Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (19 page)

These facts of studio life were impressed on her not only by Snively and photographers but also by Grace, with whom Norma Jeane met at least once in April. The Dougherty marriage would have to be formally terminated if Norma Jeane hoped to be groomed for stardom. Grace had arranged Gladys’s initial hospitalization; she maneuvered her
guardianship of Norma Jeane; she decided the girl’s sojourn at the orphanage. She had planned the marriage to Jim Dougherty, and now she could abet its dissolution. Indeed, as Jim had said, “Grace had a lot to do with everything.” And so, on May 14, Norma Jeane was shipped from Ana Lower to another of Grace’s aunts—a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Minnie Willette, who lived most conveniently at 604 South 3rd Street in Las Vegas, where divorces could be obtained almost as easily as entrance to the local gambling casinos.

Two weeks later, on duty near Shanghai, Dougherty received a letter with a Nevada postmark: a lawyer named C. Norman Cornwall announced that Norma Jeane Dougherty had filed for divorce. “First she thought she had security with me,” Dougherty recalled thinking at that time, “and now she figures a studio contract can provide it better. There are a thousand-and-one girls who can sing and dance and look good, and she wants to be in the movies. Well, good luck to her.” Jim at once wired the appropriate government office in Los Angeles to cease sending monthly payments to his wife.

By the end of June, he was back in California, where Ana Lower gave him a telephone number. But Norma Jeane was not with Minnie: she was in a Las Vegas hospital, under treatment for a mouth infection.

At first Dougherty did not recognize her deep voice on the telephone—a tone due not to her medical condition, as he learned at once. “They tell me I have to lower my tone if I’m going to be in the movies,” she said candidly, adding at once: “The nurse brought me a letter a few days ago. Why did you cut off my allowance?”

“Look, kid,” Dougherty replied with equal candor, “this is the way it goes. You don’t pay for anything unless you’re getting it.” When she went on to say that she did not want to lose Jim, that they could still “date”—and that she was merely being practical about her career—he was adamant. “She thought we could live together without being married,” Dougherty said years later, “that we could go on just as before.” Unsure of her future, she was attempting a safe middle ground.

“Are you crazy?” Jim asked. “I want a wife and kids. You want a divorce, we’ll get a divorce. Then it’s over.”

And so it was. Charging Dougherty with the typical generic assertion of “extreme mental cruelty that has impaired the plaintiff’s health,” Norma Jeane filed a suit for divorce and was uncontested by
her husband. At two o’clock on the afternoon of September 13, 1946, Norma Jeane and Minnie appeared for a final hearing before District Judge A. S. Henderson in Las Vegas. After stating her name and Nevada address, the plaintiff answered a few questions put to her by her attorney:

“Is it your intention to make [Nevada] your home and permanent place of residence?”

“Yes.”

“Has that been your intention since your arrival in May?”

“Yes.”

“You intend to remain here for an indefinite period of time?”

“Yes.”

“You have stated that your husband treated you with extreme cruelty without just cause or provocation on your part. Will you tell the Court some of the acts upon which you base this cruelty charge?”

“Well, in the first place, my husband didn’t support me and he objected to my working, criticized me for it and he also had a bad temper and would fly into rages and he left me on three different occasions and criticized me and embarrassed me in front of my friends and he didn’t try to make a home for me.”

“What effect did this have on your health?”

“It upset me and made me nervous.”

“So much so that you cannot live with him under the conditions and enjoy good health?”

“Yes.”

“Is a reconciliation possible?”

“No.”

After less than five minutes in court, Judge Henderson slammed his gavel, saying, “A decree of divorce is granted,” even as he rose from his chair. The marriage was dissolved at that moment. James Edward Dougherty countersigned the decree two weeks later, giving Norma Jeane Dougherty her freedom and his 1935 Ford coupe. They neither met nor spoke again. “I married and was divorced,” she told a reporter four years later. “It was a mistake and he has since remarried.” That was her last public statement on the matter.

