Her former lover and lifelong friend remembers America’s sex goddess as a beautiful, doomed teenager.
Norma Jean The Real Marilyn Monroe
I spotted her instantly from my vantage point atop the Lido Club’s high diving board. She stood among a line of beautiful young women just outside the fence around the club’s swimming pool.
She was impossible to miss, even in that group of typically stunning young women, the kind of beauties that flocked by the battalion to Hollywood in that golden summer of 1943. As lifeguard at the pool — part of Hollywood’s then-most famous hotel, the Ambassador — one of the job’s fringe benefits was girl watching.
For me, 19 years old at the time, no better benefit existed than the seemingly endless groups of young beauties who were ushered in and out of the pool area to model the latest fashion swimsuits.
But one woman I had spotted that morning struck me, even from my lofty vantage point. I dove into the pool and swam to the other end. Emerging, I began to dry myself while staring at one of the most extraordinary creatures I had ever seen.
She stood among a group of 20 young models, all dressed in what was then a daring new swimsuit style — a French two piece model, which left exposed a section of midriff. The young woman I had noticed was wearing a blue version of the swimsuit. She was stunning: With remarkably firm, large breasts and an hourglass shape, she looked as though the swimsuit had been expressly designed for her.
Aside from her breathtaking figure, there seemed nothing else that distinguished her physically. She had light, mousy brown hair down to her shoulders; very curly, it looked somewhat frizzy. Her face, while pretty enough, was not especially beautiful. In fact, many of the other young women that morning waiting their turn to model had more striking faces.
And yet, there was something about this woman, something so intriguing and vibrant, that I had to meet her right away. That would not be too difficult, for I already had entree in the person of a lady with the unlikely name of Miss Emmeline Snively. Miss Snively, who ran the Blue Book Modelling Agency, had her headquarters at the hotel. She used the Lido Club’s pool and a golf course adjacent to the hotel as backdrops for the photographers who shot fashion layouts using her models.
As a Lido employee, I stopped in every morning to say hello to Miss Snively, a brisk, no-nonsense businesswoman. My interest, of course, was not Miss Snively; actually, I established friendly relations for the sole purpose of meeting some of the lovely models she was parading daily around the pool.
And there was one model in particular I was dying to meet that morning. I asked Miss Snively the model’s name, and while I was very much smitten with the young lady’s charms, apparently Miss Snively was not.
“She’s one of the new girls,” she said, her voice trailing off as she tried to remember the new model’s name. She could not, but added, “It’s her first modeling job; she’s quite nervous. Why don’t you wait until they’re finished taking pictures, then go over and introduce yourself?”
So I waited as the photographer posed the models in those typical 1940s-era poses, all innocent sex and dramatic backdrops. It gave me the opportunity to study the model whose name Miss Snively could not remember. I was struck by a number of interesting aspects of this shapely woman — among them a glorious rear end. For the life of me, I could not understand why Miss Snively was not as awestruck by this woman as I was.
Perhaps it was because the woman positively radiated sex. Even while she was just standing around, sex was written all over her; she was, to my mind, sex personified. Additionally, the woman had a number of peculiar mannerisms. She constantly licked her lips while performing eye-catching gyrations with her mouth. The mouth itself seemed to be very tight, and she would throw her lips forward and backward, uncertain of herself when she was asked to smile.
After the modeling session was finished, I walked over to the woman and introduced myself. “Hi,” she replied in a high-pitched, breathless voice. “I’m Norma Jean Dougherty.”
I wish I could say that the earth heaved and the heavens parted with thunder at the moment of this meeting with Norma Jean Baker Dougherty, later Marilyn Monroe. But in fact very nearly nothing happened. Norma Jean did not seem very interested in me at all, although I noticed that she did not walk away. Quickly, I imparted as much biographical information as I could over the next minute, hoping to catch her interest.
Actually, it didn’t take long to sum up the 19 years of my life to that point. Born in Ohio, I had emigrated to Los Angeles with my family a few years before. Invalided out of the Navy after recovering from wounds in a gun mount explosion, I had become hooked on Hollywood. Determined to be an actor, I was studying acting and working in small plays, hoping for the proverbial big break that would get me a studio contract. Meanwhile, to support myself, I was working as a lifeguard at the Lido Club.
The word “actor” suddenly piqued her interest. “Oh,” she said in that little-girl voice that later became one of her best-known trademarks, “that’s a coincidence. My greatest ambition is to become an actress.” She went on to explain that she was modeling to earn enough money to pay room and board at the home of her Aunt Grace — a relative with whom she was staying — and hoped, somehow, to begin an acting career. As if anticipating my next question, she mentioned that she was separated from her husband, James Dougherty, a Navy seaman.
