Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  Then in the mid-1940s, Doc’s ex-wife appeared in Los Angeles from Austin, Texas, apparently cured of her mental issues. She was now the wife of the chief of staff of an army engineering unit stationed near Los Angeles. Nona Goddard lived with her and, after a year at Beverly Hills High School, attended the prestigious Hollywood Professional School, anticipating an acting career. In the early 1950s Nona became a featured player at Columbia under the name Jody Lawrance.60

  But she and Marilyn, friendly as adolescents, grew distant as adults, as Jody (born Josephine and called Nona) rejected the entire Goddard family. According to Bebe, Nona was perpetually angry. She decided that Doc and Grace preferred Norma Jeane to her, and she wrote Grace a nasty letter in 1953 about feeling rejected by them. That letter, according to Bebe, was the reason that Grace committed suicide that year. I’ve read the letter, and it is nasty, although Grace was already dying from cancer when she took the overdose of Nembutal that killed her. In harsh language in the letter, Nona blames Grace and Doc for the repossession of her house by the bank because the two of them refused to lend her money for mortgage payments. She claims that they always preferred Norma Jeane to her and concludes by saying that she never wants to see them again.61

  Marilyn is feminine in her films, with strong elements of parody and independence in many of her characterizations, but Nona/Jody Lawrance is a spitfire, sometimes engaging in physical battles with lovers, even disguising herself as a man in The Mask of the Avenger (1951), her first film. She has talent, but she looks like the other dark-haired featured players of the day. Unlike Marilyn, Jody was unable to carve out a distinctive look for herself. As she aged, she faded from the screen.

  A home movie of Norma Jeane with Grace, Doc, and other family members was made in the early 1940s. The film begins on a moving train and then cuts to a group of people clowning in front of a house. Three adolescent girls in the movie are modeling fur coats. Bob Herre, Nona’s son, told me that they are Bebe, Norma Jeane, and Nona and that Grace and Doc are in the film, which celebrated Fritz Goddard’s return home by train after having served in the military during World War Two. The home movie further confuses the story of the Goddard family. Bob told me that his grandmother, Eleanor Goddard, owned the furs featured in the film. She was the presumably demented ex-wife of Doc who had put their children in abusive homes. It’s surprising that she, Doc, and their children would become friendly, clowning for the camera in a home movie. Nonetheless, it’s possible.

  Between the ages of nine and twelve—from the time she entered the orphanage until she moved in with Ana Lower—Norma Jeane was far from a beauty. That lack of beauty influenced her perception of herself, even as an adult. As with many preadolescents, Norma Jeane’s body prepared for the hormonal rush and physiological rearrangements of adolescence by becoming gawky and out of proportion. By the age of ten she shot up to her adult height of five feet six inches, making her much taller than other children her age. She had a straight body and was flat-chested, with short and scraggly hair. She looked like a boy.62 Previous Marilyn biographers have overlooked this development, which is evident in photographs taken of her during these years. Moreover, she rarely smiles in those photos; she looks depressed.

  The years between nine and twelve were unhappy ones for Norma Jeane. Her elementary school classmates made fun of her, calling her “Norma Jeane, string bean” or “Norma Jeane, human bean.” The girls made remarks about her clothing, which wasn’t of the best quality. When she told the other students she intended to be an actress, they laughed. Ida Mae Monroe remembered Norma Jeane telling her over and over again that she wasn’t going to get married when she grew up; she was going to be a schoolteacher and raise dogs. Like many tall and gawky preteen girls, she took up athletics as a way of gaining distinction. She had excellent hand-eye coordination, a relatively large frame, and long legs for a girl her age—in other words, she was a natural athlete. “I was an excellent athlete,” she told Georges Belmont. At the orphanage, she was an outstanding player on the girls’ softball team, and at the North Hollywood school she attended, she ran long-distance races.63

  Defining Marilyn as an athlete may seem startling, given her later aversion to sports, but her athletic ability, in addition to the exercise regimens she pursued for years, stood her in good stead when she became a film actress. If you look closely at her body in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes you can see her muscles. Her leg muscles are evident in the photo with her skirt blowing up from The Seven Year Itch.

