Free Casting Norma Jeane by James Glaeg Page B

having. He was definitely going to get drunk tonight. And very seriously he felt he might just go drive his car off a cliff and kill himself.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
     
    Scroll of Life
     
    Within a breathless period of barely more than a month, Norma Jeane had achieved three of her paramount goals. She’d won herself a movie contract. She’d gained the companionship of a sister. And now by mid-September, after motoring across the Mojave desert to Las Vegas with just enough time having elapsed for Jim Dougherty’s formal consent no longer to be required on the legal papers, she’d obtained her Nevada divorce.
    “I’m a free woman!” she exulted to Berniece upon returning to Los Angeles, “Oh, I feel like celebrating!”
    Accordingly, telephone lines began buzzing in and out of the Nebraska Street house, and soon the oddly-assorted collection of souls who remained her closest family in the world joined the freshly divorced twenty-year-old at the most elegant restaurant their severely war-tested means could afford. There, not even the presence of Gladys Baker was expected to restrain the tide of jubilation sweeping round their luxuriously appointed table. For although it was old news that Gladys had tasked herself with serving as a wet blanket over her daughter’s fondest hopes and dreams, thankfully the mother seldom made any great show of this in public, preferring smaller and more intimate occasions instead. She waited, perhaps, for the girl to come home in a transport of joy over some little stroke of professional success, the more deeply to sting her with a half-dozen curt words of scorn over what Gladys called her “business.” Or she might chance to overhear as the girl received a phone call quoting some well-placed person in praise of her work—and afterward fix on her only a grim funereal stare. One had to presume Gladys acted from some motive loftier than that of gratuitously wounding Norma Jeane, yet it was clear that these moments fell like hammer blows on a wedge of iron irretrievably cleaving the daughter from the mother. Not even the wonder-working Aunt Ana seemed able to heal the widening breach between the two, except in keeping dear Norma Jeane’s heart perfectly unembittered and her plans and ambitions not one whit less keen and alive.
    So matters had stood when, shockingly, another voice was heard to speak in the same tones as Gladys’ just inside the restaurant door. It belonged to no less trusted a figure than one of her uncles, Sam Knebelkamp, who immediately upon meeting up with his wife Enid in the vestibule muttered to her that any pretty young thing going into the movies was like a child playing with fire. And this from the gentle, balding Sam who’d never said a word against her career before!
    Enid simply laughed. What on earth possessed Sam, she’d wondered, to say anything so ill-suited to this night’s celebration?! To be sure, there was in his normally benign face an evil portent which suggested that her fine humor might be spoiled if she found out. But Enid, reckless in her access of joy, obeyed an impulse to exorcize the moment of any such prompting by parroting her husband’s words with a jocund show to Doc Goddard. The inevitable result was that by the time the family were seated, some version of the Sam’s jarring utterance had reached the incredulous ears of nearly everyone there—quite possibly including Norma Jeane.
    Later, as the waiter cleared away the soup course, a lull in the chattering of the family’s voices allowed Sam Knebelkamp to reach out and gloss over as best he could the incident at the door.
    “Everything really seems to be working out the way you’ve hoped,” he spoke up in a kindly voice to his sometime foster daughter. No one, after all, doubted that he thought the world of her, having in his day probably put in fully as many hours looking after her as Gladys Baker ever had done. “We’re really happy for you, honey.”
    There was a soft general sigh