Page 6 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“She was nude … totally nude when I found her,” Mrs. Murray begins, “lying in bed, clutching her white telephone. Her bedroom light was on and the telephone cable under the door alerted me …”

Eunice Murray would stick to her story, but everyone who crossed the threshold that night would say something different.

How do you go about writing a life story?Marilyn once asked a journalist.Because the true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things. It’s hard to know where to start if you don’t start with the truth.

But nobody was interested in that.

1939

CHAPTER 1

HER BUST IS the first thing her classmates notice. What the hell happened to Norma Jeane the Human Bean over the long, hot summer of 1939?

Thirty or so students at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School watch, open-mouthed, as thirteen-year-old Norma Jeane Mortenson rushes into morning math class in Westwood, California. A whirling dervish of books, auburn curls, and a tight sweater.

She’s late. She’s always late.

Without a nickel for bus fare, it’s more than a two-mile walk from Sawtelle, where no one who’s anyone lives, to the school in prosperous Westwood. Norma Jeane never has a nickel, so every school day she walks the nearly five-mile round trip there and back to the intersection of Corinth and 11348 Nebraska Avenue.

Come rain or shine, she always walks alone, singing as she goes down the road, or in the school corridors, or on her wayto the lunchroom. She sings,“Jesus loves me, this I know,”which is lucky, because no one else loves her.

Norma Jeane boards with Ana Lower, who she calls “Auntie” Ana. But Ana is no real relation; she is the aunt of Norma Jeane’s legal guardian, Grace McKee Goddard.

Grace is her mother’s best friend, and has been watching out for Norma Jeane since she was born on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. When Norma Jeane’s mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, was institutionalized in 1934, she signed her daughter’s care over to Grace—and now Grace has passed the teenager on to Auntie Ana, a safe spot after years spent shuttling between foster homes and the orphanage.

Like Grace and Gladys, white-haired Auntie Ana is a devout Christian Scientist. As a local landlord and a church advisor, Ana is compassionate yet practical. She tries to teach the thirteen-year-old about sex. Warn her.

The lesson comes just in time. On the first day of school that year, Norma Jeane discovers that she has outgrown her two county-issued dresses. She goes next door to borrow a little blue sweater. And it is a littletoolittle, and too blue, and the whole class can see the bounteous gifts that Mother Nature has bestowed on the formerly skinny waif.

When I walk into the classroom,Norma Jeane realizes,the boys suddenly begin screaming and moaning and throwing themselves on the floor.

At recess, Norma Jeane is surrounded. There are six boys, all of them smiling.

“What happened to you?” asks one freckle-faced jock, his hand cupping his chin as he looks her up and down. “You’ve gone from String Bean to hubba-hubba in one summer.”

“Hmm,” purrs Norma Jeane. The buzzing “hmm” noise is the one all the girls at school make to sound like Jean Harlow in the movies.

The other kids in her class used to whisper. They pointed their fingers and crossed to the other side of the street. No one wanted to be seen with the girl who stuttered when she spoke and dressed in clothing from the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home Society. No one wanted to be friends with the girl whose mother is institutionalized. No one wanted to invite Norma Jeane home after school.

Now the boys are much more attentive.

“You’re the Hubba-Hubba, Hmm Girl, that’s what you are.”

The boy’s voice isn’t teasing. He’s paying her a compliment, which might be the very first she’s ever had. Norma Jeane doesn’t quite know how to react, so she smiles sweetly and bobs a little curtsy.

“Why thank you, sir.”

Norma Jeane is excited to tell Aunt Ana the news. “They know my name now. I’m no longer the Orphan,” she says, breaking into an imitation of her schoolmates’ taunts—‘Orphan 3463 with no friends and a mumma in the madhouse.’” She smiles. “The world is a much friendlier place now that I’m the Hubba-Hubba, Hmm Girl.”

When Norma Jeane finds some old ruby lipstick and a pencil to darken her brows, the world gets even friendlier. Drivers honk their car horns when they pass her on the way to Westwood and every boy wants to walk her home from school.

Her stutter begins to disappear.

She chooses a boyfriend. He’s more than old enough to know better, but maybe he doesn’t care that the girl sitting inhis passenger seat, laughing at his bad jokes, is only thirteen years old.

Norma Jeane and her new boyfriend drive to the beach. It’s a beautiful day for a stroll on the sand overlooking the largest and deepest ocean on earth.

She’s been practicing a new walk, a sophisticated, languid movement with pointed toes and swinging shoulders. Point and swish. Point and swish. Just like the divas on the silver screen.

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