Norma Jeane Glazer—Bucky Glazer

Norma Jeane Baker and Bucky Glazer’s marriage moves from a hurried promise of permanence to a separation that exposes how differently they understand love, adulthood, and freedom. For Norma Jeane, the marriage offers a home and the hope of being chosen; for Bucky, affection coexists with a longing to escape Mission Hills and the life he has known. When he leaves for the war, Norma Jeane does not follow him back into the Glazer household. She finds work and lives on her own, a change that makes the marriage’s ending inseparable from the beginning of her independent life.

Courtship and Marriage

Bucky decides to marry Norma Jeane only three weeks after meeting her. The speed belongs to a wartime world in which loss and departure are close at hand: one of his uncles has been reported missing at Corregidor, and his best friend from the Mission Hills wrestling team is now a Navy pilot making air raids in Southeast Asia. The decision is also shaped by Bucky’s preferred kind of woman. He is drawn to Norma Jeane’s tenderness, docility, and readiness to accept his account of the world, qualities he contrasts with the assertiveness he dislikes in other women. The novel thus introduces their attraction through a difference in power: his desire depends partly on her seeming to yield.

Norma Jeane accepts his proposal in tears and receives his engagement ring. In a gesture that makes the moment unusually intimate, she takes his rough hands, still carrying the smell of embalming fluid from his work, and presses them to her face. She tells him that her life is perfect. Her response transforms an odor Bucky regards as difficult to remove into something she welcomes, making affection visible as acceptance of the life and body he brings to her. The wedding at First Church of Christ in Mission Hills, California, is solemn and emotionally charged. Bucky bends down to kiss his young bride; his embrace bunches her dress between the shoulder blades and shifts her veil on its braid. Yet the description of her lips opening only slightly preserves a note of restraint within the public image of a loving union.

Names, Intimacy, and Domestic Roles

After the wedding, Norma Jeane appears under several versions of her married identity: Mrs. Bucky Glazer, Mrs. Buchanan Glazer, and Mrs. Norma Jeane Glazer. The change means more than taking a husband’s surname. The name Baker recedes so quickly that it seems almost liable to disappear from memory, while her new identity is tied to the household and to Bucky. In the same passage, she steals minutes from housework to write in a secret diary. The contrast places private authorship inside the domestic role: even as she becomes a wife who tends the home, she keeps a space for a self not wholly absorbed by that role.

From the first night, Norma Jeane calls Bucky Daddy, sometimes Big Daddy, while she takes the corresponding name Baby or Baby-Doll. Their private language gives their marriage a playful, explicitly sexual hierarchy, and Bucky takes pride in her virginity. This intimacy sits alongside the contrast in their ages—Bucky is only six years older—and the difference between his confidence in his authority and her willingness to look to him for reassurance. The marriage is affectionate, but its language repeatedly casts him as the knowing, powerful partner and her as the dependent one.

War, Separation, and Conflicting Desires

Bucky tells Norma Jeane that he has enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine and expects to ship out within about a month, probably for Australia. He insists that leaving does not mean he loves her less or is unhappy with her. He is happy in the marriage, he explains, but wants something beyond a honeymoon; the war makes service feel like a man’s duty. His explanation is not simply a rejection of Norma Jeane. It is a declaration that marriage cannot satisfy his desire to get away from Mission Hills, his parents, the Lockheed assembly line, and the embalming work he fears will define his life.

Norma Jeane receives the news with composure, telling him that she understands. They both cry, then kneel together on the uneven linoleum floor of their kitchen and pray. Bucky carries her to the bedroom, sobbing, with her arms around his neck. The scene holds tenderness and rupture together: they grieve as a couple, but his enlistment is also a way out of a life that includes their marriage. His eventual departure is made concrete in the late-April morning when the Glazers and Norma Jeane watch him board a Liberty ship bound for Australia. She wears a blue cotton dress, white heels, and a gardenia in her hair, and displays the blue star associated with the wives and mothers of servicemen. Her careful appearance becomes a token he can remember after sailing away, while the ship’s uncertain return date leaves their separation open-ended.

The night around Bucky’s decision to leave also exposes a sharper conflict over having a child. Norma Jeane approaches him in bed wanting to conceive; he pushes her away and tells her to let him sleep before his early work shift. His response opposes her urgent desire for a child to his need for rest and his resistance to being pulled further into domestic life. The scene gives the marriage’s emotional divide a physical form: one partner reaches for a future that would bind them more closely, while the other recoils.

Independence and the Marriage’s End

A week after Bucky leaves, Norma Jeane does not return to the Glazer home in Mission Hills or remain at Verdugo Gardens. She takes a job on the assembly line at Radio Plane Aircraft in Burbank, about thirty kilometers east of Mission Hills, and rents a furnished room near the tram stop. By her eighteenth birthday she is living on her own. Her exhaustion and disorientation do not cancel the force of the change: she is no longer a minor under the Los Angeles County social service department’s guardianship.

In that new circumstance, Norma Jeane wonders whether marrying Bucky was part of how she reached this point. The thought is presented as a question, not a settled explanation for the marriage. She also begins to understand her engagement at fifteen, her departure from high school, and marriage at sixteen as the path that preceded her first experience of living alone. Independence arrives through the wartime departure that separates the spouses, even as the novel leaves open what the marriage meant in her original decision to enter it.

When Norma Jeane later visits Gladys, she says that she is no longer married. She explains that she and Bucky were too young and that he decided he no longer wanted the marriage; her left hand, visibly trembling and now without rings, gives the account a physical marker of its end. She had loved him deeply, she admits, though that love seemed to dissolve inexplicably. Bucky, the only time they saw each other after his discharge, reacts to her changed appearance with hurt and bitterness, asking what she is trying to become and saying that he feels ashamed before his relatives. The Glazers’ family history, in which divorce has never occurred, sharpens his sense of rejection. Their later exchange shows the marriage ending not in a shared account of what failed, but in incompatible meanings: for Norma Jeane, a love that has vanished; for Bucky, a personal and familial humiliation.