Marilyn Monroe (3 page)

His departure left Marilyn in a quandary. She told herself that she was in love with Arthur Miller. But it was Kazan who would be staying on at Feldman’s. Had the director really passed her on, or would he expect their arrangement to go back to what it had been before that night? Marilyn couldn’t wait to see Miller again, but she also didn’t want to give up the chance to be cast in one of Kazan’s films. She had to decide what to do about Kazan.

Arthur Miller had gone back to a world that Marilyn could hardly imagine. His life in New York and Connecticut had almost no reality to her. At the same time, Miller can barely have comprehended the world Marilyn came from. He knew nothing of the bleak, impoverished, violent childhood in the Los Angeles area that had fueled her hopes and dreams.

Marilyn wanted to be a movie star so very badly because it was the only way she knew to escape a chaotic, nightmarish existence that constantly threatened to draw her back in. From the time she was a little girl, passed from one grim foster home to another, that dream had given her a reason to go on living. Of course, many children in those circumstances fantasize about a film career. In Marilyn’s case, the accident of geography, the fact that she grew up in and around Hollywood, made her dream seem achingly within reach.

Marilyn, then called Norma Jeane Baker, spent her earliest years in Hawthorne, a suburb of Los Angeles. She had been farmed out to a foster family by a sick mother, who was barely able to make ends meet with various low-end jobs in the film industry. Norma Jeane’s life had nothing to do with the movies. Because of her foster parents’ strict religious beliefs, movies were never mentioned. All that changed, however, when Norma Jeane, aged seven, went to live briefly with her mother, Gladys Baker. Hardly had mother and daughter settled in when Gladys became ill again and had to be hospitalized. Responsibility for Norma Jeane fell on Gladys’s best friend, Grace McKee, who worked with her in a film laboratory. It was “Aunt Grace” who first encouraged Norma Jeane to believe that she was destined to be a star like Jean Harlow.

Indeed, Grace was the only person in the child’s life who seemed to take any interest in her whatsoever. She was the only person to believe in Norma Jeane. But for all the cheerleading, Grace was in no position to care for a little girl. So Norma Jeane went back to living in a series of foster homes until Grace ran out of families with which to place Gladys’s daughter. The Los Angeles Orphans Home, an enclave of red-brick buildings on North El Centro Avenue, was the only remaining option.

On September 13, 1935, Grace led nine-year-old Norma Jeane to the orphanage door. When the child saw the huge black sign with gold lettering, she shrieked that there must be some mistake. She was not an
orphan and did not belong here. Grace had to drag her, screaming and kicking, inside. Norma Jeane had endured poverty. She had endured being treated by certain families as little more than an indentured servant. She had endured having no real home of her own. But finding herself locked in an orphanage was another matter entirely. As far as the child was concerned, it meant that she really was no one in the world. And that feeling of utter worthlessness hurt more than anything ever had in her short life.

On the first night, a tearful Norma Jeane was assigned to one of twenty-seven metal beds in a huge dormitory. After the lights went out, she slipped out of bed and went to the window. In the distance, she could see the water tower at the Gower Street studios of RKO Pictures. The sight comforted her, partly because she remembered entering the studio gates with her mother, who had once worked there. But even more, it was a symbol of the glittering fairy-tale kingdom which Grace had often promised she would one day inhabit. In the nights that followed, Norma Jeane made a point of always taking a peek at the water tower before she tried to sleep. At a moment when the sad, lonely little girl was on the brink of utter despair, that sight, and the hope it represented, provided a lifeline.

Almost every weekend, Grace, who had been appointed Norma Jeane’s legal guardian, would show up at the orphanage. She brought gifts of lipstick and rouge. Before Norma Jeane was ten, she had grown accustomed to being coiffed and made up by Grace as though she were an adult. Grace, harping on the fact that Norma Jeane resembled a little movie star, regularly took her to the movies—less for entertainment than for instruction. She inculcated the child with a powerful sense of what her future must be.

