Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer Page B

there is a tendency
for her nose to look too long (Emmeline will yet teach her to cash
that smile with her upper lip pulled down — and the future Marilyn
will quiver then subtly as a result), but these flaws are not
nearly so significant as her aura. She now realizes that men — not
boys nor service personnel, but men — are flocking around her
booth, executive businessmen full of financial deeds actually seem to like her. Deeds rather than dudes now like her!
The clear sense of ambition is taking on its edge. In the ten days
she works for Holga Steel, she also takes lessons at night in the
Blue Book Model Agency School (fashion modeling, posing, makeup,
and grooming) and calls in sick at Radio Plant where she has been
working with Mrs. Dougherty. She has already come a distance from
the girl who barely passed her classes and left high school in
junior year. But soon she will even quit defense work: she can
sometimes make as much in an hour of modeling as in a day of
spraying dope. Since she is out all the time, Muggsie, her dog,
begins to pine. When tension with her in-laws increases over her
new work at night, she moves back to Ana Lower’s house, and does
not bring the dog with her . Muggsie will die before too long.
It is “of a broken heart,” Jim Dougherty will later say.
    The war is over. Grace Goddard comes back
with Doc from West Virginia and brings the news — since she is the
only one to have been in touch — that Gladys, Norma Jean’s lost
mother, is feeling well enough to come out of the sanitarium. At
the same time, Dougherty comes back on leave, his skin a dark
yellow from Atabrine taken in the tropics, and goes immediately to
visit Norma Jean at Aunt Ana’s. Guiles gives Dougherty’s version of
the scene.
     
    Norma Jean sat on his lap and they kissed
unashamedly with Ana rocking in a nearby chair. . . . It was later,
Jim remembers, that he saw the small pile of unpaid bills for
dresses, shoes, sweaters and blouses from Bullocks. . . . “What
happened to my allotment?” he wanted to know.
    “ It always goes,” she said airily. “All
that is an investment in myself. I’ve got to have these things when
I go out on a job. If you’re dressed well, they pay higher fees. If
you’re in a hand-me-down, they’ll try to take advantage of
you.”
    “ Sure, Norma,” he told her . . . “Sure,
that makes sense.” There was something over three hundred dollars
in his wallet . . . winnings from gambling, savings from beer and
women he’d declined to have. It was intended for one long blast
with his wife, even a new outfit for her. He had imagined handing
her a fifty-dollar bill.
    When she took the money she wept a little. .
. . “I know it’s a lot . . . I’ll make it up to you some way.”
     
    Grace comes back from San Francisco with
Gladys, who is dressed all in white, even white shoes, but the
meeting is uncomfortable and distant between mother and daughter —
Dougherty remembers Gladys as beautiful and close in appearance to
Norma Jean except that she was not young at all. Soon Norma Jean is
off with Jim on furlough, yet still modeling some of the time, and
therefore not able “to make it up to you some way,” for he looks on
her modeling as a “cruel dedication.” It is not too great a demand
on our voyeurism to see a young husband in bed, while his wife,
Mind all out in the electric field of her career, feels like a
piece of insulation to his touch. He goes back to sea “certain he
was losing Norma Jean and disgusted that he seemed to have tried to
buy her back with his savings.” In turn, Norma Jean takes the
opportunity to rent an empty two-room apartment below Ana Lower’s,
moves Gladys in with her. The mother and daughter will live
together for seven months into the summer of 1946 before Gladys
decides (with what whole depression we can hardly conceive) that
she wants to go back to her sanitarium home. According to
Dougherty, Gladys was hardly cured. “She wasn’t right, even