The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  “Aunt Ana” was Edith Ana Atchinson Lower, the sister of Grace’s father. She was fifty-eight years old when Norma Jeane moved into the duplex she owned at 11348 Nebraska Avenue in West Los Angeles. Like Grace and Gladys, she was a Christian Scientist. In her devotion to the belief formulated by Mary Baker Eddy, she had advanced to the level of healing practitioner.

  Norma Jeane was loving by nature and responded to the concept of God as love, and every Sunday she accompanied Aunt Ana to the Christian Science Church, whose essential transcendental belief was that God the Creator is Love—the only Reality. Mary Baker Eddy believed that the passing material world was unreal, and therefore evil and corruption had no reality. Norma Jeane’s lifelong ability to become aloof from the evils that surrounded her and remain forever the guileless child perhaps stemmed from her early protective belief in Mary Baker Eddy’s creed that “evil is the awful deception and unreality of existence.”

  Aunt Ana’s duplex was in the Sawtelle district of West Los Angeles, and when Norma Jeane moved there, she entered the seventh grade at Emerson Junior High School, a two-mile walk from Sawtelle. “The other girls rode to school in a bus, but I had no nickel to pay for the ride. Rain or shine, I walked the two miles from my aunt’s home to school. I hated the walk, I hated the school. I had no friends. The pupils seldom talked to me and never wanted me in their games…. The first year at Emerson, all I had was the two light-blue dress outfits from the orphanage. I sure didn’t make any best-dressed list. In school the pupils often whispered about me and giggled as they stared at me…. I was very quiet. They called me dumb and made fun of my orphan’s outfit. You could say I wasn’t very popular. Nobody ever walked home with me or invited me to visit their homes. This was partly because I came from a poor part of the district where all the Mexicans and Japanese lived. It was also because I couldn’t smile at anyone.”

  According to Norma Jeane’s classmate Gladys Phillips, “In the thirties Los Angeles was a very divided, class-conscious society, and this was unfortunately true of school life, too. All the students were immediately, unofficially classified according to where they lived, and Sawtelle was simply not the place to be from.” Her teacher, Mary Campbell, remembered, “Norma Jeane was a nice child, but not at all outgoing, not vibrant…. She looked as though she wasn’t well cared for. Her clothes separated her a little bit from the rest of the girls. In 1938 she wasn’t well developed.”

  By the age of twelve, when Norma Jeane entered the seventh grade, she was tall for her age—five feet five inches, almost her full height. But she was skinny. The boys at Emerson jokingly referred to her as “Norma Jeane, the human bean.” But “Norma Jeane, the human bean” was trembling on the evanescent vine of adolescence, and the faded orphan’s outfit became the chrysalis of nature’s revenge.

  “My body was developing and becoming shapely, but no one knew this but me,” she recalled.

  I still wore the blue dress and ragged blouse, and I started to look like an overgrown lummox. I tried to cheer myself up with daydreams. I dreamed of attracting attention, of having people look at me…. This wish for attention had something to do, I think, with my trouble in church on Sundays. No sooner was I in the pew with the organ playing and everybody singing a hymn than the impulse would come to me to take off all my clothes. I wanted desperately to stand up naked for God and everyone else to see.

  My impulse to appear naked and my dreams about it had no shame or sense of sin in them. Dreaming of people looking at me made me feel less lonely. I think I wanted them to see me naked because I was ashamed of the clothes I wore—the never-changing faded blue dress of poverty. Naked, I was like the other girls….

  One morning Norma Jeane found that her last ragged blouse was torn, and she borrowed a sweater from a friend. “She was my age, but smaller,” Marilyn later remembered, “I arrived at school just as the math class was starting. As I walked to my seat everybody stared at me as if I had suddenly grown two heads, which in a way I had. They were under my tight sweater. At recess a half dozen boys crowded around me. They made jokes and kept looking at my sweater as if it were a gold mine…. After school four boys walked home with me, wheeling their bicycles by hand. I was excited but acted calm.” Norma Jeane had brought a new equation to the math class.

