Casting Norma Jeane (6 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Celluloid Kingdom

The sisters lunched that day at the studio’s Café de Paris. Norma Jeane then hurried off to a class, and the commissary quickly emptied of its large midday crowd, leaving Berniece demurely studying her stenographic notebook like the conscientious secretary she was still pretending to be.

In reality she was keeping her eye on the entranceway, just in case some exciting movie star should still walk into the enormous room of tables where she sat alone. Cornel Wilde, it was said, was hard at work on one of the nearby sound stages, shooting scenes for a movie about horse racing to be called
The Homestretch
. Elsewhere Jeannie Crain was finishing up some last-minute work for her soon-to-be-released
Margie
. Such highly recognizable celebrities often preferred to wait for a quiet hour like this to stop by the commissary on coffee break.

Berniece, meanwhile, found her mind billowing over with images and afterthoughts of her morning which were still begging to be dealt with. Something about the totality of them mystified her. In this regard she was different from her sister, who—bless her heart—seemed to rush from one experience to another on impulse, never worrying herself very much about how any one thing happened to be connected to the next. And no doubt there was a certain wisdom in Norma Jeane’s ever open and flexible ways that Berniece might do well to study and adapt to her own uses. But for the moment she longed for a chance to drop back from the ceaseless rounds of outward phenomena, to cast her eyes deeply inward, and to find this morning’s place among the forms and shapes and patterns of the things she loved and treasured, which were always those things that could be counted upon to last.

Viewed on such a level, it soon occurred to Berniece Miracle that all this curious studio scene in front of her—taking place within a citadel so secretive and privileged that she had to counterfeit a look of waiting upon some particular boss’s beck and call—had come to her like a dream out of the small framed photograph on her girlhood dresser top in Pineville, Kentucky. It completely surrounded her now, this mysterious world which for years had lain quiescent behind the reluctant eyes of her beautiful unknown mother in the portrait. And which, yielding at last to Berniece’s importunate contemplation, had first manifested itself by means of a wrinkled letter arriving out of the blue from Gladys Baker herself, saying not only that she still lived but also that Berniece had a twelve-year-old half sister called Norma Jeane. Merely recollecting that day’s revelations and her own trembling reaction to them, even now over the distance of time in Fox’s Café de Paris, caused the morning’s images jostling for order in Berniece’s mind to marshal into a magical cavalcade with those of the past.

She remembered her first sight of Norma Jeane ever on earth, which was that of an eighteen-year-old girl stepping off a train on an impulsively taken trip back east to meet her long-lost older half sister. Photographs, thus far in her young life, hadn’t done her justice. Even her lovely wedding pictures with Jim Dougherty, taken a couple of years earlier, had failed to reveal anything in the plumply pretty Norma Jeane to rival the pellucid beauty of Gladys Monroe. But seen in person at the train station, how she’d stood out from all the other passengers on the platform! In part, yes, this had been due to a certain adventuresome, lithe, and elastic way she had of carrying herself in a cobalt-blue suit that nearly matched her eyes. Even more it had to do with the distinctive smile emanating from beneath the heart-shaped brim of her hat—a smile on first glance rather unassuming than otherwise, yet on second glance charged with a quality that was decisively to captivate Berniece. Which was no external attribute at all, but a sweetness radiating from
within
the girl, so subtle and penetrating as to seem not quite of this world. It was a kind of freshness that she positively exuded, like that of a rose petal unfolding in the morning dew. Little Mona Rae had sensed this characteristic no less quickly than Berniece and moreover had instinctively trusted Norma Jeane because of it. “She’s pretty and sweet and soft,” the child had articulated in immediate reaction to her aunt, “and she smells good, and I feel good when she hugs me.”

Quite amazingly since then—reflected Berniece at her table in Fox’s Café de Paris—no scintilla of this precious and exciting attribute had been obscured by the two years recently spent by Norma Jeane at so artificial-sounding an occupation as modeling. Quite the reverse: Based on her present visit to Los Angeles, Berniece was tempted to conclude that in those two years, everything else about Norma Jeane had changed and only this one thing had stayed the same!

Sometimes at Aunt Ana’s, the visitor would watch in fascination while her newly golden-haired sister sat surrounded by a palette of tiny glass pots with black screw tops, masterfully wielding a lipstick brush to individually work scores of variously-hued globules of pigment onto the fine-grained and marvelously flexible fabric that was her complexion. Drawing a feathery line down each temple where her eyebrow hairs were too scarce to show. Defining the outer border of her mouth in deep maroon and then blending inward with ever-lighter shades of red to give her lips an illusion of glowing fullness. Darkening a colorless mole on her left cheek into a dramatic beauty spot—the delightful ghost of that dashing scar once decorating the left cheek of their grandfather Otis Monroe. And most fittingly was this so, seeing that two years at modeling had made Norma Jeane precisely what their grandfather had been before her, truly an artist with colors. She was now a highly trained professional capable of viewing herself as the sum of many flawed parts and pieces, each of which with relentless perfectionism she had to shape and alter and streamline in order for that freshness or sweetness innate within herself to outwardly shine.

