Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer Page A

comes back from every walk with the sexual
waves of a hundred men still washing in on her, but Jim is feeling
the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of
getting him into murderous fights if she persists in scattering
moonlight every time she walks the midday streets. At the open-air
training-base dances on Saturday night she is a sensation in a
white dress as she does the Lindy, her hips bobbing under each
man’s nose, and a hint of a hard look she does not often show (that
hard look which doubles the ante of sex) is in her eyes and her
mouth. She may not know it, but her unconscious is ready to take on
the biggest bidder — a survivor triumphant is standing in that
face.
    “Come on,” he says, “let’s go home.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m tired.”
    Now when she sleeps she may not be dreaming
of him so much as of the day he leaves.
     
    * * *
     
    His sinecure as an instructor is lost. In
1944, he goes to sea on a ship that will take him to Australia.
Norma Jean and he have been together for two years. She moves in
with the Doughertys, who are out all day working, and takes care of
the house. Before long she is working at a defense plant with her
mother-in-law, packing parachutes and spraying dope on target
planes. Like Gladys at the film studio, she is a hard worker. As if
she senses that she is entering a period of great change for her,
she is thriving with energy, gets an “E” for excellence from her
employers, but is disliked by her fellow workers in return. She
will be disliked even more when a photographer from the Army, David
Conover, comes by one day looking for an attractive defense worker.
Conover’s assignment for Yank magazine is to show some young
woman doing war work, and as Marilyn will comment later, “putting a
girl in overalls is like having her work in tights — if a girl
knows how to wear overalls.”
    Norma Jean has found the first focus of her
life, and it is in a camera lens. She has much to learn about
posing for a camera, but she does not have to learn how to pose.
She has learned already what a hundred little moves of her figure
will do for workers, servicemen, sailors, truck drivers, Marines.
She knows how to offer the restrained gift of a smile. She is Lady
Girl of the working class, and our own Rubens of the 4 x 5 Speed
Graphic. Click! For if the photographer is usually seen as the
artist, and his model as a species of still life, she becomes the
artist when she takes a pose: she paints the picture into the
camera, and few photographers will fail to pay her homage. At the
moment, however, it must have been enough for Conover that he had
found a promising model on that unpromising job, and he went beyond
the limits he needed, posing her in sweaters, breaking out color
film, taking her telephone number. Her career had begun: Click,
Pic, See, Salute, Laff , and Sir were getting ready to
greet her. A friend of Conover’s named Potter Hueth saw the Yank contacts and was sufficiently enthusiastic to pose her
several nights a week after work, then was so pleased with the
results that in gratitude — she was working on spec — he made an
appointment for her with Emmeline Snively of the Blue Book Model
Agency. Miss Snively (who was introduced, we may hope, once at
least to William Faulkner) had a course she required of all her
models, and it cost a hundred dollars. Norma Jean passed inspection
— on reflection we are not surprised — and was told she could pay
the fee out of her earnings. That did not take long. She was hired
at once for ten dollars a day for ten days by a salesman for Holga
Steel who needed a hostess for the company at an industrial show at
Pan-Pacific Auditorium. We can picture her as she sits at this
exhibition. Her hair is a dark blonde, almost brown, and long and
too heavy in its ringlets which are thick in a permanent’s curls,
her little nose is not yet little — in fact it is near to bulbous —
and her upper lip is too short. She smiles, and