Page 13 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“My figure?”

“You’re not really a fashion model, you’re not someone who just shows the clothes. Someone who sells an outfit. The dresses and the shirts and the bathing suits are always that bit too tight on you. No one is looking at the clothes, they are looking at you! ‘To hell with what she is wearing! Who’s that girl?’”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“If you want to be model, it is.”

“It’s a funny old business, isn’t it?” says Norma Jeane. “I asked a photographer the other day why I was wearing a bathing suit for a toothpaste ad, and he looked at me as if I was some kind of crazy!”

Emmeline Snively laughs. She likes Norma Jeane. “Make sure you keep that bathing suit on! A young lady should never model undraped.”

“Undraped?”

“Nude. Nude photography is the kiss of death for a model. The kiss of death, let me tell you.”

Miss Snively has a lot of ideas about what’s best for her model’s career. For instance, in Snively’s expert opinion, Norma Jeane’s thick, curly dark blond hair doesn’t frame her face properly. It doesn’t move when she moves. It sits on her head like a stiff little hat.

After much coaxing and persuading, Snively finally convinces her to agree to an appointment at Frank and Joseph’s Salon on Hollywood Boulevard, where her hair is bleached and straightened.

The transformation takes some getting used to.

“This isn’t the real me, I’m not a platinum blonde,” Norma Jeane laughs along with Sylvia Barnhart, the stylist in charge of her makeover. She turns her head left and right, moves her chin up and down. “But I like it.”

“And so will all the boys!” replies Sylvia, holding up the mirror so she can see the back. “Allthe boys.”

CHAPTER 9

CAPPED SMILES, FIXED NOSES, dyed hair, legs as smooth as alabaster: 1946 Los Angeles is awash with show-biz hopefuls. They all want one thing—to make it in the movies.

Their dreams in their backpacks, their longing written all over their overly made-up faces, these hopefuls trawl the streets of West Hollywood, exuding hope and desperation. Weighed down with their headshots and well-thumbed scripts, they wait at bus stops and queue at diners for temporary jobs—just until their big breaks hit. They talk about the times they were “an extra on Broadway,” how they can do “tap and jazz and can sing like an angel,” or how they were voted “Miss Teen Texas three-years-in-a-row.”

Norma Jeane lies in bed at night, listening to the staccato snoring of Ethel Dougherty through the paper-thin walls of the two-bedroom house in Van Nuys, and dreams of escape.

The war is over, the economy is booming, and everyone else seems to be getting on with their lives, except for her. She feels trapped, living with her disapproving mother-in-law, writingletters to her husband, who never seems to reply. She’s heard no news from him in weeks. Though the war is over, he’s been recalled to help transport men and supplies back to Europe and the United States after the Allied victory.

She’d tried to impress him with her modeling career, that she was working, earning a living. The last time she’d seen him, she’d shown him the magazine covers, piled high on the small table in Ethel’s living room. She’d waved about the adverts and fashion spreads.

He’d cared only about the bills. “You took all the money we had in savings and bought clothes with it,” Dougherty accuses her. She’d written him about her new blond hair. He wasn’t interested. She’d known, as he’d shipped himself off yet again, full of promises of a speedy return and fidelity, that the most important promise had already been broken.

She could no longer ignore the splendid beauty of Hollywood.

All actors and actresses were geniuses sitting in the porch of paradise—the movies. Acting became something golden and beautiful. It wasn’t an art. It was like the bright colors I used to see in my daydreams—like a game that enabled me to step out of a dark and dull world, into worlds so bright they made my heart leap just to think of them. From time to time, I took drama lessons when I had enough money. They were expensive. I paid ten dollars an hour, and I often used to say my speech lessons out loud as I was walking around … The idea of the movies kept going through my mind.

Emmeline Snively believes Norma Jeane might have what it takes to make it in the movies. She recommends the girl to her friend Helen “Cupid” Ainsworth—a comedic actress who now works out of the West Coast office of the NationalConcert and Artists Corporation and refers to herself as the “biggest agent” in Hollywood. Charmed by the sweet-natured, bottle-blond Norma Jeane, Ainsworth puts her straight on her books, with Harry Lipton as her special “motion-picture” representative.

In May 1946, Norma Jeane heads down to Schwab’s Pharmacy at 8024 Sunset Boulevard.

Part diner, part drugstore, Schwab’s sells cigarettes in one corner and cigars in the other—and has a newsstand up front and a pinball game at the back.

It’stheplace to be, where the actors gather to hear about who’s who, and what’s what. It’s where movie star Lana Turner was discovered, so they say. Now it’s full of hundreds of girls in tight sweaters, sucking on cream sodas and trying not to smear their lipstick.

The noise, as Norma Jeane swings through double doors, is overwhelming. The steaming coffee machines, the clatter of knives and forks, the thunderous laughter, the ping-pong of gossip. It is difficult to know where to put herself.

She glances up and down the counter.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asks a young man with slick hair and a shiny suit, hunched over a notepad.

“Sure,” he says looking up and pushing his heavy-rimmed glasses back up his long nose. “Go ahead, it’s not taken.”

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