Considering her testimony, the State of Nevada might have charged Norma Jeane with perjury, for she had not in fact lived there without
interruption from May 14 to September 13, as the divorce law required. During the summer, she had slipped quietly back to Los Angeles, where Emmeline Snively had contacted her friend Helen Ainsworth. A severe, two-hundred-pound agent familiarly known as “Cupid,” Ainsworth managed the West Coast office of a talent agency known as the National Concert Artists Corporation. As a favor to her old friend Snively, Ainsworth arranged an introduction for Norma Jeane with an executive at the Twentieth Century–Fox Studios on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.
²

Precisely at the appointed hour, ten-thirty on the morning of Wednesday, July 17, 1946, Norma Jeane arrived at Ben Lyon’s office. Then forty-five, Lyon had a long stage and screen career behind him, most notably as the hero of the picture firmly establishing Jean Harlow’s career—Howard Hughes’s production of
Hell’s Angels
in 1930. Lyon and his wife, actress Bebe Daniels, had lived in England during World War II (during which he served with distinction in the Royal Air Force), and on their return to America he was instantly engaged by Fox as recruiter of new talent and director of casting. He handed Norma Jeane a section of the script for
Winged Victory
and asked her to read a few lines; in Fox’s 1944 wartime melodrama, the words had been spoken by Judy Holliday, another slightly breathless blonde with great potential for comedy. Nothing is known of this first meeting, nor of Norma Jeane’s reading, but Lyon asked her to return for a film test.

And so on July 19, 1946, Norma Jeane was led to one of the sets being built for a new Betty Grable picture,
Mother Wore Tights
. There she was introduced to the great cinematographer Leon Shamroy (who had won Academy Awards for
The Black Swan, Wilson
and
Leave Her to Heaven
); to veteran makeup artist Allan Snyder (who supervised the cosmetics for, among others, Fox’s major stars Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell and Alice Faye); to director Walter Lang (known for glossy, popular entertainments); and to wardrobe designer Charles LeMaire. Lyon had summoned four of the studio’s best technicians for the test scene.

But contrary to popular belief, this was no simple task. “She’d been modeling,” recalled Snyder, “and so she came to us knowing everything about everything, or so she believed. I remember thinking that here was a very determined and ambitious girl, despite her obvious nervousness.” Norma Jeane demanded that Snyder apply heavy makeup, which was entirely inappropriate for a Technicolor test, and when Shamroy saw this he put down his large cigar and bellowed Snyder’s nickname: “Whitey, what the hell have you got on that face? We can’t photograph her that way! Take this girl downstairs, wash the damn stuff off, do her face the way you know it ought to be and bring her back up!”

Her anxiety, and what Norma Jeane knew was her tactical error, at once caused her to stutter and perspire, and (as often throughout her life) embarrassment and fear of failure caused red blotches to emerge on her face. To her great relief, she was then told this would be a silent test: only the merits of her appearance would be presented for the approval of production chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Norma Jeane was given a series of simple commands, the small crew of miracle workers set to their task, a hundred-foot roll of Technicolor stock was put in the camera and Lang cried “Action!”

There was silence on the set. Wearing a floor-length crinoline gown, Norma Jeane walked back and forth. She sat on a high stool. She lit a cigarette, stubbed it out, rose and walked toward a stage window. A remarkable transformation occurred: while the camera was in operation, she showed not a trace of distress; her hands were steady, her movement unhurried, poised; she seemed the most confident woman in the world. Most memorable, her radiant smile evoked smiles from the bystanders.

“When I first watched her,” Leon Shamroy said five years later,

I thought, “This girl will be another Harlow!” Her natural beauty plus her inferiority complex gave her a look of mystery. . . . I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson . . . and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow. Every frame of the test radiated sex. She didn’t need a sound track—she was creating effects visually. She was showing us she could sell emotions in pictures.

Either during that weekend or the following Monday, the film was screened for Zanuck, whose approval was necessary if a contract were to be offered. As it happened, he was not particularly zealous about Norma Jeane. For one thing, she had never acted anywhere—not a single role, even on an amateur night, nor had she ever had an acting lesson. Zanuck, who personally preferred brunettes like Linda Darnell, also felt that Betty Grable supplied enough blond sex appeal for the studio. In any case, he did not see the same radiance that excited his colleagues. But there was no financial risk in deferring to Lyon and Shamroy. The studio’s legal department was instructed to draw up an agreement, and on Tuesday afternoon, July 23, Helen Ainsworth appointed her colleague Harry Lipton to represent the new client on behalf of National Concert Artists.

