Authors: Barbara Leaming
On the morning of April 28, 1952, Marilyn’s appendix was removed. When a nurse wheeled her back into her room, it was filled with dozens of roses from Joe, who was then away in New York. Slugger, as Marilyn called DiMaggio, had spent a good deal of time lately at her book-filled studio apartment. She said he was the best lover she ever had.
Within hours of surgery, Marilyn received word that a new scandal was brewing. The news came as a complete shock. Erskine Johnson of the
L.A. Daily News
had contacted Twentieth Century–Fox with information that Marilyn’s mother, a fifty-year-old former mental patient, was very much alive. In other words, it appeared that Marilyn, the self-styled courageous little orphan girl, had misled the press, and this time she was not going to be able to handle the matter as blithely as she had the question of the nude calendar. In some quarters, Marilyn was being accused of having lied to her fans. Would the public turn on her? Marilyn, ever
watchful for threats to her dream, had reason to fear that the bad publicity would jeopardize her role in
Niagara.
In addition to her concerns over the film, Marilyn worried that reporters might actually seek out her mentally ill mother, who was then living with Grace and Doc in Van Nuys. It had been Grace who advised Marilyn to claim that her parents were dead. Better to lie, she counseled, than to allow people to find out about Gladys.
In the beginning, Norma Jeane hadn’t even known that Gladys was her mother. For her first seven years, she had lived in a six-room house in Hawthorne with a religious couple named Wayne and Ida Bolender, who took in foster children to augment Wayne’s salary as a mailman. Every so often a small, strange, silent woman visited Norma Jeane in the living room, which was decorated with a red print rug, a ramshackle piano, a coffee table piled with religious books, a pair of ceramic cry-baby dolls, and an old rocking chair. “The woman with the red hair,” as Norma Jeane called her, was Gladys Baker. Norma Jeane feared and dreaded her visits, which recalled her earliest, inexplicable memory—Gladys’s attempt to smother her in her crib.
Once, when Ida Bolender was giving Norma Jeane a bath, the three-year-old called her “mommy.”
“I’m not your mommy,” Ida corrected her. “Call me Aunt.”
“But he’s my daddy!” said Norma Jeane, pointing to Wayne.
“No, we’re not your parents,” said Ida. “The one who comes here with the red hair, she’s your mother.”
Gladys was born in Mexico on May 27, 1902. Her mother, Della May Monroe, was later diagnosed as suffering from manic-depressive psychosis. Her father, Otis Elmer Monroe, an American house-painter who had crossed the border in search of employment, had syphilis. Soon after Gladys’s birth, the Monroes returned to California, where Della gave birth to a son, Marion, in 1905. Syphilis caused Otis’s mental health to deteriorate, and in 1908 he entered Southern California State Hospital in Patton. Suffering from dementia in the final stages of syphilis, he died on July 22, 1909.
Della, lamenting that Gladys and Marion would no doubt wind up in a mental institution like their father, remarried. Her second husband, Lyle Graves, had a drinking problem and a violent temper. In one outburst, he hurled Gladys’s pet kitten against a brick wall. The cat died and
Della fled with her children. She sent Marion to live with relatives and found a one-room apartment in Venice. The landlord, thin-lipped, jug-eared Jap Baker, hired her to manage the property while he operated a game concession at the beach. Before long Della had a new boyfriend, Charles Grainger. She wanted to move in with him, but he objected to her daughter’s presence.
By this time, Gladys, fine-boned and barely five feet tall, had full high breasts, a long narrow tapered back, and rounded hips. Her reddish hair fell back in waves from her prominent widow’s peak. At fourteen, Gladys became pregnant by her mother’s twenty-six-year-old employer. Instead of being upset, Della instantly saw a way to realize her dream of moving in with Charles Grainger. Ten days before Gladys’s fifteenth birthday, Della, giving the child’s age as eighteen, signed her daughter’s application for a marriage license.
The marriage was calamitous from the first. Gladys was unprepared for the responsibilities of motherhood, and Jap Baker proved to be a violent drinker like her stepfather. Gladys’s first child was the ill-fated Robert Kermit Baker, whom they nicknamed Jackie. There followed a daughter, Berniece.
