CHAPTER 7
I HAD BEEN a sort of child bride and now I was a sort of child widow. Sundays were the loneliest. I would go to Union Station and watch people. You learned a lot watching them. You learned that pretty wives adored homely men and good-looking men adored homely wives.
Norma Jeane’s been lonely. Anyone can see that, her wistful thoughts so plain on her face, almost as if she’s speaking them aloud.
Three days before Christmas, Norma Jeane stands on the platform of the Glendale Transportation Center waiting for the Amtrak from San Francisco. Like one of the women she’s watched all those Sundays, she scans the approaching crowd.
“Jim!” she yells. “JIM,” she yells, and waves. “Jim!”
She runs toward her husband, weaving her way through the people, and hurls herself into his arms. While her husband’s been away, Norma Jeane’s modeling work has taught her how good it can feel to dress up in someone else’s clothes. Why not try on the role of a married woman in love?
“Darling!” She kisses his neck and runs her hand over his prickly buzz cut. “Welcome home!”
When they get to the motor lodge they’ve booked for the night, she puts on a silky black negligee. “What do you think?” she asks, standing in the doorway to the bathroom.
“I think you look mighty fine,” Dougherty replies. “Come right over here!”
“Did I tell you I’ve been modeling?” she asks, leaping onto the bed. “I’m really enjoying it. I think I might actually be quite good.”
“So my mother tells me,” he says. Ethel’s not a fan of her daughter-in-law’s new aspirations.
“She told you?” Norma Jeane wrinkles her nose. “It was supposed to be my little secret to surprise you.”
“If you’re enjoying yourself it doesn’t bother me much,” he tells her, laughing.
“What’s funny?” she asks.
“All this modeling business is fine, honey, but when I get out of the service, we’re going to have a family and you’re going to settle down.” He kisses her. “You can only have one career, and a woman can’t be in two places at once.”
The country is at war, and there’s no point in arguing. Norma Jeane doesn’t mention her modeling aspirations for the rest of his leave. Instead, they watch movies at Grauman’s Chinese, picnic at Pop’s Willow Lake, and go to the Cocoanut Grove for meals. At the twenty-four-acre nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire, they eat a steak dinner.
But a familiar unhappiness presses down on Norma Jeane. With her husband back out to sea, she’ll have nothing left butterse conversation with his mother in the evenings and Sundays at Union Station.
“I think I’m going to call my father,” she announces, out of the blue.
“Your father?” asks Dougherty, astonished.
Norma Jeane has been learning some family history. While her husband was away, she blew most of her savings on a visit to Chicago, where Grace McKee—no longer Grace McKee Goddard since splitting from Doc—has been living and working in a film laboratory.
After four or five gins, Grace told some revealing stories. Norma Jeane learned a lot about her mother, Gladys, and her extended family. Not only does it turn out that Norma Jeane has an older half sister from her mother’s first marriage named Berniece Baker, she’s now learned the identity of the Clark Gable look-alike man in the photo Gladys had once shown her. It wasn’t Martin Edward Mortensen, Gladys’s estranged second husband, whose name the twenty-four-year-old mother had misspelled as “Mortenson” on her newborn daughter’s birth certificate.
The man with the debonair mustache and a glint in his eye was Stan Gifford—her mother’s former supervisor at Consolidated Film Industries, and Norma Jeane’s real father.
She tells Dougherty that she has Gifford’s number and she’s going to call him.
“Honey,” he says. “I am not sure that is the best idea.”
But she telephones anyway.
“This is Norma Jeane,” she says, her voice trembling, as she sits on the edge of her bed, her hand gripping the pillow. “I’m Gladys Baker’s d-d-daughter.”
The voice on the line is cold and utterly devoid of emotion. “I have nothing to say to you.” Stan Gifford pauses. “Don’t ever call me again.”
He hangs up.
And she collapses back onto the bed.
Dougherty watches as his wife cries uncontrollably, pummeling the pillows with her fists.