Chapter Two
IN 1917, beautiful, doe-eyed Norma Talmadge, then twenty, married the thirty-eight-year-old independent producer Joseph M. Schenck, who founded a corporation named for his wife and molded her career with astonishing success. By 1926, when the couple separated, Norma Talmadge had appeared in more than sixty films, most of them a series of somewhat damp melodramas with titles like Smilin’ Through and Secrets, over which the star’s luminous, expressive beauty somehow triumphed. For a film lab worker like Gladys, who coveted glamour and routinely saw images of Talmadge everywhere, the name was more than an imitation: “Norma” expressed a kind of totemic longing, a benediction on her daughter’s future. Double names for girls were popular at the time, and Gladys found “Jeane” a suitable addition.1
Within two weeks of the child’s birth, Gladys gave Norma Jeane over to a foster family sixteen miles away. The reasons for this are not difficult to fathom.
In the Roaring Twenties, moral and aesthetic standards were challenged in deed as well as discourse—not only in America, but round the world. After the horror of the Great War, there were extraordinary explosions of creativity as well as bolder (and sometimes dangerous) amusements everywhere. Along with New York, Berlin and Paris seemed simultaneously to inaugurate the “Jazz Age,” and life for a time seemed a cycle of uninhibited fun, excitement and experimentation. Europeans heartily imported the works of Americans like Hemingway, Dreiser, Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton—but not the dark, imprecatory religious sentiments so deeply rooted in the American tradition.
The United States, however, was caught in the conflict between the new moral turmoil and the old Puritan repressions. In the 1920s, there were higher hemlines seen and more coarse language heard in public than ever before; there was widespread use of drugs as recreational gear (especially cocaine and heroin); and plays and movies routinely dealt with the dark underside of life. Contrariwise, by that peculiarity known as Prohibition, alcohol was then illegal. As the voices of moral vigilance became more strident, the country’s penchant for the bogus remedy of extreme moralism (as distinct from authentic morality) led to the emergence of thumpingly righteous fundamentalist religions—in California as in the South.
Other factors encouraged Gladys to place the baby with a “decent” family: she could not quit her job, there was no one to care for Norma Jeane while she worked, and her restless, nomadic life (like her mother’s, as she may have apprehended) was unsuitable for mothering.
And there were less tangible, more elusive, perhaps unconscious (but nonetheless potent) reasons to deliver Norma Jeane to the care of others. Gladys had seen her father’s deterioration and death, which (she had been wrongly told) were due to madness—a condition poorly differentiated but, it was then believed, invariably inherited. Disappointed, like Della, in marriage, Gladys had also found herself incapable of effective mothering. Hostile toward Della on account of the past and Della’s recent abandonment of her during the latter part of her pregnancy, Gladys may have been, in a way, a classic type of parent who resents an offspring of the same sex.2 In addition, she was plainly terrified by the physical responsibilities of caring for an infant. Further seasoned by sharing her friend Grace McKee’s dedication to an unfettered life of gaiety (as if it were a vocation), Gladys had developed the habit of an essentially selfish life.
She was, then, ill prepared to be a diligent, effective and constant mother, and she knew it. Of this Gladys’s own mother, Della, was similarly convinced, for as soon as she returned from her exotic South Seas adventure—when her granddaughter was a week old—she urged Gladys to place Norma Jeane in the care of a sober, devout couple named Bolender; they also lived on Rhode Island Street, the address of Della’s bungalow in Hawthorne. (The street name was changed several times as Hawthorne and adjacent El Segundo became business extensions of the Los Angeles International Airport.) “I was probably a mistake,” Norma Jeane told a friend years later. “My mother didn’t want me. I probably got in her way, and I must have been a disgrace to her.”
Like many families of that time, the Bolenders supplemented their income by caring for foster children, a responsibility for which they were paid twenty or twenty-five dollars a month either by the natural parents or by the State of California.
And so, on June 13, 1926, Norma Jeane Mortensen (her name variously noted on official forms as Mortensen, Mortenson or Baker) was delivered to Albert and Ida Bolender. He was a postman, and she devoted herself to mothering (she had one son), foster-parenting, housekeeping and local Protestant parish life of the Low Church type. Among the many dramatic presentations of Norma Jeane’s life was the account of her being shuttled to over a dozen foster homes before she was ten. Like so many other tales of her childhood, however, this bit of manufactured autobiography conveniently fed the legend of a miserable, Dickensian childhood—a theme beloved of Hollywood publicists and sentimentally cherished by many people. But Norma Jeane’s earliest years were actually rather geographically stable, for she resided seven years in the Bolenders’ modest four-room bungalow.
One unhappy event occurred during Norma Jeane’s early years—something she could have hardly recalled from the age of one, but about which she learned from the Bolenders, Gladys and Grace.
