Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Norma Jeane spent her first term of tenth grade (sophomore year, beginning September 1941), at Van Nuys High School, which was closer to the Goddard house than University High in West Los Angeles. Her report card was even less distinguished here than at Emerson. She found it difficult to apply herself to academic matters, for Norma Jeane was distracted by the presence of a handsome, five-foot-ten, brown-haired, blue-eyed young man with a thin, rakish mustache. His name was James Dougherty, and his family occupied a house just in front of the Goddards’ bungalow, set back a way from Archwood Street in Van Nuys.

  Born in Los Angeles on April 12, 1921, Jim Dougherty at twenty had a very different reputation from Chuck Moran. The youngest of five children in a family that had endured hard times during the depression, he had once lived in a Van Nuys tent, working long hours as a fruit picker before he and his parents could afford to rent a small bungalow. At Van Nuys High, he acted in high-school plays, starred on the football team and won election as student body president. He also found time to contribute to the family’s income by holding odd jobs—shining shoes, making sandwiches in a delicatessen and assisting in a local mortuary, work he continued after graduation. He deferred his chance to attend college on a football scholarship in order to help his mother and siblings.

  By late 1941, Jim was working at Lockheed Aircraft, driving a snappy blue Ford coupe and dating several girls; in fact, he was particularly serious about one named Doris Drennan—until she dropped him because, as she said, “You couldn’t support me.” When he met Norma Jeane that year, Jim was working the night shift at Lockheed (among his co-workers was a beefy, heavy-lidded chap named Robert Mitchum) and living so close to Van Nuys High that his mother Ethel and her friend Grace Goddard asked him to drive Norma Jeane and Bebe home from school—which was now a greater distance for the girls than before, since the Goddards moved in October to Odessa Avenue, into another small house owned by Ana Lower. That year, Bebe suffered several illnesses that kept her out of class, and Jim remembered that Norma Jeane seemed to take advantage of the daily opportunity “to sit a little closer to me.”

  For Norma Jeane, Jim was (as she later said) “a dreamboat” most of all because of his mustache (“she was fascinated by it,” according to Dougherty); indeed, it must have reminded her of Gladys’s mysterious boyfriend, of Clark Gable and of Errol Flynn, and the mustache made him look both older and distinguished. “What a daddy!” Norma Jeane said significantly to Bebe after arriving home from school one afternoon.

  As for Dougherty, “I noticed she was a pretty little thing, and she thought I looked angelic in white shirts, but she was only a child so far as I was concerned, and five years was a great difference in our ages.” Admired chauffeur he was willing to be, but serious dating seemed out of the question.

  But neither Jim, his mother nor Norma Jeane fully estimated Grace Goddard, who now assumed the role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, the Yonkers matchmaker. She swung into action as soon as she saw the proverbial stars in her ward’s eyes, “expertly maneuvering [Norma Jeane] into my awareness,” as Dougherty realized later. A few days after the shock of Pearl Harbor and America’s precipitous entry into the war, Grace asked Ethel Dougherty if Jim would escort Norma Jeane to a Christmas dance at Adel Precision Products, where Doc was then employed. Jim agreed, as he later said, partly because he was flattered by Norma Jeane’s adoration and partly because his romance with Doris Drennan had not survived the two challenges of her move to Santa Barbara and his inability to support her.

  The Christmas party was a major moment in the relationship. During the slow dances, Norma Jeane leaned against Jim (as he recalled) “extra close, eyes tight shut, and even Grace and Doc saw that I wasn’t just being Good Neighbor Sam, so to speak. I was having the time of my life with this little girl, who didn’t seem or feel so little any more.”

  But Grace, eager to accelerate Norma Jeane’s advance to womanhood, abetted the process. She paid for the girl to go to movies with Jim; she suggested they hike in the Hollywood Hills; they took boat rides on Pop’s Willow Lake; and occasionally they drove north to Ventura County, visited Jim’s sister Elyda and drove out to Lake Sherwood. Grace packed picnic lunches for them and so, with the help of both makeup and Grace’s friend Ethel Dougherty, Jim found himself happy to spend weekends with the pretty, admiring and undemanding Norma Jeane.