Gladys was nineteen, her hair bleached to a light shade of blonde, when Jap drove them in an open car to see his family in Flat Lick, Kentucky, near the Tennessee border. On the way up into the southeast mountains, Jap and Gladys quarreled fiercely. They failed to notice when three-year-old Jackie, sitting alone on the rear seat, tumbled out of the car. The boy’s hip injuries left him permanently lame. The quarreling continued in Flat Lick, where Gladys, wearing a tight dress, disappeared into the mountains with Jap’s older brother. When Jap found her, he whipped her with a leather bridle. Gladys escaped finally and ran into town, displaying her bloodied back to anyone who would look. She shouted at passersby that she was frightened of her husband. On the way home to California, Jap pulled over on a desolate road in Arizona. He dragged Gladys out of the car and pounded her head with his fists.
Gladys divorced Jap and was awarded custody of Jackie and Berniece. Jap, pretending to take the children for the weekend, kidnapped them to Flat Lick, believing that they would be better off raised by his own mother. Gladys pursued Jap, but no one would help her get her children back. Flat Lick was Jap’s turf and everyone seemed to take
his side. Gladys supported herself by cleaning houses in Flat Lick for a time, but after Jap married a local widow—one of the people to whom Gladys had displayed her bloodied back—Gladys returned to California to start a new life alone.
In Los Angeles, Gladys found work as a negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries—thus the persistent smell of glue that her daughter remembered years after—and there she met Grace McKee, who became a lifelong friend. Under the influence of Grace, a peroxide blonde, Gladys changed her hair color to bright red. The women, who shared an apartment in Silverlake, caroused with a good many men from the film lab and the studios. On October 11, 1924, Gladys married Martin Edward Mortenson, a meterman, but walked out after four months and moved back in with Grace.
In the fall of 1925, Gladys became pregnant, possibly by Stanley Gifford, her lab supervisor. Gifford, recently divorced, would not acknowledge the child or help Gladys. Though Mortenson had filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, he was still legally Gladys’s husband and therefore by law the father, unless someone proved otherwise. Gladys dealt with the fact of her pregnancy alone; she did not even tell Grace, and her own mother had gone off with Charles Grainger to the Far East. At 9:30 a.m. on June 1, 1926, four days after her lonely twenty-fourth birthday, Gladys gave birth to Norma Jeane in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Oddly, she listed Norma Jeane as her third but only living child, and gave the father as Edward Mortenson, address unknown. Discharged from the hospital, Gladys went directly to a furnished room. For lack of a crib, the baby slept in a dresser drawer. Eventually, Gladys had to go back to work, so she placed Norma Jeane with the Bolenders, who lived across the street from Della’s bungalow in Hawthorne. She paid them $25 a month.
When Della returned alone from the Far East, she seemed totally mad. There were disturbing incidents. On one occasion, Ida Bolender watched in horror as Norma Jeane’s grandmother ran across the street naked and tried to kick down Ida’s door. Finally, on August 4, 1927, when Norma Jeane was fourteen months old, Della was removed to Norwalk State Hospital, where she died in a straitjacket nineteen days later.
“We have to watch that one very carefully,” Ida said of Norma Jeane to her husband. Ida tapped her temple and spun her finger round and round. “It’s in her family, you know.”
No wonder Norma Jeane was afraid of the woman with the red hair.
When Gladys took Norma Jeane to her apartment for short visits, Gladys sat rigidly. She rarely talked. She never smiled. She was acutely sensitive to sound, and the tiniest noises seemed to overwhelm her. When her daughter tried to lose herself in a book, Gladys complained about the noise of the turning pages.
On the wall in Gladys’s bedroom, where Norma Jeane liked to hide in the closet, hung the framed photograph of a man who bore a distinct resemblance to Clark Gable. When her daughter asked who the man was, Gladys claimed that he was Norma Jeane’s father. The image, shadowed in memory, haunted Norma Jeane for the rest of her years.
Norma Jeane picked up a stray dog who came to live with her at the Bolenders. She called her pet Tippy, and she was devoted to him. Every morning the little black-and-white dog followed her to the Washington School, waiting outside until she was finished. When Norma Jeane was seven, a neighbor attacked Tippy with a garden hoe, and, in front of the screaming child, sliced the dog in two. The incident appears to have triggered Gladys’s memories of her own pet kitten being hurled against a brick wall by her stepfather. Suddenly, Norma Jeane, already traumatized, found herself being removed from the Bolenders.