In early 1927, Della suddenly fell ill with a weak heart and became susceptible to frequent respiratory infections. She now depended on Gladys, who moved in with her mother despite the long daily trolley-car ride to work. By late spring, Della was in wretched health. Her breathing became severely impaired by degenerative heart disease, and this caused her to suffer acute depressions. Medication provided only occasional relief and, as with many cardiopulmonary patients, the intervals were often characterized by pleasant imaginations, reveries and even periods of frank euphoria. Della could be withdrawn and tearful when Gladys departed for work, but then in the evening she might find her mother cheerfully preparing dinner. It would have been natural, in such circumstances, for Gladys to recall the unpredictable behavior of her father years earlier. There is some evidence in the family files that Della suffered a stroke in the late spring of 1927—an event that could also have caused unpredictable shifts of mood and temper.
At the end of July, Della was convinced death was near, and an array of guilty memories alternated with hallucinations: her parents, Tilford and Jennie Hogan, were reconciled, she told Gladys, and they were coming to rescue her, to take her home. The next morning, Della claimed that Charles Grainger (long since out of her life) had crept into her bed the night before and had made violent love to her. Not long after, she struggled from her home, walked over to the Bolenders’ to see her granddaughter, and banged on the door. Angered when she saw that no one came to admit her, Della broke the door’s glass with her elbow—“for no reason I know of,” Ida said, adding, “we called the police.”
On August 4, 1927, Della was carted away to the Norwalk State Hospital, suffering from acute myocarditis, a general term for inflammation of the heart and surrounding tissues. After nineteen days of agonizing distress, she died on August 23, at the age of fifty-one. The death certificate gives the cause as simply myocarditis, adding a “contributory manic depressive psychosis.” This latter term was imprecise especially in those days, and one subjoined only because Gladys stressed to the physicians at Norwalk that her mother’s moods and tempers had alternated unpredictably in recent weeks.
The fact is that little was done for Della’s grave heart condition. She had seen doctors only three or four times and often forgot the hours and doses of her medication. Thus, when the ward supervisor signed papers a day after her death, Gladys’s report on her mother’s mental state made the addition of “psychosis” understandable but really baseless. But among the documents of Della’s case during confinement, there is no psychological profile, nor is there record of an attending neurologist. Della Monroe (thus her name appeared in hospital records) died of heart disease, which caused impaired mentation due to insufficient oxygenation of the brain. As in the case of her husband Otis Monroe, there is no evidence that she was also a psychiatric case. But for Gladys, the myth of family madness deepened: after Della’s death she was distressed and for several weeks failed to report for work. Shutting herself in her mother’s bungalow, she pored over Della’s few possessions; finally, she emerged and decided to sell the place. Bracing herself for a return to work, Gladys then moved back to Hollywood, obtaining work at two movie studios, weekdays and Saturdays.
Although there were quite different reasons to pity much in her life, the truth is that (contrary to later publicity reports) Norma Jeane’s years with the Bolenders were essentially secure, she lacked for no material necessities, and there is no evidence that she was abused or mistreated. But she was the only child to remain so long: more than a dozen other children arrived, grew and departed, or returned to their families.
“Despite all the inventions of later years,” according to Norma Jeane’s first husband, “she never had known grinding poverty, never had gone shoeless, never, to the best of my knowledge, had to skip a meal.” He felt that as her career improved she “desperately wanted some colorful family tale of want and scarcity . . . [while] the truth is that she was raised in a small but comfortable bungalow with every modern convenience, if not splendid luxury.” The Bolenders even owned a scarred old upright piano, used mostly for hymn-singing by Ida’s church cronies. There were also toys and books, and a small room to accommodate a child’s parent for an overnight visit.
Yet she was clearly scarred by the psychological and emotional stress of her uncertain identity and by not knowing when her mother might suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish. When she did visit Norma Jeane, Gladys took her for outings or picnics. Mother and daughter rode the Pacific Electric trolley cars to Sunset Beach; alternately, they made several connections and traveled south to tour the glass factories in Torrance; or, year-round, they would simply ride and ride from one shoreline resort to another, stopping at Redondo, Manhattan and Hermosa for lunch or ice cream. Among Norma Jeane’s earliest memories was Venice’s own St. Mark’s Plaza, on the corner of Windward and Ocean Front Walk, where (then as decades later) residents and tourists shopped and gaily dressed crowds crossed to and from the beach. Gladys once bought a striped parasol her daughter kept for years, and at the plaza Norma Jeane loved to watch the mimes, jugglers and fire-eaters. Frequently, mother and daughter rode the Venice Miniature Railway down Windward and then walked along the inland lagoons, where Gladys pointed out the weekend rendezvous of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, of Harold Lloyd, of William S. Hart. But such happy Saturdays were increasingly rare, for Gladys visited less and less often. “Her mother paid her board all the time,” Ida recalled, adding that Norma Jeane “was never neglected and always nicely dressed.” But Gladys became for the most part an irregular, shadowy visitor at the edge of Norma Jeane’s life.
