The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (17 page)
Read The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Online
Authors: Donald H. Wolfe
Among Communist Party front organizations, the Hollywood Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council was perhaps the most influential. It combined artists, writers, lawyers, and physicians. One of the zealous members in the 1940s was Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who many years later would be Marilyn Monroe's physician at the time of her death.
Engelberg had joined the Communist Party in the early thirties when he was a medical student at Cornell University. After marrying Esther Goldstein in 1933, Engelberg became an intern at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood, where he met fellow internist Romeo Greenschpoon (later to be known as Ralph R. Greenson). According to Dorothy Healey, who was chairman of the Los Angeles Communist Party, both Hy Engelberg and his wife Esther became active communists in the party heyday of the thirties. Archives of the Los Angeles Communist Party document the Engelberg's attendance at numerous party meetings and fund-raisers. Brochures of the Communist People's Education Center list Hyman Engelberg as an instructor. In testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Dr. Oner Barker stated that Hyman Engelberg was an active member of the Doctors Unit of the Hollywood Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council.
“I remember,” said a former member of the council, “that whenever you were at a meeting at a home, you always had to have a drink so that in case anyone walked in, you'd look as if you were at a party. I recall one writer saying, âWhat do you think of my great Marxist library?' and there wasn't a book around. Then he pushed a button and the bar swung out and there was indeed a great Marxist library. But I think he used the bar more than the books.”
In Hollywood the secrecy of the Communist Party offered a sense of excitement for some who suffered from the ennui of fame and success. According to Dorothy Healey, “The biggest mistake we made was in the party's staying undergroundâthe cult of secrecy. The thrill came in the sense of the forbidden, of international intrigueâthe secret names, aliases, underground meetings, and double identities.”
Hollywood's close-knit group of communists, like communists every
where, had insisted that the rumors of a Hitler-Stalin pact were fascist propaganda. But when German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to sign the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Treaty on August 21, 1939, the news that the pact was a fait accompli brought about bitter recriminations within the Hollywood circle of liberals and party members.
The difference between the dedicated red and the progressive liberal was quickly delineated with the announcement of the pact. The bitter debate that soon followed splintered the Anti-Nazi League, which quickly changed its name to “The Hollywood League for Democratic Action.” The loyalists followed the new party line of neutrality, as it became increasingly clear that war in Europe was inevitable. Several days after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the German army began massing on the Polish border, and on September 1, Nazi troops and tanks swept into Poland.
On Saturday morning, September 3, David Niven was sleeping aboard a yacht Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had anchored off Catalina Island on the coast of Southern California. Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and a number of other Britons in exile were also on board. They woke to hear the news flash on the radio that Britain had delivered an ultimatum to Germany, and Hitler had rejected it. The two nations were at war. Fairbanks raised a glass to toast victory, and Olivier reportedly raised his glass, and raised his glassâand raised his glassâuntil, Fairbanks observed, he became “smashed as a hoot owl.” Olivier began ranting and raving, “This is the end! You are finishedâall of youâfinished! Finished! You are relics! Done for! Doomed relics!”
But just twenty-six miles across the sea Norma Jeane Baker neither felt doomed nor looked like a relic as she walked on the sands of Ocean Park. On that sunny day at the beach the war seemed far away.
“By the summertime I had a real beau,” Marilyn remembered.
He was twenty-one, and despite being very sophisticated he thought I was eighteen instead of thirteen. I was able to fool him by keeping my mouth shut and walking a little fancyâ¦. I practiced walking languorously. My beau arrived at my home one Saturday with the news that we were going swimming at the beach. I borrowed a bathing suit, which was too small, and put on an old pair of slacks and a sweater. The skimpy bathing suit was under them.
It was a sunny day, the sky was blue, and the sand was crowded with people. I stood and stared at the ocean for a long time. It always had sort of a hypnotic
effect on me. It was like something in a dream, full of gold and lavender colors, blue and foaming white. “Come on, let's get in!” my beau suddenly yelled.
“In where?” I asked.
“In the water,” he laughed, thinking I had made a joke.
So I removed my slacks and sweater and stood there in my skimpy suit. I thought, “I'm almost naked,” as I started walking across the sand. I was almost at the water's edge when some young men whistled at me. I closed my eyes and stood still for a moment. Then, instead of going into the water, I turned and walked down the beach. The same thing happened that had happened in the math class, but on a larger scale. It was also much noisier. The men whistled, and some jumped up from the sand and trotted up for a better view. Even the women stopped moving and stared as I came nearer.
I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops. In fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were 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. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole worldâ¦.
Lucky Jim
Marilyn Monroe and I were married four years, and if we had stayed married, it's a cinch that today I'd be Mr. Monroe.
