by Lois Banner
By luck of the draw these three factors lined up in Norma Jeane’s life in late 1944. Both the evangelical religion of her early childhood and the Christian Science of her adolescence and early adulthood fostered a sense of connection to a deep spiritual force. Her drive for perfection would become central to her work as a model and actress. Through luck Norma Jeane’s look matched her day’s prevailing definition of ideal beauty: innocent face, large breasts, long-looking legs.
Although Norma Jeane’s emotions continued to swing up and down, as they had during her marriage, she possessed considerable energy, which the Conover shoot released. “When nothing in her life was happening to distract her, she’d get restless, hyper,” said her friend Susan Strasberg. “She had tremendous energy, which came out in Herculean bursts of activity, followed by total depletion and depressions.” Arthur Miller experienced her manicdepressive cycles as extreme: “She meant to live at the peak always; in the permanent rush of a crescendo.” When the wave receded, she would turn against herself as worthless and then she couldn’t sleep. Through it all she could summon up hope “like a fish swimming up through black seas to fly at the sun before falling back again.” Norman Rosten described her mood swings in gentler terms. “When she’s high, a sweet chime of music surrounds her; when she’s low she moves to another plain, withdrawn, private.”6
When she pursued modeling, she did so in this hyper state, with great energy followed by occasional crashes, combined with up-and-down moods that could fluctuate over the course of a day. What would become her characteristic emotional pattern was emerging. Her genius was swift to appear: she was a leading West Coast model within two years of the Conover shoot and a contract player at Twentieth Century–Fox by 1946. It took her six more years to achieve stardom, but she demonstrated creativity, guts, and a major ability at manipulation in achieving it. The passivity of her childhood slowly ended, but her compulsions began to appear in its place.
The secular language of the movies resembles religious hagiography, with charismatic stars spoken of as gods and goddesses and with mythologies attached to their lives. Once Conover photographed her, Norma Jeane drew from that discourse by stating that she had been “discovered.” That was movie language, used everywhere in star texts. Those were the narratives created by publicists from the lives of actors that were threaded through their publicity and even their films. The word “discovery” was used to describe the moment when a movie industry representative, usually a male talent scout, suddenly recognized a young hopeful’s “star quality”—the indefinable look on the screen, akin to photogeneity, that mesmerized audiences. Gifted talent scouts presumably saw it immediately.
Like movie scouts, photographers “discovered” models, who sometimes went on to careers in Hollywood—as did Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, and Shelley Winters. David Conover found Norma Jeane by accident in December 1944, and pinup photographer Bruno Bernard (Bernard of Hollywood) independently stumbled upon her when she was walking on Sunset Boulevard near his studio. Struck by her look, he stopped her and persuaded her to model for him. By the 1940s modeling was becoming glamorous, shedding the last vestiges of its old association with prostitution. It received a boost from the 1944 smash-hit movie Cover Girl. In that film Rita Hayworth wins a beauty contest that leads to modeling for eminent photographers and a role in a Broadway show.7
Not long after the Conover shoot, Jim Dougherty arrived in Los Angeles on his first leave in nine months. He and Norma Jeane went horseback riding, dancing at the Coconut Grove, to movies and the beach, and for a week in the snow in the San Bernardino Mountains. Jim noticed that Norma Jeane was drinking mixed drinks, not just ginger ale, as she previously had. She was still sensitive and shy, with emotional ups and downs, but she seemed more confident. She told him about her modeling. He didn’t oppose it, since the work at Radioplane was exhausting and modeling was better paid. But he was bothered by her new opposition to becoming pregnant; she didn’t want to have a child in the immediate future. Troubled by her independence, he began to see the birth of a child as a way of cementing their relationship.
