The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  III

  Norma Jeane was always threatened with confinement in the orphanage if she failed to behave. That threat became real in 1942 when she was sixteen. She could no longer stay with the increasingly ill Ana Lower, and "Doc" Goddard was transferred with his family to West Virginia. Grace then told her that she'd either have to get married or return to the dreaded institution. Grace had dominated her early life, and had been Norma Jeane's legal guardian for eight years. In between spells of caring for her, she'd placed her in the orphanage and found various foster homes. She now arranged to marry her off. On June 19, 1942, six months after America entered World War II and three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Norma Jeane dropped out of the tenth grade and married a neighbor's son: the attractive, athletic and popular twenty-one-year-old James Dougherty.

  In 1941 Robert Mitchum, not yet a movie star, worked with Dougherty in the sheet metal department of Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. He said that his co-worker "looked like a large brick, red-haired, square-shouldered and [like Mitchum himself] solid all the way down." Norma Jeane liked the man Grace had chosen, but had to adjust to yet another radical change in her life. She later told her New York maid, with becoming modesty, that "Jim was handsome, well-mannered, and had a good job – and a car. What I couldn't figure out was what a guy like Jim would want with me." Dougherty – who later remarried, became a Los Angeles policeman and wrote a memoir of Norma Jeane – admitted that she was sometimes a little naïve, a little dumb.

  Dougherty gave a positive, even idealized account of their conventional and essentially happy marriage. He stated, for example, that Norma Jeane liked to prepare meals and was a good cook, though she favored peas and carrots because she liked their color combination. But Shelley Winters, who roomed with her in 1950, revealed (perhaps with some comic exaggeration) that Marilyn was absolutely hopeless in the kitchen: "Not only could Marilyn not cook, if you handed her a leg of lamb, she just stared at it. Once I asked her to wash the salad while I went to the store. When I came back an hour later, she was still scrubbing each leaf. Her idea of making a salad was to scrub each lettuce leaf with a Brillo pad."10

  Norma Jeane was certainly naïve, at least in the beginning, about sex. The first time she used a diaphragm, Jim had to get down on his knees to help her extract it. But he insisted that their sexual life was passionate and satisfying: "Norma Jeane loved sex. It was as natural to her as breakfast in the morning. There were never any problems with it. . . . Never had I encountered a girl who so thoroughly enjoyed sexual union. It made our lovemaking pure joy." Sometimes, overcome by desire, she'd even insist they pull off the road and make love in the car.

  Norma Jeane loved children but, nearly a child herself, never wanted to have them with Dougherty. When she thought she was pregnant, she became frightened by the pain of childbirth. The screenwriter Nunnally Johnson recalled that when Marilyn played a young mother in We're Not Married (1952), she held a baby on camera, but – remaining strangely remote – paid absolutely no attention to it when it cried. She suffered severe menstrual pains, which would plague her throughout her life. But, according to Dougherty, she had no other physical or psychological problems: "There were no pills needed to put Norma Jeane to sleep at night. Mom never heard her complain about her nerves or even about being depressed." Her sexual problems came when years of psychoanalysis dredged up painful memories and made her acutely conscious of her childhood traumas. Later on, when Marilyn became famous, she wanted to obliterate her marriage to a pleasant but commonplace husband. Rewriting her past, she unconvincingly claimed that she'd been emotionally and sexually estranged from Dougherty: "We hardly spoke to each other. . . . We had nothing to say. . . . The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex."

  One source of contention, which became a major theme in Miller's The Misfits, concerned Norma Jeane's outrage at Dougherty's cruelty to animals. She hated to go on hunting trips and had to close her eyes when he killed rabbits. Once, when he'd shot a deer and put it in the back seat of the car, it suddenly "came to life and lifted its head. Jim stopped the car and began strangling the deer. She tried to stop him," but couldn't do so. Nevertheless, he said, she was affectionate and never held a grudge: "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."11

  Dougherty, with an essential wartime job at Lockheed, would not have been drafted, but for patriotic reasons chose to enlist in the merchant marine. His first, pleasantly soft job, late in 1943, was on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, where he trained Marine recruits. On that nearly all-male post, he became upset when his sexy wife attracted enthusiastic attention on the beach and at dances by wearing tight-fitting, provocative clothes. He knew the men were swarming around Norma Jeane, but six months later, in the spring of 1944, he sailed to Asia. Norma Jeane, yet again, felt abandoned and deeply hurt.

