Burbank

Burbank is the setting for Norma Jeane Baker’s first independent life: after Bucky Glazer departs with the Liberty, she moves there, takes an assembly-line job, and supports herself in a rented room. The city’s factory and boardinghouse mark a sharp change from her life as a dependent child and young wife, while the isolation of her new surroundings also leaves old fears close at hand.

Work and independence

Norma Jeane does not return to the Glazer household in Mission Hills, California, or remain at Verdugo Gardens. The week after Bucky’s departure, she secures a position at Radio Plane Aircraft in Burbank, about thirty kilometers east of Mission Hills. By her eighteenth birthday she is living on her own. The factory is therefore more than a workplace: it gives her wages and a daily routine outside the roles of daughter, foster child, daughter-in-law, and wife.

Getting hired takes persistence. Other small factories turn her away for lack of experience and because she is too young; Radio Plane Aircraft initially refuses her as well. She keeps asking for an opportunity, stretching onto her toes and straightening her back as she insists that she is strong enough for the work. Once hired, she quickly adapts to the repetitive assembly line. The account describes her returning by tram after an eight-hour shift, counting the day’s earnings—about seven dollars after taxes and deductions—as money that belongs to her. A later magazine caption describes her as working nine hours a day and identifies her station as the fuselage assembly room.

The rented room

Her furnished room is near a tram stop, in a boardinghouse where she shares a bathroom with two other lodgers. The cramped, unfamiliar space is nevertheless a source of exhilaration: there, she is alone for the first time not as an orphan or a child placed in care, but as a young worker. The room gives practical shape to the independence her wages make possible. After work she can heat canned soup, eat bread with jam or fruit, and fall onto a narrow cot, without preparing a large meal for a husband.

That solitude is not uncomplicated. In the quiet room, the Magic Friend in the mirror is among the presences awaiting her. When exhaustion does not keep dreams away, she wanders through the orphanage corridors, recalls its sandy yard and swing, and searches in her sleep for the place where she and her mother once lived. Burbank’s rented room becomes the present-day setting from which these earlier experiences return: physical independence has begun, but the past has not been left behind.

Factory image and public reach

The Burbank workplace also enters the story through a wartime magazine image. A December 1944 issue of Stars and Stripes presents Norma Jeane at Radio Plane Aircraft, proud of contributing to the war effort, and identifies her as the wife of Buchanan Glaser, then stationed in the South Pacific. The caption records her liking for difficult work; the photograph turns the factory worker into a publicly circulated image. For Bucky, encountering that image aboard the Liberty makes the distance between his absent wife and the woman displayed in the magazine suddenly visible. Burbank is thus both the place where Norma Jeane earns a measure of self-sufficiency and the workplace through which her likeness reaches an audience beyond the factory.