Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (18 page)

Throughout her life, Norma Jeane was haunted by the thought of Gladys, who outlived her by twenty-two years. As she later said, there had never been a chance for a normal mother-daughter relationship, and the fear of sharing a family mental illness compounded the pointed resentment her childhood memories evoked. The actress Marilyn Monroe never took the risk of permitting a situation in which Gladys could again reject or withdraw from her. But this engendered a pattern with motherly women in her life: need clashed with fear, and to forestall pain she often rejected others first. Ashamed and avoiding reminders of her past, she tried in vain to forget her mother, although from afar she covered Gladys’s material needs when she could.

*    *    *

That evening Norma Jeane and André stopped at a country inn. There, just as she had sought comfort in Jim’s arms after the (real or feigned) rejection by her father, so now she reached out to another strong, older man. “In my dreams I had explored her body,” de Dienes wrote tremulously years later; “reality far surpassed my imagination. . . . [And then] I realized she was crying.” The tears, he saw, bespoke only Norma Jeane’s happiness, her pleasure, her relief after the tensions with Dougherty and the difficult reunion with Gladys. She was not mired in remorse, for throughout the rest of the journey she was “playful and provocative” (thus de Dienes), an energetic, eager lover who played peekaboo with sheets and nightgowns and who teased before satisfying. Of that night, and of this brief affair in early 1946, Norma Jeane later said nothing.

But the romance with de Dienes marked a turning point. He was her first sexual partner outside marriage (or the second, if David Conover’s dubious account is accepted). But apart from his obvious physical attractions and the fact that he was an older man (like Dougherty, a kind of surrogate father), he had—like Conover—won her over simply because he was a photographer. The men behind the still cameras in these early years were like the later cinematographers, producers and agents. They could present her to the world in literally the best light; she needed them, was grateful to them, felt she owed them and repaid them with herself, the reality whose image they were promoting and capturing for anonymous others.

This was the beginning of an important pattern in her life, for she was excited by the act of being photographed. “Making love” to the camera is both satisfying and safe: one may fantasize anyone or everyone, but the moment is unthreatening. This is not so uncommon among models and actors, whose desire to be seen, recognized, approved and accepted, whose longing to please and to gratify others, is at the foundation of their craft.

In this regard, she was very like Jean Harlow, who flirted (sometimes outrageously) with photographers. At an outdoor session with photographer Ted Allan, for example, Harlow was once handed a fishnet to throw over a white dress. She promptly stripped naked and stood wearing only the fishnet. “Isn’t this better?” she asked Allan, who later thought that Harlow “figured that if I were turned on, I’d
take better pictures. I realized then that she always needed something personal—that feeling of being liked. It made her feel secure.” Norma Jeane was not so different from the woman who had been constantly set before her as an idol.

Observed and admired for her body, each wished to please the gazer, to gratify those who desired her. Sex for Norma Jeane became the logical extension of a character trait within her from childhood and throughout her school years: it was a simple attempt to win approval. The girl who dreamed of worshipers before her nakedness could now give herself in the flesh, could gratify their adoration. To Norma Jeane this was not a matter of immodesty or immorality, nor did she ever seem to feel guilty. She was indeed, as David Conover had said, “doing what came naturally.”

Norma Jeane returned to Los Angeles a more experienced young woman, and this must have been evident in her manner. She found a furious husband who demanded that she make a choice between him and her career. She argued that she had no reason to be a housewife when there had been no husband around for two years; besides, she insisted, what was wrong with modeling? The answer to that was twofold: Dougherty wanted a sedate housewife, not a glamour-queen-in-the-making; he also wanted children. A new cold war infected the Dougherty household that spring of 1946, especially when (thus Jim) his wife “nearly went berserk—she thought she was pregnant.” Perhaps they both thought to question the paternity; in any case, the onset of her period resolved the matter.

