The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  In the winter, when the damp fog rolls in and enshrouds Catalina, the island takes on a surreal sense of separation from time and circumstance, even in the best of times and circumstances. But the Christmas season was always a difficult time for Norma Jeane, who was left alone in the apartment overlooking Avalon Bay. The mournful wail of the foghorn must have echoed her resounding sense of rejection by the man she had once given her heart to. In a letter that was postmarked in Avalon six weeks before Dougherty received it in Townsville, Australia, Norma Jeane told him she couldn’t bear the thought of him being so far away, and that she could “see nothing from the porch at Avalon but fog.”

  Norma Jeane from the orphanage belonged to nobody again, and she couldn’t see her way. But on a clear day, when the sun shimmered on the ocean and the seas danced with gold and lavender colors, she could see the nearby mainland’s glimmering shore. When the fog lifted she could see that it was on the mainland’s golden strand that the other person belonged, that other person whose name she still didn’t know.

  21

  Did You Happen to See…?

  There’s something addicting about a secret.

  —J. Edgar Hoover

  Though his back condition and a history of unstable health should have disqualified him from military service, Jack Kennedy’s father used his influence to have his son granted a commission as an ensign in the naval reserve. Ensign Jack Kennedy’s first active duty assignment was at ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C.

  When her brother arrived in the capital in October 1941, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy was a reporter for the Washington Times-Herald, and it was “Kick” who introduced Jack to the Times-Herald columnist Inga Arvad. Arvad’s column “Did You Happen to See…?” was a gossipy interview piece with varied Washington personalities. When Arvad happened to see Ensign Jack Kennedy of ONI, she recalled being enthralled: “He had the charm that makes birds come out of the trees. And when he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering, but exuding animal magnetism…. His bestseller Why England Slept had been published and my boss Cissy Patterson said, ‘Get an interview for your column with young Jack Kennedy’—I did!”

  The “Did You Happen to See Jack Kennedy?” column appeared in the Washington Times-Herald of November 27, 1941. It read:

  If former Ambassador Joe Kennedy has a brilliant mind and charm galore, then son no. 2 has inherited more than his due…. The 24 years of Jack’s existence on our planet have proved that here is really a boy with a future. He speaks eloquently, and he is the best listener I have come across….

  Another good listener was J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief suspected that Inga Arvad had been sent to Washington as a Nazi spy. “We had microphones planted in her apartment and a tap on her telephone,” Hoover’s assistant, William Sullivan, stated.

  John White, Kick Kennedy’s beau of the hour, said of Arvad, “She was very smart—certainly smart enough to be a spy—but also extremely loving…. She was adorable, just adorable. She looked adorable and was. She was totally woman. She was gorgeous, luscious—luscious is the word. Like a lot of icing on the cake…. What was it that attracted Jack? Oh…sex!”

  Initially, the FBI had no idea of the identity of the Nordic beauty’s mysterious lover, who was seen frequently staying the night in her apartment at 1600 Sixteenth Street. The surveillance agent described him as “a Naval Ensign who wore a gray overcoat with raglan sleeves and gray tweed trousers. He does not wear a hat, and has blonde curly hair which is always tousled…known only as ‘Jack’.” Bugs planted in the apartment revealed that he called her “Inga Binga,” and she called him “Jacko Tobacco.”

  When it was discovered that the suspected Nazi spy’s lover was Ensign Jack Kennedy of ONI, the FBI chief’s alarm sounded. Jack’s assignment at Naval Intelligence was decoding secret naval dispatches and preparing a daily update and position report of operations for Naval Command. J. Edgar Hoover sent out an urgent request for strict surveillance, which included interception of Inga Arvad’s mail, twenty-four-hour visual surveillance, phone taps, room bugs, burglary, and the solicitation of information regarding her past.

  According to the voluminous Arvad/JFK FBI files, it was during her acting and modeling days in Germany that Inga became socially involved with the Nazi hierarchy—becoming a close friend of Rudolf Hess and an acquaintance of Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels. It was at Hermann Göring’s wedding that she met the best man—Adolf Hitler. Hitler, who referred to her as “the perfect Nordic beauty,” invited her to sit with him in his box at the 1936 Olympic Games.

