‘Norma Jean’ Tells Story of an Affair

The world knew her as Marilyn, the legendary blond bombshell with the breathy voice and the wiggle in her walk who heated up the silver screen during the Eisenhower years.

Ted Jordan knew her as Norma Jean, a voluptuous teen-age model who, he says, became his lover in 1943 and remained a close friend through her meteoric rise in Hollywood to her mysterious death in 1962 at age 36.

It’s the off-screen personality that retired actor Jordan, a resident of Leisure World in Laguna Hills, captures in his book “Norma Jean: My Secret Life with Marilyn Monroe” (Morrow; $18.95).

Jordan’s portrait of Monroe is not a pretty picture.

According to his account of the much-written-about actress, she occasionally earned extra cash by picking up men in hotel bars when she was a teen-ager married to James Dougherty, who was in the merchant marine. She was a sexually uninhibited woman who had intimate relations with both men and women and ruthlessly used the proverbial casting couch to her advantage. She was introduced to “uppers and downers” in the ‘40s by Jordan’s uncle, nightclub entertainer Ted Lewis, who kept her supplied with pills in exchange for sex. Always insecure, she became increasingly depressed and dependent on drugs and alcohol in the last few years of what Jordan calls “the Greek tragedy of her life.”

Jordan, who was prompted by previous Monroe biographies, particularly those claiming that she was murdered, began writing his book in 1982. According to the various conspiracy theories, Monroe was murdered by the CIA or Jimmy Hoffa or the Mafia because of her relationships with John and Robert Kennedy. Jordan, who says he received a phone call from the actress the evening she died, does not believe anyone killed her: “She killed herself.”

“I had read most all the books” about Monroe, said Jordan, 65, “and I saw all this crap written about her, mostly from people who never knew her--especially Norman Mailer. His book was so inaccurate. I said: ‘I’m going to sit down and write a book about the girl that my brother remembers meeting, that my mom--God bless her--still remembers meeting, and write the true story about her.’ ”

However, a review of a previous edition of the book published in England raised questions about the accuracy of some of the dates and alleged incidents in the book such as Jordan saying he had a one-night fling in 1946 with actress Lupe Velez to make Monroe jealous when Velez actually died in 1944. Television’s “Entertainment Tonight” also took a critical assessment of “Norma Jean,” raising similar questions and interviewing friends of Monroe who say Jordan never knew the actress.

For his part, Jordan said, “I’m not asking anybody to believe me, but I can tell you that there are a lot of people alive today that know about my affair and knew me when.”

Jordan, who was born in Ohio, said that he was a 19-year-old struggling actor working as a lifeguard at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1943 when he met the 17-year-old fledgling model.

Norma Jean then bore little resemblance to Marilyn, the soon-to-be manufactured screen legend.

At that time, according to Jordan, she was a pretty “but far from beautiful girl. She had mousy, kinky hair. She had eyebrows that were straight across; they weren’t arched. She had an under bite, she had a mole--a seed wart they call it--and she was very unkempt. She was very filthy about her body.”

But her body, which Jordan still describes in crudely appreciative terms, made men’s heads turn. In his book, he says she “positively radiated sex.”

“I mean once you saw her, you never forgot her,” he said, conceding that his initial interest in her was based on “strictly a physical attraction.”

Monroe had joined the Blue Book Modeling Agency, which had an office at the Ambassador Hotel. Jordan remembers seeing her do her first swimsuit photo session next to the pool at the hotel.

“She couldn’t act, she couldn’t stand, she couldn’t look at the camera,” he said. “You would never say this girl is ever going to amount to anything. Absolutely never. She never would have made it the way she was. I mean, it was a different person.”

Jordan said that when he asked Monroe out for a date, she seemed unimpressed until he told her that his uncle was the entertainer Ted Lewis, who was appearing at a local nightclub.

By their fourth date, Jordan writes, they had become intimate--a scene Jordan re-creates in lurid detail in his book. They fell in love and, Jordan says, he wanted to marry Monroe, but her desire to make it in Hollywood was all-consuming--to the point, he writes, that when she became pregnant by him she had an abortion because the studios wanted “nothing to do with starlets who were mothers.”

“When I first met her, she was a very naive--I thought--overdeveloped young girl for her age,” he said. “Not too intelligent, not too much upstairs. Yet she could outwit you or outsmart you if she wanted to. You’d never think so being around her, but she could.

“When she found out I got a Screen Actors Guild card was the first time I saw the bitchy part of her. She got jealous,” he says, vowing to offer herself to even Bela Lugosi if doing so would advance her career.

“We got into a terrible argument, and she started using words that I had never heard or used before. And all of a sudden I’m saying, ‘Where the hell did she pick up all this stuff?’ ”

Monroe’s career took off like a skyrocket in the early ‘50s, but Jordan’s barely got off the launching pad. He played small parts in a string of movies and landed a role on Broadway in “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.” He was later hired to play a small but regular role as the freight agent on his old friend James Arness’ TV show, “Gunsmoke.”

Jordan also was married briefly in the ‘50s to famed blond striptease artist Lily St. Cyr, whom, he writes, Marilyn used as a model for her sexy screen image.

Throughout the ‘50s, Jordan continued to see Monroe off and on and to talk to her on the phone. He said she would often call him late at night, her speech slurred by pills and booze. Jordan said Monroe was definitely suicidal and that “in the last 2 1/2 years of her life, she was drugged up all the time.”

Jordan said there’s no denying allegations that Monroe slept with both John and Robert Kennedy. “I know it to be fact,” he said. “I didn’t just hear it, or hear the Hollywood gossip, I got it from her own mouth. She told me.”

The main reason he wrote his book, he said, is that “I wanted to straighten out the conspiracies about how Marilyn Monroe died.”

He refuses to believe that she was murdered.

“Absolutely not,” he said “I talked to her the night she died. She called me many nights, and she was so slurred and drunk and pilled up. I have someone very dear to me right now that calls me every night (and speaks in slurred speech). I tell you I get sick of it. I know one night I won’t get a call, and she’ll be gone. But this is what happened to Norma Jean.”

In his book, Jordan writes that when Monroe called him that evening, she said in an especially slurred voice that she “just wanted to say so long.”

He asked, “Where are you going?”

“Oh, on a trip,” she told him.

As she hung up, he writes, Monroe said, “Take care of yourself.”

Jordan says that at the time, he attached no special significance to the call.

The next day he heard on his car radio that Marilyn Monroe was dead.

In his criticism of “the extraordinary industry” that sprang up “centering on the question of her death,” Jordan maintains in his book that Monroe’s death was an accidental suicide.

A side note: Last January, Jordan pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of making threatening telephone calls to the authors of two different books on Monroe who in the early ‘80s had asked the district attorney to exhume Monroe’s body and reopen the case. Jordan was fined $1,000, put on three years’ probation and served two days in jail. Jordan claims that he had been receiving constant phone calls from those two authors telling him not to release his book “because what I say in my book goes against what they say. As far as I’m concerned, I never even want to talk about these two fellas or ever see them again.”

As for Monroe’s infamous missing red diary, in which she is said to have written sensitive government information, Jordan maintains that the diary does not contain government secrets.

And how does he know?

Jordan said that Monroe gave him the diary a few days before she died and that he keeps it in a safe-deposit box. Instead of containing secret revelations about President Kennedy and the CIA, however, he said, it contains only her random thoughts and favorite stanzas of poetry.

“She used to recite beautiful poetry,” Jordan said, adding that he still remembers the poems they used to read out loud together. “She was a romanticist. She was in love with love--to the point where she never gave of herself enough, like most actresses, to be able to really fall for a guy. Not really.”