Many of Marilyn’s statements on her early life, as reproduced in the Hecht manuscript, will be quoted in these pages. Where possible, they will be buttressed or countered by independent witnesses. We must treat what she tells us with informed skepticism, and that is no disadvantage. Marilyn, an international fantasy figure, constructed her image, both public and private, from a blend of fact and self-serving fantasy. She exercised to excess a common human license. Fantasy was part of this creature, and part of the challenge is to discover the woman who sheltered behind it.
What Marilyn did tell Ben Hecht was sad, strong stuff for the 1950s. What she did not tell might have finished her as an actress. At the time, indeed, it was nobody else’s business.
At fifteen Marilyn was still ‘Norma Jeane’ (or Norma Jean, when she felt like spelling it that way), the name her mother had given her at birth. It was early that year, 1942, that her legal guardian, a middle-aged woman named Grace McKee, abruptly decided to thrust her charge into the adult world.
Norma Jeane’s future triumphs and calamities would be defiantly of her own making. Her first marriage, however, was arranged. Grace McKee had decided to move East with her new husband, and they did not find it convenient to take Norma Jeane along. The answer was to find her a husband.
McKee saw a likely candidate in Jim Dougherty, the son of a neighbor she knew well. His family had seen the worst of the Great Depression — he was to recall living, at one stage, in a tent beside their battered car. At twenty-one he was tough and hardheaded, a gifted football player who had turned down college in favor of a job embalming corpses at a funeral home, then work as a night-shift fitter at Lockheed Aviation.
Jim Dougherty knew Norma Jeane. They had had a couple of dates, and he had enjoyed the discovery that, when dancing, she ‘would lean extra close, eyes tight shut.’ Norma Jeane ‘laughed at the right moment and kept quiet when she was supposed to.’ Even so, Dougherty was running around with a number of other girls.
It came as a total surprise to Jim Dougherty when Norma Jeane’s guardian suggested he marry Norma Jeane. His mother passed on the message. It was a thought that had never even occurred to Dougherty, but he agreed when told the alternative would be to send Norma Jeane back to the orphanage. That, he said, was the way decisions were made in his family.
A wedding date was set for June, to give Norma Jeane time to turn sixteen. In the weeks that remained the couple belatedly started courting. Dougherty’s pride and joy was his car, a 1940 Ford coupe, and he would whisk Norma Jeane to a trysting spot in the hills called Pop’s Willow Lake. They would rent a canoe, paddle under the trees at the water’s edge, and kiss.
They were duly married, on June 19, 1942, when she was less than three weeks past her sixteenth birthday. There was no honeymoon. He went back to work at the aircraft factory on Monday morning.
Norma Jeane gave her account of the marriage in her first days of fame, in the interviews with Ben Hecht. Jim Dougherty finally told his full story in the seventies.
The couple seem to have been talking about entirely different relationships. She told Hecht, ‘It was like being retired to a zoo. Actually our marriage was a sort of friendship with sexual privileges. I found out later that marriages are often no more than that. I was a peculiar wife. I disliked grown ups. … I liked boys and girls younger than me. I played games with them until my husband came out and started calling me to go to bed.’
Jim Dougherty seems not to have noticed such coolness. ‘Our marriage,’ he said, ‘may have been made in some place short of heaven, like in the minds of two older ladies, but there was no pretense in how Norma Jeane and I felt about each other once we’d formed that partnership.’
At first the teenage wife was a hopeless housekeeper. She had no idea how to cook. Someone told her to put a pinch of salt in the coffee, so she made it a spoonful. Coffee came in handy to deal with a sparking short in the electrical wiring — she poured it over the carpet as well as the wiring, then locked herself in the bedroom. She served up raw fish.
Gradually, though, Norma Jeane learned. Dougherty says she cooked venison and rabbit really well, and cooked carrots and peas together ‘because she liked the color.’ All in all, the way Dougherty saw it, she had the makings of a good wife. Then, in the autumn of 1943, a year into their marriage, he joined the Merchant Marine.