  When Rear Admiral Wilkinson, the director of Naval Intelligence, was informed by the FBI that Ensign Jack Kennedy was having an affair with a suspected spy, he became “so upset over the situation that you might say he was really frantic,” revealed Captain Hunter, Jack’s ONI section chief. “He wanted to get Kennedy out as quietly as possible…. He was very frightened at the time—very upset over the whole situation.”

  Rear Admiral Wilkinson wanted to have Ensign Kennedy discharged from the Navy; however, it was ultimately decided to quickly transfer him to a less sensitive assignment, and he was told to report to a desk job at the navy base in Charleston, where he was restricted from traveling beyond a seventy-mile radius. Jack Kennedy later confided to PT-109 author Robert Donovan, “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde, and they thought she was a spy!” But the move to Charleston didn’t put an end to the relationship. Continued surveillance revealed that “Inga Binga” was visiting “Jacko Tobacco” in South Carolina. Using the alias “Barbara White,” she traveled to Charleston on February 6, 1942, and checked in at the Fort Sumter Hotel. Both the FBI and naval security were trailing them and reported that Ensign Kennedy arrived at the hotel at 5:30 P.M. in his 1940 Buick convertible and went to Inga’s room, where he remained until the next morning.

  When J. Edgar Hoover learned that Jack Kennedy’s transfer hadn’t ended the affair, he called Joe Kennedy and warned him that his son was in serious trouble. According to Hoover’s assistant William Sullivan, the FBI chief had Ensign Kennedy transferred to the South Pacific “for security reasons”; however, when Kennedy returned from the South Pacific as a war hero, it helped launch his political career—not exactly what Hoover had in mind.

  In July 1942, Kathleen Kennedy took over Inga Arvad’s column at the Times-Herald, and through the machinations of Joe Kennedy it was arranged for Inga to move to Southern California, where she became a ghostwriter for Sheilah Graham’s syndicated Los Angeles Times gossip column about Hollywood—where secrets were more banal.

  While Pearl Harbor had been a disaster for some, it was a boon for the movie industry. Gas rationing allowed the average American family to go little farther than the neighborhood theater for entertainment, and in the pre-TV era every movie was accompanied by a newsreel that rendered the war visually comprehensible to the home-front audience. In the 1940s moviegoing was still cheap and had become an American habit, leading to big film grosses and big profits. Films affected morale, and the Roosevelt administration considered Hollywood film production as crucial to the war effort as some of the war production industries. “E for Effort” pennants proudly waved from the rooftops of the studio soundstages.

  Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, once the home of the Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies, was invaded by the army’s First Motion Picture Unit and became the center of production of public-information films. One of the commanding officers was Lieutenant Ronald Reagan, who while drilling the troops jokingly threatened to attack MGM and capture the Thalberg Building. Reagan referred to the studio as Fort Roach, and many of Hollywood’s talented artists and technicians were stationed there. In the fall of 1944, Lieutenant Reagan sent out a crew from Fort Roach to photograph women contributing to the war effort in strategic jobs. One of the photo assignments was at the Radioplane Company, located at the Glendale Metrop
olitan Airport. Among the photo crew sent to Radioplane was still photographer Corporal David Conover. Conover’s keen eye irised in on a shapely young girl whose overalls seemed to complement the alls they were over. He was so taken by her attractiveness that he unhesitatingly approached her and introduced himself. When asked if she had done any modeling, “Just clay” was Norma Jeane’s response.

  When Norma Jeane closed up the Avalon apartment, she had moved in with Dougherty’s mother, Ethel, who had helped her obtain her job at Radioplane, where Norma Jeane worked a ten-hour shift inspecting parachutes used in the recovery of target drones.

  “I wore overalls in the factory,” Marilyn later recalled. “I was surprised that they insisted on this. Putting a girl in overalls is like having her work in tights, particularly if a girl knows how to wear them….”

  Conover noticed that she knew how to wear them, and it was at Radioplane that a flash-gun wedding took place between Norma Jeane and the camera.

