Norma Jeane Baker's identification with the role of Cherie

Norma Jeane Baker’s identification with Cherie in Bus Stop is more than an actor’s affinity for a part: she insists that her characters are living people within her, and that Cherie deserves protection from the ridicule directed at Marilyn Monroe. The identification gives her a role she can finally choose and inhabit on her own terms, but it also sharpens the division between the character she loves, the star she resents, and the woman she sees in the mirror.

Cherie as a Part of the Self

When asked what frightened her, Norma Jeane answers that she is afraid of Cherie. The fear does not mean that she dislikes the role. She immediately clarifies that she adores Cherie and considers her herself. The exchange makes the identification intimate and unstable at once: Cherie is not simply a fictional woman Norma Jeane performs, but neither can she comfortably be reduced to the whole of Norma Jeane’s identity. When someone tells her that Cherie is only one part of her, Norma Jeane doubts that there is anything more beyond that part.

She rejects the reassurance that Cherie and Magda are merely characters. They are inside her, she says; they are characters, but also real people living in the world. This claim describes her acting as an imaginative relation that crosses the boundary between performance and personhood. It also explains why laughter at a character can feel, to Norma Jeane, like an injury to someone she knows and loves, rather than an ordinary judgment of a fictional role.

Defending Cherie from Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane’s affection for Cherie becomes a defense of the character against the comparison with Marilyn Monroe. She recalls that people laugh at Cherie for being a failure who cannot sing or dance, and objects that the audience treats its judgment as a right. More painful still, she believes Cherie is mocked because people measure her against Marilyn. Norma Jeane wants to protect Cherie from that supposedly superior public image, not to make Cherie more like it.

The contrast exposes a conflict inside the star persona. Marilyn Monroe is a name and public identity that others may treat as the successful standard, while Cherie is the supposedly untalented, hopeful figure whose vulnerability Norma Jeane recognizes and values. Norma Jeane says she likes Cherie intensely and does not like Marilyn Monroe. The opposition is not a simple rejection of acting: her attachment to Cherie is itself expressed through an actor’s deep engagement with a role. Rather, she resists the idea that a marketable persona should determine which characters—and which versions of herself—deserve respect.

Choosing and Inhabiting the Role

The production of Bus Stop begins in an almost magical state of concentration. Norma Jeane understands herself successively as Norma Jeane, Marilyn Monroe, and Cherie, becoming Cherie down to the ends of her hair. Her training with the New York Ensemble of Theatre Artists has taught her to work through the Method and to draw performance from the self shaped by memory. She knows Cherie closely, even down to the repairs in the character’s shabby, ingenuous singer’s costumes.

That knowledge connects Cherie to Norma Jeane’s earlier experience of presenting herself for others. The passage recalls her work as a model and promotional beauty contestant, where she smiled to attract affection and attention and to be cast. Until Bus Stop, she had not felt able to choose her film role in the same way. The studio had assigned roles to her, leaving her, in the book’s image, like a person forced to accept whatever was imposed. With Cherie, she believes she can make the audience love the character and break its heart. The distinction is consequential: she is no longer only trying to be selected for her appearance, but claiming authority over what a performance can mean.

Her concentration draws on Max Pearlman’s acting principles, which urge her to go deeper. An earlier production had already shown how completely she could disappear into a role: while playing Nell in La tua bocca brucia, she barely noticed I. E. Shinn or the observers on set, hid between takes, avoided interviews, and left other actors unsure how to approach her. Shinn advised her not to be so intense. That earlier response supplies a contrast for Bus Stop, where immersion is not merely an excess noticed by others but a source of artistic satisfaction and self-belief.

The Role and the Fracturing Mirror

The exhilaration of playing Cherie does not resolve Norma Jeane’s divided sense of self. She tells her beloved that something is wrong but cannot bring herself to explain that each day it takes longer for her Magic Friend to emerge from the mirror. The mirror had once seemed to answer readily: as a young woman, she needed only to look into it; as a model, she could follow the photographer’s direction and pose; as an early-career actress, preparing in her dressing room was enough to release the transformation before the camera.

Through that earlier ease, she had become Nell, Rose, Lorelei Lee, and the Girl Upstairs. The account links these transformations to an acting process in which a borrowed body takes on new life, and presents the Girl Upstairs on the subway grate as a role she could inhabit fully despite the former baseball star’s distress at the scene. Bus Stop marks a disturbing reversal. Although Norma Jeane considers Cherie her finest film role and the beginning of a genuine acting career, she is anxious, frightened, and increasingly late to morning filming. In the mirror she sees Norma Jeane rather than Marilyn Monroe, with yellowish skin, bloodshot eyes, and swelling beginning around her mouth; she also hears a man’s mocking laugh and the insult of a pathetic dog.

The relation between Norma Jeane and Cherie therefore holds both creative freedom and vulnerability. Cherie gives Norma Jeane a chosen character to champion against the contempt surrounding Marilyn Monroe, and a performance in which she can believe in her own abilities. Yet the difficulty of bringing Marilyn Monroe out of the mirror continues to grow, even as acting once allowed her to pass among identities with apparent ease. The character is neither a cure for that division nor merely its symptom: she is someone Norma Jeane loves, inhabits, and tries to shield from a public judgment that, in Norma Jeane’s experience, also threatens the self behind the star.