  I didn’t think of my body as having anything to do with sex. It was more like a friend who had mysteriously appeared in my life, a sort of magic friend. A few weeks later, I stood in front of the mirror one morning and put lipstick on my lips. I darkened my blond eyebrows. I had no money for clothes, and I had no clothes except my orphan rig and the sweater. The lipstick and the mascara were the clothes, however. I saw that they improved my looks as much as if I had put on a real gown…. My arrival in school with painted lips and darkened brows, and still encased in the magic sweater, started everybody buzzing.

  By the time she entered the eighth grade in September 1939, “Norma Jeane, the human bean,” had become the hubba-hubba-mmmmmmm girl. One of the older students who had noticed Norma Jeane’s magical metamorphosis was Chuckie Moran. “There’s the mmmmmmm girl!” he’d inevitably comment as they passed in the hall. Her renown in the halls of Emerson as “the mmmmmmm girl” had its origins in a humming sound Norma Jeane used for suggestive emphasis. It was undoubtedly borrowed from her idol Jean Harlow, who frequently used the sensual mmmmmmm sound to good effect on Clark Gable in Red Dust and China Seas. What worked on Gable apparently also worked on Chuckie Moran. Chuckie, a popular ninth-grader, had an old jalopy he was turning into a hot rod, and he often took Norma Jeane to the school dances, or the drive-in. Sometimes they’d go to the Aragon Ballroom on the Ocean Park Pier, where Pickering’s Pleasure Palace once stood, and dance to one of the popular big bands like Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, or Benny Goodman. Norma Jeane loved to do the Lindy, the Big Apple, and the Rumba, and she and Chuckie could out-jitterbug anybody on the dance floor.

  We danced until we thought we’d drop, and then, when we headed outside for a Coca-Cola and a walk in the cool breeze, Chuckie let me know he wanted more than just a dance partner. Suddenly his hands were everywhere! But I thought, well, he isn’t entitled to anything else. Besides I really wasn’t so smart about sex, which was probably a good thing. Poor Chuckie, all he got was tired feet….

  By the end of the 1930s the Depression was on the wane and the New Deal was in full power. If war clouds were looming over Europe, Hollywood was preoccupied with making movies and making money: 1939 was the year of Gone With the Wind, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, and The Wizard of Oz. But while Hollywood was grinding out politically innocuous fantasies, Hitler’s Gestapo was rounding up Jewish “undesirables,” Mussolini was gassing Ethiopians, Stalin was launching a series of deadly purges, and the Japanese were invading Manchuria. Fascism, communism, and militarism were vanquishing humanism, but according to Dorothy Parker the only “ism” Hollywood was interested in was plagiarism.

  Many of those in the film business who had genuine concerns over the plight of the oppressed joined the Anti-Nazi League, which was organized by Hollywood communists John Howard Lawson and Donald Ogden Stewart. The growing threat of fascism formed an alliance of Hollywood liberals and communists, and the Anti-Nazi League attracted a wide spectrum of supporters, including Eddie Cantor; actress Florence Eldridge; Ring Lardner, Jr.; Fredric March; and Ernst Lubitsch.

  Among Communist Party front organizations, the Hollywood Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council was perhaps the most influential. It combined artists, writers, lawyers, and physicians. One of the zealous members in the 1940s was Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who many years later would be Marilyn Monroe’s physician at the time of her death.

  Engelberg had joined the Communist Party in the early thirties when he was a medical student at Cornell University. After marrying Esther Goldstein in 1933, Engelberg became an intern at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood, where he met fellow internist Romeo Greenschpoon (later to be known as Ralph R. Greenson). According to Dorothy Healey, who wa
s chairman of the Los Angeles Communist Party, both Hy Engelberg and his wife Esther became active communists in the party heyday of the thirties. Archives of the Los Angeles Communist Party document the Engelberg’s attendance at numerous party meetings and fund-raisers. Brochures of the Communist People’s Education Center list Hyman Engelberg as an instructor. In testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Dr. Oner Barker stated that Hyman Engelberg was an active member of the Doctors Unit of the Hollywood Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council.