So far, so good, I thought, but her mild interest in me suddenly and dramatically expanded when I mentioned casually that I was the nephew of entertainer Ted Lewis. It was almost as if I had hit her with an electrical shock. Now she was the picture of devoted attention to my every word, while at the same time pressing me for details about Lewis. Very little needed to be explained about my uncle. Called “Mr. Entertainment,” he was the leading entertainer of the day, headliner at every posh nightclub in the country. Known for his famous line, “Is everybody happy?” he was the Milton Berle of his era. His show business connections made him one of the most important power brokers in the industry. More importantly in the context of this story, he was also well-connected in the movie industry, close friends with several studio moguls.
“Who represents him?” Norma Jean asked, a question that seemed odd only in retrospect, for there were not many models in those days who wondered what agent represented a particular entertainer.
But I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time. Frankly, I was dazzled by this woman, and with a youthful libido dominated by thoughts that I must have her, I was not paying too much attention to the specifics of what Norma Jean was saying. In the process, I failed to notice a number of clues which should have told me that I had encountered not a naive young model — she was only 17 years old at the time — but a young woman of a far more interesting background than she had let on.
I did not notice, for example, that when I asked her for a date, she betrayed a knowledge of Hollywood night spots that seemed remarkably sophisticated for a teenage model supposedly scraping by on a few meager modeling fees while living with her aunt.
I told her I would pick her up at her aunt’s house. “No,” she said, “it’s best that we meet somewhere.” I suggested The Haig, a local night spot just across the street from the Ambassador Hotel. She seemed to know the place, and went on to talk knowledgeably about the bar in the Windsor Hotel, the Gaylord Hotel, and the bar at the Chaptman Park Hotel. She also mentioned the Ambassador Hotel bar.
In my smitten state, I did not bother to ask how she had come to know all these places so well. It was not until some years later when she admitted to me one of the terrible secrets from her past (there would be many others, as it turned out): In fact, she said, she had worked during that period as a part-time prostitute. It was not an episode she was proud of, but she defended the selling of herself as a vital necessity. Simply put, she was desperate for money. Uneducated, with few marketable skills, she often did not have enough money to buy even makeup. The few modeling fees she earned did not cover the cost of food. (She often skipped meals to make the money stretch further.)
She had, I later discovered, a regular routine in those days. Desperately lonely she hung out at night in bars and nightclubs all over Hollywood. Picked up by men, she would go to bed with them, following which they would pay her money.
While she claimed at first that she had resorted to prostitution out of financial desperation, I realized, much later, that there was something more at work. She suddenly revealed it one night when discussing those episodes in her life. “You know,” she said, “all I have to do is take my dress off. Then they just stare at me and tell me how beautiful I am. Oh, they say how beautiful over and over again.” Of course, that was it: Norma Jean craved affection and attention, and she discovered that the easiest way to do it was simply to reveal to the world the one thing she thought separated her from every other woman: her incredibly voluptuous body. All she had to do was to show that body, and she received all the attention and admiration she so desperately craved. (She also recounted to me a recurrent dream she had: walking naked into a crowded church, and feeling no shame as everyone stares at her.)
But none of this even crossed my mind that first night I took her out. On my meager income of $80 a week, the best I could do was a date at The Haig. I listened, with total adoration, as she nearly squealed with delight in discovering that we were both Geminis. She put great faith in astrology, and was especially fascinated by the so-called “double personalities” all Geminis are supposed to have. Perhaps, but she could have been talking about nuclear physics, for all I cared; I just loved to hear her talk.
We had a few more dates, and as I began to know her, I discovered a personality that was very difficult to define. My impression was of a naive young woman with not much experience who had delusions of being an actress. Smitten as I was, I was still sober enough to conclude that she had no hope of ever being one. I didn’t especially care, nor was I particularly interested when she recited what later became the familiar details of her horrifying childhood: a mother who went insane, a succession of foster homes, a stay in an orphanage, and finally, an arranged marriage to a next door neighbor.
I also realized that she was intellectually very shallow. When I would ask her a question to which she did not know the answer, she would change the subject. She seemed to have a dread of being misinformed, or perceived as stupid, so she tended to agree with just about any opinion. Not that I cared, really; the fact is that I was totally captivated and was intent on having her. It was a fever, actually, and I didn’t even bother to think about the possible consequences of having sex with “jailbait.” The laws on such things were pretty strict, but I was so badly smitten, the thought of going to jail for 20 years on a statutory rape charge hardly entered my mind.