Yet nothing in all these preparations of Norma Jeane’s quite accounted for the results that Berniece had witnessed this morning at 20th Century-Fox.

After their meeting with the charming Ben Lyon—and using goodness only knows what wiles—Norma Jeane had managed to book a private viewing of her screen test for her sister. Through narrow, stucco-walled outdoor passages, the two had found their way to a tiny theater normally reserved for the highest inner circles of movie production. Inside it they’d taken their places amidst several short rows of vacant seats. A weighty door to the booth at the back of the room had closed to block off the clattering hum of a massive film projector. The lights had dimmed. And noiselessly up on the big white screen had flashed the fleeting sequence of silent images which had gained for Norma Jeane her little toehold inside the celluloid kingdom.

Gazing in keen anticipation up at the screen, Berniece had seen a door open. And there in vivid color had stood Norma Jeane, encased in a tight-fitting evening gown and looking somehow sleeker and more idealized than she ever had in life, even in full makeup. The initial sight of her had struck Berniece, as the girl’s own sister, with such unfamiliarity that involuntarily she’d taken in a breath. What in the world did this glossy siren have to do with the warmhearted, often plain-looking girl at home who chattered and giggled with Berniece at bedtime, her head covered in pin curls and encircled by a hairnet?

But as an avid moviegoer, Berniece had, in only seconds, become intrigued. Obviously the test role assigned to Norma Jeane by Ben Lyon was that of a young and beautiful temptress. As to what sort of place this character had entered and what it was that she seemed on the point of doing there, Berniece’s curiosity hadn’t yet been satisfied when the real Norma Jeane sitting next to her in the little theater had spoken up with some observation or other about her gown or makeup in the test. This one remark alone wouldn’t have distracted Berniece, but Norma Jeane had then gone on to scrutinize aloud each and every move and expression made by her onscreen persona who now successively crossed the room, sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette, put it back out again, stood up and approached the camera, turned, and stepped over to a window to look out. Scarcely a minute had elapsed before the images had stopped again. When the lights had come back on, Berniece had sat slightly stunned. From a cloud of reactions buzzing about in her head, she’d endeavored to separate those belonging to Norma Jeane’s analytical commentary from her own spontaneous impressions, the first of which had been of a swift pastiche of very bright pretty colors, of marvelously rich tonalities everywhere strikingly present both in the
Shocking Miss Pilgrim
set used as a background for the test and, above all, in Norma Jeane’s eyes and lips and skin.

The short piece of film hadn’t stopped working its effects on the wondering visitor to 20th Century-Fox when—into the Café de Paris strolled Cornel Wilde!

Instantly every pretense of Berniece’s as a blasé secretary dropped away, and she simply stared at the Olympic-level ex-athlete with the curly black hair and soulfully dark piercing eyes. On movie screens back in Kentucky and all across the nation, Cornel Wilde this year had been proving himself a worthy successor to Errol Flynn in the role of the son of Robin Hood in
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest
. Berniece had formed a compelling impression of him which now tallied wonderfully with the person moving and breathing a few steps away from her—or rather, it tallied in every respect except one. The actor, while perfect in all the proportions of his handsome face and athletic form, stood approximately a foot shorter than she’d expected! Berniece couldn’t help feeling a sharp sense of letdown. Of course a man’s height wasn’t something he could control, but neither did Berniece feel totally at fault that in watching this player’s high-energy exploits on the screen, some part of herself had gotten personally invested in another, different Cornel Wilde—one who stood a foot taller than this man now in front of her. No wonder the movie companies built their production studios in the tightly sequestered way they did, if secretly behind the high walls and iron gates, all they were manufacturing was illusion!

That was the thing. Arguably Norma Jeane’s screen test was no different. The apparition it showcased stood a full foot taller—in a manner of speaking—than did Berniece’s real sister, even at her most groomed and glamorous. Such was the celluloid kingdom’s uncanny triumph that Norma Jeane now far surpassed the beautiful woman in the small framed photograph on Berniece’s girlhood dresser top. She’d become, within the otherworldly dimensions of a movie screen, suddenly luminous. Suddenly gorgeous. All her actions and even the objects surrounding her now vibrated with exciting life.

“The screen test,” Berniece was to write many years later in her detailed recollection of that morning at Twentieth Century-Fox, “stayed in my mind for days.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Smoke in the Wind

At sunset on the evening of one of those same days, Jim Dougherty stood alone on the deck of a freighter coursing across the middle of the wide blue Pacific. His work shift was finished. Now he stood with his arms propped up on the rail, looking out over the huge ocean. It was time to face facts about Norma Jeane.

Such a rarity anymore as a letter from her—who’d once written to him gushingly every single day—had reached him at one of the ports recently. In about as few words as it would have taken her to tell him to pick up some groceries, she was informing him that their beloved dog Muggsie was dead. She’d been too consumed by her new career to take care of the poor animal and had left it to languish on Jim’s mom’s back porch, where no one else had paid much attention to it either. Finally the once-pampered creature had simply stopped eating and died.

