Second Red Scare era

The Second Red Scare era is the novel’s climate of loyalty tests, anti-communist investigations, and implied surveillance, a political pressure that reaches well beyond formal hearings. It shapes Hollywood’s calculations about speech and employment, follows Norma Jeane Baker into the management of her public image, and ends in a scene where the threat of state power is rendered intimate and frightening without becoming fully knowable.

Historical and Narrative Scope

The novel places the era’s pressures against the postwar shift from wartime visibility to political suspicion. In December 1944, Bucky Glazer, serving aboard the Liberty, finds Norma Jeane Baker’s photograph in Stars and Stripes. The accompanying account presents her as a proud nine-hour-a-day worker at Radio Plane Aircraft in Burbank, contributing to the war effort while her husband is stationed in the South Pacific. Bucky’s shipmates seize and pass around the magazine, teasing him over the photograph and the different spelling of his surname. The scene shows how a wartime image could turn a young worker into a public object—and how quickly that image could travel beyond her control.

The political conflict becomes explicit after President Harry Truman issues Executive Order 9835 in 1947, requiring federal employees to take loyalty oaths and participate in security programs. The novel describes the demand for comparable loyalty declarations by private businesses and the resulting scrutiny of Hollywood. It connects that atmosphere to disputes over constitutional freedoms, labor organizing, and the growing suspicion that political dissent signaled communist allegiance. The Second Red Scare is therefore not simply a backdrop: it is a system of reputational and professional risk that makes speech, association, and silence consequential.

Hollywood’s Investigations and Informal Pressure

One unnamed actor’s earlier activism brings these risks into focus. He had protested the government initiative alongside other Hollywood actors and spoken for constitutional liberties, particularly freedom of speech and assembly. The novel also links his exposure to the Screen Actors Guild’s 1945 contract negotiations, which sought health care, better working conditions, a higher minimum wage, and residual payments when films were reissued. Accusations that the union had been infiltrated by communists, together with anonymous allegations about the actor’s associations with named Communist Party members, help draw him into the sights of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

A summons to Washington threatens more than questioning. The narrative anticipates national publicity, boycotts by the American Legion and Catholic Legion of Decency, and the actor’s placement on a blacklist—although studios publicly deny that such a list exists. I. E. Shinn, Norma Jeane Baker’s agent, arranges a private meeting with influential Republican congressmen at a lawyer’s Bel Air villa. Instead of a public confrontation in Washington, the actor faces informal questioning over an elaborate dinner. His status as a veteran who fought in Germany and his forthright patriotic manner help him answer the congressmen, but the episode makes clear how political pressure can operate through private access, anticipated publicity, and the threat of exclusion as well as through official proceedings.

That pressure is present even when a commission is not in the room. When Norma Jeane Baker says she has nothing more to do with Otto Öse and asks what the other commission concerns, Shinn presses a finger to his lips. The gesture, treated in Hollywood as a joke but accompanied by genuine fear, makes discretion part of professional survival. He redirects her attention from Öse and Cass Chaplin to Marilyn Monroe: the public identity whose exposure could damage a career and the people trying to manage it.

Norma Jeane Baker Between Publicity and Political Scrutiny

The novel places the manufacture of Marilyn Monroe’s image beside the era’s culture of investigation. Otto Öse had promoted Norma Jeane Baker’s photographs and helped her reach I. E. Shinn and The Studio; she had declined his offers while still hoping to build a film career. Her first appearance in a film was reduced in the final edit to a few distant seconds. Later, a nude photograph Öse had taken surfaced in Hollywood Tatler, turning an old image into a fresh public scandal. The political climate and the nude-photo controversy are not presented as the same campaign, but together they show the vulnerability of a woman whose career depends on images that other people produce, circulate, and judge.

When the photograph becomes a crisis inside The Studio, Norma Jeane Baker faces a room of angry men and cannot recall much of what follows. She runs to the medicine cabinet and reaches for a razor blade, as Nell does in La tua bocca brucia, but her trembling fingers drop it. The episode does not make the scandal a political investigation; rather, it shows how exposure and institutional judgment converge around her, while her own acting role supplies an image through which she experiences the crisis. The story’s wider atmosphere of scrutiny gives this convergence added force: a public reputation can be treated as evidence before the person at its center can even recognize herself in it.

By 1954, Norma Jeane Baker largely avoids newspapers and television news. She knows that people have been questioned by anti-communist commissions and that one of the names given was Clifford Odets, but she says the political questions do not interest her. She is absorbed instead in breathing, in trying not to think about the pregnancy that was ended, and in reading. The narrative also suggests that she may have become aware of government informants and that Marilyn Monroe appeared on a list; it qualifies this perception rather than confirming a specific surveillance operation. Her withdrawal from the news is thus both a refusal to engage and a retreat from a world in which lists, inquiries, and hidden observers seem difficult to control.

The Hearing and the Family’s Political Divide

When the Subversive Activities Control Board summons her to Sacramento, the political issue becomes personal and direct. The Ex-Athlete advises her to tell the truth and, if she knows any communists, to name them. Norma Jeane Baker refuses the premise that the commission is entitled to everything she knows: whether she has something to conceal or reveal, she insists, is her own business. The exchange unsettles her husband, who cannot understand her position, but the account also distinguishes his anger from violence: he wants to strike her, yet does not, because he loves her and will not hit someone weaker than himself.

With the intervention of lawyers from The Studio, the scheduled public interrogation is changed into a private hearing in an elegant room at the State Capitol, held over breakfast. There is no public contest, no formal proceeding, and no press. After three hours, the commission asks the blonde actress to produce photographs of Marilyn Monroe and sign them individually for its members. The resolution is strikingly practical: the hearing concludes not with a public declaration of political belief but with the conversion of her celebrity image into personalized keepsakes for the people who questioned her.

The political divide also enters through a letter from the man who claims to be her father. He writes in strongly anti-communist terms, endorses Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign, warns of communist and atomic threats, and criticizes her defense of free speech. His denunciations of Charlie Chaplin, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Paul Robeson reveal the ideological distance between them; his promise to visit and his appeal to be reunited with his lost daughter do not erase that distance. In this family relationship, the era’s politics arrive not as abstract policy but as an attempted lesson in what she should believe and whom she should condemn.

Lists, Secrecy, and the Final Threat

The novel’s late scene carries the atmosphere of surveillance into Norma Jeane Baker’s secluded home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. A masked operative enters through the back with a key supplied by an informant identified as R. F. He understands himself as an instrument taking orders, not as someone who investigates their purpose. His knowledge of the woman is assembled from allegations: supposed ties to subversive organizations, her marriage to Arthur Miller, an alleged encounter with Sukarno, her public defense of Castro, and petitions he regards as defiance of the nation.

The narrative does not settle what the operation is meant to accomplish. The operative cannot know whether he has been sent to protect the President from a woman said to have threatened him or to prevent her from damaging the President through their connection. He gathers evidence to put in his pack and deliver to his superiors, who will examine it and destroy it; he is not to destroy the material himself. The account’s uncertainty matters: political power appears as a chain of informants, orders, records, and anticipated erasures, while the person targeted remains reduced to a dossier of accusations. Across the era’s hearings, lists, blacklisting fears, and final intrusion, the novel shows how suspicion can make public image and private life seem equally available for inspection, while leaving the machinery behind that scrutiny obscure.