  Until she was elected the “Oomph Girl” at Emerson Junior High in 1941, Norma Jeane didn’t think that she was beautiful. Even then, she still felt that her appearance was imperfect. She retained that point of view even when she was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in the world. There was always the bump on her nose (cosmetic surgery didn’t eliminate it entirely); legs too short for the fashion ideal; and a heavy chin. She spent hours in rituals of self-adornment, but she disliked her body at the same time.64

  After Norma Jeane’s unhappy stay with the MartinMonroe family, and her obvious depression, Grace had to do something special to figure out the puzzle of what to do with her. She had developed over the years from a joyful, loving child to a sullen, depressed preadolescent. The solution in the form of her aunt, Ana Lower, had been there for a long time. A special bond already existed between Norma Jeane and Ana, and the child had spent an occasional Sunday with her. But Ana had a heart condition, and she felt she couldn’t handle raising a child. Still, Grace had run out of friends and relatives willing to take in Norma Jeane. Given the child’s depression and the issues with Doc, Ana felt duty bound to do it. She was a healer in the Christian Science Church who helped people cope with physical illness and emotional depression. And Norma Jeane badly needed healing.

  So in September 1938, at the beginning of the school year, Norma Jeane went to live with Ana Lower. The experience would change her life, this time much for the better.

  Chapter 3

  Transcendence: Ana and Jim, 1938–1944

  In Ana Lower, Grace finally found an effective foster mother for Norma Jeane. The matriarch of Grace’s extended family, Ana was fifty-eight years old when Grace’s ward went to live with her. Ana was dignified and loving. Bebe Goddard described her as a “picture-perfect white-haired grandmother,” even though she was only fifty-eight—an age then considered old. She was also shrewd and practical. The initials “C.S.,” she said, meant Christian Science, but they also meant common sense. Like Grace, she was nonjudgmental, but she wasn’t controlling and manipulative, as Grace was. She radiated what could be called spirituality, a sense of being in tune with nature and herself, a state of contentment apparent to anyone who met her.1

  She didn’t wear jewelry or fashionable clothing; material possessions didn’t interest her. By 1925 the Christian Science Journal listed her as a practitioner (healer), certified to counsel people who needed emotional or physical help, using the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, the church’s major texts, as guides. She would eventually convert Grace and Gladys, as well as other Atchinsons and Goddards, to Christian Science. Ana was dedicated to helping others. Once a week she went to the Los Angeles jail to give Christian Science healings to the inmates.

  Married and divorced twice, Ana had no children of her own. She lived in the second-floor apartment of a duplex she owned in the Sawtelle area of West Los Angeles, not far from the Knebelkamps and the Howells, who were relatives and friends of Grace and Ana with whom Norma Jeane had occasionally stayed. In her second divorce Ana had been awarded the duplex and several small houses, although she wasn’t wealthy. The rents on her properties were low, and her healings were often free. Sawtelle was solidly working class. It was known for its many Japanese residents, who had nurseries and truck farms and tended the lawns and gardens in the nearby wealthy communities of Bel Air and Brentwood. Mexican families who worked for the Japanese gardeners also lived in the area.2 Even today Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Ang
eles has a number of Japanese restaurants and nurseries on it.

  The Sawtelle population—whether Anglo-American, Japanese, or Mexican—was hardworking and family-centered. Dorothy Muir, the mother of Bob Muir, Norma Jeane’s first boyfriend, lived in Sawtelle. She bridled when Marilyn biographers described it as a slum. The homes there were modest, she said, but they were owner-occupied and well cared for. In the class-conscious society of Los Angeles’s West Side, however, Sawtelle was considered lower class. Because Norma Jeane lived there, she wasn’t accepted at first at the school she attended, Emerson Junior High School, located in an upscale area of Westwood, with students from Bel Air and Brentwood. Those students set the school’s tone. “I came from the poor part of the district,” Marilyn stated in My Story, “where all the Mexicans and Japanese lived.”3

