Word: norma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Stutter. With nobody to pay her board, Norma Jeane was sent to an orphanage. "I remember," she says, "when I got out of the car, and my feet absolutely couldn't move on the sidewalk. I saw a big black sign with bright gold lettering. I thought it said 'Orphan.' I never could spell very well. I know I cried. They had to drag me in by force. I tried to tell them I wasn't an orphan." Soon after that Norma Jeane began to stutter...
...hated the orphanage. As one of the older children, Norma Jeane was assigned to wash the dishes: 100 plates, 100 cups, 100 knives, forks, spoons. "I did it three times a day, seven days a week," says Marilyn. "But it wasn't so bad. It was worse to scrub out the toilets." As payment for their work, most of the children got 5? a month. Since everybody had to put a penny in the plate on Sunday, that left each child with 1? a month to spend. With her penny, Norma Jeane usually bought a ribbon for her hair...
...Blue Sweater. At 11, Norma Jeane went to live with her new guardian, a friend of her mother's who could not always afford to keep her. In the next five years the child was batted back and forth from family to family. In all, she lived with twelve families, all poor. Once she was "sent back" because she made the lady nervous. Once she was happy with a goodhearted woman named Ana Lower. Once she lived in a drought area with a family of seven people; they all bathed once a week in the same tub of water...
...when Norma Jeane was twelve and getting sick and tired of her "county dresses" and the boys who called her "Norma Jeane the Human Bean," she borrowed a blue sweater from a girl friend. "When I walked into the class room," she says, "the boys suddenly began screaming and groaning and throwing themselves on the floor." In the schoolyard at lunchtime the swains stood around her three deep, and every afternoon after that there were a dozen bikes stacked along the curb outside her house. The neighbors were soon in a snit about "that little bitch." Norma Jeane...
Laying on Paint. Life did not seem to agree. When Norma Jeane was scarcely 16 years old, she was urged by her guardian into a marriage with a man she did not love. The groom was 21 years old, an aircraft worker named Jim Dougherty who is now a Los Angeles cop. They lived with his family for awhile, and then, she recalls, "in a little fold-up-bed place." In her despair, Norma Jeane made her first attempt-"not a very serious one"-at suicide. In 1943, after almost a year of such goings-on, Jim joined the Merchant...