Norma Jeane’s abortion is a pivotal event in which a medical procedure arranged through Mr. Z’s office becomes inseparable from Norma Jeane’s experience of fear, bodily exposure, and loss. The narrative first shows her being directed toward a clinic as though the arrangements were settled, then returns to the procedure through a fragmented, hallucinatory recollection. Her remembered escape from the operating table does not undo the abortion: its painful aftermath and Cass Chaplin’s response establish that it occurred. The episode’s force lies in that contrast between an operation treated by others as manageable business and a patient who tries, too late, to stop it.

Decision and Arrangements

The decision comes after the visit to I Cipressi, after Lakewood, and after a night of turbulent dreams. Norma Jeane calls Mr. Z, to whom she has not spoken since the premiere, explains her situation, and breaks down in tears. He listens. His silence seems to her troubled, but the narration distinguishes her interpretation from the practical response he has already given in comparable situations: he tells her to put herself in Yvet’s hands. The referral turns an intensely personal crisis into an arrangement handled by the Studio’s assistant.

Yvet is not a new figure in Norma Jeane’s memory. She recalls her from the Aviary, years earlier, before the name Marilyn was imposed on her, and remembers her looking away with an expression of pity and contempt. The earlier encounter makes the brisk telephone call resonate with an older humiliation. Yet Yvet now addresses her as Marilyn, the name by which she is known at the Studio and in film credits, and promises to arrange everything. She will collect Norma Jeane at eight the next morning and take her to a clinic on Wilshire.

Yvet specifically counters the frightening picture Norma Jeane might have formed: this will not be a dirty back-room procedure, she says in effect, but a proper clinic with a qualified doctor and a trained nurse. Norma Jeane can stay for the day, rest, sleep, and receive something for the pain. Yvet does not promise that she will feel nothing; she says there will be some pain, but describes it as limited and temporary, with a return to full health expected. The reassurance is both practical and incomplete: it explains the planned care without preparing Norma Jeane for the terror with which she experiences it. No one calls the arrangement off. The next morning arrives without the reversal she might have hoped for.

The Procedure and the Attempt to Refuse

The later recollection places the procedure in a room associated with the doctor’s work. It is officially his day off; later that morning he is due to play golf with Bing Crosby. The banal detail sits beside Norma Jeane’s escalating distress. After waking drenched in sweat, she has taken two or three codeine pills and keeps trying to explain that she has changed her mind and does not want the operation. The room’s bright lights, she tells herself, are for sterilization and infection control, but the rational explanation does not quiet her fear.

The reassurance she has been given is that she is in good hands and that Mr. Z has guaranteed her safety. Her value to the Studio is invoked as protection: an investment worth millions, the narrative makes clear, will not be exposed to a risk the Studio cannot prevent. Yvet hums a little song about good hands lifting a person’s spirits and never hurting her. When her protests fail to change what is happening, Norma Jeane shifts into the comic, sensual voice of Lorelei Lee, predicting that the people around her will start singing and dancing. The performance does not stop the procedure; it briefly gives her a familiar role to inhabit as the adults proceed.

The doctor does not recognize the famous patient, and the narration presents that anonymity as a small relief. He calls her “My dear,” without using a name. Yet the relief cannot counter the physical scene: Norma Jeane is naked beneath a thin gown, trembling, and placed on a paper-covered table with her feet in the stirrups. Her fear becomes so acute that she urinates on herself; the staff clean her without comment. She imagines the bodies Bucky Glazer handled in his work, although she had never seen the corpses, and the association deepens her sense of bodily vulnerability. She begs the people in the room not to look at her and not to take photographs.

The procedure also recalls earlier experiences of sexual passivity and violation. Norma Jeane remembers having learned to keep her distance during sex, remaining still and compliant, and contrasts that pattern with the tenderness she had found in the Ex-Athlete. Here, however, she cannot make herself distant from what is happening. The doctor’s examination feels invasive; codeine dulls the pain without making her feel safe. As an injection is given to make her drowsy, she insists that there has been a mistake, pushes away the gloved hands, and cries that she is not herself. She gets down from the table and runs barefoot from the room.

The Imagined Escape and the Confirmed Aftermath

The escape unfolds into a rescue that the narrative renders with dreamlike force. Norma Jeane runs up a flight of stairs and enters a room where she sees familiar faces, including Mary Pickford, Lew Ayres, and Charlie Chaplin. She thinks of Charlie as her real father. In an adjoining room she finds Gladys’s desk and struggles to open a drawer. Inside is a small creature, moving its hands and feet and trying to draw breath. At the same time, the procedure continues in the remembered scene: the instrument enters her body, blood appears, and she hears the creature cry once.

The scene does not present this rescue as a literal reversal of the operation. Instead, the sudden movement from the clinic to the familiar faces and the opened drawer makes her wish to save the child part of the traumatic recollection itself. The single cry gives the loss a distinct, devastating image, while the repeated attempt to refuse the procedure preserves the difference between the decision made for her and the choice she tries to reclaim. The event is narrated through Norma Jeane’s fractured perception, not as a calm clinical account.

The aftermath confirms that the abortion was completed. Later, Norma Jeane refers to the operation as something she prefers to call the Operation, and remembers that urination has become hot and painful. When she learns of the abortion, Cass Chaplin tells her not to blame the other woman and places the blame on Norma Jeane. His response adds judgment to her physical suffering; it does not offer comfort or share the burden of the loss.

Recurrence on the Film Set

The memory returns while Norma Jeane is at work. In a later scene, she has been sitting in her dressing room for three quarters of an hour, perfectly made up and dressed in a pink silk gown, long gloves, and stage jewelry, absorbed before the mirror. Someone calls that it is time for her to perform “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The transition from the recollection of the operating room to the polished film image sets the demands of performance beside an experience that cannot be made painless by appearance or professional reassurance.

Her bodily vulnerability follows her into public life. In a women’s restroom, she flushes twice to cover the sound of urination, worries that Jewell may recognize her, and wonders whether recognizing Marilyn would mean recognizing Norma Jeane inside her. The operation thus persists not only as remembered terror but as pain, embarrassment, and a renewed split between the woman and the role through which she is known. Its significance rests in that recurrence: the official promise of a safe, brief procedure gives way to a memory structured by protest, flight, and the cry of the lost child, while the film-set call asks her to return, composed, to the performance.