Casting Norma Jeane Read Free

position offstage. Lyon nodded to Shamroy as he backed into the sidelines. Shamroy trained his camera on the door and at length signaled to Ben Lyon that he was ready. And Lyon called out, “Action!”
    The door opened. Miss Dougherty took one step into the dazzling room and then paused with her hand still on the door handle. Her posture in the shimmering gown had become, unaccountably, as erect as a statue. Her breast rose and fell with excitement.
    “Walk across to the stool…” coached Lyon softly.
    For a second, the girl responded only by shifting her head slightly to catch a changed gradation of the light while an intriguing expression of doubt passed over her face. Then, as if irresistibly drawn to someone halfway across the room, she stepped forward with an unfolding motion of her entire body that was like the graceful step of a sleek young gazelle. Simultaneously, a smile stole into her face that grew with a sudden force until its unexpected radiance shattered every other thought that had been building in the two men’s minds.
    Ben Lyon glowed back at her with surprise and delight. “Now sit down…” he said in a hushed voice.
    The blonde insinuated herself onto the stool in a single movement that left the sequined folds of her gown in a striking cascade over the contours of her legs while neatly exposing the extended toes of her spiked shoes.
    “Take a cigarette out of your purse and light it…” continued the hushed voice of Lyon.
    As she followed each of Lyon’s whispered cues, it seemed that within two or three minutes’ time her very physical presence had changed before the two men’s amazed eyes. Her hands were steady now. All her movements were unhurried. No trace of her earlier distress could be seen anywhere in her face or body. She brimmed with confidence. And yes, thought cameraman Shamroy, she was now every bit as stunning as Ben Lyon had promised after all.
    “Put the cigarette out…” continued Lyon. “Get up…Walk forward toward the camera…”
    As she advanced nearer to Shamroy’s view-finder, a cobalt-hued mistiness about her eyes and a garnet-hued luminosity about her lips seemed to intermingle with the scintillations of her gown. For a moment it appeared to him that millions of particles of colored light were clustering around her from all directions in a field of energy, which she in turn channeled straight into the all-consuming mechanical eye that he held trained upon her. Shamroy cocked his head above the viewfinder to better see what was happening. Perhaps, he had to conclude, it was only a freakish effect generated by a spotlight’s glare on the viewfinder in combination with the glittering of her sequined gown.
    But many times throughout the day, his thoughts returned to the test. He wondered intensely how it was going to turn out. And late in the afternoon, when he viewed the newly processed film on the flickering screen of the Moviola, he got a cold chill.
    “This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures,” Leon Shamroy was to recall several years afterward of the impression it made on him. “She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson. Like one of those lush stars of the silent era.”

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Ford Sports Coupe
     
    From a taxi rounding the corner onto Nebraska Street not many mornings later, Jim Dougherty spotted his 1935 Ford sports coupe parked in Aunt Ana’s driveway. It told the twenty-five-year-old sailor that this time he’d caught his wife at home. And that so far his plan was working.
    Seconds later he rang the doorbell and waited, his mind flashing down to his newly bought suit and to all the trouble he’d had finding a decent fit after docking yesterday because of wartime shortages still going on everywhere…
    …When the door opened and there stood Norma Jeane.
    Jim Dougherty took in a breath. She’d become a blonde. And missing now seemed to be half of the adorable chubbiness about her cheeks. Neither in body