Several nights later, at her suggestion, we went to Chinatown. We began drinking Cuba Libres (rum and Coca Cola), and it was not long before we were fairly tanked up, as they say back in Ohio. We were also out of money, but Norma Jean acted as though we didn’t have a care in the world. She began talking about sex — “I think fucking is great” — and in my state, I did not stop to wonder if my perception of her as a naive and innocent young model might be wrong.
We walked along the street as a heavy rain began to fall. “Hey, you know something?” I told her. “We’re flat broke’”
She began to giggle. “Hell, I don’t care,” she said. “I’m having a ball. What would you like to do?”
“For the first time in your life,” I replied, “you’re going to be a lookout. Come with me, I’ll show you.” I led her down the street to a Chinese restaurant that had a large wishing well in front of it. In the center of the well was a large island with small Buddha statues. The figures had outstretched, cupped hands. The local custom was for people to throw coins toward the statues; if the hands caught the coins, then their wishes would come true. It was very rare for anyone’s coin to stay in the small hands, so the wishing well was loaded with coins. As the rain poured down, Norma Jean and I rooted around in the well, grabbing coins. With a few bucks’ worth, we bought some more Cuba Libres.
At last, feeling no pain, we headed back to her Aunt Grace’s house. But Norma Jean suddenly said, “Why don’t we go over where you work?” It was a hint of something I hardly dared believe might happen: She and I were on the same wavelength, and she wanted me as much as I wanted her. I cupped one of her breasts, and when she did not protest, I knew it was time.
Instead, I suggested that we go to West Lake Park, which contained a large lake surrounded by palm trees and weeping willows. In the rain, barely able to contain my excitement, we lay under a large weeping willow. Hardly very experienced myself, I began kissing her and feeling her body. Then she said, “Do you believe in fellatio?”
I was aware of what that word meant, and had hardly gotten over my surprise that she was a lot more experienced than I assumed when I discovered that she certainly knew a lot about fellatio. When she had finished, she said in that disarming little — girl voice, “Now you suck me.”
What followed seemed very nearly like paradise; I hardly noticed the rain and the steady downpour of water from the branches of the weeping willow. We were soaked, but in that mad passion under the tree, I knew only that I was madly in love with this woman. Not a girl — a woman, an insatiably passionate woman whose sexual appetite and range of desire made her far older than her years. She was, I discovered to my intense joy, a sexual animal who reveled in every possible aspect.
At last we left the park, looking like two drowned water rats. We didn’t care; in that power of young love, my universe had suddenly contracted to that little spot on earth.
“Do you want to go home to Aunt Grace?” I asked. Without hesitation, Norma Jean replied, “Is there any place we can go?”
My small living quarters in a local $8-a-week rooming house was out of the question — male boarders were forbidden to bring home female guests — so on a whim, I suggested the Lido Club. In an upstairs room, where I gave rubdowns to club members, I began to take a shower. Suddenly, the shower door opened and there stood Norma Jean, naked. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen in my life. She had stunning breasts, and as she stood there, just basking in the glow of my staring at her, she reminded me of a beautiful statue. “Do you like what you see?” she asked. “Will I pass the qualifications? Do you like it?”
And the statue was apparently insatiable. Despite all the earlier lovemaking, she demanded more. At one point, she bit my lip and sucked the blood. “I hope I’ve made you happy,” she said, staring deep into my eyes, “and I hope I always make you happy. Let’s go outside now and go for a swim.”
If she had asked me to walk across the Sahara at that point, I would have done it. We went downstairs, both of us nude. The pool area was deserted; rain was falling steadily. We entered the pool at the shallow end and slowly made our way to the deep end. There, she held onto the ladder with both arms behind her. As thunder and lightning rumbled and flashed overhead, she spread her legs and commanded, “Fuck me! Fuck me!”
There are heights that only 19-year-old men in good athletic condition can achieve. That was part of it, but the real spur was simple, unbridled passion, the kind that comes only once in a lifetime. On that night, I lost all control — even to the extent of ignoring the fact that here we were, in a swimming pool during an electrical storm. In my frenzied passion, it simply did not occur to me that we stood a good chance of being electrocuted by the first thunderbolt that hit the pool.
The only thing I was concentrating on was this amazing life force called Norma Jean Dougherty. “You know,” she said, her eyes like a wild woman’s, “every time the lightning strikes, it’s like an orgasm lighting up the sky, and every time the thunder booms, it’s like someone up there yelling and screaming in ecstasy.”
