become, within the otherworldly dimensions of a movie screen, suddenly luminous. Suddenly gorgeous. All her actions and even the objects surrounding her now vibrated with exciting life.
“The screen test,” Berniece was to write many years later in her detailed recollection of that morning at Twentieth Century-Fox, “stayed in my mind for days.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Smoke in the Wind
At sunset on the evening of one of those same days, Jim Dougherty stood alone on the deck of a freighter coursing across the middle of the wide blue Pacific. His work shift was finished. Now he stood with his arms propped up on the rail, looking out over the huge ocean. It was time to face facts about Norma Jeane.
Such a rarity anymore as a letter from her—who’d once written to him gushingly every single day—had reached him at one of the ports recently. In about as few words as it would have taken her to tell him to pick up some groceries, she was informing him that their beloved dog Muggsie was dead. She’d been too consumed by her new career to take care of the poor animal and had left it to languish on Jim’s mom’s back porch, where no one else had paid much attention to it either. Finally the once-pampered creature had simply stopped eating and died.
The letter’s curt tone, reflected upon now at ship’s side in the dying rays of the sun, gave Jim all the sign and portent he needed to read his own future with regard to Norma Jeane. It was for this moment that he’d refused to sign the divorce papers during his last shore leave. Anyone then would have said he was only refusing out of frustration and spite—both of which he’d admittedly felt more than once during the afternoon they’d spent driving around the Valley revisiting their old haunts—because every time their conversation had begun to look encouraging, she’d turn it back round to, “But please, Jimmie, sign the papers.” What his stratagem of not doing so had gained him, however, was the time he needed to see things clearly, the way he was seeing them now.
It was over. For the past couple of months he’d only been clutching at straws, the most recent of these straws being Norma Jeane’s proposal that the two of them “stay close.” That was a hope in vain, Jim now saw, since it was clear that her sudden fever to make it big in Hollywood wasn’t just some bad idea put in her head by this modeling-agency woman Miss Snively as Jim had been supposing all along. It was coming straight out of Norma Jeane herself, who wanted it frantically enough to abandon poor Muggsie—not to mention their marriage—on account of it. Nor was there any hope left that these farfetched ambitions of hers might pass away with the changing winds of her many other moods. Too much time had elapsed for that now. Ill-advised though such dreams and desires notoriously were, she was actually determined to pursue them. And if there was one thing you had to say about Norma Jeane, it was that when her mind was made up about any course of action, she’d follow it through to the bitterest end.
So then, what had the whole wondrous and magical scene been four years earlier? When like a dream she’d descended the spiral staircase at the Howells’ house and promised to become his wife forever. Had it all just been some big performance on her part? Jim Dougherty’s keen recollection of that June evening convinced him otherwise. To be sure, there’d been an audience present, what with two dozen and more friends and relatives gathered in that borrowed home’s central hall to witness the ceremony. And no doubt every single one of the guests had gotten caught up in the pristine glow cast by Norma Jeane, who at sixteen had looked like an angel in her pure white gown of embroidered lace. But with every “hesitation step” she’d taken down to the place where he stood, her shy smile had been fixed on Jim and on Jim alone. Well, then could it have been a performance meant for him
“The screen test,” Berniece was to write many years later in her detailed recollection of that morning at Twentieth Century-Fox, “stayed in my mind for days.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Smoke in the Wind
At sunset on the evening of one of those same days, Jim Dougherty stood alone on the deck of a freighter coursing across the middle of the wide blue Pacific. His work shift was finished. Now he stood with his arms propped up on the rail, looking out over the huge ocean. It was time to face facts about Norma Jeane.
Such a rarity anymore as a letter from her—who’d once written to him gushingly every single day—had reached him at one of the ports recently. In about as few words as it would have taken her to tell him to pick up some groceries, she was informing him that their beloved dog Muggsie was dead. She’d been too consumed by her new career to take care of the poor animal and had left it to languish on Jim’s mom’s back porch, where no one else had paid much attention to it either. Finally the once-pampered creature had simply stopped eating and died.
The letter’s curt tone, reflected upon now at ship’s side in the dying rays of the sun, gave Jim all the sign and portent he needed to read his own future with regard to Norma Jeane. It was for this moment that he’d refused to sign the divorce papers during his last shore leave. Anyone then would have said he was only refusing out of frustration and spite—both of which he’d admittedly felt more than once during the afternoon they’d spent driving around the Valley revisiting their old haunts—because every time their conversation had begun to look encouraging, she’d turn it back round to, “But please, Jimmie, sign the papers.” What his stratagem of not doing so had gained him, however, was the time he needed to see things clearly, the way he was seeing them now.
It was over. For the past couple of months he’d only been clutching at straws, the most recent of these straws being Norma Jeane’s proposal that the two of them “stay close.” That was a hope in vain, Jim now saw, since it was clear that her sudden fever to make it big in Hollywood wasn’t just some bad idea put in her head by this modeling-agency woman Miss Snively as Jim had been supposing all along. It was coming straight out of Norma Jeane herself, who wanted it frantically enough to abandon poor Muggsie—not to mention their marriage—on account of it. Nor was there any hope left that these farfetched ambitions of hers might pass away with the changing winds of her many other moods. Too much time had elapsed for that now. Ill-advised though such dreams and desires notoriously were, she was actually determined to pursue them. And if there was one thing you had to say about Norma Jeane, it was that when her mind was made up about any course of action, she’d follow it through to the bitterest end.
So then, what had the whole wondrous and magical scene been four years earlier? When like a dream she’d descended the spiral staircase at the Howells’ house and promised to become his wife forever. Had it all just been some big performance on her part? Jim Dougherty’s keen recollection of that June evening convinced him otherwise. To be sure, there’d been an audience present, what with two dozen and more friends and relatives gathered in that borrowed home’s central hall to witness the ceremony. And no doubt every single one of the guests had gotten caught up in the pristine glow cast by Norma Jeane, who at sixteen had looked like an angel in her pure white gown of embroidered lace. But with every “hesitation step” she’d taken down to the place where he stood, her shy smile had been fixed on Jim and on Jim alone. Well, then could it have been a performance meant for him
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