She is known today as a femme fatale, a magnet for scandal and a blonde bombshell, but before she was Marilyn Monroe, she was a shy, timid, ordinary girl called Norma Jeane.
With her famous curves, bleached blonde hair, red lips and high voice, the Marilyn Monroe that is remembered today is almost a caricature of the ‘ideal’ woman. This is the version of Marilyn that has become immortal – a life of scandals, glamour and tragedy. But she was so much more than that. She was a woman who adored life, who spent hundreds of dollars trying to save a storm-damaged tree, and who cared for animals in her yard. She was loud, gentle and joyous. But she was also self-absorbed, and crippled with doubt and stage fright so terrible that sometimes she couldn’t emerge from her trailer. She could be cutting, and say the sharpest words with the softest voice. She was bad at remembering lines, bad at arriving on time and bad at keeping men.
Because of her glittering rise and tragic end, the Marilyn that has entered legend is a surface image of the one that lived and breathed. Before she bleached her hair, when she struggled to pay her bills and nobody paid attention to her, she was a girl called Norma Jeane, and Norma Jeane was very different to the icon she became.
Nobody knows who Norma’s father was. Upon her birth on 1 June 1926, her mother Gladys Baker registered her ex husband, Martin Edward Mortenson, as the father, but it is likely that she added him to avoid the sting of illegitimacy. Instead, it may have been Charles Stanley Gifford, a handsome man who worked with Gladys at Consolidated Film Industries. Either way, by the time Norma was born, both men were gone. When she was a child, Norma was shown a photo of Gifford and described him as looking like Clark Gable. This would morph into a lie that she told her friends as a teenager – that Gable was her secret father, a man who belonged to another world, but who would one day whisk her away to a land of glamour and opportunity. Ever since she could speak, Norma looked outwards, and sought for something more.
It is no small wonder that Norma looked anywhere for a sense of importance. She had no roots on one side, and on the other a long history of insanity. Her grandfather had been confined to a state asylum, her grandmother eventually followed the same path, her uncle had killed himself and her mother would drift in and out of asylums for most of the young girl’s life.
Gladys couldn’t afford to look after Norma, so when she was just a baby she was placed with a deeply religious family, the Bolenders, who agreed to look after her for a fee of $5 a week. Gladys hadn’t abandoned her child – she had a plan. She would work until she was able to afford a house, then take her daughter back. She took trolley rides from Hollywood out to Hawthorne, where Norma lived, every Saturday. There, in the strict and sheltered home, Gladys would sit with the child she barely knew, before leaving again to be back in time for her weekly date.
Norma was a quiet child, remarkably quiet. When her mother occasionally took her to the film lab, she would sit there quietly for hours. As a child, these qualities were congratulated, but later in life she would be criticised as seeming totally detached from reality. Scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson described her as “ten feet under water… a wall of thick cotton... she reminds me of a sloth. You stick a pin in her and eight days later it says ‘ouch’.”
For seven years Norma lived in this relatively stable home. The Bolenders were not wealthy, but they were moral, hardworking and decent people. Norma grew into a lively child with tough features. In school she was timid and ordinary, but at home she was strong, bold and bossed around her brother. This domination of men would later become one of Marilyn’s defining features. However, as Norma turned seven, her mother had finally earned enough money to buy a house, and the young Norma moved to Hollywood 13 years before her career there would begin.
Unfortunately, Gladys was a ticking time bomb of inherited insanity. In less than three months she had an extreme psychotic episode and had to be dragged away by force. She was placed in a state asylum, just like her parents, and Norma was told her mother was ‘in hospital’. She wouldn’t understand what this meant until she became a woman herself. Now Norma had nothing – no father, no mother to visit her on Saturday, no quiet suburban home and no identity. For the next two years she was carted between two couples – an English family forced to return home when depression hit, and neighbours who became fond of the girl and requested to adopt her. From the asylum, Gladys still had a voice, and she said no.
Now a ward of the state, Norma was sent to an orphanage. When the young girl realised where she was, she kicked and screamed: “I’m not an orphan!” Her days of endless boredom in the institution were broken up by visits from Grace McKee, her mother’s friend and now her legal guardian. The glamorous lady would whisk her away, buy her soda and take her to see a movie. This is likely where Norma’s love affair with the screen began, but McKee also provided another of Norma’s enduring loves – she allowed her to try on makeup.
