PART TWO


Starlet
1946-1950

The movie career begins. Her success as a model for photographers like Conover and Andre de Dienes resulted in five magazine covers in one month in 1946 and led Howard Hughes to request a screen test. Emmeline Snively got Norma Jeane an agent, who felt she would do better testing with Twentieth Century-Fox. Although the test was shot without Twentieth head Darryl Zanuck’s approval (an unheard-of breaking of the rules), Zanuck was impressed. “It’s a damn good test,” he said after it was included in a day’s rushes. “Sign her up.” She got her first Fox contract in September 1946. What impressed Zanuck the most was what Billy Wilder would later describe as “flesh impact”: “Some girls have flesh that photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it.”