In late January, Jim was recalled to duty in the Pacific, where the Merchant Marines helped to retransport men and supplies back to Europe and America after the Allied victory; he said that he expected her to have become wiser by the time he returned later that year.

When she heard that Norma Jeane was alone, Grace occasionally invited her to Van Nuys for a meal or a weekend visit. But Norma Jeane invariably declined. This may have been partly a desire to further her independence from the past, but there was another, more ominous, reason for her distance. By 1946, Grace was a seasoned alcoholic, sometimes inappropriately giddy and verbose, frequently gloomy and remote. Like Gladys, Grace too was now unpredictable.

From her small apartment beneath Ana Lower’s, Norma Jeane
went out to work as a model. Emmeline Snively now had a wide variety of photographs to circulate round the offices of Los Angeles artists and photographers, and her telephone rang almost daily with offers.

In February, Norma Jeane posed for the Scottish photographer William Burnside, who was struck by “the lost look in the middle of a smile” and, like Conover and de Dienes, was charmed by her cooperation and her alacrity to please. “A kiss took weeks to achieve,” Burnside said years later; from there it was a short route to closer intimacy. First she loved the camera, according to Burnside: “it soothed her;” then she loved the man who held it. But Norma Jeane was no rapacious starlet offering sex as barter to advance her career: Burnside remembered “her shyness and sense of insecurity. She did not like to be touched too soon. One could not even think of sexual conquest by force.”

Norma Jeane herself was undergoing a rapid transformation. The awkwardness, the concern for acceptance, the occasional stutter and the hesitation were still there, but now she was giving herself—simply visually, to the camera, or frankly sexually, to the photographer. In the case of Burnside and perhaps others, a professional’s talent secured her gratitude, and her gratitude was expressed with her body. But Burnside soon ended their romance. She sent him a lyric:

I could have loved you once
,
and even said it

But you went away
,

A long way away
.

When you came back it was too late

And love was a forgotten word
.

Remember?

In February and March 1946 she posed for the artist Earl Moran and for the photographer Joseph Jasgur, and in both cases her relationship was very warm but strictly platonic. Moran paid her ten dollars an hour, photographing her in a variety of dress and semidress: as a bathing beauty in skimpy two-piece swimsuits; drying herself after a bath; bare-breasted, hanging up her lingerie to dry. From these snapshots he then drew charcoal and chalk pictures he sold to Brown & Bigelow, the major calendar-art company in America. “She liked to pose,” Moran
said years later. “For her it was acting, and emotionally she did everything right.”

Jasgur, a celebrity photographer known for his contributions to
Silver Screen, Photoplay
and the
Hollywood Citizen-News
, agreed to Emmeline Snively’s request for test photos of Norma Jeane. One afternoon, he opened the door of his Hollywood studio apartment to find “a shy girl, nothing like a typical model, all breathless and anxious.” She was also over an hour late, which surprised him, for it seemed incompatible with her obvious earnestness about her career; he later thought her tardiness was related to “her uncertainty that she was presentable or acceptable.”

Norma Jeane told Jasgur that she had no money to pay for the photographs and that she lacked even the price of a good meal—surely an exaggeration given her full work schedule that winter. But Jasgur was a friend of Snively, and while the first negatives dried that March 10 evening, he bought her supper. Their sessions continued throughout that month—atop the Hollywood sign and at Zuma Beach, where he took color as well as black-and-white photos, capturing her friskiness as she drew hearts on the wet sand.

Laszlo Willinger also made some extraordinary photos of Norma Jeane that year.

When she saw a camera—any camera, she lit up and was totally different. The moment the shot was over, she fell back into her not very interesting position. But she had a talent to make people feel sorry for her, and she exploited it to the best of her ability—even people who had been around and knew models fell for this “Help me” pose.