  “Her response to the camera then was amazing,” Conover recalled. “I was so excited I could hardly hold my camera steady.”

  “Am I really photogenic?” she asked.

  Not only was she photogenic, she was “a hummmm-dinger!” Conover recalled. Returning to Radioplane with the prints, Conover noted in his diary that she had a problem with stuttering, just as he did, and even with her face smudged by dirt, her eyes held something that he found intriguing. It struck him as “incongruous that such a lovely creature was working on an assembly line.”

  “Say, you d-don’t belong here,” Conover stammered when he returned with the photos.

  “Just where do I be-b-belong?” she asked with a puzzled look.

  “On a magazine cover!” Conover unhesitatingly replied.

  Norma Jeane wrote Grace Goddard:

  The first thing I knew the Army photographers were taking pictures of me…and some of them asked for dates, etc. (Naturally I refused!)…After they finished with some of the pictures, an Army Corporal by the name of David Conover told me he would be interested in getting some color shots of me. He used to have a studio on “The Strip” on Sunset Blvd. He said he would make arrangements with the plant superintendent if I would agree, so I said okay. He told me what to wear and what shade of lipstick, etc., so the next couple of weeks I posed for him at different times…. He said all the pictures came out perfect. Also, he said that I should by all means go into the modeling profession…that I photographed very well and that he wants to take a lot more. Also he said he had a lot of contacts he wanted me to look into.

  He is awfully nice and is married and is strictly business, which is the way I like it….

  Love,

  Norma Jeane

  But “strictly business” was not the way Corporal Conover recalled it in his memoirs. According to Conover, who was adept at retouching faded images, they had a brief affair.

  Norma Jeane’s half sister, Berniece, recalls hearing about the army photographer when Norma Jeane visited in the fall of 1944. Norma Jeane took the money she was saving for the future Dougherty house and spent it on a trip east to see Grace Goddard and Berniece. Grace had left West Virginia, where Doc was working, and had taken a temporary job in Chicago at a film laboratory. “She had developed a drinking problem and had to get away from Doc,” according to Bebe Goddard.

  “One of the reasons Norma Jeane blew her savings and went to Chicago to visit Grace,” Bebe believes, “was that after Jim left she was sort of lost and having a bad time. Normie and Jim’s mother didn’t get along all that well and she felt very much alone.” Norma Jeane knew that Grace held the answers to questions she had never been able to formulate as a child, and many of them had to do with the picture that had once hung on the wall of her mother’s room, which Grace had carefully packed away. According to Bebe, during the trip to Chicago, Grace gave Norma Jeane the picture of her father, Stan Gifford.

  After visiting Grace, Norma Jeane went to Detroit to see Berniece, the half sister she had never seen. “It was really Grace who coordinated this visit,” Berniece remembers. “When Grace wrote me that a visit was possible, I answered, ‘Sure, I’d love to have Norma Jeane, love to!’ And then Norma Jeane wrote me and told me that she’d be there, what train, what time—everything.”

  Berniece had married Paris Miracle and moved from Kentucky to Detroit during the war, where Paris found employment in the Ford assembly line building military vehicles. “Paris and I walked out to the tracks and stood waiting while the train screeched to a stop…. All the passengers stepping off looked so ordinary, and then all of a sudden there was this gorgeous girl—so pretty and fresh. Well, there was no chance of missing her!”

  As they drove to the Miracles’ apartment, Berniece recalls that she and Norma Jeane perched on the edge of their seats and stared at each other. “Every now and then our arms would fly around each other in a hug, and we’d look in each other’s eyes and say how happy we were. We didn’t have anything very original or profound to say. We were both so excited we were almost out of our minds…. We were overwhelmed at finally getting to see each other.”

  During the short visit, Berniece had many questions about Gladys, the mother she had so briefly known, and Norma Jeane wanted to know about Jackie, the dead half brother she had never seen. “You know, I don’t think Mother can believe that Jackie is really dead,” Norma Jeane said. “Grace told me that she still refuses to believe it.” Berniece observed that in her letters from Gladys, their mother never mentioned Jackie’s name.

