The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (19 page)

“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 to the past as she stood on the brink of the future.

C
orporal 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.”

But she was uncertain what she should do and felt very much alone. In June 1945 Norma Jeane would turn nineteen, and it was a difficult time for her. With Grace in Chicago and Jim gone she felt trapped in a limbo of loneliness. “I had been sort of a ‘child bride' and now I was sort of a ‘child widow,'” she observed. At Radioplane she had transferred from the parachute room to the “dope room” because of animosity from girls she worked with who resented the attention and wolf whistles she received. She wasn't getting along well with Jim's mom, Ethel, who disapproved of Norma Jeane's idea of becoming a model. Ana Lower was frequently ill, her mother was in an institution, and her father wouldn't speak to her.

“Sundays were the loneliest,” she later reflected,

As she watched the smiling faces of reunited families and friends leaving the station beneath the sign that said “This Way Out,” she wondered what the way out was for her. Where was the exit from the loneliness and isolation, where familial communication could be observed only vicariously? It was in this caldron of loneliness that the ingredients were
mixed into the potion that brewed up a goddess. The remote childhood hope that Grace had instilled in her of becoming a movie star like Jean Harlow became burning ambition.

“You don't have to know anything to dream hard,” she stated. “I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‘There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest!' I knew nothing about acting. I had never read a book about it, or tried to do it, or discussed it with anyone. I was ashamed to tell the few people I knew of what I was dreaming. But there was this secret in me—becoming an actress, a movie star! It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said, ‘This Way Out.'”

Without telling Ethel, she made an appointment with Miss Emmeline Snively, the proprietor of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, for 11
A.M.
, August 2, 1945.

The night before, she was too excited to sleep. She got up before dark and took a long bath and massaged cologne into her skin. It took over an hour to make up her face. Had she made her lips too large? Was the mascara line right? Should she wear the suit or the dress? She put on the dress. She brushed her white suede shoes, her only good pair. Whatever she wore would have to match the shoes. The suit went best with the shoes. So off went the dress and on went the suit—too tight—back to the white dress.

She had called in sick at Radioplane, and Ethel had guessed she was up to something. They didn't speak as Norma Jeane put on her dark glasses and walked out the door—a vision in white as she got into Doughertys' old Ford coupe and drove off to Miss Snively's office at the Ambassador Hotel.

It was only a few minutes after eleven when Norma Jeane arrived at the glass door of the Blue Book Modeling Agency. Taking a deep breath, she became “the other person” as she walked languorously into the reception room where large photos of beautiful, successful models hung on the walls. It wasn't long before she was ushered into the inner sanctum, Miss Snively's office. She tried with all her might to calm her nerves and hoped she wouldn't stutter. Miss Snively, a small, effervescent lady in her fifties, had been in the business for decades. She could distinguish a model from a wanna-be at a glance.

“My dear, please walk to the door and back.” Miss Snively noted that the walk was unsteady and wiggly, the hair was too thick and too curly,
the upper lip was too short, and there was a slight bump on the nose—but the smile was good, the legs were shapely, the bosom was superb. What caught Miss Snively's attention, however, was the air of wholesome sweetness about her. In the white dress, Miss Snively recalled, “She looked like a cherub in a church choir.”

“Do you really want to be a model, dear?”

“Yes, I'd like to try.”

“Try—that's the spirit, dear. If you've got the willpower you'll make it. There are a lot of pretty girls like you in this town, but you've got one thing, dear, that beats 'em all, and that's charm. Charm—that's what you've got!”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“But you've got to have the know-how, dear. We offer a three month course of training for one hundred dollars.”

“I guess that lets me out,” Norma Jeane said dejectedly, “I d-don't have one hundred dollars.”

“You don't have to pay me now, dear. You can pay it out of what you earn as a model. Do you want to get down to work?”

“Oh, yes!” was the immediate reply.

The next day Norma Jeane quit her job at Radioplane. When Ethel Dougherty learned of her plans and complained that Jim wouldn't approve of a modeling career, Norma Jeane took her things and moved back to Ana Lower's home.

Looking back at the days when Norma Jeane was just beginning her career, Miss Snively commented, “She was the hardest worker I ever handled. She never missed a class. She had confidence in herself, and did something I've never seen any other model do. She would study every print a photographer took of her. I mean she'd take them home and study them for hours. Then she'd go back and ask the photographer, ‘What did I do wrong in this one?' or ‘Why didn't this come out better?' They would tell her. And she never repeated a mistake. Photographers liked her because she was cooperative. She knew how to take directions.”

Norma Jeane's first modeling job was as a hostess at the Los Angeles Home Show in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. The ten dollars a day she earned was almost enough to pay back Miss Snively for her training. By the end of the summer, she was becoming a photographer's dream, earning enough money to pay rent to Aunt Ana and the repair bills on Dougherty's Ford, which she had smashed into a streetcar when she was enthralled by a daydream.