After this leave ended, Jim was stationed on vessels that protected shipping up and down the West Coast, allowing him to visit Los Angeles on weekend passes. For the next year and a half, until his stint with the merchant marine ended, he was alternately sent to the Far East and then stationed on vessels along the West Coast. Norma Jeane continued to change. She talked more about modeling and less about their future. She modeled for Conover’s photographer friends, and she made the rounds of photographers’ studios, looking for assignments. When Jim arrived at his parents’ home on weekend passes she was sometimes on a shoot, and she didn’t hurry home. A gulf grew between Norma Jeane and Jim.8
In April 1945 Jim was assigned to the Far East. At this point Ethel Dougherty intervened. She was fed up with Norma Jeane’s modeling, fed up with phone calls from strange men and mysterious trips with them. She wrote to Jim, complaining about her daughter-in-law. Jim became upset. He wrote Norma Jeane sternly, reprimanding her. Like most Americans in the 1940s he believed that men should be the family breadwinners and women should stay at home. Besides, for a family like the Doughertys, working poor for many years, a stay-at-home wife signified a greater degree of affluence. In his letter Jim wrote that the situation during the war, with women working, was temporary. When it ended, she had to give up modeling, go back home, and have a baby. “You can have only one career,” he wrote.
Jim’s letter angered Norma Jeane, finally annoyed at being ordered around. Success at modeling had increased her independence. Taking a bold step, she moved out of the Dougherty house and into the bottom apartment of Ana Lower’s duplex. Ana supported her decision to focus on her modeling career, although Norma Jeane didn’t end her marriage to Jim.
In July Norma Jeane went to the Mojave Desert and Death Valley with Conover, so that he could photograph her in natural settings. Linking models to nature, standard in pinup photos, was meant to tone down salaciousness by connecting erotic female images to the generativity and purity of nature and the out-of-doors. Some Marilyn biographers doubt the trip happened, since Conover published only a few photos from it and he could have taken them locally. Challenged about this while he was alive, he claimed the army suddenly ordered him overseas and he had hurriedly mailed the photos of Norma Jeane to a photographer friend, Potter Hueth, who never received them. They were presumably lost in the mail.9
Before he left, Conover asked Hueth to help Norma Jeane, and he did. He took his own photos of her and recommended her to Emmeline Snively, head of the Blue Book Model Agency, who interviewed Norma Jeane on August 2, 1945.10 That same day one of Conover’s Radioplane photos of her appeared on the cover of Stars and Stripes. It was a considerable achievement. Sent to soldiers worldwide, the magazine had a huge circulation.
Snively found Norma Jeane irresistible in the interview. She wore a white dress, and Snively thought she looked like a cherub in a church choir. Entering the room, she stared at a bulletin board with magazine covers featuring Blue Book models tacked on it. “All the girls are so beautiful,” she said plaintively to Snively. “Can I be a cover girl, too?” Snively melted and said, “Yes, you’re a natural.” She offered her a contract.
Snively remembered that meeting: “She had a high, little-girl voice and an astonishing bust which made her size-twelve dress look too small, although she knew nothing about carriage, posture, walking, sitting, or posing.”11 Snively’s statement sounds self-serving, since photographers had already responded positively to Norma Jeane. But Snively would not be the last individual to enlarge her role in the creation of Marilyn Monroe. Snively ran a modeling school attached to her agency, and Norma Jeane signed up for three months of classes. It was a moneymaking enterprise, one of many such schools in the city designed to teach young women poise through teaching them how to model. Norma Jeane was, according to Snively, the best student in the class. She attended every session, and she was always on tim
e. Her habitual lateness didn’t take over until later in her life, when she faced the challenge of making movies.
