The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Overnight Success

At the end of 1944, when Norma Jeane Dougherty returned to work after her vacation, she and a few other women who worked with her were asked to pose for photographs by a military unit that was making a film for army training purposes. The pictures would also appear in a government magazine called Yank. She wasn’t at all sure that she could do it, but she knew she wanted to try. For many years, Grace Goddard had told her that she was pretty, that she was special, and that one day she would be in show business. Of course, this wasn’t exactly show business. However, it was definitely exciting. On the day that the photographers, including one named David Conover, came to take her picture in her work clothes—drab gray slacks and a green blouse—she couldn’t have been more thrilled. It came easy to her. She wasn’t at all nervous. A single moment can alter a person’s entire future, and just such a moment occurred when Conover took his first frame of footage of the voluptuous yet somehow chaste-seeming Norma Jeane. Her life changed in that second. “My own future with Norma Jeane was in jeopardy the moment that army photographer clicked his shutter,” Jim Dougherty once observed. “Only I didn’t know it.”

The phrase “overnight success story” is often used when describing the rapid ascent of certain celebrities to the upper echelons of show business. Often it’s just hyperbole. In the case of Norma Jeane Mortensen—soon to be Marilyn Monroe—it happens to be the truth. The story has been told so many times, it can be easily explained by saying that she became popular with photographers and very quickly became an in-demand model. Of course, over the years it has been speculated and even reported as fact that she had sex with these photographers in order to get ahead in the business. But the motivation of the photographers who later claimed to have had romantic relationships with Marilyn has always been suspect. None ever said anything about having sex with her until she became very famous and it was considered quite the conquest to have had this great sex symbol in bed. One by one, though, stories—and even books!—by these photographers have fallen apart over the years when it comes to detail and specificity. For her part, Marilyn always gave the impression that she was not interested in sex during those years. Maybe that was just public relations malarkey on her part—but she was consistent about it just the same. It would be very surprising, say those who knew her well, to find that she actually slept with photographers in order to advance in the business. After all, it’s not as if she wasn’t beautiful enough to make it on her appearance alone. In fact, she became successful enough to soon be signed by a modeling agency, which sent her out on even more interviews for work. By the spring of 1946, she had appeared on more than thirty magazine covers.

Besides the speed of her success, what was also fascinating about Norma Jeane’s first photo sessions was how quickly she seemed to understand the business of modeling. She was very inquisitive about the process and also highly critical of her appearance. For instance, she asked David Conover questions about lighting, about different camera lenses, about how he coaxed his models into giving their best performances. In meetings with him after the sessions, she would study the contact sheets with the kind of careful scrutiny one might expect from a professional model. She wanted to know what she’d done wrong if an exposure didn’t meet with her approval. If her appearance didn’t meet her high standards, the picture was rejected. Every single shot had to be perfect, or she would not be happy with it.

Maybe it’s not that surprising that Norma Jeane was so intuitive about her appearance on film. After all, from a very early age, she had been attempting to win the favor of others. If Ida loved her enough, maybe she would allow her to call her mother. If she was good enough, maybe Gladys would want her too. If she was pretty enough, maybe she would be praised by Grace. The whole concept of how she was being received by others had always been foremost on her mind, fueled by her insecurity. She had been studying other people for years—those with whom she trafficked in her life, to see what they had to do to gain acceptance in the world, as well as those she didn’t know in movie magazines, to see what made them so special. Now, at the age of eighteen, she could step outside of herself and view herself as if she were a separate entity. Without even realizing it, she was making an art of communicating human emotion in photographs.

At the same time Norma Jeane’s exciting new modeling career was unfolding, Jim Dougherty was overseas on duty. He would have preferred it if she had been home alone, pining for him. In fact, he wrote her a very stern letter telling her that modeling was fine and good temporarily, but that as soon as he got home he expected her to get pregnant and have a family, “and you’re going to settle down. You can only have one career, and a woman can’t be two places at once.” It was interesting that now that she had found something she enjoyed, he had unilaterally decided that they were going to have a baby.

Jim’s mother, Ethel, who had always been an ally for Norma Jeane, also disapproved of her modeling. Not only did she keep her son up to date on Norma Jeane’s activities (and in a way that probably made them seem like trouble in the making), but she also made it clear to her daughter-in-law that what she was doing was unseemly and could create problems in her marriage. Norma Jeane responded by moving out of the Dougherty house and back into the lower half of her aunt Ana Lower’s duplex. Now more than ever, she was proving herself to be the strong, self-reliant girl Ida Bolender had tried to mold. She knew what she had to do, and she was going to do it. When Jim returned on leave in the spring of 1945, he found that he was no longer the center of Norma Jeane’s world. She was busy. She didn’t need him. She still loved him—maybe—but she no longer felt that she needed him to survive. The dynamic had changed between them, and he didn’t like it at all.