The war was at first kind to Mr and Mrs Dougherty. He was merely posted to Catalina Island, just across the water from Los Angeles County, and Norma Jeane joined him there. The way it seemed to Dougherty, they spent an idyllic year together. They fished, swam, and got fit. She took weight-lifting lessons from a former Olympic champion. She showed herself off a little too much to the hordes of uniformed males on the island, but Dougherty was not a worrier. The couple went out a good deal, and one night Norma Jeane spent most of the evening dancing with every man in the unit except Dougherty. When he said, ‘Let’s go home,’ Norma Jeane wanted to dance some more. This caused their first real row, but still Dougherty felt secure.
He continued to feel secure in 1944, after the call came to go overseas. On arrival in New Guinea, he found a stack of letters waiting for him. Norma Jeane, now living with Dougherty’s mother, had written nearly every day. The letters kept coming for months, while Dougherty sailed the Pacific and his teenage wife took a job at Radio Plane, a plant making aircraft used for target practice.
Norma Jeane inspected parachutes and sprayed fuselages. She would say later, ‘I wore overalls in the factory. I was surprised that they insisted on this. Putting a girl in overalls is like having her work in tights, particularly if a girl knows how to wear them. The men buzzed around me just as the high-school boys had done. Maybe it was my fault that the men in the factory tried to date me and buy me drinks. I didn’t feel like a married woman.’
In her letters, Norma Jeane told Jim how much she missed him. In one she quoted a song by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, whom she would one day know in the movie business. It was a song with a promise made by wartime sweethearts in Allied countries around the world. ‘I’ll walk alone,’ she assured her sailor husband.
When Dougherty came home on his first leave, after several months at sea, Norma Jeane was waiting at the railroad station. He recalled, ‘We headed in my car for the most luxurious motor lodge on Ventura Boulevard, the La Fonda, and rarely left our room. Norma Jeane had bought a black net nightgown for the occasion and we had most of our meals brought to our room.’ He did notice, that week, that his wife was drinking too much.
Shortly before he went back to sea, said Dougherty, ‘a kind of dread took hold of her. She didn’t want to talk about or think of my leaving.’ But Jim Dougherty had no choice about returning to the Pacific, and a few days later he did.
Norma Jeane went back to work at Radio Plane. At the end of 1944, with the war in its closing months, life changed. Or, more truthfully, Norma Jeane jumped at the chance to change it, when Private David Conover came to Radio Plane to take pictures of women doing war work.
Conover was an army photographer for an armed service motion picture unit. His commanding officer was Captain Ronald Reagan, the actor who was to become President of the United States. Conover’s mission at Radio Plane was ‘to take morale-boosting shots of pretty girls’ for Yank magazine. He later said he noticed at once that the eighteen-year-old Norma Jeane was different, that ‘her eyes held something that touched and intrigued me.’ Conover photographed her on the assembly line and then — changed at his request into a clinging red sweater — during the lunchbreak. He told Norma Jeane she belonged on a magazine cover, not in a factory.
Conover’s new discovery was making $20 a week working ten hours a day at Radio Plane. He offered her $5 an hour as a freelance model — unexpected pocket money which represented a bonanza to Norma Jeane. In the three weeks after meeting Conover there were several further picture sessions, and she joined him on a picture-taking safari through southern California. Some of the pictures ended up on the desk of the Blue Book Mo
del Agency, and Norma Jeane was summoned for an interview. Her career as a cover girl had begun.
Success as a model came quickly. Soon photographs of Norma Jeane were appearing in girlie magazines with names like Swank, Sir, and Peek. Sometimes she would appear in a swimsuit, sometimes in shorts and halter top, but the pictures were perfectly respectable.
At nearly nineteen this model girl had a good figure — a thirty-five-inch bust which she used to the last centimeter* and pale skin she liked to keep pale. She had shoulder-length California blond hair, really fair only in summer, when the sun bleached it. Norma Jeane had no trouble getting work as a model.
When Jim Dougherty next came home, after a voyage round the world, his wife was not waiting at the station. She arrived an hour late, blaming the delay on a modeling assignment. She seemed cool toward Dougherty, was no longer living with his mother, and had left her job at the factory.
