Casting Norma Jeane by James Glaeg

cat-and-mouse games with her. Men always did this. They were games Ben Lyon would never have played with her sister, sensed Norma Jeane, because he respected Berniece in a way that he didn’t respect herself. And why else, really, had she tried to place Berniece between them today, if not to shelter herself behind that respect? Berniece had had, all her life, a father to look out for her. That circumstance had equipped her with a certain backbone that anyone could see, even as Berniece simply sat in a chair talking and listening. She had reserves of confidence that clothed her no matter how shy and uncertain she might happen to feel at a given moment. Whereas Norma Jeane went naked in the world. She was forever doomed to cast every man she encountered as her provider and protector. This was her terrible need. She could find no control over it. And it showed. It opened her up to these stultifying games men were forever playing.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    Celluloid Kingdom
     
    The sisters lunched that day at the studio’s Café de Paris. Norma Jeane then hurried off to a class, and the commissary quickly emptied of its large midday crowd, leaving Berniece demurely studying her stenographic notebook like the conscientious secretary she was still pretending to be.
    In reality she was keeping her eye on the entranceway, just in case some exciting movie star should still walk into the enormous room of tables where she sat alone. Cornel Wilde, it was said, was hard at work on one of the nearby sound stages, shooting scenes for a movie about horse racing to be called The Homestretch . Elsewhere Jeannie Crain was finishing up some last-minute work for her soon-to-be-released Margie . Such highly recognizable celebrities often preferred to wait for a quiet hour like this to stop by the commissary on coffee break.
    Berniece, meanwhile, found her mind billowing over with images and afterthoughts of her morning which were still begging to be dealt with. Something about the totality of them mystified her. In this regard she was different from her sister, who—bless her heart—seemed to rush from one experience to another on impulse, never worrying herself very much about how any one thing happened to be connected to the next. And no doubt there was a certain wisdom in Norma Jeane’s ever open and flexible ways that Berniece might do well to study and adapt to her own uses. But for the moment she longed for a chance to drop back from the ceaseless rounds of outward phenomena, to cast her eyes deeply inward, and to find this morning’s place among the forms and shapes and patterns of the things she loved and treasured, which were always those things that could be counted upon to last.
    Viewed on such a level, it soon occurred to Berniece Miracle that all this curious studio scene in front of her—taking place within a citadel so secretive and privileged that she had to counterfeit a look of waiting upon some particular boss’s beck and call—had come to her like a dream out of the small framed photograph on her girlhood dresser top in Pineville, Kentucky. It completely surrounded her now, this mysterious world which for years had lain quiescent behind the reluctant eyes of her beautiful unknown mother in the portrait. And which, yielding at last to Berniece’s importunate contemplation, had first manifested itself by means of a wrinkled letter arriving out of the blue from Gladys Baker herself, saying not only that she still lived but also that Berniece had a twelve-year-old half sister called Norma Jeane. Merely recollecting that day’s revelations and her own trembling reaction to them, even now over the distance of time in Fox’s Café de Paris, caused the morning’s images jostling for order in Berniece’s mind to marshal into a magical cavalcade with those of the past.
    She remembered her first sight of Norma Jeane ever on earth, which was that of an eighteen-year-old girl stepping off a train on an impulsively taken trip back