  Frequently in the evenings, the couple parked on Mulholland Drive, atop the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains. According to the later testimony of both, their intimacy remained chaste: “She very neatly held things in check” was Jim’s summary. They talked of the war, and of school, and Norma Jeane told Jim quite frankly that she was born illegitimate; this evoked neither his pity nor repugnance. He drew her closer, and she rested her head on his shoulder as the car radio, crackling with static, picked up the season’s hit tunes: “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” . . . “That Old Black Magic” . . . “Moonlight Becomes You.” Most of all, Norma Jeane liked to hear Frank Sinatra crooning “I’ll Never Love Again” and “Night and Day.” She was “awfully sweet to be with,” as he said; she was more physically developed than most fifteen-year-olds (and was made up to resemble a smart young thing); she seemed to rely on Jim’s strength; and she admired everything he did. He found this attention extremely flattering.

  At the start of the new year 1942, Adel Precision announced that Doc Goddard was to be transferred to their West Virginia plant as East Coast head of sales. “To tell the truth,” Bebe said years later, “he had just been messing around, trying to be an actor and tinkering with all sorts of things—so finally he knew he had to settle down. He was a hell of a salesman, and at last here was a good promotion at a steady job.” Grace and Bebe would accompany him, but not Norma Jeane, whom they could not afford to keep. Grace informed her of this quite matter-of-factly one morning—but, she added, she was “working on something wonderful for [Norma Jeane].”

  Whatever Grace’s secondary plans, this was devastating for the girl, who immediately perceived that she was once again simply an expendable commodity. As Dougherty confirmed,

  her respect for Grace altered from that moment on. It seemed to her like another rejection, that she was being tossed out of another foster home. . . . Grace had told Norma Jeane that she would never feel insecure again, and now the poor girl felt that Grace had gone back on her word.

  The first sequel occurred immediately after, in late January. Ana Lower’s health had somewhat improved, and so as the second term of sophomore year began and the Goddards prepared to move, Norma Jeane returned to Ana on Nebraska Avenue and attended University High School, an attractive, Spanish-style building at the corner of Westgate and Texas avenues. During February and March (with Grace and Ethel’s constant encouragement), Jim continued to date Norma Jeane, chugging through the Sepulveda Pass or negotiating the tortuous drives through the canyons linking the Valley to the West Side (the Los Angeles freeways were not even on the drawing boards).

  For the rootless and rejected fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane, Jim Dougherty’s attention was welcome. She had, after all, no sense of herself—no parental background with or against which to grow, no emotional harbor to which she could unfailingly return; she effectively lacked every normal ingredient of a teenager’s life except school and a rapid physical development that outpaced her psychological growth.

  At University High, some of her classmates noted a change in Norma Jeane’s personality: “she was loud,” according to classmate Tom Ishii. “She talked loud, and some began to consider her wild.” But anyone aware of her life that spring of 1942 would not have been surprised that concentrated attention from a handsome, older man inevitably fed her ego. Both her emotionally deprived past and her uncertain present were factors encouraging her dependence on Jim as Norma Jeane prepared for the Goddards’ departure (which also meant the absence of her new friend Bebe). To further complicate matters, it was clear by March that Norma Jeane’s residence on Nebraska Avenue would have to be temporary, f
or Ana fell ill again with heart disease.

  And then it happened. The question came not from Jim or Norma Jeane—not even directly from Grace, who was too crafty to pose it herself.

  Ethel Dougherty approached her son with a blunt proposition: “The Goddards are going to West Virginia, and they’re not taking Norma Jeane. She can’t stay with Mrs. Lower, and that means she goes back to the orphanage until she’s eighteen.”

  “I’m listening,” Jim said.

  “Grace wants to know if you’d be interested in marrying her. She turns sixteen in June”—the legal age in California.

  “The thought ran through my mind,” Dougherty said later, “that at sixteen she was far too young for me. I had no thought of marrying her at the time, and I really wouldn’t have . . . but I agreed to it because I was going into the service soon and I figured she’d have a home with my mother. And of course I thought she was an adorable girl who was fun to be with. I didn’t really think much beyond that. And Norma Jeane went along with the idea.”

