The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  Dougherty, who occasionally sported a mustache, bore a faint resemblance to the photo of Norma Jeane’s father. “Norma Jeane was fascinated by my mustache,” Dougherty remarked. The mustache made him look older and more mature than his twenty years. Norma Jeane often referred to him as “Daddy,” just as she would later call DiMaggio “Pa” and Arthur Miller “Pappy.” “What a Daddy!” Norma Jeane once exclaimed to Bebe after returning from a date with Lucky Jim.

  “She was real nice company, but awfully young,” Dougherty recalls. “Still, the message was clear enough each day—Norma Jeane liked me. It was in her expression as she got out of the car, in her smile, the warmest smile I’d ever seen in a girl.”

  During the fall semester at Van Nuys High School, Dougherty recalled that Bebe was frequently sick and absent from school. On these occasions he’d be alone in the car with Norma Jeane, and she would sit extra close to him. Sometimes the car ride home would end up in the Hollywood Hills. After an early movie on the weekends they’d park up on the notorious Mulholland Drive and do what was innocently referred to as “necking—a lot of kissing and a lot of hugging.” In those days young people weren’t as promiscuous and, according to Dougherty, Norma Jeane knew when to stop. “She very neatly held things in check,” Dougherty stated.

  On December 7, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was feared that they would next bomb Los Angeles, where two-thirds of the nation’s aircraft production was centered at Douglas, North American, and Lockheed. Some people were so terrified of an attack by Japanese planes that they vacated their homes and moved inland. People in the movie colony suddenly took extended vacations in Palm Springs, and Los Angeles real estate took a nosedive.

  On Wednesday, December 10, Los Angeles had its first complete blackout. People in Hollywood were having dinner when the sirens wailed. A voice over the radio announced, “This is the Fourth Interceptor Command. Unidentified planes in the sky. Complete blackout ordered immediately.” The lights went out in Chasen’s, the Brown Derby, Ciro’s, the Trocadero. As the city became dark, patrons poured out of restaurants and nightclubs eager to get home or head for the desert. It seemed like the end of the world—except on Hollywood Boulevard, where they couldn’t find the switch to turn off the lights on the Christmas trees that lined “Christmas Tree Lane.”

  Unable to drive to the midnight shift at Lockheed because of the blackout, Jim Dougherty waited until the all-clear, which came in the early hours of the morning. Though Norma Jeane begged him not to go, Dougherty drove on to the Lockheed plant in Burbank, where the business of building bombers received new impetus. Despite the war jitters, Doc Goddard’s company, Adel Precision Products, decided to hold its annual Christmas dance. Knowing that something was going on between Norma Jeane and Jimmy, Grace suggested to Jimmy’s mother Ethel that Jimmy invite Norma Jeane to the dance and find a date for Bebe. Jimmy still remembers how fantastic Norma Jeane looked that night in a beautiful red party dress she had borrowed for the occasion. He recalls that during the slow numbers like “Everything Happens to Me” and “Dream,” Norma Jeane leaned extra close to him, eyes shut tight in a romantic reverie. “Even Grace and Doc noticed that I wasn’t being just ‘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.”

  In January of 1942 Adel Precision offered Doc Goddard a position as the head of its burgeoning East Coast Sales Department. Doc eagerly accepted the promotion, which involved relocating in West Virginia. Grace and Bebe were to accompany him, but it was decided that Norma Jeane, who was still a ward of the court, would have to remain. When Norma Jeane learned of the Goddards’ plans, she was devastated. Just as she began to feel that she had a real home and a real family and a budding romance, there was to be another sudden wrenching of relationships.

  As Norma Jeane prepared herself for the Goddards’ departure and an uncertain future, Ethel Dougherty approached her son with a blunt suggestion. “Sometime in the early part of 1942,” Dougherty recalled, “Mom called me aside and said, ‘Doc and Grace are going to move to West Virginia for his company. They’re going to take Bebe, but they can’t take Norma Jeane. Mrs. Lower isn’t well enough to look after her, and that means she goes back to the orphanage until she’s eighteen.’”

