24/08/2008, Washington Post
Washington Post
country: USA
date: 2008, August, 24
content: article
article complet sur washingtonpost
He Dreamed of Flying to the Stars, And Practiced by Dancing With One
Just after he got his wings and on the eve of his 20th birthday, Navy aviator Len Cormier danced the night away with Norma Jeane Dougherty at Tommy Dorsey's Casino Gardens in Santa Monica, Calif. He loved to dance almost as much as he loved to fly.
It was a first date for the young pilot and the beautiful model-about-to-be-starlet, who had been introduced by a family friend. That night, they danced to big band music and walked along the midway, where Norma Jeane took aim at milk bottles.
"She was good at that," Mr. Cormier told his family. "I know I had a great time and seems like she did too."
On one of their dates, Mr. Cormier took Norma Jeane flying. "We did half rolls and slow rolls and loops," he recalled. "She's still the only civilian I've ever taken up in an airplane."
Before he left California for training in Florida, she asked his advice on a career move suggested by a 20th Century Fox executive. He disagreed.
"Norma Jeane asked me about changing her name to Marilyn Monroe, and I didn't think it was too good of an idea, because she would get mixed up with Marilyn Maxwell," Mr. Cormier said of the movie actress and entertainer who performed often with Bob Hope. "I don't know how many people remember Marilyn Maxwell these days, but it's kind of a 'How wrong can you be,' I guess."
Mr. Cormier -- who always spoke fondly of those early years, said his wife -- went on to become a Navy fighter pilot and an executive officer in an anti-submarine warfare patrol squadron. After leaving active duty in 1947, the Boston native received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California at Berkley.
Eventually, Mr. Cormier's passion for flying took him to some heady places and brought him in contact with some of the top scientists in the space industry. He became an aerospace consultant and entrepreneur who designed a space van and worked feverishly to find funding for his craft, which would provide low-cost space travel.
Along the way, as one colleague once told him, he was "in the midst of people and organizations that were making history."
During the tense days of the Cold War, he was on the staff of the National Academy of Sciences. He attended the International Geophysical Year proceedings in 1957 and 1958, where U.S. and Soviet scientists were excited about new rocket technologies that made space exploration more than a distant notion.
Mr. Cormier, who spoke some Russian, was present at a reception in Russia on the October day in 1957 when the Soviets surprised everyone with the launch of Sputnik. It left an indelible impression on Mr. Cormier.
For one thing, he said he felt that there was a lot of psychological fallout with the Soviet launch. "However, in my opinion, this was not at all bad," he wrote in a posting on his Web site. "At the reception itself, I found it was almost immediately easier to communicate with some of the Russians -- as if some type of feelings of inferiority suddenly vanished."
Mr. Cormier -- who always spoke fondly of those early years, said his wife -- went on to become a Navy fighter pilot and an executive officer in an anti-submarine warfare patrol squadron. After leaving active duty in 1947, the Boston native received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California at Berkley.
Eventually, Mr. Cormier's passion for flying took him to some heady places and brought him in contact with some of the top scientists in the space industry. He became an aerospace consultant and entrepreneur who designed a space van and worked feverishly to find funding for his craft, which would provide low-cost space travel.
Along the way, as one colleague once told him, he was "in the midst of people and organizations that were making history."
During the tense days of the Cold War, he was on the staff of the National Academy of Sciences. He attended the International Geophysical Year proceedings in 1957 and 1958, where U.S. and Soviet scientists were excited about new rocket technologies that made space exploration more than a distant notion.
Mr. Cormier, who spoke some Russian, was present at a reception in Russia on the October day in 1957 when the Soviets surprised everyone with the launch of Sputnik. It left an indelible impression on Mr. Cormier.
The launch also was the beginning of Mr. Cormier's quest toward low-cost, reusable space vehicles. He worked at NASA, at the Los Angeles Division of North American Aviation and at North American Rockwell before forming his own companies. PanAero Inc. is his last firm.
As a charter member of the Department of Transportation's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, he made recommendations and offered advice about the U.S. commercial space transportation industry.
He was always coming up with new approaches to space transportation, his family said. "He planned to be a pilot of his own spacecraft," said his wife of 29 years, Anne Greenglass.
During his career, he made improvements on satellites and had solid ideas on building launch systems. Some of his engineering approaches are "flying today," said Doug Postman, who met Mr. Cormier in 1983 while he was working as a consultant.
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"He was methodical in his approach to solutions," said Postman, who calls Mr. Cormier his mentor and friend. "He was a person who was ahead of his time because of the concepts and ideas he had."
Mr. Cormier was part of a small community of private entrepreneurs building affordable, reusable space vehicles. Funding was the biggest hurdle for Mr. Cormier's SpaceVan 2011. He tried but failed in 2003 to win the X Prize, a $10 million award offered to the first private team to fly a manned rocket into space.
Sergi Stepanenko, who lives in St. Petersburg, recalled Mr. Cormier's contacting him in the late 1990s about his ventures for "proposed space transportation, proposed space tourism and proposed space-based telecommunications."
They exchanged letters about ways they could work together. Stepanenko said in an e-mail that he was impressed by Mr. Cormier's boyish "admiration and excitement about the universe and a dream to explore it for himself."
Driven, yet always friendly, Mr. Cormier pushed his ideas and conceptual designs as far as he could for as long as he could, to government and private companies.
At 80, the great-grandfather of three renewed his pilot's license. But his dream of flying again, this time out of Earth's orbit, did not materialize. Leonard N. Cormier, a former Fairfax resident, died June 16 at age 82 of neck and head cancer at the Heartland Hospice in Wilmington, Del.
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Le magazine Télé K7, de la semaine du 17 au 23 septembre 1983, offrait sa couverture à Marilyn Monroe et un article intérieur de deux pages intitulé "Marilyn le film fatal" consacré aux Misfits.
> sommaire
> l'article 
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Le magazine anglais The Sunday Times Magazine du 19 août 2007,
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de sept pages de nouvelles photographies découvertes de Marilyn enfant et jeune fille, avec sa mère, des amies, ou encore son premier mari Jim Dougherty.
Elle 11/04/1988
Le magazine Elle n°2205, de la semaine du 11 avril 1988,
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(Scan source: merci à Emma)
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Prix: 1,90 €. (scans perso).
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L'édition internationale de Life du 8 juillet 1957 consacrait sa couverture à Marilyn Monroe et Laurence Olivier dans le film "The Prince and the Showgirl" sortit sur les écrans en juin, avec en pages intérieures, la publication de photographies prises par Milton Greene de photos extraites du film et de sessions de Marilyn en studio.
Attention, cette édition de Life n'est pas à confondre avec l'édition américaine du magazine qui pour la même date, sortait un numéro avec un cow-boy du Texas à cheval.
>> couverture copie:
>> pages intérieures et article:
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Prix: 3,50 €.
>> commandez en ligne sur journaux.fr
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Le journal Le Figaro du 4 août 2010, a mis en UNE une photo de Marilyn Monroe pour illustrer un article intérieur sur le prochain livre "Fragments" à paraître.
>> voir le site lefigaro.fr
