The Genius and the Goddess (4 page)

After Gladys' violent crack up and sudden disappearance, Grace
Goddard became Norma Jeane's legal guardian. From January to
August 1935 she made temporary and increasingly desperate arrangements
for the child. At first Norma Jeane lived with Gladys' lodgers,
the Atkinsons, but when the house was sold they gave up their hopes
of stardom and returned to England. She then moved in with new
foster parents, the
Harvey Giffens, and then with Grace's mother,
Emma Atchinson. This proved equally unsatisfactory, and the little
refugee must have been very troubled during these frequent displacements.
In September 1935 Grace took the drastic step of putting her
into a children's home, where she remained for the next two years.
Her father, mother and sister were alive, but she had no one to care
for her. Technically, she still had a family; practically, she did not.
Condemned to be an orphan, she felt fear, loneliness and utter despair.

Orphanages were then notorious for their poor food, onerous
chores and harsh discipline, and seemed to punish children for their
parents' disappearance or death. One authority, emphasizing the physical
and mental deprivation, stated that
orphanages

were, quite literally, a last resort for almost all who turned to
them. . . . [They] were often highly regimented institutions
where children had relatively little positive interaction with
adults and limited opportunity to develop emotionally or
psychologically. . . .

When disaster struck their families, such children were
provided with food, clothing, shelter, companionship, and at least
some education. . . . Such children probably lacked emotional
warmth from a parental figure and the opportunity to act
independently in society.

During the Depression, as orphanages became increasingly overcrowded
(as prisons are today), the food, facilities and adult
supervision deteriorated, while neglect, punishment and abuse
increased. The reputation of orphanages was so forbidding that many
of them took names with pleasant connotations. The Jewish Orphan
Asylum became Bellefaire, St. Mary's Female Asylum became
Parmadale, the Protestant Orphan Asylum became Beech Brook. The
orphans were eager to be adopted or taken into foster homes, where
they would at least have the semblance of family life. When promising
parents appeared, the children were exhibited like slaves on an
auction block. In 1925, pedestrians looked up to see an institution
with "barred windows, tiny hands clutching the bars, against which
were placed listless white faces." One girl, lamenting the lack of affection,
"felt so lonely and forlorn." Many children, not surprisingly, had
chronic physical illnesses and severe psychological problems.

But foster parents, especially during hard times, could be quite
mercenary; and officials, desperate to place the children, often ignored
the minimal standards required for proper care. Another authority
noted that "in 1933 an estimated 120,000 children stretched the foster
care system to its limits." The journalist Art Buchwald, who spent
most of his youth in foster homes, observed that "the foster parents
were more interested in the money they received than in the children."
In Tennessee, two-year-old twins were placed "in the care of
a seventy-nine-year-old blind woman who was losing her mind. . . .
Sixteen children were living in the attic of a home that failed to pass
a fire inspection."
⁴

In Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Bracknell's
memorably witty remark shows the absurdity of blaming the victim:
"To lose one parent . . . may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both
looks like carelessness." Yet children usually react to their loss by
blaming themselves. Both
Charles Dickens and
Rudyard Kipling
described traumatic experiences of abandonment in childhood that
left them, like Norma Jeane, permanently angry and hurt. Dickens
wrote that "my whole nature was so penetrated with grief and humiliation
. . . that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I . . . wander
desolately back to that time of my life." Kipling agreed that "when
young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion,
and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that
knowledge."
⁵
Norma Jeane had been suddenly separated from her
mother, her guardian and several foster families. Grace now told her
they were going for a pleasant car ride, but she soon arrived at a
strange, hostile and frightening place.

The
Los Angeles Orphans Home Society – now called Hollygrove
and still standing at 815 North El Centro in Hollywood – was not
as forbidding as it first seemed to a small child. The privately
endowed, nonsectarian home was founded in 1880, and its colonial-style,
two-story red-brick building was set back on a wide lawn.
The dormitories, dining room and play areas were clean and neat.
Inside, there was a large recreation room with toys and games, radio
and phonograph, auditorium and stage. Outside, on five acres, were
swings, seesaws, exercise bars, sandboxes and even a swimming pool.
The Home housed fifty to sixty children, a third of them street
urchins or runaways, the rest actual orphans. Norma Jeane lived
with twenty-five other girls, aged six to fourteen, in a high-ceilinged
dorm, with large windows, behind the main building. The boys
slept in a separate dorm, but all the meals, sports, games, activities
and schooling were coeducational.