  “I’m listening,” Dougherty responded.

  “Grace wants to know if you would be interested in marrying Norma Jeane. She turns sixteen next June.”

  After contemplating the alternatives, and thinking about Grace’s suggestion, Dougherty said yes. When Grace presented the idea to Norma Jeane, she confided, “Jim’s such a wonderful person. I want to marry him, but I don’t know anything about sex. Can we get married without having sex?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Grace said. “Jim’ll teach you.”

  The marriage was planned for mid-June, after Norma Jeane turned sixteen. In March Norma Jeane temporarily moved back to Aunt Ana’s home in Sawtelle and transferred from Van Nuys to University High School in Santa Monica, where she was in her junior year. In April the Goddards moved to West Virginia, taking Bebe with them, and there were painful good-byes. Norma Jeane and Bebe had become close friends. “We were both just heartbroken,” Bebe Goddard confided, “And after we moved to Huntington, West Virginia, I was very lonely for Normie, but we corresponded, and I still have some of her letters.”

  When Doc and Grace Goddard left Norma Jeane behind, Dougherty recalled that she went through a period of feeling rejected. Once again she had been abandoned, and on this one occasion Norma Jeane tearfully complained that Grace “had let her down and always thought of herself first.” But that was the past. In the future Jim Dougherty would be there for her.

  Ethel Dougherty and Ana Lower planned the wedding, which took place on Friday evening, June 19, 1942. The Bolenders were sent an invitation by Norma Jeane and were among the twenty-five guests in attendance. The Goddards wired their love and best wishes from West Virginia. There seemed no possibility that Gladys would attend. Having left the Norwalk State Hospital, she was institutionalized at the Agnew State Hospital near San Francisco.

  The ceremony was conducted by a nondenominational Christian minister at the Brentwood home of the Chester Howells, friends of the Goddards. Norma Jeane descended the spiral staircase in a beautiful wedding dress that had been a gift from Aunt Ana. Dougherty’s brother, Marion, was the best man; a girl friend from “Uni High” was her matron of honor; and Dougherty’s nephew, Wesley, was the ring bearer. It was Aunt Ana who gave the June bride away. Lucky Jim fondly reminisced, “When she smiled at me after the ceremony, her sweet smile would have melted a stone. It seemed to say, ‘I trust you, I believe what you say, I love you.’ And her eyes were so expressive…. While it’s hard not to sound sentimental about it, she had offered me her heart—nobody else was going to have it. That was it.”

  Norma Jeane, “who belonged to nobody,” now belonged to Lucky Jim. But Dougherty didn’t know about the other person, the one who made Norma Jeane feel as if she were two people—“the other…whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world….”

  Mr. and Mrs. James Dougherty moved into a new studio apartment on Vista Del Monte in the Valley. “Norma Jeane was delighted with the place,” Dougherty remembered. “It was the first time in her life she’d had a real place of her own. It had a pull-down Murphy bed, which she thought was great fun…. She began our married life knowing nothing, but absolutely nothing, about sex. But Norma Jeane loved sex. It was as natural to her as breakfast in the morning. There were never any problems with it.”

  Dougherty went back to work at Lockheed the Monday following the wedding and found a note in his lunch box: “Dearest Daddy—When you read this, I’ll be asleep and dreaming of you. Love and kisses, Your Baby.” With the Goddards gone and his “Baby’s” mother in an institution, Dougherty realized he had taken on a great responsibility. �
��I was very much in love,” Dougherty recalled. “She had a quick wit and a beautiful face and body. She was the most mature sixteen-year-old I had ever met when we married…. There was something mature and terribly proper about her, which she may have inherited. I later noticed this trait in her mother, even though she was emotionally disturbed. Then at other times she was like a little girl. She had no childhood and it showed. There were two Norma Jeanes—one was the child whose dolls and stuffed animals were propped up on top of the chest of drawers ‘so they can see what’s going on.’ The other Norma Jeane had moods in her that were unpredictable and often a little scary. You’d catch glimpses of someone who had been unloved for too long, unwanted too many years.”