Shortly before her eleventh birthday, Norma Jeane went to live in Van Nuys with Grace and her fourth husband, Erwin “Doc” Goddard, a sporadically employed aircraft worker. But the arrangement did not last. Doc, who drank heavily, made sexual advances to Norma Jeane, so Grace shipped the child off to other foster homes. By the time Norma Jeane was twelve, she had been assaulted in at least two of these homes, and possibly others. Time and again, Grace had to find another family to take her in. That in each instance it was the victim, not the victimizer, who was expelled sent a powerful message to Norma Jeane: She had to be punished because somehow she had brought the attack on herself.

Through all this horror, one thing appeared to sustain the poor, abused child. Under Grace’s tutelage, she had become completely absorbed by the fantasy of the movies—a world of glamor and beauty that bore no relation to her own existence. Yet that fantasy seemed attainable, if only because she had spent her entire life within a few dozen miles of Hollywood. And it clearly helped that Grace believed in her to the extent that she did. No matter how dreadful Norma Jeane’s day-to-day reality, Grace persisted in her promises that the future would be different: One day Norma Jeane would be a star, and no one would dare mistreat her again.

That fantasy gave Norma Jeane hope, but it also confused her. Grace was sending mixed signals. On the one hand, Grace repeatedly communicated that Norma Jeane had been thrown out of Grace’s own and other households because she had behaved provocatively. On the other hand, Grace encouraged her to believe that it was precisely her beauty and sexuality that would eventually win her better treatment. Norma Jeane would later be rewarded for the very behavior that had previously elicited punishment. Further confusing the child was the fact that the abuse she had endured had been her only experience of power. Terrible as those experiences were, they suggested that Norma Jeane had the ability to attract attention in a world that was otherwise indifferent to her. All the talk of becoming a movie star reinforced the child’s sense that her sexuality was the one form of power she had.

When Norma Jeane was fifteen, it was Grace—of all people—who trod on the dream she had done so much to create. Grace announced that she and Doc were moving to West Virginia and could not take Norma Jeane with them. She offered Norma Jeane a choice: either she married a young man Grace had selected, or she would have to return to the orphanage. The prospective bridegroom was James Dougherty, the twenty-one-year-old son of a former neighbor. Norma Jeane chose marriage, though that meant dropping out of high school before she had completed her sophomore year. On June 19, 1942, three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Norma Jeane Baker married Jimmy Dougherty. She seemed to forget about the movies, apparently forever. Jimmy was a kind, decent man; he gave his young bride so much attention that she didn’t seem to mind that her dream had been put aside. Maybe the attention would do after all.

Norma Jeane might well have remained a housewife in the San Fernando Valley for the rest of her life if World War II had not intervened. The young husband left his job at the Lockheed aircraft factory to join the Merchant Marine. In spring 1944, he shipped out. Like many wartime wives, Norma Jeane went to live with her husband’s parents and found a job in a defense factory. The Radio Plane Company produced the radio-controlled small airplanes that Army gunners used for target practice. Jimmy’s mother was employed as a nurse in the infirmary. Seventeen-year-old Norma Jeane worked on the assembly line, first as a chute-packer, later as a glue-sprayer.

In 1945, Army photographers from the First Motion Picture Unit came to Radio Plane to film women in war work. A young corporal named David Conover spotted Norma Jeane and took her picture. When the results came back from the lab, Conover returned to the factory and told her she was pretty enough to model. That was all Norma Jeane needed to hear; in an instant, her old dream of escape had been reactivated.

Conover asked Norma Jeane to pose again. Her husband was due on shore leave just then, so Norma Jeane put the photographer off until Jimmy had gone back to sea. Dougherty left again in June 1945, just as Norma Jeane celebrated her nineteenth birthday. The moment he was gone, she moved out of her in-laws’ house, quit her job, and never looked back.

