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Authors: James Glaeg
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and for him alone? To know differently, Jim had only to remember how it had felt once their eyes had finally left each other’s and they’d both turned to face Reverend Lingenfelder. The closing notes of the wedding march played by Aunt Ana on the piano had signaled for everyone to sit down again and hear the exchanging of the vows. And as if it were happening right at this moment, Jim could still feel the presence of Norma Jeane as she had stood next to him, could still smell the very fragrance of her while they repeated those promises. How soft and sweet her voice had sounded to him as she spoke! And a little scared, for truth be told, he’d felt her whole body trembling right up to the moment when Reverend Lingenfelder had pronounced his words over them and they’d turned to look at each other again. It was right then, unexpectedly, that Norma Jeane’s bright face—bordered by soft ringlets of glossy brown hair tumbling down from beneath her veil of white lace—had made one of those iconic pictures never to be erased from his mind for as long as he lived. She’d smiled up at him, and something boundless had entered into her wide blue eyes. There’d been a whole world of sweet intimations shining in that look, but above all it had said to him, “I trust you,” causing Jim to stand there dazzled in his rented white tuxedo, feeling as though he’d just taken part in a miracle. Norma Jeane had entrusted him with her heart for all the rest of their lives. She, in whose beautiful eyes he’d sometimes felt he might drown, had now become his wife in full majesty of the law and in the full sight of both God and man!
No, this had been no performance on Norma Jeane’s part. Of that Jim Dougherty was positive as he gazed over his freighter’s rail at the broad blue sea. And more proof of it was in how happily they’d lived together afterward. Nothing beyond the predictable things, a few trivialities, had ever gone amiss between them. At least not until much later, after he’d shipped out to sea, when she’d stumbled upon this accursed obsession of hers with modeling. Only since then, only in the past year and a half had there taken place a change in her which Jim found to be nothing short of appalling. For never in the world would the modest, the often even terribly proper girl he’d married in 1942 have made the suggestion that Norma Jeane had made on the recent afternoon they’d spent driving around the Valley. She’d wanted the two of them go on living together just as before—but, in so many words, without being man and wife. Where on earth could she even have picked up such a notion, if not from Miss Emmeline Snively or from some other person involved with this Blue Book Modeling Agency?
No, it was over.
In the time Jim had stood at the ship’s rail thinking about it, the red sun had hurried below the horizon. And for as long as the blue ocean continued to shimmer in its afterglow, he practiced setting his face away from what he now realized he’d been living on for too long—all the aching memories of those two, perhaps three years of his young life filled with a profound bliss, but a bliss so illusory as to prove capable of then disappearing as fast as smoke does in the wind.
“Finally, as it got darker,” Jim Dougherty was later to write, “I felt myself sigh deeply, and I pushed myself away from the railing. That tiny gesture was an oddly freeing movement for me. I remember it so clearly. I suddenly accepted that there was no place for me in Norma Jeane’s future. None in the least. She was perhaps willing to occasionally toss me some crumbs of affection, but I was not at all willing to settle for that. It was over. No more crumbs. No more straws. No more smoke. I went below.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Black Lace
Someone much closer to Norma Jeane than was suspected by even her family—a winsome and fast-rising personality in the world of glamor photography called André de Dienes—was at
No, this had been no performance on Norma Jeane’s part. Of that Jim Dougherty was positive as he gazed over his freighter’s rail at the broad blue sea. And more proof of it was in how happily they’d lived together afterward. Nothing beyond the predictable things, a few trivialities, had ever gone amiss between them. At least not until much later, after he’d shipped out to sea, when she’d stumbled upon this accursed obsession of hers with modeling. Only since then, only in the past year and a half had there taken place a change in her which Jim found to be nothing short of appalling. For never in the world would the modest, the often even terribly proper girl he’d married in 1942 have made the suggestion that Norma Jeane had made on the recent afternoon they’d spent driving around the Valley. She’d wanted the two of them go on living together just as before—but, in so many words, without being man and wife. Where on earth could she even have picked up such a notion, if not from Miss Emmeline Snively or from some other person involved with this Blue Book Modeling Agency?
No, it was over.
In the time Jim had stood at the ship’s rail thinking about it, the red sun had hurried below the horizon. And for as long as the blue ocean continued to shimmer in its afterglow, he practiced setting his face away from what he now realized he’d been living on for too long—all the aching memories of those two, perhaps three years of his young life filled with a profound bliss, but a bliss so illusory as to prove capable of then disappearing as fast as smoke does in the wind.
“Finally, as it got darker,” Jim Dougherty was later to write, “I felt myself sigh deeply, and I pushed myself away from the railing. That tiny gesture was an oddly freeing movement for me. I remember it so clearly. I suddenly accepted that there was no place for me in Norma Jeane’s future. None in the least. She was perhaps willing to occasionally toss me some crumbs of affection, but I was not at all willing to settle for that. It was over. No more crumbs. No more straws. No more smoke. I went below.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Black Lace
Someone much closer to Norma Jeane than was suspected by even her family—a winsome and fast-rising personality in the world of glamor photography called André de Dienes—was at
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