Marilyn: A Biography (3 page)

Still, these reinforced roots of insanity,
and this absence of clear identity, are not only a weakness but an
intense motive to become an actor. In the logic of transcendence,
every weakness presupposes the possibility of a future strength.
Great actors usually discover they have a talent by first searching
in desperation for an identity. It is no ordinary identity that
will suit them, and no ordinary desperation can drive them. The
force that propels a great actor in his youth is insane ambition.
Illegitimacy and insanity are the godparents of the great actor. A
child who is missing either parent is a study in the search for
identity and quickly becomes a candidate for actor (since the most
creative way to discover a new and possible identity is through the
close fit of a role). But then the origins of insanity can also be
glimpsed in wild and unmanageable ambition. While the appearance of
insanity is not ever simple, and two insane people are rarely alike
(except when in depression), still the root of insanity is easier
to locate than sanity, for it is frustrated ambition, no more,
provided we conceive the true pain of such a state – an undying
will existing in conditions of hopeless entombment. To be buried
alive is insanity. What creates such complexity in the mad – that
labyrinth of interlocking selves with every knotted incapacity to
act on simple lines – is the reaction of thwarted will upon every
structure of the character. While the cause of insanity is not
simple, for it must remain at least as complex as the content of
the negative itself, that is, the complexity of the original
character.

While formal psychiatry is a maze of medical
disciplines that seek to sure, stupefy, or
pulverize
madness, it is another kind of inquiry to search into the
uncontrollable ambition to dominate one’s own life, the life of
others, or the life of communities not yet conceived, that simple
rage to put one’s signature upon existence. Let us bow our heads.
If we want to comprehend the insane, then we must question the
fundamental notion of modern psychiatry – that we have but one life
and one death. The concept that no human being has ever existed
before or will be reincarnated again is a philosophical rule of
thumb which dominates psychiatry; yet all theory built upon this
concept has failed – one is tempted to say
systematically
–
in every effort to find a consistent method of cure for psychotics.
Even the least spectacular processes of reasoning may therefore
suggest that to comprehend psychosis, and the psychology of those
who are exceptional (like our heroine), it could be time to look
upon human behavior as possessed of a double root. While the
dominant trunk of our actions has to be influenced by the
foreground of our one life here and now and living, the other root
may be attached to some karmic virtue or debt some of us (or all of
us) acquired by our courage or failure in lives we have already
lived. If such theory is certainly supported by no foundation,
nonetheless it offers some immediate assistance for comprehending
the insane, since it would suggest we are not all conceived in
equal happiness or desperation. Any human who begins life with the
debt of owing existence somewhat more than others is thereby more
likely to generate an ambition huge enough to swallow old debts.
(And be less content with modest success.) Of course, the failure
of such ambition must double all desperation.

Double-entry bookkeeping on a celestial
level! I stub my toe because of a leap taken in another life! Then
I fight with my wife because once I dispute in similar
circumstances with my fourteenth-century mother. Absurdities eat
into the argument with the ferocity of ants. Yet if we are to
understand Monroe, and no one has – we have only seen her limned as
an angelic and sensitive victim or a murderous emotional cripple –
why not assume that in a family of such concentrated insanity as
her own, the illegitimate daughter of Gladys Monroe Baker may have
been born with a desperate imperative formed out of all those
previous debts and failures of her whole family of souls. And the
imperative formed out of all those previous debts and failures of
her whole family of souls. And the imperative may have been to
display herself as a presence to the world, there to leaven the
thickening air with the tender, wise and witty flesh of an angel of
sex. Conscious of how this presence may have been managed and
directed and advanced its insufferably difficult way forward by a
harsh and near to maniacal voice of the most inward, concealed and
secretive desperation, since the failure of her project was
insanity, or some further variety of doom.

We draw back form such a projection. It is
too much, and much too soon. She was a dumb and sexy broad, a voice
of outraged bitterness is bound to say, a dizzy dish with a flair
and a miserable childhood and much good and bad luck, and she took
a little talent a long way. You could go to any southern town and
find twelve of her. A familiar voice. It is comfortable. Yet facing
the phenomenon of her huge appeal to the world – Napoleonic was her
capture of the attention of the world – let us at least recognize
that the reductive voice speaks with no more authority than the
romantic, that it is also an unproved thesis, and does no more than
scorn the first thesis, indeed, it fails to explain her altogether.
There are a million dumb and dizzy broads with luck and none come
near to Monroe, no. To explain her at all, let us hold to that
karmic notion as one more idea to support in our mind while trying
to follow the involuted pathways of her life.

