My Story

8 i begin a new dream

You sit alone. It’s night outside. Automobiles roll down Sunset Boulevard like an endless string of beetles. Their rubber tires make a purring high-class noise. You’re hungry, and you say, “It’s good for my waistline not to eat. There’s nothing finer than a washboard belly.”

And you say your speech lesson out loud:

“Ariadne arose from her couch in the snows in the Akrakaronian mountains.” Followed by “Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.”

The lessons are a dollar apiece. For a dollar you could buy a pair of stockings and a hamburger sandwich. But stockings and a hamburger will never make you an actress. Speech lessons may. So with bare legs and empty stomach you hit the consonants of “Hail to thee, blithe spirit.”

I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, “There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.”

You don’t have to know anything to dream hard. I knew nothing about acting. I had never read a book about it, or tried to do it, or discussed it with anyone. I was ashamed to tell the few people I knew of what I was dreaming. I said I was hoping to make a living as a model. I called on all the model agencies and found a job now and then.

But there was this secret in me—acting. It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said “This Way Out.”

Acting was something golden and beautiful. It was like the bright colors Norma Jean used to see in her daydreams. It wasn’t an art. It was like a game you played that enabled you to step out of the dull world you knew into worlds so bright they made your heart leap just to think of them.

When I was eight I used to look out of the orphan asylum window at night and see a big lighted-up sign that read “R.K.O. Radio Pictures.” I hated the sign. It reminded me of the smell of glue. My mother had once taken me to the studio where she worked. The smell of the wet film she cut and spliced had stuck in my nose.

That was Norma Jean’s nose. Norma Dougherty, the aspiring actress, had no such feelings toward studio signs. To her they were the beacons of a Promised Land—the land of Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Haviland, Gene Tierney, Jennifer Jones.

That’s the way it was when I sat alone in my Hollywood room. I went to sleep hungry and woke up hungry. And I thought all actors and actresses were geniuses sitting on the front porch of Paradise—the movies.