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beginnings, for Berniece and Norma Jeane to be assured above all that their mother had not always been what she was now. That once Gladys’ most precious dream had been to bring her three children together into the home they deserved. So that in her bed that night Berniece Baker Miracle, for one, could extract nothing but hope and promise from all she’d seen and learned on this eventful day. Didn’t it mean that some tiny portion of Gladys’ dream was coming true at last? For although their brother Jackie was gone—long dead—here all the rest of them were, safely together. Berniece and her child Mona Rae sharing Aunt Ana’s downstairs room with Gladys. And Norma Jeane upstairs with Aunt Ana. Didn’t this day go to show that the ancestral stock once planted by Otis Monroe in Los Angeles—the living and breathing House of Monroe as it were—was not vanquished and gone but was still substantial and thriving under the good Ana’s roof on Nebraska Street in Sawtelle? Along with one of Otis Monroe’s landscape oils which still hung over the couch in Ana’s living room upstairs!
    No, there had been nothing about today to blemish Berniece’s hopes. Rather, she’d found it rich with family legacy. So rich, she would later record, that it overflowed into her night’s dreams.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    Carole Lind
     
    For Norma Jeane’s part, the stirrings of the day had had everything to do with a riddle still vexing her at the studio. The thought occurred to her now of applying to the sprightly minds of her new acquaintances in the Publicity Department for help in finding a solution. “The casting directors want me to change my name,” she was soon telling three of them. “They don’t like Norma Jeane Dougherty .”
    In publicist Jet Fore’s workday, being interrupted by Norma Jeane was coming to be no rare thing. “I shared an office at Fox with two other guys,” he would later remember. “We were the ‘planters’ who handled the main contacts between the studio and the press. Sort of the hub of the department. So Norma Jeane would come in there all the time—every day. Often she’d be wearing this low-cut, polkadot dress, and she’d bend over our desks on purpose with those beautiful breasts of hers. Sure, she was selling herself, so to speak. And it was a great sell.” The three men, in fact, couldn’t bring themselves to take her to task for consuming too much of their valuable time.
    As to her name, Jet Fore agreed with the folks downstairs in Casting. Norma Jeane made her sound too much like some kid fresh off the farm back in Indiana. The man in charge of new talent, Ben Lyon, had already dreamed up a more professional-sounding designation for her: Carole Lind . But they’d been trying this out, and the consensus was that something about this new name too still missed the mark.
    “Do you have any ideas?” Jet Fore now asked Norma Jeane.
    “Well,” she essayed in a sweetly hesitant tone, “my grandfather Monroe was related to the president—James Monroe. I’d like to keep that for a last name, and they sort of like it downstairs. But now they want me to come up with a first name.”
    Wheels started churning inside the publicity men’s heads. One of the three, Hugh Harrison, was muttering, “Hmmm, lemme see, uh—” when in a flash he struck upon a near rhyme with Carole Lind . “ Marilyn! How about Marilyn Monroe?”
    Norma Jeane went suddenly still. “Oh, I like that.” She paused over it another instant before saying again, “I like that!”
    Immediately, as Jet Fore would remember, Norma Jeane took the idea downstairs to Casting. In about an hour she came back, her mood exhilarated. “Hey, they loved it!” she told the three. “They thought it was great.”
    “She liked it herself,” Jet would add. “It was catchy. Marilyn Monroe .”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    Sacred Space
     
    To Aunt Grace too, Norma Jeane came directly with the heretofore-missing piece of the puzzle.
    “ Marilyn