Buchanan Glazer

Buchanan Glazer, usually called Bucky, is the athletic young man who marries Norma Jeane Baker in 1942, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. At twenty-one, he is already working two jobs and imagining a future in the armed forces; she is fifteen when they meet. Their courtship moves from instant attraction to marriage in less than a month, under the pressure of wartime uncertainty. His story is therefore both a first-love romance and an early collision between intimate promises and the claims of a larger historical moment.

Background and Character

Bucky has the imposing build of an athlete: he stands six feet four inches tall and weighs about two hundred pounds. At Mission Hills High School he excelled in wrestling, football, and track, but disliked classrooms, textbooks, and the long hours spent at a desk. Although several universities offered him scholarships, he turned them down, preferring to earn his living and become independent of his family. His refusal of college sits alongside a practical competence: he can handle mathematics, radios, and maps, and he has the physical and sporting experience he believes could make him useful in military training.

Before the marriage, Bucky works part-time as an assistant embalmer at a funeral home in Mission Hills, a job that makes his hands carry the persistent smell of embalming fluid. He also works nights on the assembly line at Lockheed, helping build B-17 aircraft. The two jobs place him between death and wartime production: by day or morning he helps prepare the dead, while at night he contributes to machines intended for combat. His family takes pride in his funeral-home position, which they regard as a step on a professional ladder, even as Bucky’s own ambition points toward service in the war.

Courtship and Marriage

Bucky initially agrees to meet Norma Jeane because refusing would mean enduring the complaints and disapproving silences of his mother, Bess Glazer. He knows Norma Jeane is young, but not that she is only fifteen. When she approaches him shyly and stammers her name, he is struck both by her childlike manner and by her physical presence. An encounter he had expected to turn into a joke for his friends instead becomes the beginning of an intense attachment. He soon imagines introducing her to those friends and showing her off as his new girlfriend.

Their first meeting becomes, in Bucky’s mind, love at first sight. He later tells his Lockheed colleagues a polished version of how they met, saying that he had seen her go onstage at a cinema to receive an award. In his telling, Norma Jeane herself becomes the real prize, illuminated by the audience’s applause as if she were already a film star. The embellishment reveals how quickly he turns their private encounter into a story about her beauty and public appeal, while also making their romance part of his own self-presentation among his male coworkers.

Bucky’s ideas about marriage are shaped by a strict ideal of female sexual purity. When Bess says that her son deserves a virgin, he responds by asking how anyone could recognize one, then leaves whistling. The joke punctures his mother’s solemn authority, but his own language to colleagues also endorses the expectation that a respectable man should marry a virgin. The contradiction makes him neither simply rebellious nor simply conventional: he can mock the family’s rule in one setting while repeating its premise in another.

After about three weeks of knowing Norma Jeane, Bucky decides to marry her. The war helps make speed seem natural to him: an uncle has been reported missing at Corregidor, and a close friend from the wrestling team is now a Navy pilot on missions in Southeast Asia. Norma Jeane accepts his engagement ring, says she loves him, and takes his rough, cracked hands in hers. Rather than recoil from the embalming ointment on them, she brings them to her face and breathes in their chemical smell. Her response makes his work-worn hands part of the intimacy between them; she treats what he regards as an unpleasant stain as something precious. In that moment she declares that her life is perfect, investing the marriage with a promise of safety and belonging.

They marry on June 19, 1942, at First Church of Christ in Mission Hills, less than three weeks after Norma Jeane’s sixteenth birthday. The ceremony is attended by Bess and Elsie Pirig, who watch with smiles and tears. Norma Jeane wears a white satin gown borrowed from Bucky’s sister, Lorraine, altered to fit and carefully cleaned, with white high-heeled shoes bought secondhand in Van Nuys for five dollars. Bucky’s mother-of-pearl-colored tuxedo jacket barely accommodates his broad shoulders. The contrast between the lavish-looking bridal outfit and its borrowed and inexpensive origins underscores how the wedding’s romance is assembled from modest means as much as from ceremony.

Work, Duty, and Separation

By the winter of 1942, Bucky is increasingly restless as bad news arrives from the European and Pacific fronts. He talks about joining the Navy or Marines and sees military service as a man’s responsibility to his country. He continues to work forty hours a week at Lockheed and one or two mornings each week at McDougal Funeral Home, assisting Mr. Eeley. His funeral-home experience, athletic record, and practical skills all help him imagine a place for himself in the military. The possibility that childless married men may soon be called up makes volunteering seem preferable to waiting for conscription.

Bucky eventually tells Norma Jeane that he has enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine. He expects to be shipped out within about a month, probably to Australia, and believes that the invasion of Japan will follow and end the war. He insists that leaving does not mean he loves her less or is unhappy with her; he describes himself as happy with her, but unwilling to make the honeymoon the whole horizon of his life. His decision is presented as a choice of patriotic duty and personal ambition, not as a rejection of the marriage, though its practical effect is to separate the newlyweds.

In a mild late-April morning, Bucky, Norma Jeane, and the Glazers gather to see him depart aboard a Liberty ship bound for Australia. The terms of his service are secret, and his return on leave is not expected for at least eight months. Norma Jeane wears a blue cotton dress, white heels, and a white gardenia in her curls. She smiles and holds herself together as Bucky embraces her through tears. The flower’s fragrance becomes a private token he can carry into the shipboard world, just as the blue star she can display at home marks her as a soldier’s wife. The farewell gives their short courtship a new form: the shared certainty of marriage remains, but daily closeness is replaced by distance and an uncertain reunion.

Narrative Role and Significance

Bucky’s importance lies in the speed with which he offers Norma Jeane the ordinary security she longs for and in the speed with which wartime duty takes him away. His athletic body and protective image make him seem suited to the role of husband and defender, while his demanding work and enlistment show that his life is already directed beyond the home. The marriage begins with a promise of perfect happiness, but its first major test is separation rather than domestic conflict. Through Bucky, the novel connects Norma Jeane’s adolescent hope for lasting belonging to the wider wartime world, where love can be sincere and still be interrupted by service, danger, and distance.