  After staying in the studio apartment for six months, the Doughertys rented a small house on Bessemer Street in Van Nuys. It was at the Bessemer Street house that Dougherty came home one rainy day to find Norma Jeane trying to lead a cow from a nearby field into the living room because she had heard it mournfully mooing out in the rain.

  According to Dougherty, she tried very hard to be a grown-up housewife. She kept the house very neat, always packed him a lunch box with a love note, and tried to learn to be a good cook. Dougherty confessed that the stories of her frequently cooking peas and carrots because she liked the color combination are true. He confided that in those days Norma Jeane trusted everybody. While Dougherty was out she would buy encyclopedias from men in their thirties who told her they were working their way through college. She had a thirst for knowledge and thought she could buy it on the installment plan. At one time they had three sets of encyclopedias, and another one on the way.

  The Doughertys had a mutual understanding that they would practice birth control. Dougherty admits that he was the one who insisted on it and talked her into the decision. There were the insecurities of the war to consider, and Dougherty felt that Norma Jeane was too young to be a mother. He described Norma Jeane as a girl who “thoroughly enjoyed sexual union,” and that their lovemaking was pure joy. “We both had trim bodies and the sight of hers and mine nude excited both of us. Getting undressed for bed was almost unfailingly erotic and almost before the light was out we were locked together. If I took a shower and she opened the door, it was the same thing all over again—instant sex.”

  He once confided to a friend that Norma Jeane’s sexual appetite at times seemed insatiable. “The most vivid memory I have of Norma Jeane is of her hand reaching over as we were driving along a country road, and I knew it meant that she wanted me to stop wherever we were and make love. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Honey, we’ve got a home and a beautiful bed,’ but she would lean against my chest and look up at me and sigh, ‘It’s more romantic out here.’ So we’d park right there and do it…. Sometimes this impulse came over her while we were driving through a built-up section of the San Fernando Valley, which was well populated. And Norma Jeane would say urgently, ‘Pull off here! Pull off here!’ And away we went.”

  But Norma Jeane’s emotional demands could also be insatiable.

  “She was so sensitive and insecure, and I realized I wasn’t prepared to handle her,” Dougherty admitted. “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 and sleep on the couch…. I thought I knew what she wanted, but what I thought was never what she wanted.”

  Though the Selective Service had called in many of Dougherty’s friends and former classmates, he was exempt from the draft as long as he held his strategic employment at Lockheed. But without saying anything to Norma Jeane, Dougherty admits, “I went out and began the process of enlisting in the navy.” When Norma Jeane heard of Dougherty’s plans she became distraught.

  “Oh, honey,” Dougherty recalls her crying, “Please don’t do this! Your job at Lockheed is important! Please don’t!”

  Disturbed by her hysteria, Dougherty asked the enlistment officer to tear up his application papers, and he continued working at Lockheed.

  Dougherty claims that he “felt guilty about not being more involved with the fighting and taking the risks nearly all my schoolmates were taking.” But his next attempt at seeking sanctuary from Norma Jeane’s demands had little relationship to the war: “I went down to the local fire department and asked if there were any openings. There were, and I filled out an application.”

  Fighting fires instead of the Axis powers offered the best of both possible worlds. Lucky Jim would spend several days a week at home with the wife he loved but “wasn’t prepared to handle,” and he would spend several sequential days and nights on duty at the fire department—where all he might have to fight were infernos. But when Norma Jeane learned about the application at the fire department, she was burning mad.

  “She was angry about it,” Dougherty said, “She seemed to think we’d got all that settled when I applied for the navy.”

  “You’ll lose your deferment!” she bitterly complained, and he asked the fire department to tear up that application as well.

  Dougherty has memories of Norma Jeane’s unpredictable mood swings. Sometimes she would be quiet and withdrawn; at other times she would be aggressive and extroverted. “With friends she was often quiet and more of a listener, far more of an introvert than I could ever be,” he recalls. But Dougherty would see another aspect of his wife when they had friends over and Norma Jeane asked them to bring dance records. After dinner the carpet would be rolled back, and Dougherty would be amazed to see the instant metamorphosis that would take place. As soon as the needle hit the shellac she’d be transformed into an erotic bombshell of rhythmic grace. Dougherty would grow increasingly jealous as she cut in and danced with all the male guests, giggling and obviously enjoying the attention she received.