Norma Jeane was offered a standard contract without exclusions, exceptions or emendations. Her guaranteed salary, paid whether she worked or did not, was to be seventy-five dollars a week for six months, with the studio’s option to renew for another half-year at twice that amount. Her fate would be determined not so much by her talent as by the interest she might evoke from the ninety-person press and publicity staff at the studio. These “flacks,” as they were called, aroused public curiosity about players, planted stories in newspapers and fan magazines and kept the attention of the most influential columnists of the day: Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky. They, along with
Photoplay, Modern Screen, Silver Screen
and other slick publications, were courted and cajoled to advance the careers of certain actors. Their power was literally unlimited.

However modest the deal and uncertain the future, Norma Jeane was thrilled—as she was at the first mention of her name in a Hollywood gossip column, on July 29. Hedda Hopper’s syndicated roundup of movie news included this item:

Howard Hughes is on the mend.
³
Picking up a magazine, he was attracted by the cover girl and promptly instructed an aide to sign her for pictures. She’s Norma Jean
[sic]
Dougherty, a model.

Hughes was too late. On September 5,
Variety
printed her name for the first time, reporting under the “New Contracts” column that she was one of two young women signed by Fox.

At the age of twenty, the new potential starlet was a year too young to sign a binding contract in the State of California. Grace was still her legal guardian, and so, despite the awkwardness and irregularities in their relationship, Norma Jeane again had to turn to her. Grace McKee Goddard had been at the center of every major moment in Norma Jeane’s life: her departure from the Bolenders to live with Gladys; Gladys’s subsequent confinement in asylums; the details of Norma Jeane’s material welfare and her sojourn at the Orphans Home; her time with cousins in Compton; her return to the Goddards and the shock of being left behind when they moved East; her marriage to Dougherty and the arrangements for her divorce. Sometimes the girl had felt like an unnecessary adjunct, a dispensable if charming object in her guardian’s life. But just as often, she had been infused with a sense that she bore within her an idealized self, a lustrous new Harlow to whom professionals now also favorably compared her. Grace had indeed been the great manager of Norma Jeane’s life, and dependence on Grace had been the pattern of that management (as it had been with Dougherty). But subordination wearies human relations, and the long history of subordination must have rankled a young woman who was quickly learning how much she could achieve on her own, with energy, a certain coy, girlish expertise—and with her body.

However much Grace’s protection, obsessions and manipulations evoked a tangle of conflicting feelings, Norma Jeane had known more critical history with her than with anyone. Grace knew her as no one did—and in a sense Grace, trapped in a bleak and loveless marriage from which alcohol was no escape, now depended on Norma Jeane to make something come out right, to realize her own dream. When Grace, with an unsteady signature, wrote her own name on the Fox contract below Norma Jeane Dougherty’s, she was simultaneously justifying her past authority and releasing the object of it into an unpredictable but inevitable autonomy. She was in effect signing a warranty for Norma Jeane’s maturity in a way she had not with the Dougherty marriage; she was permitting herself to become nonessential, a player in the past who might not be retained in the future.

*    *    *

Just days before the contract was countersigned (on August 24, 1946), Norma Jeane was summoned to Ben Lyon’s office. Only one detail remained to be adjudicated: the matter of her name. Dougherty, Lyon said bluntly, would have to be changed, for no one was sure whether it should be pronounced “Dok-er-tee” or “Dor-rit-tee” or “Doe-rit-tee” or perhaps even “Doff-er-tee.” Did she have any preference for a surname? Norma Jeane did not hesitate: Monroe was the name of her mother’s family, the only relatives of which she could be truly certain. (Like Jean Harlow, she was also choosing her mother’s maiden name for her own.) Lyon agreed: Monroe was a short, easy name, as American as the name of the president who bore it.