My Story

15 the bottom of the ocean

When you’re a failure in Hollywood—that’s like starving to death outside a banquet hall with the smells of filet mignon driving you crazy. I lay in bed again day after day, not eating, not combing my hair. I kept remembering how I had sat in Mr. A’s casting office controlling my excitement about the great luck that had finally come to me, and I felt like an idiot. There was going to be no luck in my life. The dark star I was born under was going to get darker and darker.

I cried and mumbled to myself. I’d go out and get a job as a waitress or clerk. Millions of girls were happy to work at jobs like that. Or I could work in a factory again. I wasn’t afraid of any kind of work. I’d scrubbed floors and washed dishes ever since I could remember.

But there was something wouldn’t let me go back to the world of Norma Jean. It wasn’t ambition or a wish to be rich and famous. I didn’t feel any pent up talent in me. I didn’t even feel that I had looks or any sort of attractiveness. But there was a thing in me like a craziness that wouldn’t let up. It kept speaking to me, not in words but in colors—scarlet and gold and shining white, greens and blues. They were the colors I used to dream about in my childhood when I had tried to hide from the dull, unloving world in which the orphanage slave, Norma Jean, existed.

I was still flying from that world, and it was still around me.

It was while I lay on this ocean bottom, figuring never to see daylight again, that I fell in love for the first time. I’d not only never been in love, but I hadn’t ever dreamed of it. It was something that existed for other people—people who had families and homes.

But when I lay on this ocean bottom it hit me, hoisted me into the air, and stood me on my feet looking at the world as if I’d just been born.