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The Blue Sweater. At 11, Norma Jeane went to live with her new guardian, a friend of her mother's who could not always afford to keep her. In the next five years the child was batted back and forth from family to family. In all, she lived with twelve families, all poor. Once she was "sent back" because she made the lady nervous. Once she was happy with a goodhearted woman named Ana Lower. Once she lived in a drought area with a family of seven people; they all bathed once a week in the same tub of water, and the "orphan girl" was always the last one in the tub. There was always the dry bread, the army cot by the water heater, the monthly visit from the county social worker who inspected the soles of her shoes and patted the top of her head and went away. And there were still the noises in her head and the nameless feelings of guilt.
"How did I get through it?" Marilyn wonders today. "Or maybe it wasn't really so bad? Maybe I just took it all too hard?" For consolation, she went to the movies whenever she had a dime.
One day, when Norma Jeane was twelve and getting sick and tired of her "county dresses" and the boys who called her "Norma Jeane the Human Bean," she borrowed a blue sweater from a girl friend. "When I walked into the class room," she says, "the boys suddenly began screaming and groaning and throwing themselves on the floor." In the schoolyard at lunchtime the swains stood around her three deep, and every afternoon after that there were a dozen bikes stacked along the curb outside her house. The neighbors were soon in a snit about "that little bitch." Norma Jeane was in a daze. "For the first time in my life people paid attention to me," she says. "For the first time I had friends. I prayed that they wouldn't go away."
She did everything she could to keep them. She smeared on the lipstick with a will, and soon discovered mascara. "The neighbors called me cheap," she says, "but I knew I really wasn't." Her stutter began to disappear. She wrote verse. She skipped the last half of the eighth grade. "I looked back on the whole mess around that time," Marilyn recalls. "And something came up inside me and I said to myself. 'Somebody's got to come out of this whole!' ':
Laying on Paint. Life did not seem to agree. When Norma Jeane was scarcely 16 years old, she was urged by her guardian into a marriage with a man she did not love. The groom was 21 years old, an aircraft worker named Jim Dougherty who is now a Los Angeles cop. They lived with his family for awhile, and then, she recalls, "in a little fold-up-bed place." In her despair, Norma Jeane made her first attempt—"not a very serious one"—at suicide. In 1943, after almost a year of such goings-on, Jim joined the Merchant Marine, and Norma Jeane went to work in a defense plant as a paint sprayer. That was that, in effect, though they were not divorced until 1946.