Though Gladys had never told Norma Jeane about her brother and sister, she had a fantasy of buying a house where she would raise all three of her children. In fact, she had lost touch with Jackie and Berniece, and thus was unaware that Jackie had died in 1931. In the years since Gladys had left Flat Lick, her son had led a pitiful existence. He had difficulty walking, one leg being shorter than the other. He lost an eye when a firecracker exploded. He had kidney trouble. Jap Baker, instead of taking him to the hospital, insisted on trying to catheterize the boy at home, and he died of kidney failure soon afterward, aged fourteen.
At the time Norma Jeane came to live with her, Gladys was working at Columbia Pictures with Grace and had managed to save some money. Though Grace warned her that staff cuts were threatened, Gladys made a down payment on a bungalow near the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 1933. When Gladys did indeed lose her job, there was no choice but to rent out part of the bungalow to an English couple, who worked as film extras.
The responsibility of a home she could barely afford and a child she had no idea how to care for plunged Gladys into a deep depression. The news that her maternal grandfather, Tilford Hogan, had hung himself in Linn County, Missouri, confirmed her fears about the family fate. Gladys had hallucinations. Lying on the living-room sofa, kicking and screaming, she imagined that someone was coming down the staircase to murder her. One morning in January 1935, Gladys woke up in Norwalk State Hospital, where her mother had died in a straitjacket seven years previously. Doctors listed her condition as paranoid schizophrenia; Grace told Ida Bolender that a portion of Gladys’s brain had collapsed. From then on, Grace never tired of repeating that she had warned Gladys against taking on too much responsibility, such as buying a house and trying to care for Norma Jeane.
Before Norma Jeane married Jimmy Dougherty, Grace instructed her to disclose that she was illegitimate and that the Mr. Mortenson listed on her birth certificate wasn’t her real father. So Dougherty knew something of her background and of the mother who, following an escape attempt, had been transferred to Agnews State Hospital in San Jose. Gladys tried to kill herself at least twice. Once, she stuffed a bed-sheet down her throat. On another occasion, she jabbed the blue vein in her wrist with a hairpin. Dougherty knew that Norma Jeane worried about the fate that had befallen both her mother and her grandmother; and he knew, having once casually told Norma Jeane she was crazy, never to utter that painful word again.
Dougherty was on shore leave from the Merchant Marine when Norma Jeane asked him to accompany her to the bus stop where she was to pick up Gladys, who had finally succeeded in her bid to be released from the state hospital. Dora Hogan Graham, Della’s sister, had petitioned the authorities on her behalf, and Gladys agreed to live with Aunt Dora in Portland, Oregon, for at least a year as a condition of her release. En route, she stopped off to visit Norma Jeane, whom she had seen only once in eleven years. When Gladys stepped down from the bus, her appearance came as something of a shock. For reasons that no one could explain, the former mental patient was dressed as a nurse, in a white nylon dress and a nurse’s white stockings and shoes.
One year previously, Norma Jeane had quietly visited Agnews. Her husband, apparently, didn’t know about the trip. She drove out there
with high hopes, but they were quickly dashed. On seeing Gladys, she did not have the feeling, “This is my mother.” Gladys wasn’t even the woman with the red hair anymore, her hair having turned to salt and pepper. Confronted with someone who seemed less like her parent than Grace did, Norma Jeane, desperately disappointed, never went back. Gladys was a stranger to her. In a sense, that was what she had always been. As Norma Jeane later said, part of her wanted to be with her mother, yet part of her remained afraid.
Norma Jeane loved and loathed, was drawn to and repelled by her mother, all at the same time. On the one hand, Grace’s litany that too much responsibility had caused Gladys’s breakdown made Norma Jeane feel guilty. On the other hand, she could never expunge the memory of fighting for her life as Gladys tried to smother her in her crib.
Had Gladys really attempted to murder Norma Jeane? It’s impossible to say. One can only know that the mentally unstable Gladys communicated, in one way or another, a wish that Norma Jeane had never existed. In a child’s mind, it would be a short way from that to her mother’s wishing her dead. Whether or not the incident actually occurred, Norma Jeane believed it had. And Norma Jeane believed something else: that her mother associated her with sin, with badness, with evil. Gladys had somehow communicated the notion that as an illegitimate child Norma Jeane was the embodiment of her own sins and had to be snuffed out. Subsequently, when Norma Jeane was expelled from several foster homes after being sexually assaulted, the punishment seemed to validate Gladys’s claim that she was intrinsically bad.