Page 6 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

JOY NEVER LASTS.

That’s the lesson young Norma Jeane learned when she lived with her mother, Gladys Baker, in Hollywood.

Back then, Norma Jeane went to the cinema every Wednesday, all on her own.

For ten cents, she would sit in the front row and watch a film over and over.

Beautiful women in beautiful clothes who walked like tigers in the forest, full of power and purpose, especially Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra .

It was more than a whole new world. It was her whole world.

Though the little girl often stayed past sundown, she was always careful to mind her mother and stay on the sidewalk walking home.

Theirs was a little white two-story house, where Norma Jeane and her mother lived with lodgers. For a while, it was a dream. Gladys even buys an out-of-tune, second-hand grand piano that had once belonged to Oscar-winning actor Fredric March.

“You’ll play the piano over here, by the windows,” Norma Jeane’s mother tells her.

“And here on each side of the fireplace there’ll be a love seat.

And we can sit listening to you. As soon as I pay off a few other things I’ll get the love seats, and we’ll all sit in them at night and listen to you play the piano. ”

But these domestic dreams are soon shattered. Gladys’s mental health deteriorates, just as it had when Norma Jeane was born, and she’s sent away to yet another hospital.

When those few months of happiness end, Norma Jeane feels the pain.

Now her heart is breaking again, because Aunt Ana’s heart is giving out. She’s over sixty now and suffering from cardiovascular disease. Far too infirm to look after a teenager.

Norma Jeane returns to live with her guardian, Grace McKee Goddard. In the 1920s, Grace and Gladys worked together cutting and splicing negatives at Consolidated Film Industries, back when Grace drank a little less and Gladys could stick with a job.

In her younger years, Grace dreamed of becoming an actress, a passion she instills in young Norma Jeane. “One day you’ll be just like Shirley Temple. You’ll see,” Grace tells her.

Yet Grace’s own personal life is tumultuous.

She marries and divorces three times. Her fourth husband, Ervin “Doc” Goddard, has his own teenage daughter, Eleanor “Bebe” Goddard, with whom fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane shares a room when she moves in with the family at 14743 Archwood Street in Van Nuys.

The girls also share a love of clothes and makeup. When they enroll in Van Nuys High School in September 1941, they tell everyone they’re half sisters.

For rides home after school, they rely on the kindness of a neighbor.

James Dougherty is twenty-one years old, with sapphire eyes, dirty blond hair, and a wide grin.

The former football captain and class president of Van Nuys High School is dressed in coveralls, just coming off his shift at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank.

The assembly lines are making P-38 Lightning fighters and Hudson bombers as the United States gears up to join the war that started when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

“Normie?” he asks one afternoon, spotting the five-foot-five Norma Jeane standing alone, her hair in braids and with freshly applied scarlet lipstick. “Where’s Bebe?”

“She’s home sick,” shrugs Norma Jeane. “So, it’s just me today.” She gets into the front seat of his flat-nosed blue Ford coupe and shuffles close to him.

“I wish I knew how to drive,” she says. “Will you teach me one day, Jim?”

Dougherty collects Norma Jeane every day from school. They drive through the Hollywood Hills, and park up at that spot on Mulholland Drive where all the teens end up on a Tuesday afternoon.

“Can I call you Daddy?” she asks, as he kisses her neck.

“You can call me whatever you want,” he mumbles.

Norma Jeane doesn’t know her father. She’s only seen his photograph once before. Gladys, in one of her more lucid moments, showed it to her. There was a sparkle in his eye, a curl to his lips, and a devilish mustache. He looked just like Clark Gable.

She thinks Dougherty looks a bit like her father, too. She talks about her father. Endlessly. Or her lack of one. She was born illegitimate, she explains. Dougherty doesn’t mind, so long as he can carry on kissing her.

“What a daddy,” she smiles, pushing him gently away.