Indeed, Norma Jeane was quickly blossoming into an early iteration of the famed actress and personality she would eventually become. Leaner and sporting darker curls than the later Monroe, she exuded a youthful beauty that, if not yet wondrous, was certainly noticeable. Boys her age (and older) had begun to pursue her. “She could be a bit shy and withdrawn at times, but for the most part, she absolutely glowed,” said a friend named Susan Ryder. “She was not only pretty but very bright. You could see it in her eyes. She also had great skin; the clearest, pinkest skin I’ve ever seen. It was silky and flawless. Then in the ninth grade, she began spilling out of her clothes. Not fat, just curves. She wore makeup and sweaters that were a size too small, accentuating her bustline. She couldn’t walk down the street without having some jerk in a passing car come to a screeching halt and start yelling and whistling at her out the window.”
Barbara Anthony, another playmate from this period, considered Norma Jeane “quite alluring and sensitive but thin-skinned and somewhat secretive. She didn’t talk much about her personal life. She did well in school. She was witty, but, as I say, she could be very thin-skinned. If you said something that rubbed her the wrong way, she’d let you know it.”
In 1940 Ana Lower suffered a mild heart attack, and Norma Jeane went back to the Odessa Avenue home of the Goddards. Given Doc Goddard’s sexual proclivities, the arrangement was far from ideal, but under the circumstances, it remained the most practical alternative. By that fall, Norma Jeane had entered the tenth grade at Van Nuys High School and had met James Edward Dougherty, the son of Edward and Ethel Dougherty, neighbors of the Goddards. At age twenty, Jim Dougherty, truly “the boy next door,” cut a manly figure. He had blue eyes, light brown hair, and a muscular physique. A graduate of Van Nuys High, he had been student body president as well as a football star and member of the Maskers Drama Club. In addition, he owned his own car, a blue Ford coupe. Although he’d been offered a partial college scholarship, he had opted for a job at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, in Burbank, augmenting his income by working at a funeral home embalming corpses. When Lockheed offered to increase his salary, he quit the funeral home job.
At the time that Norma Jeane met him, Dougherty was dating three other girls, among them Doris Ingram, who’d been crowned Miss Santa Barbara. He nevertheless began driving his neighbors Bebe Goddard and Norma Jeane Baker to school every morning and hanging out with them on weekends. Each girl had a crush on Jimmy. In December 1941 Grace Goddard asked Dougherty to take Norma Jeane to a Christmas dance at Lockheed. There she was introduced to the future actor Robert Mitchum, then one of Jim’s coworkers. By the end of January 1942, Jim and Norma Jeane were going steady. A month later, Grace informed Norma Jeane that she and Doc, along with his children, would be moving to Huntington, West Virginia, where Doc had procured a lucrative position with an electronics firm. She also told her it would be best if Norma Jeane remained in California, especially now that she and Jim Dougherty were involved.
Looking back, Marilyn would tell Rose Fromm that once again she felt as though she’d been deserted. “It came as a blow,” she said. “Not that I necessarily wanted to go with them—rather, that I wasn’t given a choice. When I thought about it, I remembered that though Daddy Doc never touched me again, he used to give me suggestive looks. Grace probably surmised it was only a matter of time before he tried something. Maybe she was jealous, or perhaps she just didn’t want to chance it.”
Having returned to Ana Lower’s Nebraska Avenue home, Norma Jeane withdrew from Van Nuys High School and enrolled at University High. She continued to see Jim Dougherty. What she didn’t know was that Grace Goddard, no doubt feeling guilty over having left Norma Jeane behind (and so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage), had conspired with Jim’s mother to have him propose to her. After they became engaged, Norma Jeane dropped out of University High, and in early June, she and Jim signed a one-year lease on a small cottage in Sherman Oaks. Ana Lower made Norma Jeane’s white embroidered wedding gown. The service in the Los Angeles home of friends of Grace Goddard took place on the evening of June 19, 1942, and was led by Reverend Benjamin Lingenfelder of the Christian Science Church. Aunt Ana walked the sixteen-year-old bride to the makeshift altar, where Jim Dougherty, in a rented white tuxedo, took over. Ana Lower paid for a wedding reception for thirty-five guests at an Italian-themed nightclub and restaurant called Florentine Gardens. The Bolenders attended, but Doc and Grace Goddard were conspicuously absent.