Sometime later, we left the pool. Back upstairs, we lay on a mattress on the floor. I stared at this gorgeous child-woman as she talked about her marriage.
“I was 16 when I married Jim [Dougherty],” she said. After a while, she suddenly admitted, “I’ve been promiscuous.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Only with men I like,” she replied. “If they’re nice, then I try to please them. I like older men — you know, a father image. I never had a father to talk to when I was a child, so I’m always looking for one.”
As I later found out, that was true as far as it went. Years later, I discovered that she was well-known to the bartenders at the major hotels. They knew her as a hooker, the young woman — they had no idea she was a teenager — who would sit at the bar, order a drink, and then wait. Men, coming in and spotting her alone, would strike up conversations with her. If they seemed intellectual or talked intelligently about the movie business, she would leave with them.
Then what? As she later told me, she would go with the men to either their hotel rooms or apartments. There, after making sure the men understood she was desperate for money, she would strip naked. The men would stare at her and, in the moment she waited for, tell her how beautiful her body was. She would make the men put on condoms before having sex with her. Afterward, the men would give her “gifts” — money to buy underwear, an extra dress, or nice new shoes.
Interestingly, Norma Jean never demanded large amounts, preferring to accept whatever the men would give her. “They all act the same way,” she once told me. “I feel like I have a special power over them. All I have to do is take my dress off. They give me a superiority complex; they make me feel I’m more than I really am. You know, in foster homes, nobody tells you how beautiful you are.”
I was prepared to tell her she was beautiful, for that was the honest fact. I thought she was the most beautiful thing that God had ever put on this earth. I had never met anyone even remotely like her. Nothing in my past had prepared me for this ravenous she-animal, this sexy, young girl who casually used words like “fuck,” “cock,” and “cunt” while at the same time appearing almost innocent. Nothing had ever prepared me for a teenage girl who was so totally open about sex and human sexual anatomy, yet who often seemed coy and shy. It was a bewitching combination.
In a word, I was in love — madly, passionately, hopelessly so. And in that state, there was much I did not see at first. I did not see that there were other sides to Norma Jean.
For one thing, I did not understand just how driven she was to become an actress. It was a desire that at first I just shrugged off — every girl in Holly wood those days wanted to be an actress — but Norma Jean burned with a consuming ambition that was obvious to all but the most starry-eyed lover. And I did not understand how willing she was to do anything to make it, including using anybody who could help her.
’’Anybody” included me, I was to find out the hard way. But in the summer of 1943, I saw Norma Jean only as a lover, the center of my universe; we went everywhere together. Yet, the clues were there, had I bothered to look.
One came in Hollywood, at a popular night spot called Slapsy Maxie’s. I took Norma Jean there to see my uncle, Ted Lewis. After the first show, we went backstage. I introduced Norma Jean to Lewis, whose eyes almost popped out of his head. And no wonder: Norma Jean was wearing a white angora sweater. As usual, she was wearing no bra — unusual in those days — and her breasts and nipples stood out in what can only be described as a breathtaking monument to natural architecture. Having obtained Lewis’s undivided attention, Norma Jean proceeded to charm him out of his socks. She stayed for the second show, and in another visit backstage, met two of Lewis’s best friends, the columnist Walter Winchell and, even more importantly, writer-producer Damon Runyon. They fell all over themselves in assuring her that they would help her in any way possible to get into the Screen Actors Guild — a necessary prerequisite for acting in the movies.
I was oblivious to all this, and even more oblivious to the fact that Norma Jean began a secret relationship with Lewis and, later, Winchell — to get her into the movies. True, her modeling career had suddenly prospered, and she was getting more and more assignments. In my infatuation, I attributed that to the recognition by the rest of Hollywood that she was as beautiful as I thought she was.
I did realize she was movie crazy, talking endlessly about how she wanted to work in pictures. She bubbled with joy when I finally got my Screen Actors Guild card and began working on a movie at 20th Century Fox. She had never been inside a movie studio — they were like churches to her — and I agreed one day that I would smuggle her inside. (There was a strict ban on visitors for such lowly contract players as myself.) What happened next befuddled me at the time, but in later years I understood: that visit was Marilyn Monroe’s first real acting performance.