  “I remember,” said a former member of the council, “that whenever you were at a meeting at a home, you always had to have a drink so that in case anyone walked in, you’d look as if you were at a party. I recall one writer saying, ‘What do you think of my great Marxist library?’ and there wasn’t a book around. Then he pushed a button and the bar swung out and there was indeed a great Marxist library. But I think he used the bar more than the books.”

  In Hollywood the secrecy of the Communist Party offered a sense of excitement for some who suffered from the ennui of fame and success. According to Dorothy Healey, “The biggest mistake we made was in the party’s staying underground—the cult of secrecy. The thrill came in the sense of the forbidden, of international intrigue—the secret names, aliases, underground meetings, and double identities.”

  Hollywood’s close-knit group of communists, like communists everywhere, had insisted that the rumors of a Hitler-Stalin pact were fascist propaganda. But when German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to sign the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Treaty on August 21, 1939, the news that the pact was a fait accompli brought about bitter recriminations within the Hollywood circle of liberals and party members.

  The difference between the dedicated red and the progressive liberal was quickly delineated with the announcement of the pact. The bitter debate that soon followed splintered the Anti-Nazi League, which quickly changed its name to “The Hollywood League for Democratic Action.” The loyalists followed the new party line of neutrality, as it became increasingly clear that war in Europe was inevitable. Several days after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the German army began massing on the Polish border, and on September 1, Nazi troops and tanks swept into Poland.

  On Saturday morning, September 3, David Niven was sleeping aboard a yacht Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had anchored off Catalina Island on the coast of Southern California. Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and a number of other Britons in exile were also on board. They woke to hear the news flash on the radio that Britain had delivered an ultimatum to Germany, and Hitler had rejected it. The two nations were at war. Fairbanks raised a glass to toast victory, and Olivier reportedly raised his glass, and raised his glass—and raised his glass—until, Fairbanks observed, he became “smashed as a hoot owl.” Olivier began ranting and raving, “This is the end! You are finished—all of you—finished! Finished! You are relics! Done for! Doomed relics!”

  But just twenty-six miles across the sea Norma Jeane Baker neither felt doomed nor looked like a relic as she walked on the sands of Ocean Park. On that sunny day at the beach the war seemed far away.

  “By the summertime I had a real beau,” Marilyn remembered.

  He was twenty-one, and despite being very sophisticated he thought I was eighteen instead of thirteen. I was able to fool him by keeping my mouth shut and walking a little fancy…. I practiced walking languorously. My beau arrived at my home one Saturday with the news that we were going swimming at the beach. I borrowed a bathing suit, which was too small, and put on an old pair of slacks and a sweater. The skimpy bathing suit was under them.

  It was a sunny day, the sky was blue, and the sand was crowded with people. I stood and stared at the ocean for a long time. It always had sort of a hypnotic effect on me. It was like something in a dream, full of gold and lavender colors, blue and foaming white. “Come on, let’s get in!” my beau suddenly yelled.

  “In where?” I asked.

  “In the water,” he laughed, thinking I had made a joke.

  So I removed my slacks and sweater and stood there in my skimpy suit. I thought, “I’m almost naked,” as I started walking across the sand. I was almost at the water’s edge when some young men whistled at me. I closed my eyes and stood still for a moment. Then, instead of going into the water, I turned and walked down the beach. The same thing happened that had happened in the math class, but on a larger scale. It was also much noisier. The men whistled, and some jumped up from the sand and trotted up for a better view. Even the women stopped moving and stared as I came nearer.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the whistles and whoops. In fact, I didn’t quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world….

  20

  Lucky Jim

  Marilyn Monroe and I were married four years, and if we had stayed married, it’s a cinch that today I’d be Mr. Monroe.

