Read Casting Norma Jeane for Free Online Page A

out like a gentleman—or at least a gentleman’s gentleman.” Furthermore, adorning the fair complexion of his left cheek was a large scar that added a dashing final touch to the robust, worldly appearance he made. This expressive mark, though actually received in a bad fall, accorded perfectly with Della’s romantic notion of Otis Monroe as man well acquainted with danger.
    The projected foreign adventures had seemed about to get underway when Otis went to work for the Mexican National Railway soon after they were married. But the squalid conditions they encountered in Mexico had soon propelled them back across the border and westward to the burgeoning new El Dorado called Los Angeles, where he’d found a similar job with the Pacific Electric Railway. Thus had it happened that the rest of Otis’ life, instead of being about steamships plying the bright blue waters of the world, had turned out to be about train cars clanging over the parched desert clays of Southern California. His working hours, instead of climaxing in luminous flights of pigment from palette to canvas amid throes of solitary inspiration, had devolved into a sloshing on of bucketfuls of paint alongside whole crews of laboring men. And his advancement in the world, instead of bathing his small family in the perquisites and possessions of an onrushing fame, had amounted to a slogging climb from the obscurity of rented rooms to that of rented flats and then of rented houses.
    Within a few years, Otis Monroe had stopped mentioning his vast artistic dreams altogether. Whether or not he still cherished them, Della did not know. That had been the worst part of it for her—the rest wouldn’t even have mattered, but she’d never really come to know her husband. Yes, she could still, after six or seven years, look into his hazel eyes and truthfully say she still loved him. And despite his frequent drinking bouts, she still considered him to be a good man. But marriage to Otis Monroe, she wrote, was “like living with a shadow of someone.” His mind and his heart had never become any more accessible to her than if he’d been the sole inhabitant of some distant planet’s icy moon.
    Barely had a job promotion come along allowing the Monroes to purchase their own home in still-fashionable Boyle Heights, when Otis had been seized by a horrifying illness. Both physical and mental in nature, it was ascribed within the family to “paint poisoning.” The astonishingly abrupt decline which ensued had turned him into someone in whom Della could no longer recognize anything of the man she’d married. And at the age of forty-three, Otis Elmer Monroe had died in the Patton State Hospital a howling madman.
    That had been in 1909. Strangely now, thirty-seven years later in the late summer of 1946—and perhaps this was all in Aunt Grace’s way of presenting the story—the appalling details of Otis’ demise slipped with wonderful ease into the background. And it was as if the artist perpetually out of reach to Della were finally speaking out across the generations to Berniece and Norma Jeane. That he should choose to do so through a certain house on Folsom Street was the whimsical part of the matter, since it was the property around the corner at 2440 Boulder Street that he and Della had actually bought and owned. Exactly how the Folsom Street place had once fit into the family’s scheme of things was now forgotten, except for one fact which Berniece was later to record. Here, she would write, stood “a house built piece by piece” by their grandfather Otis Monroe. Gazing upon it, they felt as if in some mysterious way this particular dwelling, lavished upon in such a variety of crafts at the hands of this one man alone, had been waiting all these years to be seen and appreciated by this one small audience alone.
    The group in the Dougherty Ford saw much else on their day’s excursion. Enough, in the tracing of Gladys Monroe Baker’s life from those shaky