Norma Jeane undergoes an abortion

Norma Jeane Baker undergoes an abortion after Mr. Z directs her to his assistant Yvet, who arranges a clinic visit and assures her that the procedure will be safe. The episode turns that promise of orderly medical care into a scene of panic and fractured perception: Norma Jeane begs for the operation to stop, flees the table, and imagines finding the unborn child as the procedure continues. Its starkest contrast comes at the end, when she appears perfectly made up and dressed for a musical number, ready to resume her public role as Marilyn Monroe.

The decision and its arrangements

The scene begins after I Cipressi and Lakewood, following a night of turbulent dreams. Norma Jeane has reached the point of deciding what must be done, but the decision does not settle her fear. She calls Mr. Z, whom she has not spoken to since the premiere, explains the situation, and begins to cry. His silence seems troubled to her; the narration instead presents it as practical, the silence of someone who has heard similar pleas before and recognizes a familiar script.

Mr. Z tells her to trust Yvet. Norma Jeane does not know the name, but remembers Yvet from the Aviary, where she had once turned away with an expression of pity and contempt and directed Norma Jeane toward a bathroom. The memory carries the shame of that earlier encounter into the present arrangement. Yvet, once associated with humiliation, is now the person assigned to manage the crisis.

On the telephone, Yvet addresses her as Marilyn, the name that belongs to her at the Studio and in film credits. She promises to organize everything, collect Norma Jeane at eight the next morning, and take her to a clinic on Wilshire Boulevard. She insists that it is a proper clinic, not a back-room operation, and describes a qualified doctor, a trained nurse, time to rest, and medication for pain. Her assurances acknowledge that pain will not disappear altogether, but frame it as limited and temporary. Norma Jeane agrees. No one calls to cancel the arrangement.

The clinic and the loss of control

On the morning of the procedure, Norma Jeane wakes drenched in sweat and takes codeine. She continues to tell the people around her that she has made a mistake and does not want the operation. The bright lights acquire an ominous meaning: she tries to explain them to herself as sterilizing lights, the sort used to reduce infection. The doctor is supposedly on a day off, and the scene places the machinery of her care alongside the ordinary arrangements of his life. To the people in the room, the procedure remains manageable; to Norma Jeane, it is becoming impossible to endure.

The Studio’s financial interest is part of the reassurance. Mr. Z has said she is in good hands, and the narration emphasizes that a multimillion-dollar investment will not be left unprotected. As Marilyn Monroe, she is supposedly safe from risks the Studio can prevent. Yvet’s sing-song reassurance about helpful hands makes this confidence sound less like comfort than a rehearsed performance. When her protests fail, Norma Jeane tries on the playful voice of Lorelei Lee, turning the fear into a joke about the room breaking into song and dance. The shift does not persuade the doctor, who is described as capable of smiling but does not smile.

The doctor calls her by an endearment rather than by name, which briefly reassures her that he has not recognized the famous patient. She is naked beneath a thin gown and trembling. As she is placed on the table, the paper sheet rustles beneath her; in her terror, she urinates, and the staff clean her without comment before positioning her feet in the stirrups. Her fear is made physical and specific: she clenches her fists, bites her lip, and pleads not to be looked at or photographed.

Panic, flight, and the imagined child

The medical contact opens onto memories and associations that make the procedure feel like a repetition of earlier violations. Norma Jeane imagines the cadavers Bucky Glazer had worked on, though he had never let her see them, and dwells on their sunken eyes and yielding skin. The doctor’s gloved fingers become invasive in her perception, recalling the brief, furtive touch of Clive Pearce. The narration also recalls the advice of Elsie Pirig that sex could be endured by keeping away from it: Norma Jeane had often responded by lying still, smiling, and offering herself in the hope of pleasing a man. Against that learned passivity, the Ex-Atleta’s tenderness had once seemed startling, while I Gemelli had made a joke of her sexual uncertainty. These memories crowd the procedure rather than explaining it away; her body is caught between old strategies of submission and a desperate attempt to refuse.

The doctor warns her to keep still and prepares her for an injection that will make her drowsy. Norma Jeane pushes the hands away and insists that there has been a mistake. The lights become so overpowering that she imagines she has travelled into a future where the sun fills the sky. Then she gets off the table and runs barefoot from the room. The action briefly restores the possibility of escape: she is moving, and the operation may not yet be too late.

Her flight passes into a vision in which the faces of Mary Pickford, Lew Ayres, and Charlie Chaplin appear familiar, and Charlie Chaplin becomes, in her imagination, her true father. She enters the room associated with Gladys Mortensen, forbidden to her but now apparently empty of Gladys. There she finds a desk and struggles to pull open a stuck drawer. Inside, she sees the child moving its hands and feet, gasping for breath as the procedure and its consequences intrude into the vision. The image of the speculum entering her body and the child’s single cry fuse the physical event with her imagined search. The passage does not offer a detached clinical account; it renders the loss through the terror of a mother reaching too late for a living child.

Return to the set

The episode cuts from the clinic’s exposed body to the finished image of the star. After being called, Norma Jeane has sat for three quarters of an hour in her dressing room, fully coiffed and made up, wearing a pink silk dress, long gloves, and stage jewelry. The scene lingers on the polished appearance prepared for the camera as she is summoned to perform Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. Her return to work makes the gap between Marilyn Monroe and the frightened patient unmistakable: the public persona is ready on schedule, even as the private experience remains unresolved.

That abrupt transition is the event’s governing contradiction. Yvet and Mr. Z treat the procedure as a problem to arrange and contain, while the narrative presents a person whose consent collapses into pleas, bodily panic, escape, and a vision of the child’s death. The set does not pause for that experience. The transformation back into costume and performance therefore functions less as recovery than as a forced resumption of the identity through which the Studio recognizes and protects its investment.