Bucky shows photos of Norma Jeane to his Lockheed coworkers

Bucky Glazer’s display of photographs at Lockheed turns private images into a public test of possession. He expects his coworkers to admire Norma Jeane and congratulate him; instead, Bob Mitchum destroys the prints. Bucky leaves with the negatives and the conviction that Norma Jeane remains his to claim, even as the scene reveals how readily her image can be separated from her control.

The Display at Lockheed

Bucky selected about half a dozen photographs in which Norma Jeane appeared especially sensual and proudly showed them to his Lockheed coworkers. The images showed her in black lace lingerie and a copper-red wig styled after Rita Hayworth. Amid the factory noise, he raised his voice to insist that the display remain confidential. His colleagues responded with excitement and astonishment, treating the photographs as a spectacle and teasing Bucky about his good fortune in having Norma Jeane as his wife.

The scene makes the supposed secrecy part of the performance. Bucky asks his coworkers to keep the images to themselves while deliberately bringing them into a crowded workplace. His pride depends on other people seeing what he presents as his private advantage. The photographs do not simply reveal Norma Jeane to the group; they allow Bucky to fashion himself, in their eyes, as the fortunate husband.

Mitchum’s Intervention

Bob Mitchum did not join in the coworkers’ admiring response. After quickly looking through the photographs, he confronted Bucky over showing his wife’s images around and tore the prints into pieces before Bucky could stop him. The gesture abruptly reverses the scene: what Bucky had offered as a source of admiration becomes an object of reproach and destruction.

Bucky and Mitchum would have come to blows if the foreman had not been nearby. Bucky walked away mortified and furious. He interpreted Mitchum’s response as envy, reasoning that Mitchum was an aspiring actor who would never escape the assembly line. That self-justification protects Bucky from the possibility that Mitchum objected to the way he had treated Norma Jeane’s photographs. The scene leaves the coworkers’ earlier approval unsettled by a visible act of refusal.

The Negatives and the Power of the Image

Although Mitchum destroys the prints, Bucky retains the negatives. His private satisfaction at keeping them turns the apparent loss into a continuing hold over the images. The scene closes not with reconciliation or a change in his attitude, but with Bucky’s conviction that he still has both the negatives and Norma Jeane. The distinction between the destroyed copies and the surviving negatives gives the episode its lasting imbalance: the public display has been interrupted, but the source of the images remains with him.

Elsewhere, the novel presents Norma Jeane’s relationship with the camera as instinctive and intimate: she seems to encounter her own reflection in its lens, and that photographic self-image can feel more powerful than a human relationship. In the Lockheed episode, however, it is Bucky who controls the circulation of the photographs. The contrast places her experience of the camera beside his use of her image as a possession to exhibit.

Later Circulation and Significance

The novel also describes a separate nude-calendar photograph, published under the name Miss Sogni d’Oro, that a reporter identified as Norma Jeane. The image had appeared in a 1950 calendar, and a later reprint in Playboy brought renewed attention. Norma Jeane said she had not authorized either publication and could do nothing because the negative and image rights were not hers. The evidence does not establish that this was one of the photographs Bucky showed at Lockheed; rather, the episodes trace a wider pattern in which images of Norma Jeane circulate beyond her control.

That pattern gives the Lockheed display significance beyond Bucky’s quarrel with Mitchum. His coworkers’ excitement, Mitchum’s destruction of the prints, and Bucky’s retention of the negatives are competing responses to the same fact: Norma Jeane’s image has become something others can show, judge, and claim. The episode anticipates the later public scandal surrounding her photographs while keeping its focus on the private act that begins this particular chain of display and possession.