Norma Jeane defied her husband and motherin-law and signed with the Blue Book Model Agency during the summer of 1945, when the end of World War Two was energizing Americans. The troops were coming home, and rationing was over. People could buy new cars, appliances, clothing. Women no longer had to paint the seams of stockings on the backs of their legs, as they had during the war; they could buy nylons again. Parades and festivals were held. On V-J Day in August, when Japan surrendered, people poured into the streets, dancing with strangers. After four years of blackouts, the lights of the city—and of its movie marquees—were turned on. “The city was adazzle with blazing bulbs,” Lana Turner remembered, “brilliant and glittering and fun.”12
Norma Jeane liked earning her own income. As the daughter of Gladys and the ward of Grace, both working women, she honored their values. They upheld the ideal of marriage and motherhood, but they valued their independence. Norma Jeane was raised to expect to marry, but also to be able to support herself if necessary. Even when she later slept with producers to advance her career, these wealthy men didn’t support her. Taking money for sex meant that she was a prostitute, and she tried to avoid that designation. During her marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller she supported herself, and she supported Miller during their marriage. She took pride in her financial independence.
As her modeling career began to take off, Norma Jeane chose a new name she thought more appropriate for a model: Jean Norman. It was more sophisticated than Norma Jeane Dougherty, which suggested midwestern provincialism. She also changed her handwriting. The script she had used during her childhood and marriage, with round and deliberate letters, looks like a child’s careful printing. She now adopted a sprawling cursive, hasty in look, as though she were dashing through life.
She was witty and zany with the photographers, an adolescent Marilyn filled with joy. She posed for hours in their studios, joking and laughing. When they shot her on the beach she eagerly ran over the sand and climbed up sand dunes and rock cliffs. When she became melancholy on a Zuma Beach shoot with photographer Joseph Jasgur, he had her stick out her tongue. That silly gesture triggered her playful side: it was as though a switch had clicked on. “She raced across the sand to the water’s edge and back like a demented wind-up toy, exulting in the sea air on her bare skin and the feeling of powdery sand between her toes.” She had boundless energy. “Her enthusiasm and tenacity are infectious,” Bruno Bernard stated. “After hours of continuous shooting, she still remains fresh.”13
Her body had a flexibility that allowed her to assume almost any pose the photographer wanted. She continued her Catalina exercise regimen—bending, lifting weights, bicycling, fast walking. Moreover, she had a natural rapport with the camera. “When she moved into position,” photographer William Carroll remembered, “it was so rapidly as though she was reading my mind. Then, after hearing the camera click, she would modify the pose to give me something fresh and brightly new to photograph.” Describing their interaction fifty years after it happened, Carroll may have exaggerated her early ability, yet he caught her when she was in the process of shaping it. To do so, she examined every print taken of her, posing shrewd questions to the photographers. What were her best angles? How could she minimize her hips? How could she improve her hair and her smile? Marilyn remembered, “I wouldn’t settle for second best. I would take home photographs of myself to study how I looked and if I could improve myself posing in front of a mirror.”14
Despite such determination and success, her emotionalism continued. In November 1945, after three months of modeling training and numerous sessions with photographers, Norma Jeane still seemed to Snively a “scared, pretty lonely little kid who wore mostly fresh white cotton dresses.” In March 1946, photographer Joseph Jasgur found her shy and anxious. She was an hour late for their appointment. She had been worried about her appearance, and she had repeatedly redone her makeup and hair. When photographer Bob Shannon shot her that year, he found her up-and-down moods disconcerting. He was worried when she took five aspirins for menstrual cramps: it seemed too many pills to him. But she rarely took barbiturates, or strong pain medications like Percodan or Demerol; at this point, her endometriosis and her anxiety weren’t yet that severe.15
The Doughertys sometimes experienced Norma Jeane as being in another world, dissociated from her surroundings. She was sometimes very late to family gatherings without any explanation. “She sometimes had a vacuous expression on her face,” David Conover remembered, “as though she lacked an identity.” Her visions and nightmares of demons and witches periodically reappeared. She remained afraid of going insane, like her mother. She recounted a dream to Conover in which men in hospital garb forced her into a straitjacket and took her into a building that looked like the orphanage where she had lived. They marched her through one black door after another, until they put her, still in a straitjacket, into a bleak room, and left.
