's talented artists and technicians were stationed there. In the fall of 1944, Lieutenant Reagan sent out a crew from Fort Roach to photograph women contributing to the war effort in strategic jobs. One of the photo assignments was at the Radioplane Company, located at the Glendale Metropolitan Airport. Among the photo crew sent to Radioplane was still photographer Corporal David Conover. Conover's keen eye irised in on a shapely young girl whose overalls seemed to complement the alls they were over. He was so taken by her attractiveness that he unhesitatingly approached her and introduced himself. When asked if she had done any modeling, “Just clay” was Norma Jeane's response.

When Norma Jeane closed up the Avalon apartment, she had moved in with Dougherty's mother, Ethel, who had helped her obtain her job at Radioplane, where Norma Jeane worked a ten-hour shift inspecting parachutes used in the recovery of target drones.

“I wore overalls in the factory,” Marilyn later recalled. “I was surprised that they insisted on this. Putting a girl in overalls is like having her work in tights, particularly if a girl knows how to wear them….”

Conover noticed that she knew how to wear them, and it was at Radioplane that a flash-gun wedding took place between Norma Jeane and the camera.

“Her response to the camera then was amazing,” Conover recalled. “I was so excited I could hardly hold my camera steady.”

“Am I really photogenic?” she asked.

Not only was she photogenic, she was “a hummmm-dinger!” Conover recalled. Returning to Radioplane with the prints, Conover noted in his diary that she had a problem with stuttering, just as he did, and even with her face smudged by dirt, her eyes held something that he found
intriguing. It struck him as “incongruous that such a lovely creature was working on an assembly line.”

“Say, you d-don't belong here,” Conover stammered when he returned with the photos.

“Just where do I be-b-belong?” she asked with a puzzled look.

“On a magazine cover!” Conover unhesitatingly replied.

Norma Jeane wrote Grace Goddard:

But “strictly business” was not the way Corporal Conover recalled it in his memoirs. According to Conover, who was adept at retouching faded images, they had a brief affair.

Norma Jeane's half sister, Berniece, recalls hearing about the army photographer when Norma Jeane visited in the fall of 1944. Norma Jeane took the money she was saving for the future Dougherty house and spent it on a trip east to see Grace Goddard and Berniece. Grace had left West Virginia, where Doc was working, and had taken a temporary job in Chicago at a film laboratory. “She had developed a drinking problem and had to get away from Doc,” according to Bebe Goddard.

“One of the reasons Norma Jeane blew her savings and went to Chicago to visit Grace,” Bebe believes, “was that after Jim left she was sort of lost and having a bad time. Normie and Jim's mother didn't get along all that well and she felt very much alone.” Norma Jeane knew that Grace held the answers to questions she had never been able to formulate as a child, and many of them had to do with the picture that had once hung on the wall of her mother's room, which Grace had carefully packed away. Ac
cording to Bebe, during the trip to Chicago, Grace gave Norma Jeane the picture of her father, Stan Gifford.

After visiting Grace, Norma Jeane went to Detroit to see Berniece, the half sister she had never seen. “It was really Grace who coordinated this visit,” Berniece remembers. “When Grace wrote me that a visit was possible, I answered, ‘Sure, I'd love to have Norma Jeane, love to!' And then Norma Jeane wrote me and told me that she'd be there, what train, what time—everything.”

Berniece had married Paris Miracle and moved from Kentucky to Detroit during the war, where Paris found employment in the Ford assembly line building military vehicles. “Paris and I walked out to the tracks and stood waiting while the train screeched to a stop…. All the passengers stepping off looked so ordinary, and then all of a sudden there was this gorgeous girl—so pretty and fresh. Well, there was no chance of missing her!”

As they drove to the Miracles' apartment, Berniece recalls that she and Norma Jeane perched on the edge of their seats and stared at each other. “Every now and then our arms would fly around each other in a hug, and we'd look in each other's eyes and say how happy we were. We didn't have anything very original or profound to say. We were both so excited we were almost out of our minds…. We were overwhelmed at finally getting to see each other.”

During the short visit, Berniece had many questions about Gladys, the mother she had so briefly known, and Norma Jeane wanted to know about Jackie, the dead half brother she had never seen. “You know, I don't think Mother can believe that Jackie is really dead,” Norma Jeane said. “Grace told me that she still refuses to believe it.” Berniece observed that in her letters from Gladys, their mother never mentioned Jackie's name.

 

In a letter to Grace after their visit, Norma Jeane noted that David Conover wanted to take more pictures; however, Dougherty was coming home over the Christmas holidays, and Norma Jeane wrote, “I would rather not work when Jimmie was here. So he [Conover] said he would wait…I love Jimmy so very much, honestly I don't think there is another man alive like him! He really is awfully sweet.”

Norma Jeane was waiting for Dougherty at the Glendale Depot when his train arrived from San Francisco, and for a while things were as they used to be. That first night they headed for “the most luxurious motor
lodge on Ventura Boulevard, the La Fonda,” Dougherty remembered. “Norma Jeane had bought a black nightgown for the occasion, and we rarely left our room.”

Over the holidays they went to familiar places—movies at the Grauman's Chinese, Pop's Willow Lake, the Coconut Grove, or the homes of old friends, but as his Christmas leave ran out Norma Jeane was becoming distant and more and more melancholy. “She grew increasingly morose and a kind of dread took hold of her. She didn't want to talk about or think about my leaving,” Dougherty observed. “I knew that she considered my shipping out again as another rejection.”