While Gladys Baker, the mother, worked as a
film technician, that was probably no more of a coincidence than if
we were to read that the father of a brilliant automotive engineer
had been a foreman on a Detroit assembly line. For that matter,
Gladys Baker was a foreman, a section head with five girls under
her; their job at Consolidated Film Industries was to splice
together processed negatives. The father (at least the man
considered to be the father by the reckoning of most of Gladys’
fellow workers) was also employed at Consolidated. He had a romance
with Gladys that lasted for several months, a fair period for C.
Stanley Gifford, since he was known in the company as a lover and
therefore did not usually take long to move on. Hollywood, in 1926,
being more tolerant of broken sex mores than other places, a
collection was taken up among Gladys’ co-workers to help with the
expenses of the delivery. The sum came to $140, which in those days
may have paid most of the bills at Los Angeles General Hospital.
Gifford did not contribute. The psychology of the stud speaks in
his silence: “Considering the sweat that bitch cost me. . . .” Of
course, Gladys Baker, known as a slavedriver of a foreman, was
sharp-tongued. Twenty-five years later, Marilyn discovered her
father was a successful dairyman living in Hemet, California, and
put in a call to visit, for she had never seen him. He would not
come to the phone. “He suggests,” said his wife, “you see his
lawyer in Los Angeles if you have some complaint. Do you have a
pencil?”

Is Gifford a small-town monument to bad
conscience, afraid of his wife, or profoundly suspicious of the
financial intentions of long-lost bastards? Perhaps he is the
holder of an enduring grudge — we can as easily assume some
evaluation of his manhood was left in the flesh by Gladys Baker. In
any case, two and a half decades later, he was small prize to a
young woman looking for her identity. Probably his greatest gift to
the illegitimate daughter had been libido. It is no accident that
studs are usually heartless about the aftermath. By their logic
they have already treated the mother well and given the baby a good
beginning. If his abandoned daughter would be obliged to look
harder for a father than anyone in American life since Thomas
Wolfe, well, that by his logic was the balance of justice: the
mother, after all,
had
looked for a stud.

If it is the acme of the facetious to
speculate about the character of her father, we cannot remind
ourselves often enough that little as we know about C. Stanley
Gifford, we know less about Mr. Monroe, the grandfather, not even
his first name. We can be told that Della Monroe Grainger,
Marilyn’s grandmother, was born Hogan, from a lower-middle-class
family of Hogans in the state of Missouri, and came West when
adolescent, later traveled to India after her second husband
Grainger had been sent there by the oil company for which he
worked. We also know she was a follower of Aimee Semple McPherson
and went to prayer service regularly at Angelus Temple, even had
Norma Jean baptized by Aimee in the Foursquare Gospel Church when
Della came back to Hawthorne from India, alone, her marriage with
Grainger terminated. The baby, Norma Jean, now six months old, was
living across the street with a family named Bolender who were
foster parents (for the reasonable sum of five dollars a week), and
on Saturdays Gladys Baker took the long trolley ride from her
furnished room in Hollywood (where she was working once more at
Consolidated) out to Hawthorne. The supposition was that she could
stay overnight and thereby be with the baby again on Sunday, but
usually she had a date for Saturday night in Hollywood and took the
trolley back. The date was necessary if she thought to find a
husband and make a home for her daughter, but it is not difficult
to conceive of lonely, arid, afternoon hours spent in the Bolender
home with an infant that was hers and yet strange to her, this
small handsome mother (with a resemblance to the young Gloria
Swanson), whose face stares out of a photograph with clear and
elegant features. There she is, again, unphotographed, in the
Bolender living room holding her infant, a love child. We have to
recognize the measure of the decision. If abortions were not
routine in 1926, still they were available in Hollywood. Some inner
imperative may have told her this child was too special to abort,
for it was clear she was not sentimental about babies. Her first
husband Baker had permanent possession of her other two children.
Gladys even listed them as “dead” when admitted to the hospital for
Norma Jean’s birth, and they may have been as dead to her as the
dead love of that past which married her to Baker in Mexico at the
age of fifteen — what a life had Gladys Monroe Baker before she was
even twenty-five! Now the child who had disrupted her chance for a
career or an advantageous marriage was in her arms and, specter of
family insanity, was boring her, was remote from her, strange
infant, strange project to which she had committed herself for a
purpose she could not now name, not as she sits on Saturday
afternoon in a home so religious a colored poster of Christ is on
the living room wall. (Mr. Bolender, a mail carrier, prints up
religious pamphlets on a press he has in a workshop at the end of
the house.)

