Free Casting Norma Jeane by James Glaeg

untidy. Records, photos, and stockings lay on the floor, a crumpled dress on a chair. There were dirty glasses and an empty bottle on the table. And a bed, rumpled.”
    De Dienes looked for a place to sit, with Norma Jeane hovering behind him and uttering shards of confession through sniffles and tears, seemingly to the effect that the gentleman visitor she’d just entertained was someone of influence at the studio. Was she ashamed? Or was she afraid? Possibly both, the photographer surmised. Meanwhile, however—the whole project of talking her into marrying him now appearing in a garish new light—his mind was in full process of whirling like a calculating machine, adding up increments for each week and month he’d invested in creating their rapport as photographer and model…subtracting ruthlessly for his six days’ drive across the country, not to mention for an anger and jealousy fully aroused in him but no longer having any useful place…multiplying by the inestimable factor of his recurring and often powerful hunch that a splendid future lay ahead for Norma Jeane…then dividing by the grave advice of peers who said that de Dienes, being infatuated, was vastly overestimating the starlet’s salability and strengths.
    All this arithmetic and much more he achieved in seconds, arriving at a total reliable enough to slap a wry smile on his face by the time he and Norma Jeane were seated face-to-face.
    He didn’t really care who the man was, he told her. After all, what kind of celebrity photographer would he be if he didn’t understand the role of the casting couch in her chosen line of work? She wanted to be free? OK, she was free. In fact, he said, he didn’t blame her one bit for not wanting to marry a crazy—if supremely talented—Middle European such as himself. And he’d harbor no hard feelings either— so long as he was still her favorite photographer!
    This was all Norma Jean had wanted to hear. Soon she was laughing with him as though nothing had happened. And why, the photographer cynically asked himself, shouldn’t she laugh? She’d just managed to retain her access to André de Dienes, whose mere signature was a recommendation to the editors of Vogue . It was he who’d recently put her on the cover of Family Circle and who in fact had top contacts with all the right magazines, both American and foreign.
    “What do you think of this name—?” Norma Jeane soon asked him.
    She picked up a pencil and tried out her signature on a notepad which he’d already spotted on her coffee table. Its open page had been covered with the same two words over and over again, each of them starting the large, swirling capital letter M.
    “ —Marilyn Monroe ,” she announced, holding up the notepad for him to see.
    De Dienes’ eyes for a second time rested thoughtfully on its handwritten flourishes.
    “Well, don’t you like it?” asked Norma Jeane.
    “It isn’t that,” he responded slowly. In fact, the name sounded perfect. But momentarily he was allowing his shaken senses to take refuge in a memory undreamed of by anyone like Norma Jeane living in a world so far removed from his own childhood homeland.
    For what he was hearing wasn’t a movie star’s name at all, but the clear sound of a bell arising from the thickness of the Turia forest and resonating outward with the message of the angel to the Virgin Mary, upon the hearing of which many of the devout among the neighboring farmers and villagers were still known to stop everything they were doing and to repeat their Angelus prayers. That serene picture made a poor match, to be sure, with the one actually before him of Norma Jeane sitting across the coffee table, naked underneath her black lace negligée. Yet spontaneously the memory of it had rushed over him as soon as he’d noticed her notepad lying there covered with the swirling M’s. The sight of it had put him in mind of the white-whiskered, long-haired old bell-ringer who lived in his tower