Norma Jeane now only wanted to talk about her success as a pinup girl, and Dougherty could only make a pretense at being impressed. She had spent their savings on new clothes, and spent a good part of the precious leave going out on modeling jobs. In the coming months Dougherty tried to stay nearer home, making short hauls up and down the western seaboard of the United States.
At Christmas 1945, Norma Jeane found it impossible to be at home — another modeling assignment. There was a showdown when she returned. Dougherty said, ‘I just told her she would have to choose between a modeling career and maybe the movies or a home life with me.’
Norma Jeane failed to respond, and Dougherty went back to sea. He was in China, halfway up the Yangtze River, buying bracelets and nail polish for Norma Jeane, when he next had news of her. It came in the form of a lawyer’s letter, enclosing divorce papers for signature. Dougherty decided not to sign till he had seen his wife.
Early one morning, on his return to California, he took a taxi straight from the dock to the house where Norma Jeane was living. She came to the door pulling a wrap around her shoulders, exhausted. She was sorry, she said, but could they meet tomorrow? The next day, and at several subsequent meetings, Norma Jeane told him of her new resolve. She was going to become a movie actress.
Dougherty had once won first place at a high school Shakespeare festival, for his delivery of Shylock’s ‘revenge’ speech in The Merchant of Venice. He said now, ‘I always thought I was the ham around here. How come you want to perform all of a sudden?’ Norma Jeane took his mockery, but insisted the marriage was over.
‘There was this secret in me — acting,’ she was to say years later. ‘It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said ‘This Way Out.’
Norma Jeane had acted in school plays, usually playing male parts, but otherwise she had no acting experience at all. Now, rattling in from the suburbs in the old car she had shared with Dougherty, she began exploring Hollywood.
‘You sit alone,’ she remembered later. ‘It’s night outside. Automobiles roll down Sunset Boulevard like an endless string of beetles. Their rubber tires make a purring high-class noise. You’re hungry, and you say, “It’s good for my waistline not to eat. There’s nothing finer than a washboard belly.”
‘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.”’
*Marilyn’s studio liked to say it was larger — 37 inches was the official line in 1954. She herself once told a reporter she would like her epitaph to read ‘Here lies Marilyn Monroe — 38-23-36.’ Dress designer and sometime lover Billy Travilla, who should have known, said the true statistics — in Marilyn’s prime — were 35-22-35. I have used his figure.
3
‘THIS IS THE END OF my story of Norma Jeane. … I moved into a room in Hollywood to live by myself. I wanted to find out who I was. When I just wrote, “This is the end of Norma Jeane,” I blushed as if I had been caught out in a lie. Because this sad, bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, “I never lived, I was never loved,” and often I get confused and think it’s I who am saying it.’
This was Marilyn, by then a household name, talking in 1954, and the confusion was real. As her actual psychiatrists would discover, and as armchair ones have insisted ever since, Norma Jeane did not cease to exist when Mrs Dougherty became an actress.
There was irony in the fact that the death certificate, in 1962, would refer only to the passing of a Hollywood invention called Marilyn Monroe. For it was Norma Jeane who died, a Norma Jeane who had spent most of her life presenting herself to the world and — most troubling of all — to herself, through a filter of untruth. Norma Jeane had begun weaving her web of delusion before the break with Jim Dougherty, and along with the fantasies there was some outright deceit. Only when that is dealt with can we move along to the actress called Marilyn Monroe.
The former Mrs Dougherty would tell Ben Hecht, ‘I was completely faithful to my overseas husband.’ Jim Dougherty could still maintain three decades later that ‘it never entered my mind, and I don’t believe to this day, that she was deceiving me. In all the years I was seeing her, I never knew Norma Jeane to lie. If she was having dates, she would have told me.’
A spouse often closes the shutters of the mind to the possibility of infidelity. In the lonely wartime sailor husband there was the need to close out pain. In ex-husband Dougherty there is, not least when the wife was Marilyn Monroe, the muffler of simple pride. The record, though, says Norma Jeane was unfaithful.
