Mr. Haring

Mr. Haring is Norma Jeane Baker’s former English teacher, a figure whose significance lies in the care she hoped he had felt for her and the recognition he never actually gave. Her memories make him both a possible rescuer in dreams and a possible stranger in a theater, setting the abandoned student she remembers against the famous woman she has become.

Identity and Background

Mr. Haring taught English to Norma Jeane Baker before she left school. She remembers him as an older teacher who had once regarded her as one of his best students and as someone with evident promise. The evidence establishes that he did not later contact her: after she left school, he never sought her out, and after she became Marilyn Monroe, he did not write to her.

That silence is central to how she recalls him. Norma Jeane Baker wonders whether he was proud of her, or whether he, like her former husband, had come to feel ashamed of her. The questions expose her uncertainty about how the people who knew her before fame might judge the person she became; they do not establish what Mr. Haring thought.

The Teacher Who Never Came

In dreams, Mr. Haring returns to the Pirig home and asks to speak with Norma Jeane Baker. The imagined encounter gives him the initiative he lacked in waking life: he challenges her for leaving school without first speaking to him, while acknowledging her ability and promising future. In this recurring alternative, the teacher notices her absence and insists that her education and potential mattered.

The dreamed reprimand cannot undo his actual silence. Back in Van Nuys, passing the high school, Norma Jeane Baker feels a small pang as she remembers that Mr. Haring never came to find her. She imagines telling him that she had cared for him, then doubts that he had ever cared for her. The imagined exchange feels to her like a scene from a film, yet she cannot find words that would make it convincing: her adolescent desperation remains difficult to express even in retrospect.

The Uncertain Sighting

Years later, while watching a film at the Sepulveda Theatre, Norma Jeane Baker notices a solitary man a couple of seats away. His delicate features and thinning hair remind her of Mr. Haring. She does not look closely enough to confirm his identity, deciding that if it is really her former teacher, they will recognize each other by the end of the film; if not, they will not.

The possibility of recognition is unsettled on both sides. Norma Jeane Baker wonders whether he would recognize his former pupil in Marilyn Monroe on the screen, and whether she herself would recognize him after so many years. The scene offers no confirmation that the man is Mr. Haring and no reunion between them. Instead, the resemblance brings her former teacher into the audience’s darkness as an uncertain witness to the transformation from schoolgirl to star.

Narrative Significance

Mr. Haring’s appearances are shaped by absence and uncertainty. In the dream, he supplies the attention and intervention Norma Jeane Baker wishes had come from an adult who knew her promise; in the theater, even his identity is uncertain. Neither memory grants her the recognition she seeks. The contrast makes him less a developed participant in her later life than a figure through whom the novel gives form to her lingering questions about being remembered, valued, and seen beneath the public image of Marilyn Monroe.