Across the street from the Bolenders is the
house of her mother, another one-story stucco bungalow with a
veranda and a scraggly palm tree in the front yard, and to spend
time with Della Grainger is worse than to spend time with the
Bolenders. Her mother’s rages are even more unpredictable than her
own (although probably no worse than her father’s). The one memory
of Gladys’ father which comes down to us is how Mr. Monroe once
pulled a pet kitten out of his daughter’s hands and threw it
against a wall. We can see that near-insane man with his profound
vision of darkest dalliances between women and cats as he stands in
the presence of his wife, a most violent-tempered red-haired witch,
and of his daughter, showing every sign of soon growing into a
witch as she plays with the kitten, while he, descendant of
President Monroe and now married all the way down to a green-eyed
red-headed Hogan with airs, will not yet be dominated in his own
home — death to cats. He believes God will applaud him.

Yes, the baby means incarceration for a
weekend with the timid sanctity of the Bolenders or the on-off
rages of her screaming, deserted and ladylike mother, while back in
Hollywood, trolley-ride to the other end of endless Los Angeles,
they have just been making
The Jazz Singer
with Al Jolson.
Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow,
Constance Bennett and Norma Talmadge are stars. Norma Jean has — we
may as well guess — even been named after Norma Talmadge. But then
Gladys also has a resemblance to her. John Barrymore, a very
handsome version of Gifford, is a leading man, and John Gilbert,
and Adolphe Menjou. Valentino, in whose footprints Gladys’ daughter
will stand, has just died. He is the only one of these “strong and
manly” lovers without a mustache.

Of course, Gladys will stay overnight in
Hawthorne now and again and go to Sunday sermon with the Bolenders,
carrying Norma Jean in her arms. The baby will rarely cry. Indeed,
later, when Norma Jean can walk, Gladys will occasionally take her
to the film lab and let her sit there quietly while she works.
Workers congratulate the mother for her good child. But it is as
likely a first sign of the spiritual orphan who does not expect
attention, and in later years the comments on such calm behavior
will be less adulatory. Natasha Lytess, once her dramatic coach,
later ignominiously dismissed, was to say, “I often felt like she
was a somnambulist walking around,” and Nunnally Johnson, the
scriptwriter, described her as “ten feet under water . . . a wall
of thick cotton . . . she reminds me of a sloth. You stick a pin in
her and eight days later it says ‘Ouch.’” Already in infancy it is
possible her thoughts are turning circular and bear the same
relation to purposeful inquiry that the steps of a prisoner pacing
a cell offer to a journey.

On most Sundays, however, the well-behaved
baby did not see the inside of church with her mother. The mother
was in Hollywood awakening after a Saturday night without her. Is
it safe to assume Gladys never felt closer to the baby than when
she was without her? But the emotional impost of going to Hawthorne
was steadily on the increase. Della was each week less stable. If
she were always capable of shrieking at delivery boys one day, then
being gracious the next, one newsboy was now so terrified of her
that he asked his supervisor to send the weekly bill by mail; and
Ida Bolender, caught in the act of spanking Norma Jean for
upsetting a bowl of food, heard Della scream, “Don’t ever let me
catch you doing that again!” Her voice must have had that
recognizable tone which speaks of the blood-of-my-blood, for Ida
Bolender, never a bold woman, was thereafter in fear of Della, and
forever worried when Della, rising at last to a grandmotherly
function, would take Norma Jean across the street for a visit. Ida
dares not interfere, and yet is resentful, one might as well
assume, since Della, if just turned fifty, is still sufficiently
beautiful to play the dilettante even as a grandmother.