At first she may have thought that the car horns that reached a crescendo in the Los Angeles basin on the afternoon of August 14, 1945, were honking at her. But the persistent honking of horns throughout the city was the first cacaphonic news flash to most Angelenos that World War II had come to its sudden conclusion. The noisy celebrations of peace reached jubilant crescendos on Hollywood Boulevard, Times Square, and the Main Streets of America, but the euphoria was soon chilled by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the onset of the cold war. With the defeat of the Axis powers, the unity of purpose that had united East and West came to an end as the Soviets aggressively sought world domination.

Following Lenin's dictum “Capture the cinema, and you capture the hearts and the minds of the people,” the Comintern focused on Hollywood, where a concerted effort was made to infiltrate the film industry. The full extent of the Comintern's covert activities has only recently been documented, with the opening of the Central Party Archives in Moscow. Many of the Hollywood fronts were orchestrated by the Comintern headquarters under directives from the Kremlin.

Money was always a problem, and the “silver-spoon Communist” Frederick Vanderbilt Field was frequently relied upon by the Comintern to put together funding for CP fronts. It was Field who financed the Russian Institute; the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council; and the People's Education Centers, where John Howard Lawson and Dr. Hyman Engelberg were instructors along with Hollywood labor leader Herb Sorrell.

Another shadowy figure along with Dr. Hyman Engelberg in the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council was Eunice Murray's husband, John M. Murray. Eunice Murray's son-in-law, Norman Jefferies, stated that John Murray was a devoted member of the Communist Party who had several identities and led a double life. Both lives would have ended in the shadow of obscurity were it not for brief mention of Eunice Murray's husband by Monroe biographers. In the addenda of Frank Capell's book,
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe
, Capell refers to John Murray as “a left-wing labor organizer” who often came home “messed up from his strike and organizing activities.” In
Marilyn Monroe: The Biography
Donald Spoto refers to John Murray as a Yale divinity student who became a Hollywood studio carpenter, “which Eunice took for an imitation of the Lord Jesus Himself.”

However, there is no academic record of John Murray's having attended Yale Divinity School, and according to Norman Jefferies, Murray's faith was drawn from the well of Marx and Engels, and he revered Joseph Stalin.
Murray was far from being a simple carpenter who worked at the studios; his tools were the hammer and sickle, and he worked diligently with Herb Sorrell in following Lenin's dictum to capture the cinema. John Howard Lawson's declared objective was to introduce Marxist thought into the content of Hollywood films, while John Murray's task was to communize the Hollywood trade unions.

In 1940 John Murray and Herb Sorrell had made a concerted effort to gain control of the motion-picture unions by forming the CP-oriented United Studio Technicians Guild to supplant the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Together they organized the bitter jurisdictional strike against the Walt Disney Studio in 1941. When World War II ended they formed a leftist coalition of anti-IATSE studio employees called the Conference of Studio Unions, and the surrender of Japan marked the beginning of renewed labor wars in Hollywood orchestrated by Murray and Sorrell.
^*

Selecting Warner Bros, as the field of jurisdictional battle, Murray and Sorrell placed 750 pickets around the Warner Bros, lot in Burbank. When the IATSE employees tried to enter the studio gates the pickets overturned their cars as Jack Warner angrily looked on from a soundstage roof. The Burbank police and studio guards beat back the pickets with clubs and fire hoses, and by the end of the next day over eighty people had been injured in a pitched battle between the rival unions before additional police called from nearby towns could restore a semblance of order. The matter was turned over to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which in October 1945 ruled in favor of the Conference of Studio Unions. The victory inflamed Murray and Sorrell's ambition to take over all the Hollywood locals, and the labor wars quickly spread to the other Hollywood studios.

Norman Jefferies recalled that it was during the time of the strikes that he was dating John and Eunice Murray's daughter, Patricia, a student at Santa Monica High School. The Murrays had built a large and comfortable home in Santa Monica at 802 Franklin Street, and according to Jefferies it was the scene of numerous meetings involving the communist labor movement in Hollywood. Fifteen years later it would be to this same house on Franklin Street that Marilyn Monroe would be driven by Mrs. Murray for her appointment with her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

Jefferies described John Murray as a bright, well-educated man versed in history and the arts who spoke six languages. “Jack [John] Murray was a strange man—so was his brother Churchill,” Jefferies observed. “Jack wasn't home much, or even in Los Angeles, unless it was on party business. That was his life. The Murrays didn't have much of a marriage because he was gone most of the time. He was either in Mexico or on the East Coast.

“During the strikes the Murrays frequently had cell meetings, or what they called ‘club' meetings there at the house,” Jefferies recalled. “Herb Sorrell was there a lot, but Jack Murray was the strategist along with his brother Churchill and people he brought up from Mexico. Sorrell was the organizer and the street fighter, but Jack and Churchill were the brains. Eunice was part of all this, but I never got the idea that she was an organizer.”