  Yet Norma Jeane's letters of June 15 and December 3, 1944, to Grace Goddard in West Virginia, express her admiration and affection for Dougherty, and confirm his belief that they were happily married:

  I love Jimmie just more than anyone (in a different way I suppose than anyone) and I know I shall never be happy with anyone else as long as I live, and I know he feels the same towards me. So you see we are really very happy together. That is, of course, when we can be together. We both miss each other terribly. We will be married two years June 19th. And we really have had quite a happy life together. . . . I love him so very much. Honestly. I don't think there is another man alive like him. He really is awfully sweet.

  With Dougherty gone and nothing to do at home, Norma Jeane looked for wartime work. His mother, who worked as a nurse at the Radio Plane plant in Burbank, got her a job there. She started by packing the parachutes which were attached to miniature target-practice planes, operated by remote control. The chutes brought the planes down safely so that they could be used again. She was then "promoted" to the dope room, where she sprayed foul-smelling liquid varnish, made of banana oil and glue, onto the fabric of the fuselage. In this extremely unpleasant job, she earned the minimum wage of twenty dollars a week for sixty hours of work. The varnish was pretty strong stuff, and there was constant danger from sniffing glue. But the noxious fumes also provided her first high and introduced her to the attraction of drugs. After a year of this taxing work, the exhausted Norma Jeane complained to Grace that she had to be on her feet for ten hours a day. On June 4, 1945, she wrote that she'd finally found a way to escape from this dead-end job in a noxious factory: "I haven't worked at Radio Plane Company since January. They keep asking me to come back but I don't really want to do that kind of work any more because it makes me so darn tired."

  Norma Jeane escaped from this drudgery when the photographer David Conover "discovered" her. He was working for the Army's Motion Picture Unit, commanded by the actor Ronald Reagan. To boost the morale of soldiers in combat, he'd been sent to the factory to get still photos of beautiful girls toiling on the home front. On June 4 she enthusiastically told Grace about the promising new life that had suddenly beckoned:

  The first I know the photographers had me out there, taking pictures of me. . . . They all asked where in the H— I had been hiding. . . . They took a lot of moving 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 still shots of me. He used to have a studio on the Strip on Sunset. 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 that 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 t
hat he wants to take a lot more. Also he said he had a lot of contacts he wanted me to look into.

  I told him I would rather not work when Jimmie was here, so he said he would wait, so I'm expecting to hear from him most any time again.

  He is awfully nice and is married and is strictly business, which is the way I like it. Jimmie seems to like the idea of me modeling, so I'm glad about that.12

  But Jimmie, fearing the worst, did not like the idea of his wife modeling, and Conover became her first lover. She later confessed that the anguish of solitude rather than the desire for sex made her succumb to other men: "I didn't sleep around when I was married until [after one year] my husband went into the service, and then it was just that I was so damn lonesome, and I had to have some kind of company, so once in a while I'd give in, mainly because I didn't want to be alone."

  Like Dougherty, Conover found sex with Norma Jeane more than satisfactory. In fact, he recalled that she exhausted him and that "her sexual appetite far exceeded my capacity to give her pleasure." But the photographic sessions, rather than their affair, changed her attitude to life and to her husband. When Dougherty returned from the war, she greeted him coolly, seemed completely self-absorbed and informed him that their marriage was over. Dougherty, still in love with her, was surprised to discover that "Norma Jeane wasn't talking about our future anymore. It was her career nearly all of the time. In the year and a half I had been at sea, she had changed into almost another human being."13

  Three

  A Star Is Born

  (1947–1954)