  —Jim Dougherty

  In 1940 America hovered between peace and war. Following the Hitler–Stalin pact, the left and the right joined in a strange mixed marriage of neutrality. “Keep America Out of War” was the rallying cry of Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy the ambassador to Britain, and the isolationists. “The Yanks Are Not Coming” was the slogan of John Howard Lawson, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, and the voices of the Comintern. Keeping America out of the war became a central objective of the Communist Party (CP). Frederick Vanderbilt Field, known as the “silver-spoon communist,” traveled the country campaigning for neutrality and organizing the American Peace Mobilization, a CP front with over three hundred committees from the East Coast to Hollywood.

  “All-out aid to the British Empire means total war for the American people,” Field stated. “Men in high places are dragging us into a war three thousand miles away. Americans don’t want their sons to die—mangled scraps of flesh—in order to enrich Wall Street. America, keep out of the war!”

  As the Battle of Britain was being waged, Hollywood still held to the belief that the business of Hollywood was Hollywood business. “Hollywood made three hundred and fifty pictures last year,” commented Walter Wanger. “Fewer than ten of these pictures departed from the usual westerns, romances, and boy-meets-girl story.” Hollywood’s big musical event of 1940 was Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and the comedy riot of the year was the first pairing of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in Road to Singapore.

  But America was gearing up for war, and among those working on the assembly lines at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank was the man destined to marry Norma Jeane—James Dougherty. Jim Dougherty lived with his parents on Archwood Street in Van Nuys, and Doc and Grace Goddard lived just behind them. Doc had found a job as a salesman for Adel Precision Products, and the Goddards moved from Cahuenga Pass to a small house in the Valley owned by Ana Lower. In the spring of 1941, Ana Lower, who suffered from heart disease, was unable to continue caring for Norma Jeane, who was sent to live with Doc and Grace, where she shared a room with Doc’s daughter Bebe.

  “I was thirteen when I first met Norma Jeane, who I called ‘Normie,’” Bebe recalled, “but we really didn’t live together until she moved into the house in Van Nuys. We were both born in 1926, and we became good friends. Jimmy Dougherty lived next door and was five years older than Norma Jeane, but Normie went for older men and thought Jimmy was a dreamboat.”

  It wasn’t long before Dougherty noticed that another pretty girl was living with the Goddards. “I discovered her name was Norma Jeane,” Dougherty recalled, “but I didn’t have enough interest to find out her last name.”

  Dougherty worked the graveyard shift and he remembers an afternoon when he was trying to sleep and Norma Jeane was in the nearby backyard whooping and hollering with laughter. Annoyed, he went to his bedroom window and saw her playing with Grace’s spaniel.
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br />   “The dog had got the best of Norma Jeane and had her down on the ground, licking her face. She was giggling and shrieking,” Dougherty recalls. “I got up—I think it was the second time this had happened—and I was a little angry. But when I asked her to can the loud noise, Norma Jeane was so angelic, you might say, all I could say was, ‘Well, don’t worry about it. Forget it.’ After that we’d talk and shoot the breeze, but she was much younger than she looked. She was just a kid—a charity case, having just gotten out of an orphanage.”

  In September 1941, the Goddards moved to a more spacious California ranch house set back from the street in a grove of pepper trees on Odessa Avenue. The new Goddard home was farther away from Van Nuys High, but the transportation problem was solved when Grace asked Jim Dougherty’s mother, Ethel, if her son would mind picking “the kids” up from school. Jim volunteered because “it seemed like the neighborly thing to do.” Norma Jeane was pleased with the arrangement. Jim was a gentleman, with a lively, outgoing personality and a handsome, happy-go-lucky Irish face to go along with his uncomplicated manner. His friends called him Lucky Jim.

  “As I recall, there was quite a flirtation when Jimmy was bringing us home from school,” Bebe said. “We’d ride home from school with Jimmy and hang around the house. After school sometimes we’d have quite a crowd…. Jimmy and a couple of guys that played guitar would hang around and teach us to play craps and stuff like that. Then he finally asked her for a date.”