Norma Jeane—Sidney Haring

Norma Jeane Baker—Sidney Haring is an old teacher-student attachment that returns to view when Haring recognizes his former pupil in a revealing magazine photograph. The encounter does not reunite them; instead, it exposes the cost of the distance Haring had considered proper. He tells himself that he could not have changed her course, yet his furtive care in preserving the image gives his regret a physical form.

Identity and Early Connection

Haring had known Norma Jeane when she was about fifteen. He was already married, had two young children, and understood that his family depended on him. In his later recollection, she belongs to a wider group of vulnerable girls who entered his classroom: orphans, foster children, and adolescents deprived of an ordinary childhood, seeking guidance and affection from a comparatively young male teacher. He recognizes the particular power that position gave him, even as he insists that he must not touch his pupils or risk his job.

His explanation is shaped by the language of duty. He had a wife and children to care for; he could not rescue every girl who needed comfort. Norma Jeane, he thought, had no one: her mother was ill and her father, as Haring understood it, was dead. He calls her condition a sign of destiny, turning the circumstances that made her vulnerable into a reason to stand aside. The contradiction is central to the remembered relationship: Haring describes the girls’ need for love with clarity, but casts his own withdrawal as the only responsible choice.

Recognition in Pageant

In February 1945, Haring confiscated a copy of Pageant from a group of smirking students during a literature class at Van Nuys High School. He initially threw it into a desk drawer without looking at it. Later, alone in the classroom, he retrieved it and turned to the page the students had marked. The photograph showed Norma Jeane in heavy makeup and a suggestive pose, wearing a sheer, mid-thigh nightdress and high heels, with a cloth panda held between her breasts. Haring recognized her immediately.

His response is not detached professional concern. He looks at the full-page photograph repeatedly, his vision clouded, and feels himself flush with shame. He thinks the shame is deserved because he had not saved her, although he immediately disputes what that could have meant: he might have tried harder, warned her against marrying so young, or acted if she had been pregnant or forced into marriage. Each possibility opens onto another limit. He was married; he had met her as a child; and, he argues, there was nothing he could have done that he had not done. His conclusion that keeping his distance was the right course does not quiet his remorse.

Guilt, Secrecy, and the Poems

Haring’s guilt is bound up with the carefulness of his response to the magazine. After the school day has ended, he glances toward the classroom door in case a student or colleague might see him. He tears out the photograph without creasing it, puts the rest of the magazine in a used envelope, and drops it in the wastebasket so the custodian will not become curious. Then he opens the lowest desk drawer and slips the page into the folder where he keeps poems Norma Jeane had written for him.

The folder makes the relationship legible in two different forms. The magazine photograph belongs to her public exposure: her face and body are presented for strangers to inspect. The poems, by contrast, preserve an earlier, private address to Haring. One surviving fragment connects the possibility of not being cast down with allowing oneself to be loved. Set beside his recollection of her as a girl seeking comfort, it gives his self-accusation a particular edge: he had kept evidence of her affection, but remembers having chosen not to intervene. The narrative does not establish what practical action would have been possible; it shows instead that he cannot make his certainty of having done the right thing agree with his shame.

A Pupil’s Later Visibility

Haring’s discovery occurs amid a change in the scale and meaning of Norma Jeane’s visibility. A December 1944 issue of Stars and Stripes had featured her as a wartime worker at Radio Plane Aircraft in Burbank, California. Its account described her nine-hour workday and pride in contributing to the war effort, and identified her as the wife of sailor Buchanan Glazer, then stationed in the South Pacific. When Glazer saw the page aboard the Liberty, he recognized his wife and reacted with astonishment; his shipmates teased him over the picture and the misspelling of his surname. This earlier public image already made Norma Jeane visible to strangers, though as a worker and serviceman’s wife rather than as the provocative figure Haring would find in Pageant.

Later, photographer Otto Öse’s nude photograph of Norma Jeane, taken years before, appeared on the front page of the popular newspaper Hollywood Tatler under a headline asking whether Marilyn Monroe had posed for a calendar. Norma Jeane had previously refused Öse’s offers while she still hoped to build a film career; he had helped her gain an important agent and a studio contract, but her first film appearance had been cut almost entirely from the finished picture. These developments do not show Haring participating in the manufacture or circulation of her image. Their relevance to his relationship is the contrast they sharpen: he privately keeps a picture that turns his former pupil into a spectacle, together with poems that retain her earlier, intimate voice.

The Relationship’s Unresolved Meaning

Haring’s recollection neither supplies a reunion nor converts his regret into a rescuing act. Its focus is the late moment of recognition and the inward argument that follows: he sees the girl he knew in a public image, recalls the choices he made, and preserves the page without showing it to anyone. His explanations protect the identity of a husband, father, and teacher who believes he observed necessary boundaries; his shame registers the emotional remainder those boundaries did not resolve.

The stored photograph and poems therefore do not offer a simple answer about what Haring owed Norma Jeane. They make visible the imbalance between his remembered private authority as her teacher and her subsequent exposure to public scrutiny. He had once possessed the position to offer guidance, and later possesses only an image and a folder of her words. The relationship endures in that uneasy archive: not as proof that he could have changed her fate, but as evidence that he continued to question the distance he had called right.