By the end of the month, Conover had taken a set of pictures of Norma Jeane for
Yank
magazine. He showed the photographs to a friend, who in turn put her in touch with the Blue Book Modeling Agency in Los Angeles. The agency passed her on to a film agent, who landed her a screen test at Twentieth Century–Fox. A little over a year after Conover first photographed Norma Jeane, she had divorced her husband, signed a contract at Twentieth, and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

On August 26, 1946, Grace accompanied Marilyn to Twentieth. Marilyn was still a minor, so her guardian had to sign the contract as well. Miraculously, everything seemed to be working precisely as Grace had once predicted. In a way, it had all been so easy; from Conover on, everybody had been kind and helpful. Marilyn was confident that she was about to become a movie star at last. In the months that followed, she did whatever Twentieth asked. She worked. She studied. She had her chance, and she applied herself with an earnestness that was disarming. But by the end of the year, Marilyn had had only two bit parts. Worse,
when her contract came up for renewal, the studio decided to let her go because production chief Darryl Zanuck thought she was unattractive. On July 26, 1947, when Twentieth notified Marilyn that her option would not be picked up, her film career screeched to a halt. Marilyn could always eke out a living as a magazine model, but that was not the dream Grace had instilled in her. Horribly disappointed, Marilyn was prepared to do anything to get her career moving again.

By the fall of 1947, she had joined countless other starlets, models, and assorted young women on the Hollywood party circuit. Like them, Marilyn hoped to meet someone who could help her get a part in a film. At one of these parties, early in 1948, Marilyn encountered Pat De Cicco. He invited her to one of the town’s Saturday-night institutions, Joe Schenck’s all-night, high-stakes gin rummy game in Holmby Hills. Marilyn knew exactly who Schenck was. Until only a few months ago, he had been one of her bosses at Twentieth, where he served as an executive producer. Schenck had been board chairman at United Artists in the 1920s and had founded Twentieth Century with Darryl Zanuck in the thirties. When Twentieth merged with Fox in 1935, he had been appointed board chairman.

At sixty-nine, Schenck was said to be one of the richest men in Hollywood. His card games were attended by top studio executives, producers, and directors. De Cicco, Schenck’s court jester, provided girls. In exchange for dinner and the chance to meet some of Hollywood’s most important players, the women were expected to make themselves available to “Uncle” Joe’s friends. When a guest absented himself from the card table, more often than not it was to take a girl of his choice to one of the mansion’s many bedrooms.

Marilyn became a regular at Uncle Joe’s. Schenck took a special liking to her, and soon she came to be known as “Joe Schenck’s girl.” She stood behind his chair as he played cards. She served drinks and emptied ashtrays. Before long, Marilyn was at the house several nights a week for dinner. To keep the old man happy, she even briefly moved into the guest cottage in order to be nearby when he wanted her at night. Uncle Joe repaid Marilyn by persuading Harry Cohn to sign her to a six-month contract. She started at Columbia Pictures in March 1948.

At the studio, Marilyn fell in love with Fred Karger, a vocal coach who had been assigned to work with her. Swept away by her feelings,
Marilyn informed Uncle Joe that she could no longer live at the estate; she moved to an apartment of her own. Karger, however, was less serious about the relationship than she was. Marilyn desperately wanted to marry, and she was crushed when Karger announced that he didn’t feel comfortable with her as a stepmother for his child from a previous marriage. Nonetheless, Marilyn’s devotion to Karger meant that she turned down an invitation to spend the weekend on Harry Cohn’s yacht, and that killed any chance she might have had of being kept on by Columbia after her contract expired on September 9, 1948.

So Marilyn was back on the party circuit—except this time she no longer had the protection of being Joe Schenck’s girl. When Marilyn attended Uncle Joe’s parties, or accompanied him to Palm Springs for the weekend, he was happy to pass her around to friends. There were plenty of men willing to take Marilyn upstairs for half an hour, but no one seemed even remotely interested in casting her in a film. Though Marilyn regularly passed in view of some of Hollywood’s best directors and producers, no one guessed her potential. No one suspected she was star material. Most didn’t even think she was worth a second look. She appeared indistinguishable from all the other girls. When Marilyn approached Howard Hawks one weekend in Palm Springs, the director made it clear that he saw nothing special about her. He thought she was stupid and told her so. He wasn’t even interested in a sexual encounter.