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Norma Jeane was trained for nothing except laying on paint; her education was so poor that she could not even fake a cultural conversation. In public she was smothered by feelings of inferiority. In private she was swept by panics, anxieties and hallucinations. And yet, curiously, life in its deepest expressions was on Norma Jeane's side—perhaps had always been on her side. The sensitivity which made her feel so deeply the shocks of her childhood was countered by a set of instincts as solid as an anvil. She took blows that would have smashed many people, and she cracked a little, but she did not fall apart. And always there was that traffic-jamming, production-stopping hunk of woman that the scared little girl inhabited.
High Smile. A photographer was the first to appreciate her professional possibilities. He took some publicity stills of Norma Jeane at the defense plant, and dragged her over to see Miss Emmeline Snively at the Blue Book School of Charm and Modeling in Hollywood. Miss Snively bleached Norma Jeane's hair, taught her to lower her voice and smile ("She smiled high, and that made wrinkles"), and "tried to correct that awful walk, but I couldn't —she had double-jointed knees."
By the spring of 1947, Norma Jeane was the busiest model in Hollywood. In one month she adorned the covers of five magazines. The film studios cocked an eye. One day Norma Jeane got a call from two of them: Starmaker Howard Hughes and 2Oth Century-Fox. She went to Fox first. Cried Casting Director Ben Lyon: "It's Jean Harlow all over again!" He signed her for $125 a week. He slapped a new label on her (Monroe was the maiden name of Norma Jeane's mother, and Marilyn began with an M too), and put her to work on her first part, in Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay. Marilyn's part: "Hello." It was cut from the finished film. Nevertheless, Marilyn began to acquire some of a celebrity's mannerisms. She roared through the studio gate in her battered jalopy as though it were a Hispano-Suiza, and she was seldom less than an hour late.
Others Are in a Hurry. Marilyn's lateness has since become legendary. She once missed a plane because she stopped at the boarding gate to smear a little more lipstick on. Already half an hour late for a mass reception in her honor, she ducked into a ladies' room and was not seen again for 45 minutes. She was even two hours late for her own appendectomy. She went to a psychoanalyst about her lateness; a friend says it was no good because she always walked in when the hour was almost over.