Enrico’s Restaurant is the setting for a decisive January 1950 evening in Norma Jeane Baker’s transformation into Marilyn Monroe. At a gala following her debut, she celebrates among strangers while grieving Cass Chaplin’s absence; before the night is over, she has met V, confronted a blacklisted screenwriter’s appeal, and left the restaurant to face a crowd outside.

Setting and debut

That evening, Norma Jeane Baker repeatedly calls the house on Montezuma Drive, hearing only the empty line. She knows Cass Chaplin is angry, and understands that I.E. Shinn’s dislike of him has kept him away from both the premiere and the gala at Enrico’s Restaurant. Inside, the reception is filling with excited voices and perfume. A woman who recognizes Norma Jeane as Angela congratulates her on a striking debut; she is the wife of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executive and a former supporting actress.

The scene carries two apparently opposing moods. Norma Jeane feels that she is dying of love for Cass, yet finds herself happy among elegantly dressed strangers, drinking champagne. In a white silk-and-chiffon dress with a bridal color and a daring neckline, she appears as the newly radiant Marilyn Monroe. I.E. Shinn introduces her to producers and executives whose names she cannot retain. Enrico’s is thus both a professional reception and the place where the new screen identity is publicly affirmed.

Meeting V

V, a popular former football star from Kansas and a veteran of Paramount war films, makes his way through the crowd to meet her. Norma Jeane remembers having watched him on screen years earlier, imagining herself in the place of his romantic co-star, then chastising herself for the fantasy because she was newly married to Bucky Glazer. Now she encounters V in person, in civilian clothes rather than an Air Force uniform. Their meeting becomes one of the evening’s defining reversals: the screen figure she once watched from a distance is now beside her at the gala.

The novel frames the encounter against the apparent glamour of both guests. V is a box-office star whose private life is described through his divorce and the custody and support arrangements with his former wife; Norma Jeane is presented as a dazzling Hollywood newcomer. I.E. Shinn watches them from several yards away. The evening’s new connection with V coincides with the loss of Cass: Norma Jeane later identifies that night as the one when she met V and lost her boyfriend.

The petition and the departure

A middle-aged man approaches the pair with a petition. V steps aside, leaving Norma Jeane to face the stranger, who presses the document toward her. In the dim restaurant light, she reads that it protests the treatment of people accused of being un-American. The names of Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson head its two columns, followed by many blank lines and only a handful of signatures. The man identifies himself as a screenwriter whose films include The Young Aces; blacklisted in 1949, he has been unable to work.

I.E. Shinn has warned Norma Jeane not to sign petitions circulating in Hollywood, but she offers to sign without hesitation. Her cordial, tipsy manner gives way to indignation: she defends Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson as artists and objects to the treatment of artists by their country. V urges her not to sign, and the exchange becomes heated. When he calls her drunk, she insists that she is the only sober person in the room. The evidence shows her poised to sign, but does not establish whether she does so.

Norma Jeane runs out, fed up with the people inside and conceding that Cass had been right about them. Outside, a small crowd notices her as she tries to get into a taxi and wonders who the blonde is. She smiles in embarrassment. A man in a raincoat bumps into her, and she first wonders whether he is thrusting another petition at her; instead, he is holding an autograph book and asking for her signature. The restaurant’s threshold turns the private cost of the evening into a public image: inside, she has taken a stand and lost Cass; outside, strangers already recognize a blonde worth approaching.