André de Dienes, on the other hand, had compelling backing. Jean-Louis, the fashion designer who served Marilyn in later years, knew de Dienes in the forties, and confirmed that ‘he had a real relationship, a love affair, with Marilyn back then.’ Was de Dienes a lone folly in the dying days of her marriage to Jim Dougherty, and how was he treated in the end?
Still the ardent suitor, still assuming himself engaged to Norma Jeane, de Dienes sent her money to help pay for the divorce from Dougherty. ‘But when it came to get married,’ he was to recall wistfully, ‘she cancelled it, on the phone, while I was driving to meet her in Vegas. Jealous, I drove to Los Angeles. And I surprised her, in her apartment, with a lover. … I knew then it was all over.’
De Dienes bore no grudge. Till his death in 1985, he treasured a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health, given to Norma Jeane by her last foster parent, a Christian Scientist. On the flyleaf is the inscription, in careful, childish handwriting:
Dearest André,
Lines 10 and 11 on page 494 of this book is my prayer for you always.
Love, Norma Jeane
Lines 10 and 11 read:
Divine love always has met and always will meet every human need … since to all mankind and in every hour, divine love supplies all good.
According to Norma Jeane herself, in her story of breaking into Hollywood, she firmly avoided giving herself to all mankind. Her sad tale went: ‘Now I was a sort of “child widow.” I looked at the streets with lonely eyes. I had no relatives to visit or chums to go places with. … There were always men willing to help a girl be less lonely. They said “Hi, baby,” when you passed. When you didn’t turn to look at them they sneered, “Stuck up, eh?” I never answered them.’
When she talked to Ben Hecht, Marilyn indicated that she lived a chaste life in 1946. She was broke that year, though, and there may have been some love that was less than divine. Later, while under the tutelage of drama teacher Lee Strasberg, she offered the private admission that in the early days in Hollywood she had been a call girl. Strasberg, who often sought out frank verbal biographies from would-be pupils, said this emerged during their first serious discussion.
According to Strasberg, talking years later to his biographer, ‘She told me she was the one summoned if anyone needed a beautiful girl for a convention.’ He said that later she felt ‘her call-girl background worked against her.’ Strasberg’s biographer, Cindy Adams, had no doubt of his meaning. ‘He said it three times, on tape,’ she recalled. And he meant exactly that — she was a call girl. It was exactly what he knew to be a fact from his pupil’s own lips.’
Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s New York maid from 1957 till her death, claimed the actress confided in her on many matters. She said Marilyn told her how, as Norma Jeane, she had once literally sold herself to a man shortly before the end of her marriage to Dougherty. The man, middle-aged, had persuaded a tipsy Norma Jeane, for fifteen dollars, to go to his hotel room. At first he merely asked to see her naked, then he demanded more. Norma Jeane wanted to run out, but changed her mind because, she supposedly told her maid, ‘Then I thought about it. It didn’t really bother me that much. So what was the difference?’ She did insist that the man use a contraceptive. According to Pepitone, there would be other visits to the same bar, other men, and more pocket money for the drifting Norma Jeane.
The real-life sexuality of the world’s sex symbol can be glimpsed through a mass of recollection, sometimes droll, more often sad.
Philippe Halsman, the distinguished Life photographer, took many pictures of Marilyn over the years. The first session was in 1949, when she was twenty-three. Marilyn was one of eight girls selected to act out four situations: a confrontation with a frightening monster, the taste of a delicious drink, the hilarity of a really good joke, and being in the embrace of a wonderful lover. Marilyn, he recalled later, performed well only the part of the girl in the lover’s embrace.
Halsman would say years later, ‘When she faced a man she didn’t know, she felt safe and secure only when she knew the man desired her; so everything in her life was geared to provoke this feeling. Her talent in this respect was very great. I remember my experience in her tiny apartment with my assistant and the Life researcher. Each of us felt that if the other two would leave, something incredible would happen.’
