Casting Norma Jeane (9 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

Parade of the Stars

Under the magic of night several hours later, the studio’s float pulled onto a Hollywood Boulevard illuminated like fairyland for the opening of the Christmas shopping season.

“This is the end of Norma Jeane,” would write Marilyn years afterward of this epochal moment in her life. For there was only one all-important community left in which she’d had no choice but to allow the old name still to cling to her, and that had been at the studio. But tonight it was the powers that be of no less prestigious an entity than 20th Century-Fox Pictures itself who were sending word out to the entire world in the form of a glittering sign which somebody in the art department had hastily hand-painted and jauntily affixed next to the seat now holding the starlet aloft in one of America’s most dazzling parades. Tonight it was official. She was Marilyn Monroe.

Spectators by the thousands upon thousands lined the route of Hollywood’s Parade of the Stars. Her stomach pounded. Her head felt dizzy. Her voice completely left her. Such was the reaction she’d always experienced when faced with an audience—
any
audience, even if only that of her own little family poised around a large restaurant table, directing smiles at her that were meant to be encouraging but which seemed edged with an uneasy formality and expectation. Whereas here was an audience stretching visibly for more than a mile in front of her, a veritable sea of faces on both sides of the boulevard, punctuated by myriads of glistening eyes that turned toward her in waves out of the shadows as Fox’s float proceeded from one shining Hollywood landmark to the next. And yet the first of the grand movie palaces which they passed, the magnificent Pantages, had barely disappeared behind them as the gigantic old Warner Brothers Theater rolled into view two blocks further down, when she perceived that these countless eyes belonged not to strangers at all but to a warm presence already quite familiar to her from her daydreams. Far from threatening, they comforted her. They were a million anonymous human cameras clicking away contentedly in the semidarkness. And Marilyn, having recently put in two years as a photographer’s model, could say unequivocally there was no place in the world she’d rather be than in front of cameras.

So lulled, somewhere in the twenty-year-old starlet’s mind, a door opened through which she easily glided to find herself alone with the secret child of her past.

Who in all this audience guessed how she’d come to this moment only through a terrible year spent just one short block away from this spot—in a school building unseen behind the stores now passing her on the left-hand side? Not that her little second-grade classroom at the Selma Street School had been in itself so terrible, since it had given her some of the few kindly hours of human anchoring she’d managed to know that entire year. Nor could she ever forget that it was during that same year’s sojourn in Hollywood that certain facts had been made known to her—that certain revelations had been passed down to her as it were, one through her mother Gladys and the other through her Aunt Grace—which she still treasured as heirlooms beyond any price. No, it was the saving peculiarity of the memories slipping so readily into place in her mind tonight that it had taken her twelve years of hindsight to assemble them in their true and terrible light.

Luckily shielding the seven-year-old Norma Jeane from the brunt of such reflections had been the fabulous refuge coming up next along that same left-hand side of the boulevard. From her perch aboard the Fox float, Marilyn could glimpse the Egyptian Theater’s colorfully muraled walls at the far end of its long, jungle-like forecourt. How many Saturday afternoons had she spent under the splendid sunburst ceiling inside, sitting all alone at the exact center of the very front row? So totally would every image up on the screen seize her attention that she’d sit here through the same movie two and three times over. Until finally, stabbed by a reawakening consciousness of a parallel reality awaiting her elsewhere, she’d be forced to emerge from that wonderful temple of the imagination, sometimes only after dark.

And just here too along Hollywood Boulevard, but on the opposite side of Fox’s float in the second story over the sidewalk, rose the palazzo windows of a place she’d only heard talked about at the age of seven, but which today she recognized as virtually the soil out of which Norma Jeane had sprung—the once-jumping Montmartre Café. It had been, during her mother Gladys’ and her Aunt Grace’s heyday, the
in
spot for wild nights on the town. Here, more than once no doubt, the two flirtatious film cutters had dined and danced and sought to rub elbows with the stars. How improbable was it then for Marilyn to speculate as to whether her own first alighting onto the human scene might not have been signaled here by a proverbial twinkle in Stanley Gifford’s eye?