I had brought her to the studio commissary, where everything almost stopped dead as she walked in beside me. Well, walked in hardly describes it; she sort of wiggled in. Dressed, again, in an angora sweater and tight skirt, the voluptuous body walked into that commissary in a kind of rolling, sinuous glide that I had come to take for granted as her distinctive walk. But to the men in the commissary, some of whom literally stopped in mid — bite, the Walk was a phenomenon they had never experienced. To heighten the effect, it was somewhat chilly, and her nipples, made erect by the coolness, stood out like headlights. In sum, Norma Jean Dougherty took over the studio that day; she practically caused a riot. The men just could not get enough of her; they couldn’t stop watching her, couldn’t wait to hear her say something in that cooing little girl voice with all the breath in it.
“Who is that girl you’re with?” Damon Runyon asked me as we left sometime later.
“That’s Norma Jean Dougherty,” I reminded him.
Runyon, a man of understatement, carefully regarded her. “Well, you sure have fine taste in women,” he said, staring at her breasts.
I appreciated the compliment, but I had bigger plans in mind for Norma Jean: I wanted to marry her. It was a fatuous hope, of course, for I failed to understand that the last thing Norma Jean wanted at that point was marriage — and certainly not to some smitten young kid working as a contract player. No, Norma Jean wanted much more; she wanted to be a movie star. It was a leap of ambition that was almost breathtaking, for she had set her sights on a quick route to the top, to vault herself almost instantly from the ranks of the army of unknown models in Hollywood to studio stardom. It just didn’t work that way, as anybody in the business knew, but Norma Jean had decided that the rules were for everybody else; she was going to do it her way.
Slowly, I became aware of the change in Norma Jean. The natural wonder I first knew was gradually but perceptibly being changed into somebody I really didn’t know, the persona that came to be known as Marilyn Monroe. She was beginning to move in a fast crowd, the big-time producers, agents, and accompanying retinue that marked somebody on the make. Her ambition was more naked now, and that wonderful naturalness was beginning to disappear.
Her way was to head straight for the top. In the Hollywood of those days, such a direct route was possible because of the so-called “studio system,” in which each major studio kept its players under restrictive contracts which bound them to a form of indentured servitude, requiring them to make films however and whenever the studios decided they would. That made the heads of studios something like demigods, with total power to decide who worked and who didn’t.
Norma Jean understood this system perfectly, which is why she began cultivating anyone who had access to the studio moguls.
To be sure, there were some more obvious changes. I had taken the first nude photographs of her in early 1944. Where once she might have been delighted with my amateurish attempts at “art” photography, now she hated them, complaining, “They make my ass look too big.” She also had cosmetic surgery to remove a bump on the end of her nose and to correct a weak chin line. She was being seen at all the best Hollywood parties, where the movers and shakers operated. No more angora sweaters; now, she wore expensive outfits. Her hair no longer was indifferently brushed; now, it was being changed by a professional hairstylist into what came to be her distinctive platinum blonde look.
But the really important changes were the ones you couldn’t see. And they were the ones I was most concerned about as we began to drift apart. They all seemed to crystallize in the fall of 1944, when she went with me as I drove out to see my folks in Ohio.
We spent what I thought was an idyllic several weeks out there. The leaves were just turning, and as we roamed the woods as lovers, I believed that this sort of closeness, away from the grind of Hollywood, would reunite us in the tight bond in which our love had begun. We climbed the local mountain, made love in a cave, and carved our initials in a tree (they remain there to this day). Away from Tinseltown, we looked like two teenage lovers, which, at root, was precisely what we were.
But I had not reckoned on the lure the tragic, irresistible lure — that was pulling at Norma Jean. It was Hollywood, and as we drove back westward, she sank into a depression. We talked about the future, and suddenly she erupted into an outburst that had none of the cooing little girl voice, none of the breathy emphasis. This was pure Norma Jean Dougherty, the orphan girl of an insane mother, the struggling foster child who had to fight for every scrap of love and affection, the Hollywood waif who had sold her body for a few bits of cloth or a new pair of shoes. From somewhere deep in her psyche came the voice that proclaimed the challenge “Listen, Teddy, I told you once, when you’re broke, you’re a joke. And if I’m lyin’, I hope I’m dyin’. I’ll fuck anybody who can help me get what I want. I’m tired of being broke. After thinking this whole situation over, Teddy, why in hell couldn’t I just as easily give myself to a producer or a director, or some big shot agent who can do me some real good? Sure, I fucked many guys around the Ambassador district. Big fucking deal I Even to this day I don’t feel guilty about it. Why should I? Listen, if I have to suck every cock in Hollywood, that’s what I’ll do!”
As we sped through the night, back toward Hollywood, I sensed, somehow, that Norma Jean Dougherty was dying there, right beside me. What was emerging was the great bitch goddess… And the fire that was consuming Norma Jean would, in time, also devour the goddess that had arisen from her ashes.
