Page 5 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

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.

Come rain or shine, she always walks alone, singing as she goes down the road, or in the school corridors, or on her way to 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 little too little, 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 in his 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.

“Shall we dive in?” asks her beau.

“In the ocean?”

“Of course, the ocean,” he laughs as he strips off his shirt and shorts and runs toward the foam.

Norma Jeane peels off her shirt and her cheap old slacks, leaving her clothes in a neat pile on the sand. She can feel the warm sun tapping her shoulders, the wind whipping her curls, sticking a strand to her lips.

In a swimsuit borrowed from a friend, she walks toward the water’s edge. In the too-small suit, she’s nearly naked, but there’s no turning back.

A young man wolf whistles. There’s another whistle and another.

Who are they whistling for? she wonders.

No one ever whistled for Norma Jeane the Human Bean. They are whistling for this new girl. What a thrill.

She stretches in the sun and walks slowly up the beach.

I’ll remember this afternoon forever. Today I became a girl who belongs to the world …