âJim Dougherty
I
n 1940 America hovered between peace and war. Following the HitlerâStalin pact, the left and the right joined in a strange mixed marriage of neutrality. “Keep America Out of War” was the rallying cry of Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy the ambassador to Britain, and the isolationists. “The Yanks Are Not Coming” was the slogan of John Howard Lawson, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, and the voices of the Comintern. Keeping America out of the war became a central objective of the Communist Party (CP). Frederick Vanderbilt Field, known as the “silver-spoon communist,” traveled the country campaigning for neutrality and organizing the American Peace Mobilization, a CP front with over three hundred committees from the East Coast to Hollywood.
“All-out aid to the British Empire means total war for the American people,” Field stated. “Men in high places are dragging us into a war three thousand miles away. Americans don't want their sons to dieâmangled scraps of fleshâin order to enrich Wall Street. America, keep out of the war!”
As the Battle of Britain was being waged, Hollywood still held to the belief that the business of Hollywood was Hollywood business. “Holly
wood made three hundred and fifty pictures last year,” commented Walter Wanger. “Fewer than ten of these pictures departed from the usual westerns, romances, and boy-meets-girl story.” Hollywood's big musical event of 1940 was Walt Disney's
Fantasia
, and the comedy riot of the year was the first pairing of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in
Road to Singapore
.
But America was gearing up for war, and among those working on the assembly lines at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank was the man destined to marry Norma JeaneâJames Dougherty. Jim Dougherty lived with his parents on Archwood Street in Van Nuys, and Doc and Grace Goddard lived just behind them. Doc had found a job as a salesman for Adel Precision Products, and the Goddards moved from Cahuenga Pass to a small house in the Valley owned by Ana Lower. In the spring of 1941, Ana Lower, who suffered from heart disease, was unable to continue caring for Norma Jeane, who was sent to live with Doc and Grace, where she shared a room with Doc's daughter Bebe.
“I was thirteen when I first met Norma Jeane, who I called âNormie,'” Bebe recalled, “but we really didn't live together until she moved into the house in Van Nuys. We were both born in 1926, and we became good friends. Jimmy Dougherty lived next door and was five years older than Norma Jeane, but Normie went for older men and thought Jimmy was a dreamboat.”
It wasn't long before Dougherty noticed that another pretty girl was living with the Goddards. “I discovered her name was Norma Jeane,” Dougherty recalled, “but I didn't have enough interest to find out her last name.”
Dougherty worked the graveyard shift and he remembers an afternoon when he was trying to sleep and Norma Jeane was in the nearby backyard whooping and hollering with laughter. Annoyed, he went to his bedroom window and saw her playing with Grace's spaniel.
“The dog had got the best of Norma Jeane and had her down on the ground, licking her face. She was giggling and shrieking,” Dougherty recalls. “I got upâI think it was the second time this had happenedâand I was a little angry. But when I asked her to can the loud noise, Norma Jeane was so angelic, you might say, all I could say was, âWell, don't worry about it. Forget it.' After that we'd talk and shoot the breeze, but she was much younger than she looked. She was just a kidâa charity case, having just gotten out of an orphanage.”
In September 1941, the Goddards moved to a more spacious California
ranch house set back from the street in a grove of pepper trees on Odessa Avenue. The new Goddard home was farther away from Van Nuys High, but the transportation problem was solved when Grace asked Jim Dougherty's mother, Ethel, if her son would mind picking “the kids” up from school. Jim volunteered because “it seemed like the neighborly thing to do.” Norma Jeane was pleased with the arrangement. Jim was a gentleman, with a lively, outgoing personality and a handsome, happy-go-lucky Irish face to go along with his uncomplicated manner. His friends called him Lucky Jim.
“As I recall, there was quite a flirtation when Jimmy was bringing us home from school,” Bebe said. “We'd ride home from school with Jimmy and hang around the house. After school sometimes we'd have quite a crowdâ¦. Jimmy and a couple of guys that played guitar would hang around and teach us to play craps and stuff like that. Then he finally asked her for a date.”
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 dayâNorma 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 “neckingâa 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 worldâexcept 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 âGood 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 sug
gestion. “Sometime in the early part of 1942,” Dougherty recalled, “Mom called me aside and said, âDoc 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, âI trust you, I believe what you say, I love you.' And her eyes were so expressiveâ¦. While it's hard not to sound sentimental about it, she had offered me her heartânobody 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 peopleâ“the otherâ¦whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole worldâ¦.”
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 funâ¦. 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 DaddyâWhen 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 marriedâ¦. 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 Jeanesâone was the child whose dolls and stuffed animals were propped up on top of the chest of drawers âso 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.