On one occasion Halsman had Marilyn jump repeatedly into the air for his camera. He said later, ‘I was greatly surprised to see the embodiment of sex appeal jump like a small, immature girl. I said to her, “Will you jump again? I’m not sure you expressed your character the first time.” “You mean you can read my character from my jump?” she asked. “Of course,” I replied. She then looked at me with big, frightened eyes and trembled and wouldn’t jump any more.’
Halsman is the only man on record who asked Marilyn the question that may hold part of the explanation of Norma Jeane’s perennial fear. ‘Tell me,’ he inquired, ‘how old were you when you first had sex?’
‘Seven,’ Marilyn responded.
‘Mon Dieu!’ cried Halsman, lowering the camera. ‘How old was the man?’
The reply came in the famous whisper, with a catch of breath: ‘Younger.’
This was Marilyn’s only jest about childhood sex. Normally her theme was different — and grim. She claimed early on that she had been sexually molested as a child, and it was a theme she harped on obsessively throughout her life. Was it a real event?
The first firmly recorded reference to the violation of Norma Jeane seems to have been in 1947, when she offered it to Lloyd Shearer, a journalist who interviewed her at the request of the Twentieth Century-Fox publicity office. He listened to a horrific package story, and his reaction was this: ‘She confided to us over lunch that she had been assaulted by one of her guardians, raped by a policeman, and attacked by a sailor. She seemed to me then to live in a fantasy world, to be entangled in the process of invention, and to be completely absorbed in her own sexuality.’ Shearer was so skeptical that he decided to write nothing about Marilyn.
The childhood assault, as she told it herself in 1954, took this form: ‘I was almost nine, and I lived with a family that rented a room to a man named Kimmel. He was a stern-looking man, and everybody respected him and called him Mr Kimmel. I was passing his room when his door opened and he said quietly, ‘Please come in here, Norma. …’ He smiled at me and turned the key in the lock. ‘Now you can’t get out,’ he said, as if we were playing a game. I stood staring at him. I was frightened, but I didn’t dare yell. … When he put his arms around me I kicked and fought as hard as I could, but I didn’t make any sound. He was stronger than I was and wouldn’t let me go. He kept whispering to me to be a good girl. When he unlocked the door and let me out, I ran to tell my “aunt” what Mr Kimmel had done. “I want to tell you something,” I stammered, “about Mr Kimmel. He — he —”’
By Norma Jeane’s account her current foster parent told her, ‘Don’t you dare say anything against Mr Kimmel. Mr Kimmel’s a fine man. He’s my star boarder!’ Kimmel later told Norma Jeane, she said, to go buy some ice cream.
Marilyn Monroe, the actress, would repeat this account of her girlhood nightmare over and over — to reporters, to lovers, to anyone who would listen. Peggy Feury, who ran the Loft acting studio in Los Angeles, recalled meeting Marilyn at a New York party shortly before her death in 1962.
The story may well have had a core of truth. Not long before her death, during an interview with journalist Jaik Rosenstein, Marilyn said, ‘It did happen. But I didn’t run out of the room crying or screaming. … I knew it was wrong, but to tell the truth I think I was more curious than anything else. … Nobody ever told me about sex, and frankly, I never did think it was all that important or that it was wrong.’
Dr Ralph Greenson, the Hollywood psychiatrist who treated and befriended Marilyn in her last years, accepted the fact that she had a ‘terrible, terrible background.’ Marilyn may have used a core truth, however, as a model for later
fabrications. Dr Greenson also referred to her ‘mistreatment fantasy.’ Delusions and hallucinations are a feature of schizophrenic disorders. Dr Ruth Bruun, a psychiatrist who considered Marilyn’s family history for this book, perceived indications of schizophrenia in the surviving information about her mother and grandmother.
Dr Greenson was the only one of Marilyn’s psychiatrists whose opinions have partially survived. In correspondence with a colleague, obtained exclusively for this book, he expressed his concern about Marilyn’s ‘tendency to paranoid reactions.’ At first he thought perhaps, that rather than being schizophrenic, her paranoid tendencies were ‘more masochistic, and an acting out of the orphan-girl rejections … the tendency towards severe depressive reactions, and the impulsive defenses against this, seem to me to be central.’ In the end, after her death, Greenson would describe Marilyn as a woman with ‘extremely weak psychological structures … ego weakness, and certain psychotic manifestations, including those of schizophrenia.’