For that was the name of the gentleman who still haunted her in a thousand daydreams. She’d known him principally by means of an enormously appealing photograph which that year Gladys had kept enshrined on Norma Jeane’s bedroom wall. To reach the hallowed spot where it had hung, her frequent way home from school had lain via a path that diverged from tonight’s parade route at the large and busy intersection coming up next just ahead. Tonight Marilyn’s view in the direction little Norma Jeane had taken home was going to be obscured by choking crowds, by wintertime’s darkness overhead, and by an unprecedented glare of holiday lights from the Boulevard. But amidst the everyday bustle at Highland Avenue’s crossing, the child would turn right and trudge uphill a short curving distance to tiny Arbol Street at the foot of Cahuenga Pass. The house they’d once owned there was still standing—Marilyn had just been back to see it in the past month or two with Berniece and Aunt Grace—a pretty white place with a Greek portico front and a white picket fence surrounding the yard.

Photographically, C. Stanley Gifford’s warm presence suffusing that all-important house on Arbol Street had been rather like what emanated now from the sea of faces turning to regard Marilyn as her float entered the packed intersection of Hollywood and Highland. Moreover, like each of the persons making up tonight’s crowds, Gifford had been without any name to Norma Jeane at that early stage of her awareness. Nonetheless, his bright mysterious eyes, ironical yet hugely reassuring under the tipped brim of his fedora, had seemed to keep continual watch over her from his framed picture high on the wall. She’d always clearly understood that he was her father. That unspeakably precious fact had been among the few such treasures Gladys Baker had ever managed to confide to Norma Jeane.

Immediately now on the starlet’s right-hand side, three more places whirled past in quick succession to tantalize her with her last remembered glimpses of the mother who’d shared with her that confidence, of the mother who later might have shared with her incalculably more had everything not changed and had Gladys not become instead a light extinguished, a sparkling presence permanently crushed out. This world-changing loss had all been accomplished within a single year, right here before her eyes as a small child. Yet such was the durability of hope that only in the past couple of months had she finally accepted that loss as a fully grown woman. With the result that tonight she passed these places making only one fervent prayer—that just because Hollywood and Highland had been the crossroads of Norma Jeane’s world for one year did not mean it had to be the crossroads of Marilyn Monroe’s mind forever—that by putting on her new name she was now putting off all the scars of that past.

She could clearly recall their strolling round this corner during the lightsome summer of 1933, past the fancy entrance driveway to the first and mightiest of the three addresses, the massive old Hollywood Hotel. Gladys had still been talkative then—vibrantly and cleverly so, especially when animated by the presence of Aunt Grace, who most often came along on their Sunday evening walks to C.C. Brown’s for ice cream. On such evenings the two women had chattered much of the fabled hotel whose mission-style gables and churrigueresque bell towers had overlooked the surrounding lemon groves and barley fields as long ago as the very year when Gladys’ own parents, the ill-starred Otis and Della Monroe, had first brought Gladys as a mere infant to southern California. However, it was the hostelry’s later and more citified decades that had most fascinated Gladys and Grace. Their heads were filled with stories about the many idols of the silent screen who’d wined and partied and honeymooned in the hotel well into the days and nights of the two women’s own vivid recollection as workers and players themselves on the frenzied Hollywood scene.