According to her over-optimistic file, which reads as if she were
on holiday and trying to please her keepers, Norma Jeane seems to
have adjusted remarkably well. Her dossier states that her "behavior
is normal. . . . She is bright and sun-shiny. . . . The school reports on
her are good. . . . She is quiet. . . . She sleeps and eats well. . . . She is
well behaved. . . . Her grades are good. . . . She participates in all activities
willingly. . . . She is co-operative." But – like Jay Gatsby watching
the alluring lights across the sound – she dreamed of escaping to a
glamorous life in the movies."When I was nine," she recalled, "I used
to look out of the orphan asylum window at night and see a big
lighted-up sign that read 'R.K.O. Radio Pictures.'"

Some notable orphans have left poignant accounts of their life in
institutions.
Charlie Chaplin's experiences in London were remarkably
similar to Norma Jeane's in Los Angeles. His father abandoned
the family soon after Charlie was born; his mother retreated into her
own world of silence and indifference. She sent Charlie and his brother
to a school for "Orphans and Destitute Children." While they were
in the orphanage, she had a mental breakdown and was committed
to an insane asylum. Like Norma Jeane, Charlie was not actually an
orphan, since both his parents were alive, but psychologically he felt
he
was
one. In his autobiography, he observed that though "we were
well looked after, it was a forlorn existence. Sadness was in the air."
⁶
His head was shaved and stained with iodine for ringworm; he was
mocked by the village boys as an inmate of a "booby hatch"; and,
too terrified to protest, he was severely beaten for a crime he didn't
commit.

The American poet
Elizabeth Bishop, born in 1911, was also a
damaged orphan. Her father died when she was eight months old;
her mother was committed to an insane asylum when Elizabeth was
five, and she never saw her mother again. Brought up by her paternal
grandparents, she suffered from severe eczema, asthma and numerous
childhood diseases. As an adult, she became an alcoholic and experienced
suicidal depressions.

Eileen Simpson – a psychotherapist, once married to the poet and
suicide John Berryman – has written perceptively about her experiences
with the "drab surroundings, ill-fitting clothing, and inadequate
diets" of an orphanage, with the children who "cried incessantly,
refused to eat, slept poorly, were alternately clinging and detached."
As with Norma Jeane, "there had always been a broad vein of sadness"
in her character and very little talent for happiness. She "knew what
it was like . . . to cry out for reassurance that she was not alone, and
to hear only the opaque, tomblike silence that, in the middle of the
night, isolated me from the living."

Simpson explained why "foster care was as problematical as institutional
care had been. A successful match between child and surrogate
parents was not easy to arrange, especially since many foster families
were more interested in augmenting their income than in looking
after someone else's child. Few of the children were adopted by their
families, and far too many were shunted from one household to
another, with predictable results."
⁷
Chaplin and Simpson had the
comfort of a sibling, Bishop lived with sympathetic relatives; but
Norma Jeane, rejected by everyone, was absolutely alone. Like Chaplin
and Simpson, she was severely damaged by her years in the orphanage.

Marilyn emphasized that she was brought up very differently from
the normal American child and never believed she would have a
happy life. Natasha Lytess criticized Marilyn's habit of frequently referring
to her miserable childhood, excusing her bad behavior and
appealing for sympathy. But she had suffered terribly, and felt justified
in embellishing her story to advance her career. A publicist at
Twentieth Century-Fox, writing a brief account of her early life,
noted that the first money she ever earned was five cents a month
for setting tables at the orphanage; and that she later spent at the local
drugstore the ten cents a month she got for washing dishes. She began
to stutter in the orphanage and continued to stutter as an adult whenever
she was nervous. Her happiest childhood memory, an image of
freedom, was "running through high grass in a vacant lot in
Hawthorne." Her saddest memory was "disappointment in people
when she was a little girl."