  Buddies told Dougherty about the merchant marine. He had learned that there were frequent home leaves between trips, and in midsummer of 1943, a little more than a year after their wedding, Dougherty told Norma Jeane that he had definitely made up his mind—he was joining the merchant marine. That night there was a terrible scene. “It was a bad one, the worst I could remember since we were married,” Dougherty reluctantly recalled. “Norma Jeane threw herself frantically at me, begging me to make her pregnant so that she ‘would have a piece of me, in case something happened.’ She seemed to fear, now that she had me and her life had a direction for the first time, that it would end suddenly—that she would be cheated again by life the way she had been so many times before. I explained to her that if anything did happen, the child might end up like she did—with a mother who couldn’t support it because of the pressures, and it would wind up in an institution. But she wouldn’t agree, and she cried and wept all night. Perhaps I was too harsh—too insensitive to her needs….”

  The day Dougherty left to report to the merchant marine in San Pedro, California, Norma Jeane was hysterical. She was so distressed that Dougherty feels he wouldn’t have been able to leave her had she not been left in the care of his mother, Ethel. After a couple of days at the Maritime Training Base on nearby Catalina Island, Dougherty was allowed to phone home, and Norma Jeane was thrilled to hear the sound of his voice. “You would have thought I’d been gone for a year,” he vividly remembered.

  When he called Norma Jeane to tell her that he was to be stationed with a training unit on Catalina and she could live with him in Avalon, he recalled that she let out a shout of joy that could have been heard from Van Nuys to Catalina without the aid of a telephone.

  In September of 1943 they found an apartment in Avalon, on the side of the bay that overlooks the harbor. Dougherty had been assigned as a physical instructor to new recruits, and he worked regular hours and was able to return to the apartment in the evenings. The wartime population on the island was predominantly male. The merchant marine, the OSS, and the marines had virtually commandeered Catalina as a training ground, and the few women who lived there were either old
ladies who remained in their homes for the duration, or the few wives of officers and instructors in permanent training companies. Ninety percent of the wartime population consisted of virile males isolated on an island where the few women were mostly old, plain, and married. “Those hordes of sex-starved marines and sailors crowded onto that small island with us suddenly loomed as a major threat,” Dougherty said.

  He remembers the Saturday night Stan Kenton and his band came over to play at a dance for the servicemen in the Avalon Casino Ballroom. “Norma Jeane was very excited and got into a tight white summer dress and spent hours over her hair. This drawn-out getting-ready ritual had begun soon after we were married. She could spend an hour deciding what to wear and just as long bathing. Norma Jeane would drive me crazy getting ready. I don’t think she really knew how long a minute was, or an hour. She thought time was a rubber band. Well, when we finally got to the dance, I swung into a few steps of a swing version of ‘The Peanut Vendor’ with Norma Jeane, and almost immediately felt a tap on my shoulder. A marine cut in and I lost sight of Norma Jeane for more than an hour. She was having a ball, of course. Hell, she was the belle of the ball.

  “I couldn’t be sure, but Norma Jeane must have danced with every one of those guys at the dance during the three or four hours we were there, because they were all cutting in on each other. It was the first taste I’d had of her appeal to a large group, and I must admit I was shaken by the experience. I’ll even grant I got a bit jealous…. I felt threatened.”

  But for Norma Jeane it was a dream come true, and there was no way that Lucky Jim could have fully comprehended his young bride’s cache of daydreams—dreams she scarcely understood herself.

  Eighteen months after their wedding, Jim Dougherty shipped out. Though he could have stayed on as a physical trainer at Catalina, he admits that he requested sea duty. He would like to believe that Norma Jeane never learned that it was his decision and not the merchant marine’s. In December he sailed for the South Pacific on the freighter Julia S. DuMont. He had signed up for over a year at sea.