1962

1962 is a year of apparent renewal and heightened exposure in the novel: Marilyn Monroe takes possession of a house of her own while an anonymous summons draws her toward an appointment with the President. The year’s episodes are framed by the longer history of her image, first circulated through wartime publicity and later subject to scandal and commercial exploitation.

A public image formed before the year

The novel’s account of 1962 carries the weight of an image built long before it. In December 1944, Buchanan Glazer was serving aboard the Liberty when he found Norma Jeane’s photograph in Stars and Stripes. The magazine showed her at work assembling aircraft fuselages at Radio Plane Aircraft in Burbank, where she worked nine-hour days and took pride in contributing to the war effort. The caption identified her as Glazer’s wife, stationed in the South Pacific; aboard ship, the sailors’ teasing and their rush to seize the magazine made her image at once a source of his pride and a public object to be inspected.

That public visibility later became part of Marilyn Monroe’s professional ascent. Otto öse’s photographs helped bring her to the attention of I. E. Shinn and the Studio, although her first film appearance was reduced to a few distant seconds in a bucolic comedy with June Haver. A nude photograph Otto öse had taken years earlier was eventually published on the front page of the Hollywood Tatler, turning an old image into a fresh scandal. These episodes establish the tension surrounding the 1962 scenes: Monroe’s public identity could be renewed, traded on, and exposed independently of her control.

A house of her own

On Valentine’s Day 1962, Monroe wrote to her mother that she had just taken possession of her new home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood and was furnishing it. Her letter conveys uncomplicated happiness at this concrete change: she has a place of her own and is beginning to make it hers. Set beside the pressures attached to her public image, the domestic news marks a personal beginning, though the evidence does not suggest that a new address can resolve the difficulties surrounding her life.

The Palm Springs encounter

In March 1962, at Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs, a well-dressed intermediary identified Monroe to the President, who was impressed by the blonde woman and asked whether she was Marilyn Monroe. The intermediary confirmed her identity and described her as a friend of a female acquaintance, adding a dismissive judgment about her state of mind. The President then asked whether he had already been out with her. The exchange presents Monroe as both unmistakably famous and strangely uncertain in the President’s recollection: her celebrity is immediately recognizable, but the nature and history of their contact remain a question even to him.

The summons after Easter

In the week after Easter, a summons arrived for Monroe. An anonymous male caller had instructed her not to dress conspicuously, and a sequence of messages had included both explicit and coded communication. She understood the prospect as the most exciting and intense adventure of her life as a woman and prepared for it herself, without makeup artists or costumers. She bought a cream-and-dark-brown cashmere dress on credit at Saks in Beverly Hills, covered her newly treated platinum hair with an elegant cloche hat, and chose conspicuous lipstick, in the style of Lorelei Lee, while intending to appear composed and controlled as befitted a friend of the President. The account records her anticipation and careful preparation, not the outcome of the appointment. In 1962, the promise of entry into the President’s private orbit thus remains entangled with the scrutiny and staging that have long shaped Monroe’s public life.