The story of sexual assault in childhood is not the only episode hinting at fantasy, or at least self-serving exaggeration. First husband Jim Dougherty recalled a night when, after a minor tiff during the evening, Norma Jeane woke him in the middle of the night. She said she had been for a walk, wearing only a nightgown. Dougherty remembered: ‘I felt her embracing me with tears streaming down her face as she cried, “There’s a man after me! There’s a man after me!” I held her a few moments and then told her, “Honey, you’re having a nightmare.” “No!” she insisted, “I’m awake. I was going to leave home. And I walked down the street and a man chased me home.”’
Professional controversy still whirls around Sigmund Freud’s so-called seduction theory, which proposed that the sexual abuse of children by adults was a primary cause of neurosis. Freud himself is said to have abandoned the theory later, shifting to the view that most patients’ claims of sexual abuse are fantasy rather than fact. He wrote in 1900: ‘I must, after all, take an interest in reality in sexuality, which one learns about only with great difficulty.’
Real or imagined, Norma Jeane would never put her childhood horror story behind her. Back in the world of the flesh, what of the less violent side of Norma Jeane’s sex life?
She told a story of a happier episode that supposedly occurred at the age of eight, the same year as Mr Kimmel’s assault. ‘I fell in love with a boy named George. … We used to hide in the grass together until he got frightened and jumped up and ran away. What we did in the grass never frightened me. I knew it was wrong or I wouldn’t have hidden, but I didn’t know what was wrong. At night I lay awake and tried to figure out what sex was and what love was. I wanted to ask a thousand questions but there was no one to ask.’
Norma Jeane said she fought off the boys till the age of sixteen and marriage to Jim Dougherty. ‘There were,’ she said for publication in 1954, ‘no thoughts of sex in my head.’ Within two years of that statement, in a long private talk with her New York hostess and close friend Amy Greene, Norma Jeane asserted that she had first slept with a boy while she was in high school. Norma Jeane had gone to Emerson Junior High School when she was eleven, and to Van Nuys High School when she was just fifteen, dropping out in less than a year to marry Jim Dougherty. If Norma Jeane was telling the truth, she thus became one of the 3 percent of American females of the forties who, as Kinsey would shortly reveal to a startled nation, lost their virginity before the age of sixteen, and one of the 50 percent who did so before marriage.
All this would be new to Jim Dougherty, who asserted, ‘She began our married life knowing nothing, but absolutely nothing about sex. But Mom had cautioned me before our wedding day and I knew I had to be careful that first night. … That delicate threshold had never been crossed before … not ever.’
Norma Jeane would say later, ‘The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex. My husband either didn’t mind this or wasn’t aware of it. We were both too young to discuss such an embarrassing topic openly.’
Jim Dougherty’s version? ‘Norma Jeane loved sex. It was as natural to her as breakfast in the morning. There were never any problems with it. … Getting undressed unfailingly set us both a-tingle, and almost before the light was out we were locked together. … Sometimes she would tease me just a little, wearing only two small red bandannas when I got home from Lockheed. …’
Dougherty also told an interviewer: ‘She was something else. I couldn’t even put my lunch box down when I came home from work before she’d drag me upstairs.’ One might dismiss Dougherty’s version as the predictable boast of Marilyn Monroe’s first husband, but he has a supporting witness. Working beside Dougherty at the factory was the then unknown Robert Mitchum, who a few years later would play opposite a new star called Marilyn Monroe. He found Dougherty perennially cheerful, not least the morning he turned up with a photograph of his ‘old lady.’ It showed the teenage Norma Jeane standing by the garden gate in the nude. She was posed, Dougherty told Mitchum, as if waiting for him to come home.
Of the men who followed Dougherty in Marilyn’s life, those who have talked paint a starkly different picture of her sexuality. They, and Marilyn herself in comments to psychiatrist Dr Greenson, suggest a woman who found little satisfaction in sex. The change may have been caused by the dismal personal experiences that followed the marriage to Dougherty. Somewhere in that same period also lies the genesis of perhaps the saddest preoccupation in the life of Marilyn Monroe — childbearing.
