My Story

the bottom of the ocean

When you’re a failure in Hollywood—that’s like starving to death outside a banquet hall with the smells of filet mignon driving you crazy. I lay in bed again day after day, not eating, not combing my hair. I kept remembering how I had sat in Mr. A’s casting office controlling my excitement about the great luck that had finally come to me, and I felt like an idiot. There was going to be no luck in my life. The dark star I was born under was going to get darker and darker.

I cried and mumbled to myself. I’d go out and get a job as a waitress or clerk. Millions of girls were happy to work at jobs like that. Or I could work in a factory again. I wasn’t afraid of any kind of work. I’d scrubbed floors and washed dishes ever since I could remember.

But there was something wouldn’t let me go back to the world of Norma Jean. It wasn’t ambition or a wish to be rich and famous. I didn’t feel any pent up talent in me. I didn’t even feel that I had looks or any sort of attractiveness. But there was a thing in me like a craziness that wouldn’t let up. It kept speaking to me, not in words but in colors—scarlet and gold and shining white, greens and blues. They were the colors I used to dream about in my childhood when I had tried to hide from the dull, unloving world in which the orphanage slave, Norma Jean, existed.

I was still flying from that world, and it was still around me.

It was while I lay on this ocean bottom, figuring never to see daylight again, that I fell in love for the first time. I’d not only never been in love, but I hadn’t ever dreamed of it. It was something that existed for other people—people who had families and homes.

But when I lay on this ocean bottom it hit me, hoisted me into the air, and stood me on my feet looking at the world as if I’d just been born.

16 my first love

He’s married now to a movie star, and it might embarrass him if I used his real name, and her, too. I read in the paper that their marriage, only a year old, is heading for the Hollywood reefs where most of the movieland marriages come apart. A few years ago I might have felt like giving it a push, just for old times sake. But now I’m happy and I wish him well and I wish anybody he loves well.

I was coming out of the casting department at M.G.M. with the usual results—no job and no prospects— when a girl I knew introduced me to an ordinary looking man. All I could tell about him was that he wasn’t an actor. Actors are often wonderful and charming people, but for a woman to love an actor is something like incest. It’s like loving a brother with the same face and manners as your own.

We went to a cafe and sat down and talked. Or rather, he talked. I stared and listened. I was sick inside with failure, and there was no hope in me. His voice was like a medicine. He told me he was a musician and how much he liked to play the piano and why some music was better than other music. I didn’t think of him as a man or a musician. All I thought was “He’s alive and strong.”

He called me up, and I always hurried to join him. The first thing I saw when I entered any place to meet him, no matter how crowded it was, was his face. It would jump out at me.

After a few weeks he knew I loved him. I hadn’t said so, but I didn’t have to. I stumbled when I went to sit down, my mouth hung open, my heart ached so much I wanted to cry all the time. If his hand touched mine by accident my knees buckled.

He smiled at me through all this as if I were half a joke. When he laughed at things I hadn’t meant to be funny, I felt flattered. He talked a lot about women and the emptiness of their love. He had just been divorced and was very cynical. He had a six-year-old son whose custody had been granted him by the court.

One evening after he had put his son to bed he sat and played the piano for me. He played a long time. Then he did something that made my heart beat crazily. In order to see the music better he put on a pair of glasses. I had never seen him with glasses on.

I don’t know why, but I had always been attracted to men who wore glasses. Now, when he put them on, I felt suddenly overwhelmed.

He stopped playing, removed his glasses and came over to me. He embraced and kissed me. My eyes closed, and a new life began for me.

I moved from the Studio Club where I was living to a place nearer his house so he could stop in on the way to work or home from work. I sat all day waiting for him. When I looked back on all the years I could remember, I shuddered. I knew now how cold and empty they had been. I had always thought of myself as someone unloved. Now I knew there had been something worse than that in my life. It had been my own unloving heart. I had loved myself a little, and Aunt Grace and Anna. How little it seemed now!

I sat alone thinking a lot about the past and understanding the frosty hearted child, Norma Jean. She would never have lived to grow up if her heart had had love in it. Now waiting for him when he was fifteen minutes late filled me with agony. Had I loved anyone or anything in my childhood and girlhood, what a thousand agonies there would have been every day! Maybe there were, and I had hidden them. Maybe that was why it hurt so now to love, and why my heart kept carrying on as if I were going to explode with pain and longing.

I thought a great deal about him and other men. My lover was a strong individual. I don’t mean he was dominant. A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

When he came into my room and took me in his arms all my troubles were forgotten. I even forgot Norma Jean, and her eyes stopped looking out of mine. I even forgot about not being photogenic. A new me appeared in my skin—not an actress, not somebody looking for a world of bright colors. All the fame and color and genius I had dreamed of were in me. When he said “I love you” to me, it was better than a thousand critics calling me a great star.

I tried to figure out what was so different about my life than before him. It was the same—no hopes, no prospects, all doors closed. The troubles were still there, every one of them, but they were like dust swept into a corner. There was one thing new—sex.

Sex is a baffling thing when it doesn’t happen. I used to wake up in the morning, when I was married, and wonder if the whole world was crazy, whooping about sex all the time. It was like hearing all the time that stove polish was the greatest invention on earth.

Then it dawned on me that people—other women—were different than me. They could feel things I couldn’t. And when I started reading books I ran into the words “frigid,” “rejected,” and “lesbian.” I wondered if I was all three of those things.

A man who had kissed me once had said it was very possible I was a lesbian because I apparently had no response to males—meaning him. I didn’t contradict him because I didn’t know what I was. There were times even when I didn’t feel human and times when all I could think of was dying. There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.

Now, having fallen in love, I knew what I was. It wasn’t a lesbian. The world and its excitement over sex didn’t seem crazy. In fact, it didn’t seem crazy enough.

There was only one cloud in my paradise, and it kept growing. At first nothing had mattered to me except my own love. After a few months I began to look at his love. I looked, listened, and looked, and I couldn’t tell myself more than he told me. I couldn’t tell if he really loved me.

He grinned a lot when we were together and kidded me a lot. I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me. But his love didn’t seem anything like mine. Most of his talk to me was a form of criticism. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. It was sort of true. I tried to know more by reading books. I had a new friend, Natasha Lytess. She was an acting coach and a woman of deep culture. She told me what to read. I read Tolstoy and Turgenev. They excited me, and I couldn’t lay a book down till I’d finished