The letter’s curt tone, reflected upon now at ship’s side in the dying rays of the sun, gave Jim all the sign and portent he needed to read his own future with regard to Norma Jeane. It was for this moment that he’d refused to sign the divorce papers during his last shore leave. Anyone then would have said he was only refusing out of frustration and spite—both of which he’d admittedly felt more than once during the afternoon they’d spent driving around the Valley revisiting their old haunts—because every time their conversation had begun to look encouraging, she’d turn it back round to, “But please, Jimmie, sign the papers.” What his stratagem of not doing so had gained him, however, was the time he needed to see things clearly, the way he was seeing them now.

It was over. For the past couple of months he’d only been clutching at straws, the most recent of these straws being Norma Jeane’s proposal that the two of them “stay close.” That was a hope in vain, Jim now saw, since it was clear that her sudden fever to make it big in Hollywood wasn’t just some bad idea put in her head by this modeling-agency woman Miss Snively as Jim had been supposing all along. It was coming straight out of Norma Jeane herself, who wanted it frantically enough to abandon poor Muggsie—not to mention their marriage—on account of it. Nor was there any hope left that these farfetched ambitions of hers might pass away with the changing winds of her many other moods. Too much time had elapsed for that now. Ill-advised though such dreams and desires notoriously were, she was actually determined to pursue them. And if there was one thing you had to say about Norma Jeane, it was that when her mind was made up about any course of action, she’d follow it through to the bitterest end.

So then, what had the whole wondrous and magical scene been four years earlier? When like a dream she’d descended the spiral staircase at the Howells’ house and promised to become his wife forever. Had it all just been some big performance on her part? Jim Dougherty’s keen recollection of that June evening convinced him otherwise. To be sure, there’d been an audience present, what with two dozen and more friends and relatives gathered in that borrowed home’s central hall to witness the ceremony. And no doubt every single one of the guests had gotten caught up in the pristine glow cast by Norma Jeane, who at sixteen had looked like an angel in her pure white gown of embroidered lace. But with every “hesitation step” she’d taken down to the place where he stood, her shy smile had been fixed on Jim and on Jim alone. Well, then could it have been a performance meant for him and for him alone? To know differently, Jim had only to remember how it had felt once their eyes had finally left each other’s and they’d both turned to face Reverend Lingenfelder. The closing notes of the wedding march played by Aunt Ana on the piano had signaled for everyone to sit down again and hear the exchanging of the vows. And as if it were happening right at this moment, Jim could still feel the presence of Norma Jeane as she had stood next to him, could still smell the very fragrance of her while they repeated those promises. How soft and sweet her voice had sounded to him as she spoke! And a little scared, for truth be told, he’d felt her whole body trembling right up to the moment when Reverend Lingenfelder had pronounced his words over them and they’d turned to look at each other again. It was right then, unexpectedly, that Norma Jeane’s bright face—bordered by soft ringlets of glossy brown hair tumbling down from beneath her veil of white lace—had made one of those iconic pictures never to be erased from his mind for as long as he lived. She’d smiled up at him, and something boundless had entered into her wide blue eyes. There’d been a whole world of sweet intimations shining in that look, but above all it had said to him, “I trust you,” causing Jim to stand there dazzled in his rented white tuxedo, feeling as though he’d just taken part in a miracle. Norma Jeane had entrusted him with her heart for all the rest of their lives. She, in whose beautiful eyes he’d sometimes felt he might drown, had now become his wife in full majesty of the law and in the full sight of both God and man!

No, this had been no performance on Norma Jeane’s part. Of that Jim Dougherty was positive as he gazed over his freighter’s rail at the broad blue sea. And more proof of it was in how happily they’d lived together afterward. Nothing beyond the predictable things, a few trivialities, had ever gone amiss between them. At least not until much later, after he’d shipped out to sea, when she’d stumbled upon this accursed obsession of hers with modeling. Only since then, only in the past year and a half had there taken place a change in her which Jim found to be nothing short of appalling. For never in the world would the modest, the often even terribly proper girl he’d married in 1942 have made the suggestion that Norma Jeane had made on the recent afternoon they’d spent driving around the Valley. She’d wanted the two of them go on living together just as before—but, in so many words,
without
being man and wife. Where on earth could she even have picked up such a notion, if not from Miss Emmeline Snively or from some other person involved with this Blue Book Modeling Agency?

No, it was over.

In the time Jim had stood at the ship’s rail thinking about it, the red sun had hurried below the horizon. And for as long as the blue ocean continued to shimmer in its afterglow, he practiced setting his face away from what he now realized he’d been living on for too long—all the aching memories of those two, perhaps three years of his young life filled with a profound bliss, but a bliss so illusory as to prove capable of then disappearing as fast as smoke does in the wind.

“Finally, as it got darker,” Jim Dougherty was later to write, “I felt myself sigh deeply, and I pushed myself away from the railing. That tiny gesture was an oddly freeing movement for me. I remember it so clearly. I suddenly accepted that there was no place for me in Norma Jeane’s future. None in the least. She was perhaps willing to occasionally toss me some crumbs of affection, but I was not at all willing to settle for that. It was over. No more crumbs. No more straws. No more smoke. I went below.”