Van Nuys High School

Van Nuys High School gives shape to a brief but consequential interval in Norma Jeane Baker’s youth. It is where she tries to secure an ordinary place among her peers, discovers that performance can feel like a possible home, and develops a literary intimacy with her favorite teacher, Sidney Haring. Her departure near the end of the school year leaves these possibilities unfinished: she withdraws only three weeks before classes conclude, without telling Haring why.

Identity and Setting

The school belongs to a period when Norma Jeane’s future still appears open, though the war makes that openness precarious. At fifteen, she is engaged and expects to marry as soon as she turns sixteen. She imagines that this will spare her from returning to high school for two more years. The prospect of a future is uncertain in a country at war, but, in her own recollection, the engagement makes her elated and envied by her friends. Van Nuys High School therefore stands not simply for education, but for a path she expects to leave before completing it.

The school also provides a social world beyond the classroom. School athletes appear among the young men who take Norma Jeane on outings, alongside servicemen, workers, and men from a variety of local backgrounds. These meetings range from dates at the cinema and dances to bowling, baseball, skating, boating, and drives along the coast. The school is not presented as organizing these encounters; rather, its students form one strand in the wider social network through which Norma Jeane experiences adolescence. The recollection also distinguishes between the excitement of being courted and the boundaries she says she maintained: the men treated her respectfully, did not force unwanted touching, and did not pressure her to drink.

Attempts to Belong and Perform

Norma Jeane tries out for the majorette squad, a role associated with girls judged attractive, friendly, and athletic. She has rehearsed the steps and figures for days, including the turns of her torso and limbs, and believes herself as qualified as the other students. Yet in the gym, before more than forty girls, she becomes overwhelmed. Sweaty and feeling far from athletic, she grows weak and frightened; her throat dries until she cannot speak, and her legs nearly give way on the trampoline. The captain thanks her and calls for the next candidate. The failure is painfully public, and it exposes the distance between preparation and the composure the selection demands.

Acting offers another route to being chosen, but the first attempt is no easier. Norma Jeane auditions for the drama group in a production of a play by Thornton Wilder. She hopes both to be ordinary and to be more than ordinary, and imagines that inhabiting the role of Emily might give her a home among her friends. On the bare stage, under a cold spotlight, she cannot begin. When she finally reads, her breath is short; she stumbles, loses her place, and struggles to get the memorized lines out. After the teacher dismisses her, she asks for another try. The second reading is only somewhat steadier, and she is told to try again the following year.

A separate attempt before the chorus director also ends in a courteous rejection. Together, these setbacks make the school’s auditions more than minor disappointments: they show Norma Jeane reaching for forms of belonging that depend on being assessed by others, while anxiety repeatedly interrupts the performance she has prepared. Her interest in acting nevertheless survives the immediate failure. The imagined life inside a play has already become a way to picture a self and a place she might inhabit.

Literature and Sidney Haring

In her English work, Norma Jeane writes about Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, Abraham Lincoln, and Christopher Columbus. She also brings Haring poems of her own, carefully written in blue ink on unlined paper. He reads them and encourages her to bring more, including poems by her mother if she wishes. His invitation connects the private act of writing with the ordinary routines of teaching, while giving her work an attentive reader.

In the winter of 1941, Haring begins seeing her two or three times a week after lessons. They talk at length, chiefly about the novels and poetry he gives her: works by Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë, Pearl S. Buck, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Browning, whom Haring especially favors. He continues to critique Norma Jeane’s poems. Their conversations extend beyond the classroom; after one winter afternoon when she realizes she is late for dinner at her foster home, Haring offers her a ride. The drive takes only five minutes, but it becomes a habit because it gives them more time to discuss literature.

The narrative presents the meetings as innocent, while also registering uncertainty about the poems and the feelings they may carry. Haring wonders whether Norma Jeane wrote them for him and whether their intimate second-person voice refers to him. The evidence does not resolve those questions. What it does establish is a relationship organized around reading, writing, sustained conversation, and the repeated journey home—a form of intellectual attention that contrasts with the more performative tests of the gym and stage.

Withdrawal and Narrative Significance

At the end of May, with three weeks of the school year remaining, Norma Jeane suddenly withdraws from Van Nuys High School. She gives no explanation to Haring, either in person or in writing. After she misses English class, the principal informs the teachers that she has officially left for personal reasons. The announcement leaves Haring stunned, though he does not show it. He repeatedly lifts the telephone to call her foster household and ask what happened, but cannot bring himself to follow through.

Her exit interrupts both the educational routine and the emerging closeness with the teacher who has made literature part of her daily life. It also sharpens the contrast between the future she expects to enter through early marriage and the imaginative refuge she has begun to find in reading and drama. The school does not resolve that tension: Norma Jeane leaves before the final weeks, and Haring is left without an explanation. In the novel’s account of her adolescence, Van Nuys High School is thus a temporary institution of possibility, where ordinary schooling, public failure, artistic desire, and an abruptly broken connection converge.