Casting Norma Jeane (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Oceans of Print

“I’ve got it!” cried Norma Jeane several days later as she burst into her aunt Grace’s home in the San Fernando Valley. “I’m an actress!”

Waving a copy of the contract in her hand, she rushed toward Grace, who stood beaming in the kitchen.

“I’m with the finest studio in the world! I’m with 20th Century-Fox! They liked my screen test! I’m really on the payroll. Look!”

But Aunt Grace, instead of reaching excitedly for the document, went to the stove for coffee while her niece gushed on about the wonderful people she was encountering at 20th Century-Fox. Not until Grace turned around again did Norma Jeane really look at her and stop. Something wasn’t right. “She was still smiling at me,” the younger woman would later recall, “but she was standing still. Her face was pale and she looked tired, as if life was something too heavy to carry much further.”

For an instant, that sight frightened Norma Jeane. It felt as though the very foundations of her world were momentarily slipping out from underneath her. Her guardian was beginning to drink too much. This had been obvious ever since Grace’s return from the four-year sojourn back east which had separated her from Norma Jeane during the war.

What a time for Aunt Grace to be falling apart! Now, just as the dream promised to turn into reality. For it had been Grace’s dream to start with, not Norma Jeane’s. Out of the depths of the Depression, it was Grace who’d first spoken it. From that awful hour when Norma Jeane’s mother Gladys had lost her hold on reality and needed to be hospitalized, it was Gladys’ best friend—Grace McKee—who had first prophesied it. They’d be standing in a long line at the Holmes Bakery waiting for their pitiful twenty-five-cent sackful of old bread, and Grace would grin down at the child who’d been left in her charge. “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane,” she’d repeat. “You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big. You’re going to be an important woman. You’re going to be a movie star! Oh, I can feel it in my bones!”

The words had possessed the power to make the stale bread taste like cream puffs. And today, with Norma Jeane grown to half a foot taller than her pert little guardian, the dream was starting to come true.

Norma Jeane put her arms around Aunt Grace and helped her to the table.

“I’m all right,” Grace protested. “The coffee will fix me up fine.”

Once seated, Grace began surveying the contract’s oceans of fine print. Hers had always been an absolute power of choice with regard to everything that concerned Norma Jeane. Only two things had the girl’s debilitated young mother, Gladys Baker, required—that her child never be taken to live outside California, and that she never be given up to anyone else for adoption. Otherwise everything had been left up to the energetic Grace McKee, aided by a meager twenty-seven dollars a month that came from the County of Los Angeles. To feed her “niece” through all those hard years. To buy her what clothes she could. To see to her schooling. To find relatives of her own or of Norma Jeane’s to house the girl during the frequent periods when it was undesirable to do so herself. To arrange at one point, unavoidably in the circumstances of the moment, for her to be placed in an excellent nearby orphanage for twenty-one months. Even to engineer a sort of interim marriage between Norma Jeane and Jim Dougherty, when competing needs had taken Grace away to West Virginia at the start of the war.

Finally now, as legal guardian for the soon-to-be divorced but still underage Norma Jeane, it was for Grace McKee—whom marriage in the meantime had turned into Grace Goddard—to cosign her ward’s contract with 20th Century-Fox.

She took up her pen and did so. The two women wept.

“I told you, honey!” cried Aunt Grace again and again, “I said you were going to be a movie star! I told you!”

“It’ll be different now for all of us,” promised Norma Jeane. Soon she’d buy Aunt Grace a new house, she declared, and hire her a fulltime maid.

But first came the question of a name for the dazzling screen goddess-to-be whose job would be to make all these things possible. Mr. Lyon at the studio had suggested they find something better than Norma Jeane Dougherty. And immediately the new starlet and her aunt fell to discussing possibilities.

CHAPTER SIX

Five O’Clock Girls

The head of publicity for 20th Century-Fox, Harry Brand, called Jet Fore down to his office.

“Jet, this is Norma Jeane Dougherty,” said Brand. “I want you to take her around and introduce her to the department.”

Jet quickly sized up the new girl. His boss seemed to be singling her out for a little special treatment, and Jet was trying to gather some inkling as to why. Could she, for instance, be the girlfriend of anybody special?

“In those days,” he was later to recall, “we had probably fifty or sixty girls and guys who were under what they called stock contracts. They went to school on the lot every day. Drama school, singing school, dancing school, that kind of thing. And then the studio would use them as bit players and extras in pictures. I handled all these stock kids—wrote little two-or three-page biographies on them, took them places, tried to get them little bits of publicity. Norma Jeane had been signed to a stock contract, so she was now going to be sort of under my charge. She looked eighteen or nineteen. I thought she was a pretty girl all right, but we had plenty of other girls under contract who were just as pretty. Just as pretty.”

Surely, Jet presumed, she was too young to already be one of the Five O’Clock Girls. Such was the term used for a considerable troop of attractive and ambitious young employee-volunteers of both sexes known, at least at one of the studios in town, to offer unabashedly personalized services to producers and other executives in exchange for hopes of advancement in their careers. The name had been coined with an exquisite perversity to indicate not the hour at which they reported to offices all around the lot ready to perform in so questionable a way—that time actually being 4:00 p.m. sharp—but rather an hour later, when they could expect once again to be unceremoniously dumped out of the sanctums of power and back into the commonplace hallways and mean company streets.