  But she did so only because she had no choice: as she later said, she married Jim “so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage.” In mid-March, two days after the Goddards left California for West Virginia, Norma Jeane shocked her teachers and classmates by informing them she was quitting school to get married that June; from that day she was no more to be seen in class, and thus her formal studies ended in the middle of her second year of high school. This aborted education later haunted her, causing an inferiority complex others would be only too glad to exploit.

  It might be too severe to judge Grace and Ethel’s motives as calculating; at the same time, their manipulation of Norma Jeane cannot be easily excused. They effectively communicated to her the dangerous notion that her liberation and sustenance were connected to life with a man. Also, in a sense, the Goddards’ relocation to West Virginia and the forthcoming marriage provided another neat parallel to Grace’s obsession, the transformation of Norma Jeane into Jean Harlow: at sixteen, Harlow had withdrawn from high school to marry a handsome twenty-one-year-old socialite named Charles McGrew. Jean Harlow—this was the identity Grace had imagined for the girl, the image in whose reflection Grace had groomed her.

  “Grace McKee arranged a marriage for me,” Marilyn Monroe said years later. “I never had a choice. There’s not much to say about it. They couldn’t support me, and they had to work out something. And so I got married.” It later seemed, she said, “like a dream that never really happened. It didn’t work out—just like Jean Harlow’s didn’t work out. I guess we were too young.”

  Too young indeed, despite the promptings of Grace, who simply ignored the girl’s age and concentrated on the role. Even the teenager’s innocence was blithely dismissed, as Jim recalled. One afternoon he, his mother, Norma Jeane and Grace were sipping Coca-Colas. Suddenly the girl asked haltingly if she could marry Jim “but not have sex.” The question was not so much naïve as, more likely, designed to force everyone to reconsider the imminent marriage. But Grace leaped in with an answer: “Don’t worry. You’ll learn.” This reply might have been no different had Norma Jeane expressed anxiety about an algebra test.5

  Her hesitations were not merely sexual. “After all, I had never seen any marriage work out,” she said perceptively years after, and in that regard she was on the mark. Della, Gladys, Ana, Grace, Ida and Olive provided only examples of failed marriages and the emotional inconstancy of spouses.

  As for Dougherty, he “tried to make her feel desirable and worthy of everyone’s respect and admiration. But by doing so, I may have been undermining my own future with her.” He took her shopping to select a ring before remembering the custom of asking her to marry him—a mere formality in this case, since the decision had already been made for her. Almost distractedly, she accepted, and with the cast and the scenario ready, a date was set for the event.

  On June 1, 1942, Norma Jeane turned sixteen. The following Sunday, she and Jim found a one-room bungalow in Sherman Oaks, at 4524 Vista Del Monte. Despite the tiny quarters, they agreed to sign a six-month lease; the owner offered to supply a new “Murphy bed,” which could be easily retracted into a wall cabinet and enlarge the living space. Their few possessions were moved in before the wedding.

  The final preparations bore marks of inconsistencies and evasions of truth, which of themselves seem negligible but which actually reveal the tissue of insecurity in which the marriage was wrapped. The invitations had been sent by “Miss Ana Lower” for the wedding of her “niece, Norma Jean Baker,” but on the marriage certificate the bride had signed “Norma Jeane Mortensen.” She wrote that she was the daughter of “E. Mortensen, birthplace unknown” and of a woman named “Monroe, born in Oregon.” She did not supply her mother’s first name; like all her relatives and even the Goddards, Gladys would not attend. Albert and Ida Bolender said they would drive up from Hawthorne, although they disapproved of both the wedding and its setting.

  At eight-thirty on Friday evening, June 19, 1942, the ceremony was performed by a nondenominational minister named Benjamin Lingenfelder, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chester Howell (friends of Grace’s), at 432 South Bentley Avenue, West Los Angeles. Everything was slightly surreal and improvised. A girl Norma Jeane knew only slightly at University High was her matron of honor; Jim’s brother Marion was best man, and Jim’s nephew Wesley bore the ring on a velvet pillow. The groom recalled how his bride “liked the winding staircase in the front hall, just like in the movies. But she was shaking so she could hardly stand.” Jim, too, was a mite unsteady—“feeling a little undone, because my brother had given me a double shot of whiskey before I arrived.”

