Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (6 page)

“I’m just trying to warm myself,” Roxanne remarked.

Not certain what her schoolmate wanted of her, Norma Jeane
twisted herself so that her back faced the girl. Roxanne persevered. “Do you want a back rub?” she asked. She began massaging Norma Jeane’s shoulders in soft, soothing movements. She continued in silence, her fingers inching their way down Norma Jeane’s back, and up under her pajama top, then down again until they reached the upper part of her backside.

“Why are you doing this to me, Roxanne?” Norma Jeane asked.

“Relax,” whispered the girl, “just relax.”

Norma Jeane moved away until she reached the edge of the bed and could go no farther. Without breaking her rhythm, Roxanne followed and snuggled even closer.

It became clear to Norma Jeane that Roxanne, a year older and far more experienced, had overcome the objections of other visiting girlfriends. Norma Jeane was no match for her seducer. Yet she was determined to make one final effort. She turned around and faced her bedmate. “I want you to go back to your side of the room,” she insisted in as officious a tone as she could muster.

“I guess my voice had no conviction,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “because she not only didn’t budge, she proceeded to unbutton my pajama top and her own as well. She then rolled me onto my back and out of my bottoms. She began to kiss me and didn’t stop until I began to cry.” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm she couldn’t recall exactly how she felt about the experience, only that she never returned to
Roxanne Smith’s home and in addition cut off all further contact with her in school.

“If anything,” said Marilyn, “I probably felt betrayed.”

In the fall of 1938, Norma Jeane went to live with (Edith) Ana Lower, Grace McKee Goddard’s fifty-eight-year-old aunt, at her two-family Nebraska Avenue home in Sawtelle, at the time a lower-middle-class section of Los Angeles. A divorcee, “Aunt Ana,” more than anybody else, became Norma Jeane’s true surrogate mother. “She was the first person in the world I ever really loved, and who in turn loved me,” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm. “She was a wonderful human
being. She never hurt me, not once. She was very spiritual, always consulting Mary Baker Eddy’s
Science and Health
, the Christian Science handbook, constantly reading me excerpts from it and, like the Bolenders, forever dragging me to church. But it didn’t bother me. Aunt Ana was all light and kindness. I used to tell her all my little dreams and fantasies about wanting to become an actress. ‘You’re going to be a star, Norma Jeane,’ she’d say. She wasn’t rich. She rented out the bottom floor of her house to make money. And though she didn’t have much, she paid for my voice, dance, and piano lessons. Nobody else ever cared what became of me. She did. The sad thing is she died in March 1948, before I began to make a name for myself, so she never knew whether she was right or wrong about my future. But had she lived, she would’ve been thrilled for me.”

Living with Ana had only one drawback: she refused to install a telephone in her home. She maintained that people would call at all hours, and she didn’t want to be disturbed. This made it difficult for Norma Jeane to have friends over for playdates. Yet Ana’s essential goodness and her openness afforded Norma Jeane a sense of security she hadn’t felt before. It was Ana who revealed the identity of the man in the photograph Norma Jeane had seen in her mother’s bedroom, telling her all she knew about C. Stanley Gifford. It was also Aunt Ana who informed her that Gladys Baker, her mother, had recently attempted to escape from the mental hospital at Norwalk and as a result had been transferred to the more secure Agnew State Asylum in San Francisco.

On June 1, 1939, Norma Jeane’s thirteenth birthday, she accompanied Ana Lower and Grace Goddard to San Francisco for a visit with her mother. Recalling the encounter for Dr. Fromm, Marilyn said, “She looked as though she’d been lobotomized. She wasn’t there. I mean she was there physically but not mentally. She didn’t speak, just sat on the bed, looking frightened and lost.”

On the train ride back to Los Angeles, Norma Jeane learned from Ana that she had an older half sister named Berniece, who had similarly just learned of Norma Jeane’s existence and had reached out to her
by way of a written note. Although Berniece and Norma Jeane didn’t meet until 1944 (after Berniece had married and become a mother), by the fall of 1939, they were in touch with each other via telephone and letter. Norma Jeane informed her half sister that she’d enrolled at Emerson Junior High School, where her favorite subjects became English literature and Spanish. Her least favorite: cooking. She enjoyed athletics, especially track and field. She’d joined the staff of the school newspaper and had developed an interest in acting. She looked forward to performing in school plays and thought that one day she might want to be in the movies. All in all, she sounded like a typical, happy-go-lucky teenager without a care in the world rather than a fatherless child whose schizophrenic mother was locked away in an insane asylum and whose foster father had sexually molested her.

