Norma Jeane’s codeine overdose after Shinn’s death

Norma Jeane Baker’s codeine overdose follows the news of I. E. Shinn’s death and turns her fear of having lost his forgiveness into a suicide attempt. The scene binds grief, guilt, and the loss of an imagined child to a stark bodily crisis, while leaving the details of her rescue outside the passage provided.

The Call and the News

The morning after a press conference, Norma Jeane wakes believing the telephone is ringing, though she has left the receiver off the hook. She hopes I. E. Shinn is calling to forgive her. Her hope is sharpened by the thought that the Studio has already forgiven her and decided not to fire her; she wonders whether Shinn, too, should forgive her. At the conference, she had spoken publicly about posing nude for fifty dollars in 1949, saying that she regretted doing it but was not ashamed. The private wait for Shinn’s call therefore follows a public performance in which she has tried to control the meaning of her past.

When she finally replaces the receiver, the telephone rings. She answers at once, asking if it is Shinn, but the caller is his assistant. The assistant’s trembling voice announces that Norma Jeane should sit down. Still lying naked in bed, Norma Jeane calmly concludes that Shinn is dead, assumes that his heart failed, and tells herself that she killed him. The scene establishes her guilt as her own immediate conviction, not as evidence that she caused his death.

The Overdose

Later that morning, Norma Jeane swallows the roughly fifteen codeine pills left to her, washing them down with long drinks of milk that is nearly sour. Naked and trembling, she lies on the shadowed floor and waits to die, looking at the ceiling. Her thoughts turn to the child she believes has been lost forever: she imagines both the possibility of a child with a spinal deformity and a child with beautiful eyes and a beautiful soul. The passage holds these sharply different possibilities together without resolving them; what matters in the moment is the finality she attaches to the loss.

Within minutes, she vomits the pills. The account dwells on the thick, bitter material in her mouth and on her compulsive brushing afterward, repeated until her tender gums bleed. Her intended death is interrupted by a physical reversal, but the excerpt does not say that vomiting was deliberate or that it alone saved her.

Rescue and the Limits of the Account

The next words are a standalone heading: “The Rescue.” It signals a change from the attempted death toward intervention or survival, but the supplied passage gives no details of who rescues Norma Jeane, how it happens, or what treatment follows. The overdose’s immediate outcome is thus bounded by what the text does show: the pills come back up, and her body is left in distress.

The passage’s sequence makes the telephone a hinge between expectation and catastrophe. Norma Jeane waits for forgiveness, receives news of a death, and turns blame inward; the child she mourns remains an imagined future rather than a confirmed fact in this excerpt. The abrupt heading of rescue marks a turn in the narrative without erasing the intensity of the crisis that precedes it.