  A modest reception was held at a nearby restaurant, where a showgirl entertaining another wedding party dragooned Dougherty onto a makeshift stage for a dance. But when he returned to his table, he found his bride “not very happy. She thought I’d made a monkey out of myself, and I did.” About four in the morning, the newlyweds arrived home in Sherman Oaks.

  Within and beyond all the details, tasks and tensions of the wedding day, Jim Dougherty retained one memory clearer than any other: his bride “never let go of my arm all afternoon, and even then she looked at me as though she was afraid I might disappear while she was out of the room.”

  1. The story is somewhat more complicated, but this later statement represents her girlhood résumé of it, and her impression is more significant than in her accurate retelling of the plot.

  2. Mortensen died on February 10, 1981, in Mira Loma, Riverside County, California.

  3. As one scholar of the religion has noted, “The controversy about the origins of Christian Science, the obscurity of periods of Mrs. Eddy’s life, and the inaccessibility of the archival materials of the Mother Church are together responsible for the absence of completely reliable standard works on the movement.”

  4. According to Gladys Phillips Wilson, “She never went to fancy places or country clubs because the rich boys just didn’t date her. They probably wanted to, because she was a dish, but it wasn’t done.”

  5. Once Norma Jeane had asked Ana Lower about sex, and she was simply handed an ancient manual. What Every Young Lady Should Know About Marriage was a book so coy and evasive that its hottest topic concerned ironing a man’s shirts.

  Chapter Five

  JUNE 1942–NOVEMBER 1945

  I’M THE CAPTAIN and my wife is first mate,” Dougherty said of marriage; accordingly, his wife should be “content to stay on board and let me steer the ship.” But from the beginning of the arranged marriage between the insecure, virginal Norma Jeane and the confident, experienced Jim, there were signs of occasional mutiny, and eventually the subaltern jumped ship.

  Much later, the captain’s two logs appeared: selective, biased, abounding with clarifications of chronology and intimate details but teeming with improvised dialogue and imaginative reconstructions of events. For years they provided the only available chart of the matrimonial voyage—until the discovery of tran
scribed conversations during which both captain and first mate confided very different accounts of a journey that was headed for shipwreck from the first day.1

  James Dougherty always publicly insisted that “there were never any problems with our marriage . . . until I wanted a family and she wanted a career.” Such comments for the record reflected his conventional understanding of marriage as dominated by the husband and his wish to present a rosy picture of the first of the three marriages each of them contracted. But in remarks excised from later interviews prior to their publication, he was often more forthright about the thornier aspects of the union. “I wouldn’t be married to another movie actress for anything in the world,” he said. “She had only one thing on her mind—to be a star—and she gave up everything for it. I think Grace had a lot to do with it.”

  As for Norma Jeane, she later said, “My marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy, either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.”

  For about six months, from June to December 1942, the Doughertys lived in their one-room rented cabin in Sherman Oaks. Here, sixteen-year-old Norma Jeane tried to rise to the unrealistic demands of being a suitable housewife for a twenty-one-year-old independent man. She asked few questions, accepting the role of sexual companion and housekeeper enjoined on her by Grace and now expected of her by Dougherty. But this seemed to her very different from the earlier plan proposed—for her to replace Jean Harlow—and the shift in her prospects confused Norma Jean. “I really didn’t know where I was, or what I was supposed to be doing,” she said later.

  Later, Dougherty had to admit,

  She was so sensitive and insecure I realized I wasn’t prepared to handle her. I knew she was too young, and that her feelings were very easily hurt. She thought I was mad at her if I didn’t kiss her good-bye every time I left the house. When we had an argument—and there were plenty—I’d often say, “Just shut up!” and go out to sleep on the couch. An hour later, I woke up to find her sleeping alongside me, or sitting nearby on the floor. She was very forgiving. She never held a grudge in her life. I thought I knew what she wanted, but what I thought was never what she wanted. She seemed to be playing some kind of a part, rehearsing for a future I couldn’t figure out.