With her husband away and the circle of her acquaintances widening, it would not have been surprising to find this pretty, lonely nineteen-year-old available to a sharp admirer. But the situation was quite different. The actor Ken DuMain, as well as Norma Jeane’s colleague Lydia Bodrero, remembered that Snively’s models often double- and triple-dated with friends in the spring of 1946. Evenings with Norma Jeane might include a movie and a ride out to the beach, or a few hours dancing at a club. She did not have a reputation for easy virtue, although she did go out with several young men more than once. DuMain recalled
escorting her to a Sunset Strip nightclub she especially liked, “where a female impersonator named Ray Bourbon attracted crowds of admirers. She loved this sort of thing and was great fun to be with. There was also an innate sweetness and decency about her that no atmosphere or joke could alter.”

Even had she been so inclined, the opportunities would have been short-circuited by a new and awkward circumstance in her life. Piteous letters arrived almost daily in Norma Jeane’s mailbox that spring, for Gladys begged to come and live with her. She would be no trouble, Gladys promised; she would find a job. In April, Norma Jeane sent cash to cover the journey, and soon they were sharing the one bed and two small rooms on Nebraska Avenue. This would be Norma Jeane’s last brief and ineffective attempt to establish a relationship with her mother.

Such was the domestic situation Jim found when he returned on a brief furlough in April. Arriving at the apartment, he found Gladys staring at him blankly: it was clear, as he recalled years later, that Gladys by this time was not a woman who could care for herself. But neither could her daughter assume such a responsibility.

The precise nature of Gladys’s mental and emotional problems remains vague, for the few medical reports remaining among family records are inconclusive. On the one hand, she was alert, aware of her surroundings and her identity, and she was not violent; she did not suffer from hallucinations, paranoia or frank schizophrenia. Contrariwise, there was a retreat from the ordinary business of living; she seemed, in other words, unable or unwilling to maintain ordinary human relations, much less steady employment: in general terms, she seems to have suffered a loss of affect. “She wandered,” Eleanor Goddard recalled, “and she was unpredictable. She was docile, but she was not ‘there.’ ” Years later, more sophisticated medical examinations might have located a biochemical imbalance or even a benign tumor; psychological counseling might have disclosed chronic, treatable phobias or a guilt complex; and drug treatment might have provided help. But in 1946 there were no human or financial resources for Gladys.

The immediate corollary of her living with Norma Jeane was clear: there was no room for three, and so after only a few moments Jim departed to spend the two-day leave with his mother. In light of their
earlier disputes over her career and his plans for their future, he interpreted Gladys’s presence as a convenient way for Norma Jeane to prepare for a separation. She was “calculating,” it seemed to him. “She had made sure that Gladys would be living there on Nebraska Avenue, that her mother would have my place in the only bed in the apartment.” But this assessment may have been too harsh: unaware of Gladys’s earlier request in Portland, he felt resentful, summarily excluded from contact or conversation with his wife about their marriage. To him, Gladys seemed simply “a woman without much emotion,” not to say an unwelcome intrusion. He returned to Merchant Marine duty without seeing Norma Jeane again.

In late April, Gladys entered a Northern California clinic, where her daughter struggled to send money to provide supplements for her mother’s basic care. Such contributions never ceased, although Norma Jeane’s primary concern was now her career.

During early 1946, she spoke several times with Emmeline Snively about the possibility of working in the movies. Conover, de Dienes, Burnside and Moran had told her that this was not a vain hope, that she was a natural for the studio “stables” of starlets. Annually, hundreds were tested and signed low-paying contracts. Sometimes they were cast in bit parts, a handful were trained and groomed for small speaking roles and, for the very few fortunate, there was eventual graduation to supporting-player status.

Among these aspirants, only a minority became stars. The studios knew that public taste was fickle and that great success rarely endured. Apprentices had to be available, a pool of “talent” from which producers could select the new starlets. Among the accepted norms, one was unwritten but taken for granted. An unmarried young woman was more favorably regarded for possible advancement in the system: pregnancy, after all, could cost a studio enormous sums if a picture had to be canceled or recast during production. Eager starlets had to be ready for a variety of sacrifices.