Year after year as the fifties unwound, a vast public would wait and watch as Marilyn tried to have babies. As marriage followed marriage the headlines would tell of repeated gynecological surgery or miscarriage after miscarriage. Time after time, Marilyn would speak of her longing for children, would make a point of favoring children’s charities and funds for orphans. At her funeral, instead of flowers, donations were directed to children’s hospitals. A children’s clinic in London benefited from a bequest Marilyn made. Yet, in its origins, even this side of Marilyn was a sad confusion.
Looking back at the age of twenty-eight, the former Norma Jeane would say of her husband: ‘He never hurt or upset me, except on one subject. He wanted a baby. The thought of having a baby stood my hair on end. I could see it only as myself, another Norma Jeane in an orphanage. Something would happen to me. I couldn’t explain this to Jim. After he fell asleep, I would lie awake crying. I didn’t quite know who it was that cried, Mrs Dougherty or the child she might have. It was neither. It was Norma Jeane, still alive, still alone, still wishing she were dead.’
Jim Dougherty again told a different tale. He said Norma Jeane was eager to have a baby as soon as they got married, and he talked her out of it. He also told a hilarious tale of Norma Jeane experimenting with a brand-new diaphragm purchased at his insistence. She got the device in, then had to summon her husband to help get it out.
Norma Jeane quickly demonstrated that she could cope with children, looking after Dougherty’s nephews for weeks at a time. She reveled in doing so. When Dougherty joined the Merchant Marine, he said, his wife became frantic, ‘begging me to make her pregnant so that she could have a piece of me, in case something happened.’ Years later, as Marilyn, Norma Jeane would tell a friend, actress Jeanne Carmen, how much she had yearned for children by her first husband.
Yet during their four-year marriage, things turned around. In the final months it was Dougherty who was begging Norma Jeane to have children. She now refused, declaring that she dreaded the possibility of losing her figure. There had been a drastic change in Norma Jeane’s mind, and two fragments of information — both sourced to Norma Jeane — may account for the turmoil.
Marilyn Monroe died childless, by every public account. In 1979 a book by her former maid, Lena Pepitone, contained an assertion that the teenage Norma Jeane had given birth to a child. Few noticed this claim and students of Marilyn suspected Pepitone was merely seeking headlines. Research for this book, however, turned up two other witnesses who said
Marilyn spoke to them of having borne a child.
According to Pepitone, Marilyn told her story about being molested, but added that the man involved actually had intercourse with her. She became pregnant, but concealed the fact from her guardian for several months. When she did own up to the pregnancy, her guardian saw to it that she had medical attention and arranged for the child to be born in hospital. Pepitone quoted Marilyn as saying, ‘I had the baby … my baby. I was so scared, but it was wonderful. It was a little boy. I hugged him and kissed him. I just kept touching him. I couldn’t believe this was my baby. … But when it was time to leave, the doctor and a nurse came in with Grace [Grace McKee, her guardian]. They all looked real strange and said they’d be taking the baby. … I begged them, “Don’t take my baby … .” They took my baby from me … and I never saw him again.’
Pepitone said in an interview that Marilyn, on one occasion, said she had never learned what happened to the child; on another, she said she did know and sent regular payments to the California couple who had reared the boy. Pepitone had the impression that the child had been born when Marilyn was about fourteen or fifteen.
Amy Greene, with whom Marilyn lived in 1955, also clearly recalled her saying she gave birth in her teens, let the baby go for adoption, and still felt guilty about it. Former actress Jeanne Carmen, who met Marilyn in the same period as Amy Greene, recalls a similar story with a variation — the baby was born, Marilyn told Carmen, after the marriage to Dougherty and before the real Hollywood breakthrough, when Marilyn was about twenty-one. Carmen said, ‘Marilyn was enormously troubled over this. In one breath she would say, “There’s no God”; then, “Am I going to be punished for giving the baby away?” Desperation was very near the surface.’