Then, of course, right next door to the Hollywood Hotel was to rise the most famous theater in the world, the towering Grauman’s Chinese, which happened to have been a-building just while Gladys Baker had been pregnant with Norma Jeane and still preoccupied with the grief of Stanley Gifford’s choosing not to marry her. But by the time Norma Jeane herself came to know these places—seven years after that in 1933—the recovered Gladys had been able to laugh quite merrily as their little company of three had enjoyed sundaes and floats at the storied ice cream parlor located yet one further door down Hollywood Boulevard. Indeed good fortune, for the moment, had seemed to be smiling on them. Both Gladys and Grace, despite the horrendously hard times sweeping across America, were holding good jobs in a glamorous industry town that so far appeared to have outwitted the Great Depression. Gladys, in fact, was successfully juggling jobs at two studios in order keep up payments on her steeply mortgaged new home. The observant little Norma Jeane, it was true, hadn’t failed to notice that even on their most buoyant Sunday outings, her mother never embraced her nor even smiled at her in the solicitous, heartwarming way the girl had often seen other mothers do with their children. But sometimes, sitting in the pleasant wooden booths of C.C. Brown’s, Norma Jeane had been allowed to rest her head against the shoulder of the still young, delicately beautiful, red-haired Gladys while dreaming to the lilting cadence of the ladies’ rapid voices. And this at the time had felt like enough.

It must have been just weeks after those memories, around the start of Norma Jeane’s school year that fall, that the terrible thing had first begun coming over her mother. In truth, lined up and awaiting turns to strike the poor woman out of a clear blue sky had been a row of thunderbolts, an array of misfortunes so exquisitely timed as if meant purposely to destroy her, this unholy assault lasting four or five months during which time not even Aunt Grace had fully comprehended what manner of war her friend was waging. Norma Jeane of course had understood far less, seeing only its very end result.

That result, those four or five months later, had come shortly after Christmas. The child had been sitting in the kitchen at her breakfast with an English couple who’d been sharing the house on Arbol Street, when Gladys had suddenly begun shrieking from the living room couch that someone was coming down the stairs to kill her. The couple had restrained Norma Jeane from running out to her mother. What had come next was the most frightful noise the child had ever heard—unforgettable crashing and thuds that, together with Gladys’ screaming and laughter, had kept up so long and so violently that the Englishman had finally called for the police. A short while later, an ambulance had come to take Gladys away.

Little noted at the time—little noted, that is, by anyone out loud—was that Gladys’ fears of bodily harm hadn’t been totally unfounded. Union strikes plaguing movieland during several previous months had engulfed her film-cutting jobs for a long enough time to threaten Gladys literally with the loss of her home. The hapless young mother, facing in this the collapse of a life’s plan which she deemed almost akin to sacred, had recently been caught by a photographer in the act of climbing over a fence to evade the picket lines and get back to her work at RKO. The result had been her picture in the newspaper’s city pages, and her identity potentially made as clear as day to union goons not known for dealing tenderly with strikebreaking members.

But during those same intervening months and equally unbeknownst to Norma Jeane, other thunderbolts too had helped unhinge her mother’s mind. One of them traced to a grandfather back in Missouri, namely Della Monroe’s kind and sensitive father Tilford Hogan, who in the spring of that worst and deepest year of the Great Depression had succumbed to despair at the loss of his health and of his farm and had thrown a rope over a high rafter in the barn and hung himself. This was a shock Gladys might well have worked her way through in safety if only the news of it hadn’t been delayed in reaching her until the fall—for by then other news had reached her too which had struck a thousand times closer to her heart. Her dear and firstborn child, her only son Jackie, who had been stolen from her ten years before along with little Berniece and carried off by their father to Kentucky—that boy who’d secretly stood centermost in her dreams for the house on Arbol Street—was suddenly revealed to be lost to Gladys forever, having perished half a continent away in extreme agony from a kidney infection at the age of fifteen.

For as long a time as it was a question of her son Jackie’s death and Jackie’s alone, Gladys Baker had handled her situation with remarkable self-containment. Many weeks had passed after her getting word the boy was gone during which she’d allowed nothing in her outward life to change. With
Flying Down to Rio
in front of the cameras at RKO and
It Happened One Night
just swinging into production at Columbia in the fall of 1933, she’d continued to hold down her positions at both studios, throwing herself upon the sympathies of no one and keeping always to the same aloof distance from acquaintances and co-workers that they’d long taken to be a sovereign mark of her subtly attractive persona. In view of her recent loss, they could only judge her to be a tower of strength.