  That fall, Gladys Baker suddenly reentered her life. Gladys’s condition had improved. She was still a patient in Agnews State Hospital near San Jose, after having lived in a group home in San Francisco for a time, but she was hoping to leave the state mental system and return to regular life. Gladys wrote Grace in the fall of 1938, asking her to tell Norma Jeane about her half-sister, Berniece, now nineteen and recently married. Norma Jeane hadn’t known she existed. Gladys had visions of reconstituting her family, as she had in 1933, when she and Norma Jeane moved into the Arbol Drive house. Norma Jeane was hopeful; she hadn’t given up on her mother. Wanting a family of her own, she was happy to learn about Berniece. They began to correspond. Now that she was living with Ana Lower and was in touch with her half-sister, Norma Jeane’s life seemed to have stabilized.

  During her first year with Ana, Norma Jeane was still gawky and tall. Former Emerson students remembered her early on as “neat but plain” and “shy and withdrawn.” She didn’t talk much in classes, and her grades were mediocre. When she spoke, she sometimes stuttered. Some students made fun of her clothes. Grace bought her two blue suits before she entered Emerson, and she alternated them during the year. Her classmates concluded that she owned only one piece of clothing—a cardinal sin in this upper-class school. She wore tennis shoes to save money, and that was also unacceptable.4

  Like many Los Angeles middle schools, Emerson was large, with five hundred students per grade. Given the size, it was difficult for a student to know many classmates. And it took time until the popularity system characteristic of middle and high schools was in place. Student government leaders, class beauties, and athletes had to emerge. During her first year at Emerson, many students shunned Norma Jeane, as they had in elementary school. Yet William Moynier, who was in several classes with her, remembered her as “giggly” and “friendly”; she was beginning to open up in some situations.5

  Norma Jeane wasn’t a loner. She made friends with Gladys Wilson, another Sawtelle student at Emerson, and she became friends with a group of older Emerson students. As an adult, Marilyn had separate groups of friends that she kept apart from one another. Such separation gave her a sense of control and allowed her to be secretive, conducting different lives at the same time. The beginning of this behavior, like other behaviors of hers, emerged in junior high. It’s not uncharacteristic of children who have been institutionalized.

  Soon after entering Emerson, Norma Jeane became friends with Bob Muir, a student who was a grade ahead of her. In 1973 Dorothy Muir, Bob’s mother, published an account of their friendship, unknown to previous Marilyn biographers.6 Bob had a circle of male friends at Emerson drawn from boys he had known in elementary school. Now in junior high, they were interested in girls. Wanting to maintain their group while dating, each boy identified a girl he considered special and brought her along with him when the group got together. Bob Muir brought Norma Jeane.

  Over the next several years she was often at the Muir house. Bob’s group played Monopoly or danced in the living room, with the rug pulled back and a record on the phonograph. Norma Jeane was the youngest person in the group, but she was the best dancer. They went on hikes in the nearby Santa Monica Mountains and to the more distant San Bernardino Mountains in the winter to play in the snow. In the spring they went to the desert to see wildflowers in bloom. Norma Jeane was bubbly, telling jokes about herself. Dorothy Muir remembered her as a “sweet girl we all grew to love.” She was unusually mature and sympathetic to others, although she avoided discussing anything personal. Dorothy knew only that she lived with her aunt in Sawtelle. Eventually she stopped going to the Muir house. Dorothy heard she was dating an “older guy,” probably Jim Dougherty.

  During her first year at Emerson, when she was twelve years old, Norma Jeane began to menstruate. By the summer that followed, her breasts and hips had grown in size, and she attracted boys. Realizing her appeal, she devised a strategy to become popular—or at least noticed. In a version of her later campaign for screen popularity, she mocked current fashions by wearing them in an unique way. The “sweater girl” look, launched by Lana Turner when she wore a tight sweater in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget, was coming into vogue. But it hadn’t yet reached Emerson.

