Sidney Haring

Sidney Haring, Norma Jeane Baker’s English teacher at Van Nuys High School, becomes both her literary mentor and a figure haunted by the limits of his restraint. He offers her books, criticism, conversation, and occasional rides home, but the relationship ends without explanation when she leaves school. Years later, recognizing her in a pin-up photograph, he revisits that failure of connection: he tells himself he could have done nothing, yet hides the photograph with the poems she once brought him.

Identity and Background

At twenty-nine, Haring is a young public-school teacher already marked by hardship. Thin to the point of gauntness, with thinning hair that is nearly white, he walks with a limp from a serious accident in his youth. His teacher’s salary is meager, and he is trying to support a young wife, a four-year-old daughter, and an eight-month-old son. Family responsibility is not an abstraction for him; it is a daily fact that shapes the limits he sets around his conduct.

In class, Haring is usually gloomy and brusque. When he smiles, it is often at his own sarcastic remarks, and his reactions can be difficult for students to anticipate. Norma Jeane Baker, by contrast, is quiet and composed, though her beauty and physical maturity make her conspicuous. Haring understands that she attracts attention, but insists to himself that he has not indulged that attention. His awareness of her appearance exists alongside his sense of the teacher’s duty—and makes the boundary between them something he must actively police.

A Literary Mentorship

The opening of their connection is literary. Haring reads a poem by Norma Jeane Baker’s mother and judges it unfinished, using the blackboard to explain its uneven rhymes and rhythm. He questions an obscure place-name in the poem and criticizes what he sees as a tendency toward introversion and enigma in women’s poetry. The episode establishes his authority as a critic, but also the awkward intimacy of the occasion: lessons have long since ended, and she is visiting him privately.

Despite his severity toward the poem, Haring invites Norma Jeane Baker to bring him more writing, whether her own or her mother’s. In the winter of 1941, he begins seeing her two or three times a week after school. Their conversations range across novels and poetry: he gives her works by Emily and Charlotte Brontë and Pearl Buck, as well as poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Browning, his favorite. He continues to critique her poems, though she does not bring him more of her mother’s work.

A practical favor becomes part of the routine. One winter afternoon, Norma Jeane Baker realizes that she is late and that her foster family is expecting her home to prepare dinner. Haring offers her a ride. The trip from Van Nuys High School to the Pirig home takes only five minutes, but the drive gives them extra time to talk about literature. The narration presents the arrangement as innocent, and Haring insists on that innocence; at the same time, his repeated need to reassure himself shows how carefully he monitors the closeness developing between teacher and student.

Distance and Disappearance

Haring’s self-restraint is bound to uncertainty about what Norma Jeane Baker’s poems mean. He wonders whether the love poems were written for him and whether the poems’ beloved addressee is himself, but he cannot establish that this is so. He does not turn those suspicions into a declaration or an intervention. His uncertainty remains unresolved, part of the emotional distance he maintains even as he welcomes her company and writing.

At the end of May, three weeks before the school year finishes, Norma Jeane Baker abruptly withdraws from Van Nuys High School. She neither attends English class nor writes to explain her departure. The principal tells Haring and the other teachers that she has officially left for personal reasons. Haring is stunned, though he does not show it. He repeatedly picks up the telephone to call the Pirigs and ask after her, but each time stops short of following through. His private rule is to avoid compromising himself and keep his distance; it protects his family and professional position, but leaves him without an answer about what happened to a student he had come to know closely.

The Photograph and Retrospective Guilt

In February 1945, Haring confiscates a copy of Pageant from a group of snickering students during a literature lesson. He dismisses the magazine in front of them, puts it in his desk, and returns to it later in private. On the marked page he finds a full-page photograph of Norma Jeane Baker, whom he recognizes immediately despite the heavy makeup and overtly sexy pose. She wears a sheer nightgown and high heels and holds a smiling cloth panda between her breasts. The image’s public, posed sexuality contrasts sharply with the shy student he remembers and with the poems he once criticized and kept.

Recognition turns into a reckoning. Haring asks himself whether he might have done more: warned her against marrying so young, helped if she had been pregnant or forced into marriage, or otherwise tried to protect her. He also rehearses the reasons he did not act. He was married, had young children who depended on him, and had known her when she was about fifteen. He tells himself that keeping his distance was the right course and that he had done all he could. Yet the photograph makes that defense unstable: his thoughts return to vulnerable, abandoned teenage students who seek guidance and affection from a relatively young male teacher, and to the possibility that he failed Norma Jeane Baker when she needed help.

His final gesture contains both shame and attachment. After checking furtively that nobody is looking through the classroom door, Haring carefully tears out the photograph, puts the rest of the magazine in a used envelope, and throws it away so the custodian will not become curious. He takes care not to crease the page, opens the lowest desk drawer, and slips it into the folder where he keeps the poems Norma Jeane Baker wrote for him. He does not contact her or resolve his old questions. Instead, the private archive joins the student’s writing to the later image that has transformed his memory of her. Haring’s narrative role rests on that contradiction: a man who maintained distance in the name of duty, and who, years later, cannot look at the consequences of that distance without shame.