By 1945 the profession of modeling had many faces, from projecting upper-class elegance for fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to embodying raunchy sensuality for men’s magazines. Illustrators in the tradition of George Petty and Alberto Vargas used live models to paint idealized airbrushed women, sexy and elegant, often to adorn the calendars that Americans bought in the millions of copies. Wholesale clothing manufacturers and retail department stores employed models to display clothing, while businessmen exhibiting products at expositions hired models to show off their wares. Photographers shot advertising spreads and illustrations for middlebrow magazines like Collier’s and Redbook, as well as photos of movie players for the movie fan magazines, which had sizable readerships.16
During the war, the demand for models grew with the launch of “girlie” magazines—like Twitter, Eye, and Bang, loosely modeled after Life and Look— in which photos of semiclothed women appeared alongside stories about current events—and crude humor. The style of the magazines ranged from peek-a-boo to raunchy. At the end of the war Esquire dropped its pinup photos when its editors became tired of fighting the censors in the post office, who were enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibited sending obscene material through the mail. As a result of Esquire’s action, the “girlie” magazines took off. They were logical places for Jean Norman photos.
From the start of their relationship, Emmeline Snively pegged Norma Jeane as a pinup model. Fashion models were mostly tall and skinny, with small breasts, because those bodies didn’t draw attention away from the clothing being modeled. But Norma Jeane’s large breasts and hips drew attention to her. And her bust was too large for her to fit into the standard size twelve that clothing models wore. When Snively sent her to model clothing for a Montgomery Ward catalog, she was let go after two days because she was too voluptuous. She was also hopeless at the slinky model walk. She had double-jointed knees that threw her hips off center so they swayed as she walked. She later used the sway as the basis of her signature walk.
Moreover, Snively didn’t find Norma Jeane that sexy, except for her large breasts. Bruno Bernard sometimes found her attempts to look sexy ridiculous. When she affected hooded eyes and a round mouth, he called it her “French baby whore” look and told her to stay with her “child-woman” expression. Other photographers disagreed. They liked her “over-the-top” sexy persona. Norma Jeane overheard their comments: “That Norma Jeane—she’s built like a sex machine. She can turn it on and off.”17 She later refined her hooded eyes and round mouth into a characteristic expression of hers.
Norma Jeane had expressive eyes and a large head, which photographed well. But Snively and the photographers found other problems with her face and figure. Some were the same as those Grace Goddard had noted years before. She had a bump on her nose and a chin so weak that from some angles she looked double-chinned. Her nose photographed as too long.18 She had a bad bite. Her hips were broad and her legs weren’t that long; the ide
alized long legs of the Petty and Varga girls remained in vogue.
Makeup, lighting, and camera angles hid some of these deficiencies. By shooting from low angles, Jasgur gave her chin definition and made her appear taller. He made her broad nose look thinner by carefully adjusting the light he directed on her face and the angle of the camera. Bruno Bernard, who still considered women’s legs their most erotic body part, shot Norma Jeane from an angle that extended her short legs, to the point that Norma Jeane asked him if he was making her into a Varga girl. “What’s wrong with Vargas?” he responded.19 In later years, photographers continued using these techniques to cover over Marilyn’s bad features; in 1950 she had cosmetic surgery to correct what were seen as the deficiencies in her chin and nose.
Then Snively and Jasgur decided that her gum lines were too high, and they had her lower her upper lip when she smiled. Norma Jeane practiced lowering it in front of a mirror until she got it right, but she never managed to eliminate the quivering upper lip that is apparent in her films. They also didn’t like her curly hair, since Lana Turner’s smooth-hair look was in vogue. Snively and the photographers also wanted Norma Jeane to dye her hair blonde, because they thought it would suit her pale skin better than her natural brown. But she wanted to remain natural, and she worried about the expense of having her hair straightened and dyed. In February 1946, a shampoo company considering her for an ad demanded that she dye her hair blonde and straighten it. When the photographer shooting the ad offered to pay for the process, Norma Jeane acquiesced.