Indeed, Norma Jeane was quickly blossoming into an early iteration of the famed actress and personality she would eventually become. Leaner and sporting darker curls than the later Monroe, she exuded a youthful beauty that, if not yet wondrous, was certainly noticeable. Boys her age (and older) had begun to pursue her. “She could be a bit shy and withdrawn at times, but for the most part, she absolutely glowed,” said a friend named Susan Ryder. “She was not only pretty but very bright. You could see it in her eyes. She also had great skin; the clearest, pinkest skin I’ve ever seen. It was silky and flawless. Then in the ninth grade, she began spilling out of her clothes. Not fat, just curves. She wore makeup and sweaters that were a size too small, accentuating her bustline. She couldn’t walk down the street without having some jerk in a passing car come to a screeching halt and start yelling and whistling at her out the window.”

Barbara Anthony, another playmate from this period, considered Norma Jeane “quite alluring and sensitive but thin-skinned and somewhat secretive. She didn’t talk much about her personal life. She did well in school. She was witty, but, as I say, she could be very thin-skinned. If you said something that rubbed her the wrong way, she’d let you know it.”

In 1940 Ana Lower suffered a mild heart attack, and Norma Jeane went back to the Odessa Avenue home of the Goddards. Given Doc Goddard’s sexual proclivities, the arrangement was far from ideal, but under the circumstances, it remained the most practical alternative. By that fall, Norma Jeane had entered the tenth grade at Van Nuys High School and had met James Edward Dougherty, the son of Edward and Ethel Dougherty, neighbors of the Goddards.
At age twenty, Jim Dougherty, truly “the boy next door,” cut a manly figure. He had blue eyes, light brown hair, and a muscular physique. A graduate of Van Nuys High, he had been student body president as well as a football star and member of the Maskers Drama Club. In addition, he owned his own car, a blue Ford coupe. Although he’d been offered a partial college scholarship, he had opted for a job at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, in Burbank, augmenting his income by working at a funeral home embalming corpses. When Lockheed offered to increase his salary, he quit the funeral home job.

At the time that Norma Jeane met him, Dougherty was dating three other girls, among them Doris Ingram, who’d been crowned Miss Santa Barbara. He nevertheless began driving his neighbors Bebe Goddard and Norma Jeane Baker to school every morning and hanging out with them on weekends. Each girl had a crush on Jimmy. In December 1941 Grace Goddard asked Dougherty to take Norma Jeane to a Christmas dance at Lockheed. There she was introduced to the future actor Robert Mitchum, then one of Jim’s coworkers. By the end of January 1942, Jim and Norma Jeane were going steady. A month later, Grace informed Norma Jeane that she and Doc, along with his children, would be moving to Huntington, West Virginia, where Doc had procured a lucrative position with an electronics firm. She also told her it would be best if Norma Jeane remained in California, especially now that she and Jim Dougherty were involved.

Looking back, Marilyn would tell Rose Fromm that once again she felt as though she’d been deserted. “It came as a blow,” she said. “Not that I necessarily wanted to go with them—rather, that I wasn’t given
a choice. When I thought about it, I remembered that though Daddy Doc never touched me again, he used to give me suggestive looks. Grace probably surmised it was only a matter of time before he tried something. Maybe she was jealous, or perhaps she just didn’t want to chance it.”

Having returned to Ana Lower’s Nebraska Avenue home, Norma Jeane withdrew from Van Nuys High School and enrolled at University High. She continued to see Jim Dougherty. What she didn’t know was that Grace Goddard, no doubt feeling guilty over having left Norma Jeane behind (and so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage), had conspired with Jim’s mother to have him propose to her. After they became engaged, Norma Jeane dropped out of University High, and in early June, she and Jim signed a one-year lease on a small cottage in Sherman Oaks. Ana Lower made Norma Jeane’s white embroidered wedding gown. The service in the Los Angeles home of friends of Grace Goddard took place on the evening of June 19, 1942, and was led by Reverend Benjamin Lingenfelder of the Christian Science Church. Aunt Ana walked the sixteen-year-old bride to the makeshift altar, where Jim Dougherty, in a rented white tuxedo, took over. Ana Lower paid for a wedding reception for thirty-five guests at an Italian-themed nightclub and restaurant called Florentine Gardens. The Bolenders attended, but Doc and Grace Goddard were conspicuously absent.