  Norma Jeane devised a way to copy the new style. Teenage girls in this era often wore a front-buttoned cardigan sweater over a white blouse with a Peter Pan (round) collar. Norma Jeane eliminated the blouse as well as the bra and camisole worn under it. She then took a cardigan, turned it around, and buttoned it in the back. The sweater clung to her breasts, achieving the “sweater girl” style. She called that sweater, which was red, her “magic sweater.” She had outfoxed her female classmates, showing a cleverness at dress that would remain characteristic of her. Then she put on a pair of tight blue jeans. When the principal warned her they were immodest, she substituted a tight skirt for the pants. Shocking the girls and intriguing the boys, she put on a lot of makeup, following the methods Grace had taught her.7

  Her primping paid off. Emerson boys began walking her home and vying for her attention. When her name was mentioned in a class, the boys in the class sometimes breathed a collective sigh, “Mmmm.” Even the girls noticed her, since she was winning the competition among them for boys—an important part of their culture. As graduation approached, she was elected the school’s “Oomph Girl.” “Norma Jeane the human bean” had become an acclaimed beauty.8 If Aunt Ana had known what she was doing, she probably would have put a stop to it, but her foster child had learned during her years in foster homes and the orphanage how to be secretive. She arrived at school early, taking her makeup with her and putting it on in the girls’ bathroom before classes began and taking it off before she went home.

  Norma Jeane displayed other skills. She began to show an appealing wit, often directed at herself. Her humor was “cute,” Bebe Goddard remembered, and it “popped out” unexpectedly. Despite her poor grades, she was a good writer and she contributed articles to the school newspaper, including one on the ideal dream girl for men. She claimed she had sent out five hundred questionnaires on the subject. The results proved that men preferred blondes. “Gentlemen prefer blondes!” she exclaimed, copying the title of the 1925 Anita Loos novella. (In 1953 she would star in the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, based on the Loos work.) Referring to herself, Norma Jeane described the dream girl as having honey-blonde hair, blue eyes, a molded figure, classic features, a good personality, and athletic ability—while retaining her femininity. She was also a loyal friend.9

  By her last year at Emerson, when she was fifteen, her reputation and her grades had improved. She developed a passion for Abraham Lincoln when she studied his life in a class. She identified with his impoverished upbringing in rural Kentucky and the death of his mother when he was young; she liked his democratic attitudes and his identification with ordinary people. His physical appearance—dark and rugged—appealed to her. He became another father figure for her.

  Yet she nearly failed her class in rhetoric and spoken arts because she couldn’t get her words out. Despite her growing confidence, she still stuttered. When she was chosen secretary of her English class her last year at Emers
on and had to read the minutes of the previous meeting aloud, she stumbled. She got stuck on the letter “m,” finally blurting out “M-m-m-minutes of the last m-m-m-meeting.” In the graduation yearbook she was one of twenty-six students representing the letters of the alphabet. She chose the letter “M” for herself, and she wrote her own caption—“Norma Jeane, the ‘mmm girl.’ “It was a wry comment on both her stuttering and her increasing appeal to boys.10

  During her years at Emerson, she wasn’t involved in athletics. She sang in the glee club and was cast in several plays, mostly in boys’ parts—as a prince in one—because she was so tall. But she wasn’t successful at acting because she stuttered when speaking on stage. That failure didn’t end her aspirations to become an actress. She continued to go to the movies and to act out the roles in them in her bedroom at home, paying attention to body movements and facial expressions. Establishing a habit she later followed, she practiced in front of a mirror until she got every gesture right. Figuring out that the mind can control facial expressions as well as body movements, she had stumbled on a Hollywood acting technique. According to her close friend, photographer Sam Shaw, in later years she often practiced leg, arm, and facial movements in front of mirrors.11

  She pored over the stars’ images in the movie fan magazines passed on to her by a neighbor, becoming familiar with “every gesture, every plucked eyebrow, every dewy eye.” She clipped pictures of Ginger Rogers from those magazines and tacked them on her bedroom walls. At one point she had twenty-four Gingers tacked up. Gladys Wilson thought she lived in a dream world, but she was also calculating her future. She noticed that many film actresses had been models before they entered films. She put together a plan; she would first model and then act in films. But she was too shy to do anything more than dream about it at this point in her life.12