In March 1953, long after they were divorced, Jim Dougherty wrote an article for Photoplay magazine entitled “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” which began: “Our marriage was good . . . It’s seldom a man gets a bride like Marilyn . . . I wonder if she’s forgotten how much in love we really were.”
She evidently had forgotten, because she’d previously told Dr. Fromm that her marriage to Dougherty had been “a sham, a coupling of convenience.” On the surface, at the point she married him, she seemed at least moderately content. They didn’t go on a honeymoon, but the young couple went on weekend fishing expeditions to Sherwood Lake in Ventura County, California. They took ski lessons together and attended college football games. They saw movies at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where Norma Jeane had gone as a child. They prepared picnic luncheons and frolicked on the beach at Malibu. And when they weren’t making love at home, they would have sex in the backseat of his car on the side streets and back roads up and down the San Fernando Valley.
Their sexual relationship proved to be less than satisfying for Norma Jeane. “For all the girls he’d supposedly had,” she informed Fromm, “he [Dougherty] didn’t seem to know very much. He didn’t believe in foreplay. It was slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. I knew even less than he did, so I thought it was mostly my fault. He’d fall asleep afterward, leaving me awake, frustrated, and angry. I began to suspect he might still be seeing Doris Ingram, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to complain. I wrote to Aunt Grace in West Virginia, by then a seasoned alcoholic, extolling the virtues of marriage. I sweetened my letters out of loyalty to Grace and in an effort to please her, which is more than she’d done for me.”
The Norma Jeane that Dougherty wed was still an unformed person. She had a beautiful face and figure. She was a mature sixteen-year-old in certain respects but a little girl in others. She’d had no childhood as such. In a way, there were two Norma Jeanes: One was the little girl whose dolls and stuffed animals were propped up on top of her chest of drawers “so they can see what’s going on.” The other Norma Jeane was a person of unpredictable moods. In her published memoir, Marilyn portrayed herself at this stage as being “divided” into 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.” In his Photoplay piece, Jim Dougherty depicted his former wife as possessing two distinct and very different personalities, which made her “a bit scary at times.” He blamed her lack of cohesion on her “impossible” childhood. “Now and again,” he wrote, “you’d catch glimpses of someone who had been unloved for too long, unwanted for too many years.”
Whatever chance the marriage might have had of surviving ended when Jim, about to be drafted into the army, joined the Maritime Services and went away to a merchant marine training base, finally winding up on Catalina Island, just off the Southern California coast. Norma Jeane, feeling a sense of abandonment, moved in with her mother-in-law and occasionally visited Catalina to be with her husband, but the visits terminated after she began working at the Radioplane Company in Burbank as a parachute inspector and paint sprayer. It was here, at the height of World War II, that she was “discovered” by US Army photographer David Conover, who’d been assigned by his commanding officer (Ronald Reagan, the future US president) to shoot pictures of women working to aid the war effort. Eventually penning a book titled Finding Marilyn: A Remembrance, Conover detailed first seeing her at Radioplane and asking if he could photograph her in a tight sweater rather than her work o
veralls. She obliged, and the die, as the saying goes, was cast. The photo appeared on the cover of Yank. Other pictures of Norma Jeane ran in Stars and Stripes, the US troop newspaper, which named her “Miss Cheesecake.” She was voted “the present all GIs would like to find in their Christmas stocking.” Conover’s book goes on to document his short-lived but memorable affair with the photogenic model. Norma Jeane, having moved out of her mother-in-law’s house and back in with Ana Lower, is depicted by Conover as having “a great body and enormous passion.”