Norma Jeane was released from the orphanage in June 1937 and
lived for the next year with a series of foster parents: first with Grace's
sister and brother-in-law,
Enid and Sam Knebelcamp; then with her
own elderly great-aunt,
Ida Martin; next with her guardian, Grace
Goddard; finally with Grace's aunt,
Ana Lower; and with other foster
families when Ana's health was poor. Ana, divorced and living on
rental property, was fifty-eight when the twelve-year-old Norma Jeane
came to live with her in 1938. She looked plump, white-haired and
grandmotherly, but her manner was stern and severe. A devout
Christian Scientist (like Gladys), she went to church several times a
week. Norma Jeane's grandmother, her mother, her guardian, her
great-aunt, and even the sensible and compassionate Ana, all had had –
and warned Norma Jeane to beware of – untrustworthy husbands and
disastrous marriages.

Norma Jeane had to adjust not only to many different families,
moods, rules, beliefs and ways of life, but also to nine different
schools, for her first ten grades, between 1932 and 1942. Hardened
to being the least important person in her foster family, she nevertheless
remembered the disgusting humiliation on her weekly bath
night: "I never minded coming 'last' in these families except on
Saturday nights when everybody took a bath. Water cost money, and
changing the water in the tub was an unheard of extravagance. The
whole family used the same tub of water. And I was always the last
one in." No wonder that she later luxuriated in long, perfumed and
purifying baths.

Norma Jeane, a pretty and obedient girl, was never beaten. But she
had to endure something far worse than repulsive bath water. When
she was a child, most psychiatrists believed that "sexual abuse was rare
and that children often lied about it. In 1937 two prominent American
psychiatrists not only denied that sexual assault traumatized most children
but argued that 'the child may have been the actual seducer
rather than the one innocently seduced.'"
⁸
By the time she was twelve
years old, Norma Jeane – with no one to protect her – had been
sexually assaulted at least three times. At the age of eight, she was
molested by a boarder in a foster home. When she tried to explain
what had happened to her, the foster parent became very angry and
– following the current belief – blamed
her
: "Don't you dare say
anything against Mr. Kimmel. Mr. Kimmel's a fine man. He's my star
boarder! . . . Shame on you, complaining about people!" After she left
the orphanage and entered puberty, she was again molested by adult
predators: by a cousin when living with Ida Martin and by Grace's
husband,
"Doc" Goddard, a six-foot five-inch drunkard.

Though Marilyn claimed she'd been raped as a child, her first
husband stated she was a virgin when they married. She later gave a
more accurate, though equally repulsive account of what actually
happened: "I wasn't really raped, but he forced me to do something,
and I had a shock. . . . He forced me to take him in my mouth."
Virginia Woolf was also sexually molested, at six years old, when her
adult half-brother, George Duckworth, lifted her onto a table and
fingered her private parts. As an adult, Woolf always associated sex
with degradation and contempt. She became sexually frigid, had several
mental breakdowns and finally committed suicide.

But at the age of twelve, showing no outward signs of her emotional
scars, Norma Jeane looked in the mirror at her smooth, shapely body
and was pleased by what she saw. She first aroused the attention of
young boys by wearing a tight sweater to show off her breasts, and
soon realized that her well-developed body was the key to popularity
and success. Though sexy, she repressed her sexual feelings, and recalled
"that with all my lipstick and mascara and precocious curves, I was
as unsensual as a fossil."
⁹

Norma Jeane was always threatened with confinement in the
orphanage if she failed to behave. That threat became real in 1942
when she was sixteen. She could no longer stay with the increasingly
ill Ana Lower, and "Doc" Goddard was transferred with his
family to West Virginia. Grace then told her that she'd either have
to get married or return to the dreaded institution. Grace had dominated
her early life, and had been Norma Jeane's legal guardian for
eight years. In between spells of caring for her, she'd placed her in
the orphanage and found various foster homes. She now arranged
to marry her off. On June 19, 1942, six months after America entered
World War II and three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Norma
Jeane dropped out of the tenth grade and married a neighbor's son:
the attractive, athletic and popular twenty-one-year-old
James
Dougherty.