In March 1953, long after they were divorced, Jim Dougherty wrote an article for
Photoplay
magazine entitled “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” which began: “Our marriage was good . . . It’s seldom a man gets a bride like Marilyn . . . I wonder if she’s forgotten how much in love we really were.”

She evidently had forgotten, because she’d previously told Dr. Fromm that her marriage to Dougherty had been “a sham, a coupling of convenience.” On the surface, at the point she married him, she seemed at least moderately content. They didn’t go on a honeymoon, but the young couple went on weekend fishing expeditions
to Sherwood Lake in Ventura County, California. They took ski lessons together and attended college football games. They saw movies at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where Norma Jeane had gone as a child. They prepared picnic luncheons and frolicked on the beach at Malibu. And when they weren’t making love at home, they would have sex in the backseat of his car on the side streets and back roads up and down the San Fernando Valley.

Their sexual relationship proved to be less than satisfying for Norma Jeane. “For all the girls he’d supposedly had,” she informed Fromm, “he [Dougherty] didn’t seem to know very much. He didn’t believe in foreplay. It was slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. I knew even less than he did, so I thought it was mostly my fault. He’d fall asleep afterward, leaving me awake, frustrated, and angry. I began to suspect he might still be seeing Doris Ingram, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to complain. I wrote to Aunt Grace in West Virginia, by then a seasoned alcoholic, extolling the virtues of marriage. I sweetened my letters out of loyalty to Grace and in an effort to please her, which is more than she’d done for me.”

The Norma Jeane that Dougherty wed was still an unformed person. She had a beautiful face and figure. She was a mature sixteen-year-old in certain respects but a little girl in others. She’d had no childhood as such. In a way, there were two Norma Jeanes: One was the little girl whose dolls and stuffed animals were propped up on top of her chest of drawers “so they can see what’s going on.” The other Norma Jeane was a person of unpredictable moods. In her published memoir, Marilyn portrayed herself at this stage as being “divided” into two people: “One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody, the other was someone whose name I didn’t know.” In his
Photoplay
piece, Jim Dougherty depicted his former wife as possessing two distinct and very different personalities, which made her “a bit scary at times.” He blamed her lack of cohesion on her “impossible” childhood. “Now and again,” he wrote, “you’d catch glimpses of someone who had been unloved for too long, unwanted for too many years.”

Whatever chance the marriage might have had of surviving ended when Jim, about to be drafted into the army, joined the Maritime Services and went away to a merchant marine training base, finally winding up on Catalina Island, just off the Southern California coast. Norma Jeane, feeling a sense of abandonment, moved in with her mother-in-law and occasionally visited Catalina to be with her husband, but the visits terminated after she began working at the Radioplane Company in Burbank as a parachute inspector and paint sprayer. It was here, at the height of World War II, that she was “discovered” by US Army photographer David Conover, who’d been assigned by his commanding officer (Ronald Reagan, the future US president) to shoot pictures of women working to aid the war effort. Eventually penning a book titled
Finding Marilyn: A Remembrance
, Conover detailed first seeing her at Radioplane and asking if he could photograph her in a tight sweater rather than her work overalls. She obliged, and the die, as the saying goes, was cast. The photo appeared on the cover of
Yank
. Other pictures of Norma Jeane ran in
Stars and Stripes
, the US troop newspaper, which named her “Miss Cheesecake.” She was voted “the present all GIs would like to find in their Christmas stocking.” Conover’s book goes on to document his short-lived but memorable affair with the photogenic model. Norma Jeane, having moved out of her mother-in-law’s house and back in with Ana Lower, is depicted by Conover as having “a great body and enormous passion.”

In May 1976 Jim Dougherty was quoted in
People
magazine as claiming, “If I hadn’t gone into the merchant marine during World War II and been shipped off to the Pacific, Norma Jeane would still be Mrs. Dougherty today.” Had she survived long enough to read Dougherty’s comment, Marilyn Monroe would probably have deemed it an overblown case of wishful thinking. By the time he returned from the Pacific, his wife had undergone a dramatic change.