In May 1976 Jim Dougherty was quoted in People magazine as claiming, “If I hadn’t gone into the merchant marine during World War II and been shipped off to the Pacific, Norma Jeane would still be Mrs. Dougherty today.” Had she survived long enough to read Dougherty’s comment, Marilyn Monroe would probably have deemed it an overblown case of wishful thinking. By the time he returned from the Pacific, his wife had undergone a dramatic change.
She had left her job at Radioplane and gone full-time into modeling, having been signed by Emmeline Snively of the Blue Book Modeling Agency. As a popular pinup and cover model (her image appeared in more than a hundred magazines), she started to meet other photographers, agents, would-be agents, film producers, publicists, advertising executives—in short, an entire crew of Hollywood types, all of them quite different from the people she’d known as Mrs. Jim Dougherty. She had colored her hair a golden blond. The limited contours of domesticity had given way to an exhilarating and expansive new world.
As for Norma Jeane’s mother, she had been released from the San Francisco mental hospital and, as of May 1945, was living in a small room on the top floor of a rundown hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. In December André de Dienes, a fashion photographer with whom Norma Jeane had started a romance, drove her to Portland for a reunion with Gladys, the first time she’d seen her mother since 1939.
“We had little to say to each other,” Marilyn would inform Dr. Fromm, recounting the Portland visit. “She looked much older than I remembered her. She emanated no warmth. I tried to maintain a cheerful façade. I unpacked a few presents I’d brought for her—a silk scarf, a bottle of perfume, and a box of chocolates—and placed them on top of a coffee table. She wouldn’t go near them, just stared at them. Then, without a word, she lowered her head and buried her face in her hands and seemed to forget all about me. I saw myself to the door and left.”
• • •
With her modeling career in full bloom, Norma Jeane was earning enough to rent the bottom floor of Ana Lower’s house on Nebraska Avenue. In early 1946 she received a letter from her mother asking if she could come to Los Angeles and stay with her. Against her better judgment—and in spite of the disappointment of her Portland visit—Norma Jeane agreed. Their second attempt at living together as mother and daughter turned out no better than the first. Within months, Gladys Baker reentered the psychiatric ward at Norwalk State Asylum, the same institution from which she had once tried to escape. From there she would in time be sent to the Rockhaven Sanitarium, a virtual country club for the incurably insane, in Verdugo, California, where she remained until 1967, five years after Marilyn’s death. Throughout Gladys Baker’s lengthy internment at Rockhaven, it was Marilyn who footed the bills.
In 1946 Norma Jeane became involved with Tommy Zahn, a lifeguard and aspiring actor who later described her to a reporter as “tremendously fit, very robust . . . so healthy.” Photographs of her taken at this time support Zahn’s portrayal. That same summer she hired an attorney, established residency in Las Vegas, and instituted divorce proceedings against Jim Dougherty. The divorce decree was granted on July 5, 1946, in Clark County, Nevada.
Her newfound freedom marked the beginning of an extremely active sexual phase during which Marilyn took numerous lovers ranging in age and experience from a young college student named Bill Pursel to over-the-hill Borscht Belt comedian George Jessel. “Talk about being promiscuous,” she told Dr. Rose Fromm, “I can’t remember the names of three-quarters of the men I slept with at that time.” A name she did recall belonged to Charlie Chaplin Jr., son of the legendary comic, with whom she had an affair in 1947. According to Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the affair ended when Charlie Jr. caught Marilyn in bed with his brother Sydney. The latter romance ended when she underwent one of several early abortions.
In subsequent years, Jim Dougherty, having remarried and become a patrolman with the Los Angeles Police Department, would tell a journalist: “I never knew Marilyn Monroe. I knew Norma Jeane Baker, but Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker were two different people.”
By 1952, the year she met Joe DiMaggio, Norma Jeane Baker had grown into the iconic role of Marilyn Monroe both in name and in terms of her career, which, while not yet at its height, was well on its way. Having overcome the “Golden Dreams” nude calendar scandal, she now defended herself against a charge by the press that she’d fabricated her family history, having presented herself to Twentieth Century–Fox and to the public at large as an orphan, when, if truth be told, her mother was still very much alive.