  I

  In her autobiography Marilyn said, with some exaggeration, that during her childhood and early adult life, "the Hollywood I knew was the Hollywood of failure. Nearly everybody I met suffered from malnutrition or suicidal impulses." Thinking of the English actors who'd lived in her mother's house, she contrasted their unreal hopes with the grim reality of their lives: "Among the phonies and failures were also a set of has-beens. These were mostly actors and actresses who had been dropped by the movies – nobody knew why, least of all themselves." By the end of the war Norma Jeane was ready to pursue the same difficult goal, and aspired to be a model, singer, dancer and actress. She had learned to live without her husband, had no desire to go back to housework and was sick of the factory. Photogenic, with blue eyes and fine skin, she was five feet five inches tall, weighed 117 pounds, and had a voluptuous 36-24-34 figure. She'd earned twenty dollars a week at the plane factory; her first job as a model paid ten dollars a day.

  In 1945 David Conover introduced her to Emmeline Snively, owner of the Blue Book Modeling Agency. A formal woman in her late forties, she ran a successful business that supplied young models for scores of popular photo magazines. She made the most of her respectable image, always wore a hat and spoke with an English accent, which had considerable snob value in Hollywood. She signed up Norma Jeane for one of her courses and advanced her the money to pay for it. Her initial assessment emphasized her new client's eagerness to learn, willingness to work and tremendous ambition:

  She was a clean-cut, American, wholesome girl – too plump, but beautiful in a way. We tried to teach her how to pose, how to handle her body. She always tried to lower her smile because she smiled too high, and it made her nose look a little too long. At first she knew nothing about carriage, posture, walking, sitting or posing. She started out with less than any girl I ever knew, but she worked the hardest. . . . She wanted to learn, wanted to be somebody, more than anybody I ever saw before in my life.

  In May 1946 Norma Jeane went to Las Vegas for several weeks to get her divorce. While there she wrote a girlish, star-struck letter to Miss Snively about her first contact with a movie crew:

  I'm having lots of rest and I'm getting a tan. It's very warm and honestly the sun shines all the time.

  Las Vegas is really a colorful town with the Helldorado celebration and all. It lasted for five days, they had rodeos and parades every day.

  Roy Rogers was in town making a picture. I met him and rode his horse "Trigger" (cross my heart I did!). What a horse!

  I was walking down the street one day last week and noticed they were shooting a movie so like everyone else I stood and watched. In between shootings a couple of fellows from Republic Studio walked over to me and asked me if I would please come over and meet some actor (I don't remember his name. I think his last name was Cristy or something like that). Anyway he wanted to meet me so I did and I met most of the studio people including Roy Rogers and I rode his horse, gee he is nice.

  They asked me to have dinner with them at the Last Frontier and then we went to the rodeo. What a day! Ever since I've been signing autograph books and cowboy hats. When I try to tell these kids I'm not in pictures they think I'm just trying to avoid signing their books, so I sign them.

  They're gone now. It's quite lonely here in Las Vegas. This is certainly a wild town.1

  She loved being young, pretty and desirable, and enjoyed her brief moment of behaving like a film star.

  In her years as a model Norma Jeane learned how to use makeup skillfully, including a special foundation to disguise the fuzz on her fair skin. She had plastic surgery to lift her nose slightly, which gave her more upper lip and improved her smile, and had some cartilage put into her jaw to improve the line of her chin. The results were splendid and she became a popular pin-up. The war was over, but many young Americans, the major market for these magazines, were still in the armed services. "Soldiers in the Aleutians voted her the girl most likely to thaw Alaska, and the Seventh Division Medical Corps elected her the girl they would most like to examine." Despite her success and financial independence, she felt as conflicted about modeling for girlie magazines as she would, later on, about playing dumb parts in third-rate movies. She craved respectability. "When I was a model," she said, "I wanted more than anything in the world for my picture to be on the cover of the Ladies' Home Journal. Instead, I was always on magazines with names like Peek and See and Whiz Bang. Those were the kind of movies I made, too."