As Jet Fore began showing the new player through Fox’s Publicity offices, he pinpointed a quality about her that just might have been enough to win, on its own, the extra push from the formidable Mr. Brand. Beneath her attractive figure and pretty face began to shine a disarmingly warm personality. “She was just an awfully nice girl—
friendly
,” Fore was later to remember. “I took her around and introduced her to everyone in our big department. There were the guys who planted our stories in the trade papers and on the wire services. There was our contact for the major magazines. We had one person who only planted Louella Parsons’ column and another who only planted Hedda Hopper’s column. There was a fashion coordinator, the fan magazine contact, radio planters, and so on—about fourteen offices taking up about a third of the administration building’s second floor. Norma Jeane charmed every one of these people just by being a down-to-earth kid who seemed to feel very lucky to be doing what she was doing.”

Not that, in the eyes of Jet Fore or of his colleagues, every refreshing kid necessarily had a glowing future on the silver screen. “As a matter of fact,” he would remember, “I thought she’d probably only be around for about a year or so.”

Inevitably too, some of the others in Jet’s department were cynical enough to calculate the odds of Norma Jeane Dougherty’s ending up, during that time, as one of the Five O’Clock Girls.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Broken Cobwebs

No word about the Five O’Clock Girls had ever been heard in the house on Nebraska Street. Yet there existed among Norma Jeane’s closest family more than one intuitive soul who keenly sensed that the girl’s new life, while admittedly thrilling, might also be fraught with perils. Consequently certain letters had passed back and forth across the country, and these, though they contained no explicit mention of the problem, had the effect of bringing Berniece Miracle to Burbank Metropolitan Airport one or two days later out of the bright summer sky.

The cleverly turned out twenty-seven-year-old, emerging with her small daughter at the top of her plane’s passenger ramp, had urgent preoccupations all her own. She peered anxiously across the wind-swept tarmac at the faces of those watching the flight’s arrival from Nashville, and immediately spotted that of Norma Jeane. The girl was waving one hand wildly—as Berniece was to write many years later in a meticulous recounting of the scenes of her trip—and with the other was holding strands of very blonde hair away from her eyes in the whipping wind. The two half sisters had already met once before, and their rapport on that occasion had been instant and lasting.

There was one circumstance about this particular meeting that overrode every other consideration for both sisters and made this day virtually epochal for Berniece. A technically even closer relative was expected to be waiting there with Norma Jeane. This was no less a person than Berniece’s own mother,
their
mother, Gladys Baker—a woman of whom Berniece had practically no memory at all. Now the moment had come for her to put an end to years of tug-of-war between the two poles of curiosity and dread, to take her six-year-old child Mona Rae by the hand, to resolutely step down the ramp, and to meet at last the woman from whom she’d been “stolen” when she was three years old.

The nervous young mother had progressed with her child half the distance across the tarmac when she began to discern the others who were there with Norma Jeane. She recognized dear Aunt Grace bobbing on tiptoes trying to spot Berniece amidst the arriving passengers. Close to Aunt Grace stood another person clearly not Berniece’s mother—a large woman with white hair who could only be the legendary Aunt Ana Lower. Ana in turn had one arm wrapped around the shoulders of a petite woman in her midforties who remained motionless and unsmiling while the rest of them all waved and beamed. This woman’s hands were clasped downward in front of her body with both arms held rigidly straight. Her eyes at that moment appeared closed into slits against the wind and glare of the airfield. It seemed possible she was praying. Yet even constrained in so bizarre an attitude and at twenty or twenty-five paces away, there was a lovely symmetry to be traced in this woman’s delicate features.

A sense of recognition flooded over Berniece Miracle. Here in life was the identical stamp of mysterious beauty which had comprised Berniece’s only knowledge of her mother while growing up. Her father Jasper Baker—after having snatched the infant Berniece away from his ex-wife and having forbidden the woman even to be spoken of in his home—had somehow thought it proper to give his child at least a picture of her lost parent. Berniece had kept it—a small but exquisitely beautiful framed photograph—on her dresser top all through high school. Upon it she’d lavished the nimbus of her adolescent yearnings and around it built up a ponderous store of unanswered questions. What she knew factually of the maternal half of her parentage had seemed to her so pitifully insubstantial that the whole of her ancestral memory on that side of the family came to be represented in her mind by the image of a few torn cobwebs.

Norma Jeane broke away from her three companions, ran forward to embrace Berniece, and then bent down to hug Mona Rae.

“Aunt Norma Jeane, your hair is
blonde
now!” blurted out the child, correctly remembering that two years earlier, the two sisters’ hair had been of an identical chestnut brown—richly highlighted with reds and ambers to be sure, but nowhere in shades so strikingly golden as this.

Norma Jeane acknowledged Mona Rae’s remark by a warm flash of her eyes, but right now she had thoughts only for speeding her sister and her niece over to where the others stood. “Well, Mother, here is Berniece,” announced Norma Jeane. “And this is Mona Rae.”

Suddenly Berniece discovered herself to be smiling joyously. She squeezed her estranged mother’s shoulders tightly while resting a cheek against her graying curls, causing the small woman finally to stir and place her arms—which till then had hung at her sides in a manner eerily like the broken cobwebs of Berniece’s earlier fantasy—limply around her daughter’s waist for a few seconds before bending down to give her newfound granddaughter a languid hug followed by several listless pats on the back.

Berniece’s eyes gravitated toward those of Aunt Ana, the one whose letters of invitation it had been which provided the needed catalyst for Berniece to make this trip. The wise old woman, in waiting her turn to be introduced to Berniece, had not missed an uneasy expression fleeting across the newcomer’s face during her embrace with Gladys. In response to it, Ana silently lifted one index finger skyward while lowering her broad, square forehead in a serene nod to give ample assurance, as the Christian Science practitioner she was, that Heaven was there to meet every felt need.

Finishing their introductions, the five women and the child then all turned, linked arms, and headed into the wind toward the baggage claim area. Meanwhile, it took little effort for Berniece to recover her hopeful smile, so likely did it seem that the tattered filaments of their shared family past were about to be transformed into something whole and lasting according to her fondest desires.