As she’d done in the nude calendar controversy, Marilyn took matters into her own hands, releasing a statement admitting that Gladys Baker was incapacitated, a patient in a mental institution, and that she’d fibbed only to protect her mother from the glare of public scrutiny. She said that although she’d lived with her mother for a brief period as a child, she barely knew her. Nor had she ever met her father. Her childhood, she added, had largely been spent in an orphanage and in the homes of a number of foster families. If the press felt she had misled anyone, she wished to apologize and hoped to be forgiven. She was forgiven.
As Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “Let’s give Marilyn Monroe the benefit of the doubt.”
Chapter 4
IN LATE MAY 1952, HAVING fully recuperated from her appendectomy and having set the record straight on her Little Orphan Annie past, Marilyn Monroe arrived for a brief stay in New York before continuing on to Buffalo, where, in June, she would star in Niagara, a suspense drama with a cast that included Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters. Marilyn’s role as a young, sultry, oversexed wife called for her to wear a dress that, in the words of one film critic. was “cut so low you can see her navel.” In anticipation of her stay in New York, Joe DiMaggio temporarily vacated his quarters at the Elysée Hotel and moved into a large suite at the Drake. He filled the suite with several bouquets of fresh roses.
Marilyn’s first order of business in New York entailed visiting Yankee Stadium to watch DiMaggio—immaculately attired in a pinstripe suit—suffer through one of his pre- and post-game WPIX-TV broadcasts. Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto, DiMaggio’s interview subject that day, recalled how elated Joe seemed when Marilyn complimented him on his performance. “I don’t know whether she meant it or not,” said Rizzuto, “but Joe lapped it up. She told him how well he’d done—‘You’re doing swell,’ she said, ‘just relax’—and he broke into an ear-to-ear smile. And whenever Joe DiMaggio smiled, he’d reveal those horse-sized buck teeth of his. Needless to say, they weren’t his best feature. In any event, they didn’t seem to bother Marilyn. I once read that she felt attracted to men who wore glasses and had bad teeth. Joe didn’t wear glasses, but he certainly qualified so far as his choppers were concerned.”
Rizzuto remembered how, once the broadcast ended, the tiny TV studio filled up with Yankees ballplayers eager to catch a firsthand glimpse of Monroe “There were maybe a dozen of us in the room,” said the shortstop, “all vying to get close to Marilyn, badgering her for an autograph. Even old Casey Stengel, the skipper, shoved his way in. And Marilyn was very accommodating, very sweet about everything, posing for pictures with some of the players and so forth. Everyone knows how glamourous she looked, so I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that in person she looked even more scrumptious than she did on the silver screen, and I guess some of the guys were maybe getting a little too familiar with her, because all at once Joe began
to lose it. He became agitated, no doubt equally pissed off because he was being ignored. He suddenly grabbed Marilyn rather forcefully and started pushing her toward the door. ‘C’mon, you fuckers, you’ve seen enough,’ he said. And then a moment later they were gone.”
That week, DiMaggio squired Marilyn to all his usual haunts. They visited the Stork Club, the Copacabana, El Morocco, the Colony, the Jockey Club, and Toots Shor’s. And wherever they turned up, they were in the spotlight. Fellow diners and drinkers looked and whispered. They tapped each other on the shoulder and pointed with their eyes. Marilyn adored the attention. She told Joe she loved New York and hated Hollywood. “There’s no place like New York,” she said. At Toots Shor’s, they encountered Dario Lodigiani, an old wartime crony of Joe’s, a former bunkmate who’d grown up with Joe in San Francisco and then found himself in the same World War II unit as Joe. Dario, who’d played second base for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox, regaled Marilyn with stories related to DiMaggio’s military service, including one about how in 1944 (after Joe had spent time at a number of training bases on the mainland), the Seventh Army Air Forces flew him to Honolulu to play baseball with the troops.
Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love Page 5