Aged 11, Norma left the orphanage and flittered between foster homes until eventually Grace took her in. It wasn’t an easy situation – Grace had recently married a man ten years her junior who had three children of his own and liked to drink. Although home life was anything but stable, Norma was finally able to pursue her love of acting. She was rejected by her high school dramatic society, so instead she played the parts in films she watched, reciting lines over and over in her bedroom. But in public she was silent and incredibly timid, earning the nickname ’the mouse’. Her time with Grace came to a bitter end when her husband stumbled drunkenly into Norma’s room one too many times. She was on the move again.
Norma finally found a loving and stable home with Ana Lower, Grace’s aunt. Lower absolutely adored Norma and Marilyn would later comment that she “changed my whole life. She was the first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She showed me the path to the higher things of life and she gave me more confidence in myself. She never hurt me, not once. She couldn’t.
She was all kindness and all love.” This confidence began to pour outwards. Norma embraced her developing body, wearing tight sweaters and crop tops. For the first time in her life people began to take notice of her. “This is what my identity is,” she must have thought. No longer Norma the orphan, she was Norma Jeane, the pretty girl.
Norma’s time with Lower was idyllic but brief. By 1942, Lower was suffering with serious health problems and Norma returned to Grace’s house, but by now she was a different woman. However, her life was to take an unexpected turn. When Grace’s husband received a lucrative job offer, the family had to move. With Gladys still rejecting offers from anyone wanting to adopt Norma, this would have seen her sent back to the orphanage. To avoid this, Grace came up with a plan and arranged someone else to look after her – a husband.
Jim Dougherty was a well-built, pleasant and sporty man. He was four years older than Norma and making a steady wage in a defence plant. When Grace asked him to take the 15-year-old to a dance, he fell for her instantly. Six weeks after Norma’s 16th birthday, they were married. On her wedding day, her demure mask fell away and she started a drunken conga line. Her husband angrily remarked: “You made a monkey of yourself!” Many years later Marilyn would describe this marriage as “like being retired to a zoo.”
The marriage wasn’t particularly painful, but it was dull. Dougherty joined the Maritime Service and in 1944 was shipped out to the Pacific. Meanwhile, Norma dutifully played the part of the loving, devoted wife. Her mother-in-law got her a job at a defence plant where she worked for hours spraying fire retardant on planes. It was an incredibly unlikely place for a starlet to be discovered, but one day an army photographer visited looking for an attractive young woman doing war work. He saw Norma’s potential immediately, dressing her in a variety of outfits and taking her telephone number. From the realms of obscurity, Norma had finally been found.
Norma was quickly signed up with the Blue Book Model Agency. She promptly passed their course and began work immediately. She called in sick at the plant, then spent her days earning $10 a day modelling as a hostess at an industrial show, while her nights were dedicated to more modelling lessons. She moved out of her in-laws and back to where she had been happiest, with Ana Lower. When Dougherty returned from the war, he found an entirely different woman than the one he had left. In just a couple of months, she would write to him to ask for a divorce.
Norma had found work as a model, but it was not steady, and she was not an overnight success. However, with her newfound confidence in her future, she quit her job at the factory. Eager to expand her portfolio, she went away for a month in the spring with photographer André de Dienes. They travelled through the west – through the desert sun, old mining towns and into the redwood country. They eventually became lovers, but when he asked to photograph her in the nude, she leaped out of the car and ran away screaming “I won’t! I won’t! Don’t you understand? I’m going to be a great movie star someday.”
Norma soon began to make waves as a model, and appeared on the cover of Laff, Peek and See. It is at this point that she finally gave into her agency’s demands to dye her brunette hair blonde. She had been resistant to the change for a good few months – for a woman with so little identity to begin with, it likely felt akin to cutting the few ties she had. But now she was ready to wipe away the past. She waved farewell to her brown curls and playful dungarees and stared back into the face of a blonde bombshell. “It wasn’t the real me,” Marilyn would later claim, but it was the version of her that everyone would remember.
Whether she liked it or not, the blonde worked. The success of her modelling career attracted the attention of the 20th Century Fox executive and former actor Ben Lyon, and he invited her for a screen test. Not only had Norma never acted in a film before, but she had horrendous stage fright. She had to be coaxed and encouraged through her audition, but her lack of experience paled in comparison to her presence. Lyon would say it was like “Jean Harlow all over again” while the cameraman uttered: “This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures.”
She was signed to a six-month contract starting at $75 a week. When she heard the news, Norma wept – she was going to escape the fate of insanity and nothingness that had so marked her early life. She lost one other thing at this point, the last remains of her past – her name. Norma Jeane was dead. Marilyn Monroe was born.