  In a letter to Grace after their visit, Norma Jeane noted that David Conover wanted to take more pictures; however, Dougherty was coming home over the Christmas holidays, and Norma Jeane wrote, “I would rather not work when Jimmie was here. So he [Conover] said he would wait…I love Jimmy so very much, honestly I don’t think there is another man alive like him! He really is awfully sweet.”

  Norma Jeane was waiting for Dougherty at the Glendale Depot when his train arrived from San Francisco, and for a while things were as they used to be. That first night they headed for “the most luxurious motor lodge on Ventura Boulevard, the La Fonda,” Dougherty remembered. “Norma Jeane had bought a black nightgown for the occasion, and we rarely left our room.”

  Over the holidays they went to familiar places—movies at the Grauman’s Chinese, Pop’s Willow Lake, the Coconut Grove, or the homes of old friends, but as his Christmas leave ran out Norma Jeane was becoming distant and more and more melancholy. “She grew increasingly morose and a kind of dread took hold of her. She didn’t want to talk about or think about my leaving,” Dougherty observed. “I knew that she considered my shipping out again as another rejection.”

  “On one of those last days, she suddenly announced that she was going to call her father, a man she had never been in touch with before. Her illegitimacy was something we had talked about on a few occasions. It was something she accepted without any apparent bitterness.” But after Norma Jeane had returned from Chicago with the picture of Stan Gifford, she discovered where he lived and had gotten his phone number.

  Dougherty vividly remembered the call: “‘This is Norma Jeane’ she said in a trembly voice, ‘I’m Gladys’s daughter.’”

  Gifford said he had nothing to say to her, told her not to call again, and hung up.

  Dougherty recalls how totally devastated she was by Gifford’s refusal to speak to her. He tried to ease her pain by explaining that perhaps a call out of the blue may have been difficult for him, especially if Gifford was married and had another family. But nothing he could say or do was of consolation, and she wept for days.

  Dougherty lamented, “When I was getting ready to return to the ship, it was another very emotional experience for her. It was just sad, very sad—sad for me because I didn’t want to leave her, and sad for her because every time I left, it was a destructive thing that hit her extremely hard.” When Norma Jeane went with Dougherty to the dock at San Pedro and waved good-bye, he didn’t realize she was waving good-bye t
o the past as she stood on the brink of the future.

  I could have loved you once, and even said it,

  But you went away,

  A long way away.

  When you came back it was too late

  And love was a forgotten word,

  Remember?

  —Norma Jeane

  22

  This Way Out

  When Miss Dougherty came to us, the first thing we tried to do was change that horrible walk. That wiggle wasn’t good for fashion models.

  —Emmeline Snively

  Corporal David Conover was awakened by a scream “so shrill and penetrating” that he jerked upright on the sofa where he slept. He looked around the dingy motel room and saw Norma Jeane sitting on the bed shivering and bathed in perspiration.

  “It’s that n-nightmare,” she stammered.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “They force me into a straitjacket and carry me out of the house. I’m screaming, ‘I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!’ When we come to a brick bu-building that looks like my old orphanage, we go through one black iron door after another and each door slams shut behind me. ‘I don’t belong here!’ I shout. ‘What are you doing to me?’ They pu-put me in a bleak room with barred windows and they go out and lock the iron door, leaving me in a straitjacket. ‘I don’t belong here!’ I scream again and again, until I have no more breath.”

  The night terror struck on the last night of a photo safari in which Conover was trying to capture Norma Jeane on film in the Mojave Desert during the spring of 1945. She had taken sick leave from Radioplane while Conover helped her put together a portfolio she could take to modeling agencies. On the way back to Los Angeles they had shared a motel room in Barstow to save money. When they got back to L.A., Conover found that orders were waiting for him at Fort Roach—he was to be shipped out the next day to a combat photo unit in the Philippines. When Conover called Norma Jeane and broke the news about his orders, he advised, “Take the pictures to the Blue Book Modeling Agency and talk to Miss Emmeline Snively.”