In late 1960, less than two years before her death, Marilyn herself told another interviewer, ‘I didn’t sleep around when I was married until 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.’
By her own account, then, the teenage bride began deceiving her husband about halfway through their four-year marriage. There can be little doubt what she was up to over the bleak Christmas of 1945, when she left Dougherty alone at home while she stayed away on a modeling assignment.
Norma Jeane had told Jim in December that she had to go away for nearly a month, to work with a photographer named André de Dienes. He wanted to take her hundreds of miles north, to Washington State. The fee would be two hundred dollars, exactly the amount needed to pay for repairs to the Dougherty’s old Ford. She said she did not really want to go, but felt she should, not only for the money, but because de Dienes was a prominent photographer who would be good for her career. So she went.
Norma Jeane called long-distance, in tears, while Jim Dougherty was eating his Christmas dinner. She said she wished she could be home but now felt obliged to stay with de Dienes. ‘Most of his camera equipment was stolen because of me,’ she explained. ‘I left the car unlocked. …’ When she did come home, said Dougherty, Norma Jeane refused to talk about the trip, except to say she never wanted to pose for de Dienes again.
André de Dienes, the immigrant son of a Hungarian banker, later told his side of what happened that Christmas. Aged thirty-two at the time, and a newcomer to California, he had been looking for a model who would pose outdoors in western settings, preferably nude. One day, in his bungalow at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, the telephone rang. It was the Blue Book Agency, offering a new girl.
‘There came this lovely little girl in a pink sweater and checkered slacks,’ de Dienes was to recall. ‘I fell right away in love with this young girl. In my subconscious I wanted to marry her. What was wrong with that? I was a nice young boy myself.’
That afternoon de Dienes, who was indeed to become a successful photographer of the stars, told Norma Jeane he wanted her to pose nude. She was unsure. As he recalled it, ‘she told me she was married, but that her husband was at sea and she didn’t love him.’
r /> De Dienes began courting Norma Jeane in Dougherty’s absence, sent flowers, came to dinner at her home. It was against this background that he and Norma Jeane set off on their Christmas trip.
Norma Jeane did not go to bed with de Dienes immediately. He said he had tried to seduce her for days, until one happy night when they failed to find a hotel with two vacant rooms. Norma Jeane agreed to share a room — and her favors. ‘She was lovely and very nice,’ the Hungarian was to recall. ‘But finally it was something she allowed me to do to her.’ In bed, de Dienes recalled, nineteen-year-old Norma Jeane discovered variations on sex untried with Jim Dougherty.
While working outdoors in the snow with Norma Jeane, de Dienes was moved. ‘She was sweet. Beautiful. Her smile. Her laughter. And she was frail — mentally and physically. As soon as she finished her work she would hop back in the car and fall asleep. This girl had no business in show business. She was a sensitive, sweet little girl.’
Norma Jeane did leave the car unlocked, and de Dienes’ equipment was stolen. He forgave her for that, and forgave her too when she still refused to pose in the nude. De Dienes was in love and soon, back in Los Angeles, he asked Norma Jeane to marry him. According to the photographer, she agreed. He then traveled on business to New York, where he papered his walls with her photographs.
Was de Dienes telling the truth? In this book there will be others, some more obscure than de Dienes, with claims to have bedded Marilyn. Were they her lovers, or are they braggarts and profiteers? The reader should know that those given this author’s credence either convinced me in personal interviews, or were supported by other witnesses.
One man I did not believe was David Conover, the Army private who indeed took the photographs that led to her first modeling job — the pictures are there to prove it. He then went on to write a book claiming that he became Marilyn’s lover and lifelong friend. A visit to Conover in Canada satisfied me that his ‘documentation’ was forged. He was either a confidence man or mentally ill, or both. Then there was Hans Jørgen Lembourn, a Dane who wrote a most literate account of what his publishers called ‘a forty-night affair with Marilyn Monroe.’ On analysis, his book has virtually no substance at all.