“I’m not sure what’s worse,” she says between sobs. “To have no daddy, or to have a daddy who doesn’t love you at all.”

CHAPTER 8

“WE’LL HAVE TO GET RID of the wiggle,” Miss Emmeline Snively says.

The Blue Book Modeling School is headquartered in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. The agency’s director sits bolt upright behind a large leather-topped desk, reviewing her latest prospect.

Norma Jeane Dougherty, in a freshly ironed white sharkskin dress and white suede shoes, walks up and down in front of Miss Snively, hips swinging left and right over her double-jointed knees.

Miss Snively watches the young modeling hopeful with an inscrutable gaze, her white kid-gloved hands resting on her lap. She opines, “The wiggleandthe hair.”

With only twenty girls in her agency bluebook, Emmeline Snively is particularly choosy. She promises to groom those select few “for careers in motion pictures, photographic modeling and fashion modeling” via “personalized instruction incharm and poise, success and beauty and personalized development.” It’s all in the brochure.

California blonde,notes Snively about Norma Jeane’s hair.Fair in summer and dark in winter, bleached on top by the sun. Too dull for photographs, it looks flat in the light. And far too thick, and far too curly.She sets down her fountain pen and leans across the desk. “Do you really want to be a model, dear?”

“I’d really like to try. I have some photographs,” Norma Jeane gestures toward her bag lying on the leather-topped desk.

“Yes, yes … we’ve seen your snaps.”

A photographer shooting a local beauty contest had already sent over Kodachromes of Norma Jeane.

No one turns up to a modeling audition in a white dress that turns transparent in the sun. And yet, here she is, as clean and white and shining as her dress.

“Oh, those girls are so pretty,” Norma Jeane says, looking at the agency photo board.

Snively likes the looks of this pleasant-faced girl. Her teeth are nearly perfect, though she’ll need the small lump taken off her nose and maybe a bit more of a point to her chin. But she has charm. Lots and lots of charm.

What a wonderful little doll she would be on the cover of a magazine someday,the modeling agent thinks.She has that girl-next-door look.She is irresistible.

“You have to have the know-how to model,” explains Snively. “We offer a three-month course for one hundred dollars.”

“B-b-but I don’t have one hundred dollars.”

The poor child looks so dejected, so downcast, that Snively makes her a rare offer. “Then you can pay me out of your future earnings. Do you want to start working immediately?”

“Yes, please!”

There’s one more thing.

“Your smile. It’s too high, and that makes wrinkles,” Miss Snively tells her. “Lower that smile.”

“Lower my smile?” Norma Jeane’s top lip is quivering with the effort.

“Lower than that …”

Emmeline Snively has never seen a girl work as hard as Norma Jeane. She attends fashion modeling classes with Mrs. Gavin Beardsley, makeup and grooming with Maria Smith, and posing instruction with Miss Snively herself. Norma Jeane, despite always being late for the airplane factory, is never once late at the Blue Book. She is attentive, she takes notes, and she studies her photographs, finding her good and bad angles.

She’s started out with less than any girl I’ve seen, but she wants to learn, she wants to be somebody. She has real drive,Snively thinks.If I teach her how to pose, how to handle herself, she’ll go far.

For her first, informal assignment, Miss Snively sends Norma Jeane to Hungarian-born photographer Andre de Dienes.

At the sight of her, he thinks,It was as if a miracle had happened to me. Norma Jeane seemed to be like an angel. An earthly, sexy-looking angel!

The following week Norma Jeane is booked as a hostess at the Los Angeles Home Show in Pan-Pacific Auditorium. She’s a hit with the clients, the other models, everyone. Sheearns $10 a day for ten days, which is a lot more than the $20 a week she earns at the factory. Had she not had to eat, drink, and pay Ethel some rent, the job would have earned her almost enough to pay back the Blue Book Agency.

By the spring of 1946, when postwar optimism has made everything seem a little more possible, Norma Jeane Dougherty has appeared on the cover of thirty-three magazines. FromGlamorous ModelstoPeek and See,she is everywhere, perhaps even a little overexposed.

“The problem,” says Emmeline Snively one afternoon, “is your figure.”