  Though she had steady work and a decent income, Norma Jeane remained as transient as an adult as she'd been as a child. In this respect, she was a typically rootless resident of Los Angeles. "This lack of a sense of permanency," wrote two social historians, "accounts for the unreal appearance of the region and the restless character of its population. . . . The houses have no earthly relation to the environment. They are unreal, as unreal as motion-picture sets." She had very few possessions, and lived at more than sixty addresses in her thirty-six years.

  She owned a car, essential for seeking work in Los Angeles, getting to her agents and to auditions at the studios. Early on, the photographer Philippe Halsman was surprised to find his glamorous model living in a cheap one-room apartment on the edge of the city and driving about in a beat-up old sedan. She cemented her friendship with the neurotic columnist Sidney Skolsky, who was afraid to drive, by chauffeuring him through the city. Her professional progress can be measured from the decrepit Pontiac she drove at the beginning of her career to the brand-new Cadillac she was given in September 1953 for appearing on the Jack Benny show. In America the car had always had social and (as Jim Dougherty noted) sexual implications. As the California historians nicely observed, "to have a car meant being somebody; to have to borrow a car meant knowing somebody; to have no car at all, owned or borrowed, was to be left out – way out."2

  In 1946 Norma Jeane signed on with her first agent, Harry Lipton, who for the next two years helped her secure several short-term contracts with Hollywood studios. She signed a six-month contract with Fox in July 1946, renewed it in January 1947 and was terminated by Fox – who didn't know what to do with her – in August of that year. She changed her name in 1947. She signed a six-month contract with Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures, then a minor studio, in March 1948, and was crushed when they dropped her in September. Finally, she signed another six-month contract with Fox, which was converted to a seven-year contract with incremental pay rai
ses, in May 1951.

  In these early years Marilyn had tiny parts in five forgotten movies. She was almost entirely cut out of her first two pictures. Just before Fox dropped her in 1947, she appeared in The Dangerous Years as a waitress in a teenage hangout. She warned a relative not to blink or she might miss her fleeting appearance. This was a common career path for young film actresses like Marilyn: she worked as a model, became a starlet under contract to a studio, posed for publicity photographs and got small parts in movies, often by performing sexual favors for influential men. Such tiny parts were barely a step away from modeling: she was just a blank, pretty face in a sexy body. Very few young women got the breakout part that made them stars.

  As a starlet in the studio system, Marilyn was often treated with contempt. Orson Welles recalled that she was even humiliated in public: "At a Hollywood party which Marilyn attended (circa 1946 or '47) while she was still a lowly starlet, he saw someone actually pull down the top of her dress in front of people and fondle her. She had laughed. 'Just about everyone in town had slept with her.'" Being sexually available, Marilyn felt, was an essential if unpleasant part of her job. It focused attention on her greatest asset and allowed her to show off her body. Laughter in this situation was her only defense; moral indignation would have been pointless. She was certainly sexually exploited, but in her casual and carefree way she was also complicit.

  Marilyn had many brief affairs, but quickly learned the difference between one-night stands that assuaged her loneliness but achieved nothing, and liaisons with powerful but unattractive men that advanced her career. Her first "protector," the influential producer Joseph Schenck, whom she met in 1948, was fifty years older than Marilyn. Like many Hollywood moguls, he was a self-made man with a colorful past, born in eastern Europe and from a Jewish background. He came from a Russian village on the Volga, where his father was a woodfuel merchant, emigrated to America in his teens and worked his way up from errand boy to owner of several New York drugstores. In 1912 he acquired the Palisades Amusement Park, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, then built a chain of nickelodeons and movie theaters with Marcus Loew. In 1933, with Darryl Zanuck and William Goetz he founded Twentieth Century Pictures, which two years later merged with Fox. Schenck made movies with the director D.W. Griffith, the comedians Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, and the popular silent film actress Norma Talmadge, Norma Jeane's namesake. Schenck had been married to Talmadge from 1917 (when she was twenty years old) to 1934. In 1941 he was convicted for bribing union officials to prevent strikes, and spent four months in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.