Marilyn’s life, like Norma’s, was never smooth sailing. For years she did nothing but pose for stills, attend the opening of restaurants, ride in parades and stand on floats. She languished at the bottom of the studio’s talent pool, labelled a ‘dumb broad’ and thrown the occasional role in low-budget flicks where she received the lowest billing.
Two relationships with two different men helped Marilyn’s rise to fame more than any other. First of all, Joe Scheck, the rapidly aging 70-year old co-founder of 20th Century Fox. There is no evidence at all that their relationship was sexual, but rather a firm and important friendship. Despite the sway he held, Marilyn didn’t push him for any favours, and seemed happy to simply absorb his wisdom. However, when her contract was dropped after just one year, Scheck intervened, this time at Columbia. Marilyn was given the second lead in the film Ladies Of The Chorus, which came out in 1948. The film was a cheaply made B-flick and not worth the limited money it cost to make it, but Marilyn was a vision.
She was 23 years old when she met Johnny Hyde. The moment he saw her on screen he wanted her, and had her transferred to his agency immediately. He was one of the most prominent figures in Hollywood, and being ‘picked’ by him was no small matter. He told Marilyn he would make her a star; she told him she didn’t make enough to pay her telephone bill. Hyde was 53, but like so many before and after him, he fell in love almost instantly. He had four sons and a beautiful wife who silently abided his host of affairs with clients, but Marilyn was not like the others. He was dying from a bad heart, and decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to making her a star. His wife filed for divorce, and he proposed to Marilyn.
Hyde offered Marilyn her life on a platter. Not only did he respect and love her, but he had been given barely a year to live, and promised that she wouldn’t have to look after an invalid. She could be his wife for mere months, be happy, then go on to enjoy the advantages of his name and riches. But Marilyn said no. It was a decision that she later paid for, but Marilyn, for all her diamonds, her extravagances and glamour, was never in love with money. She was in love with love, and she was not in love with Hyde.
Regardless of her refusal, Hyde dedicated the final months of his life to securing her future. He taught her everything he knew and arranged a new contract – now starting at $750 a week. He even persuaded her to fix the final flaws on her perfect face, with plastic surgery on her nose and chin. He died before he was able to secure for her the third of his estate that she never asked for. Hours after his death, Marilyn was ordered out of his home and forbidden to attend his funeral. She went anyway, throwing herself across his coffin and screaming for him to wake up before she was led out of the church. Marilyn was alone again, but now she was equipped to conquer Hollywood.
MARILYN'S MEN
In this case, gentlemen definetely did prefer bondes.
1.James Dougherty, 1942
Dougherty rushed into an early marriage with Norma, but the couple drifted apart when she began her modelling career. After she became a success, Dougherty and Monroe both provided conflicting accounts of just how happy their marriage was. Dougherty even later claimed that he created her Monroe persona.
2. Joe DiMaggio, 1951
Despite Monroe fearing that he was a stereotypical jock, she agreed to go on a date with baseball player Joe DiMaggio and the couple were married in 1954. However, the relationship soon turned sour and Monroe filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty nine months later. Despite this, they remained friends and for 20 years after her death he had half a dozen red roses delivered to her grave once a week.
3. Marlon Brando, 1955
In his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, Brando claimed that he met Monroe at a party where she played piano, and they had an on and off affair for many years. Whether this is true or not, we may never know, but they certainly maintained a friendship until the end of her life, and also discussed working together.
4. Arthur Miller, 1955
Often referred to as ’The Egghead and The Hourglass‘ when they were together, Monroe first met playwright Arthur Miller during the filming of Bus Stop. Despite trying to keep their relationship out of public view, Monroe was forced to announce their engagement after a reporter’s car crashed while following them, killing a passenger. They married in 1956 after Monroe converted to Judaism, but less than five years later, in 1961, they were divorced.
5. Frank Sinatra 1961
Following her divorce from Miller, Monroe stayed at Sinatra’s house in Los Angeles in the summer of 1961. Monroe even talked about marrying the crooner, but he broke off the relationship by the fall, just around the time he met Juliet Prowse, who he was subsequently engaged to.
One of the most discussed and speculated-upon relationships in history, the extent of Monroe’s relationship with President Kennedy will likely never be known. Her rendition of Happy Birthday, Mr President on his birthday was one of the last public appearances she made, and it is rumoured they had previously spent a week together. She also made frequent calls to the White House during the last few months of her life, which were ignored by the president.
Written by Frances White in "All About History", issue 28, 2015, UK, excerpts pp.44-52. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comments...