Just when other children had those to call mother and father, therefore, Norma Jeane was hurtled into confusion. “One morning I called [Ida] ‘Mother,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me that—I’m not your mother. Call me ‘Aunt Ida.’ Then I pointed to her husband, and I said, ‘But he’s my Daddy!’ and she just said, ‘No.’ ” Later, “she discussed her father more than anyone in her past,” according to a close friend. “She remembered her mother, although without much feeling. But she missed a father terribly, although she was smart enough to be wary of anyone she took for a surrogate father.”
Ida Bolender was correct to speak truthfully about the situation; her manner and tone, however, seem to have lacked the kind of comforting explanation that would have prevented the child’s bewilderment and the conviction that she was in some way markedly different from other children. At two and three, Norma Jeane could not have understood the sporadic arrivals and departures of the woman she was told to call mother. “She didn’t come very much,” she said later. “She was just the woman with the red hair.” Gladys, whose visits meant good times, made guest appearances, but the major players of Norma Jeane’s early life were the Bolenders, and in matters of conduct, religion and morality they yielded center stage to none.
“To go to a movie was a sin,” Norma Jeane remembered of one Bolender doctrine. “If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies,” Ida warned, “do you know what would happen? You’d burn along with all the bad people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers.” The sharp disjunction between Gladys’s attitudes and those of the Bolenders must have caused Norma Jeane considerable confusion about proper conduct and standards of right and wrong.
Confusion or no, photographs from these first several years show Norma Jeane a winsome child with ash-blond hair, an engaging smile and bright blue-green eyes. But she always recalled that in the Bolender household “no one ever called me pretty.” The plainspoken, decent, humorless Ida did not believe in flattery; prettiness might even be dangerous. She and her family lived within bustling, modern Los Angeles County, but Ida and Albert could have been the models for Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Norma Jeane’s closest playmate was a stray dog she brought home and named Tippy. The Bolenders allowed her to keep the puppy so long as she cared for it, and Norma Jeane was usually seen followed two paces behind by the worshipful Tippy.
The family had, in fact, no inclination for mere worldly amusements; they placed primary emphasis on morality and religious responsibilities. The church they all attended (literally shaken to its foundations by the 1933 earthquake) was the focus of Bolender life—and therefore, by extension, the lives of the children committed to their care. “We took her to Sunday school with us,” Ida said. “I had not only Norma Jeane and my own son, but other children, too, with me.” This pious little platoon marched off to the pews not only on Sunday but also for prayer and instruction one afternoon and one evening during each week, as Marilyn recalled. “Every night I was told to pray that I would not wake up in hell. I had to say: ‘I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell or give alcohol while I live. From all tobacco I’ll abstain and never take God’s name in vain.’ . . . I always felt insecure.”
That the Bolenders were not prodigal with entertainments or compliments is entirely consistent with the austere and highly charged religious character of their lives. Perhaps the primary advantage of faith, they believed, was the certainty of their moral posture, and it was morality which assured salvation. They were members of a branch of the United Pentecostal Church much influenced by the famous Los Angeles Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, a revival community founded on Azusa Street in 1906. Like many people with good intentions but a restrictive and potentially dangerous literal-mindedness, adherents to this kind of religion often equate true religion with unquestioning obedience to a certain code of right conduct; a sense of mystery (much less a mystical sense) is not even mentioned. For children especially, everything was to be made clear and immutable, and people of any age who questioned or complained were pitied, ignored or held in quiet contempt. This is not to imply, however, that there is any evidence that the Bolenders were other than attentive, caring foster parents. “They were terribly strict,” Norma Jeane said years later. “They didn’t mean any harm—it was their religion. They brought me up harshly.”
For over a century, Roman Catholic, mainstream Protestant and then Jewish communities had flourished in Los Angeles. But in the 1920s and 1930s, flamboyant evangelical sects proliferated along with the aromatic eucalyptus and acrid auto fumes. Unconventional, sometimes hysterical attempts at faith healing; bizarre costumes; midnight-to-dawn meetings where sinners were asked to “testify”; services that resembled movie-set extravaganzas—all these were typical of local religious life. This is not remarkable in a place where the entertainment industry depended on the mechanisms of fanfare and promotion; the fringe churches, too, engaged advertising and public-relations counselors.
The best example of this colorful spirit during Norma Jeane’s childhood was the notorious Aimee Semple McPherson, greatly admired by the Bolenders, who took Norma Jeane and their other young charges to hear the famous evangelist. A Pentecostal minister born in 1890, Sister Aimee began her preaching career with itinerant evangelism, radio sermons and healing services at seventeen; eventually she found her greatest welcome in Los Angeles. There, after terminating two marriages but attracting many followers, she established her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, whose Angelus Temple was built by her devotees in 1927 at the staggering cost of one and a half million dollars. Her congregations nationwide, augmented and united by radio broadcasting, numbered in the tens of thousands.
McPherson was quite a character. Usually present was her mother, sunnily addressed as “Ma Kennedy,” who led the applause for her daughter’s highly theatrical revival services—rites ideally suited to Hollywood. To preach a sermon on God’s law, she wore a police uniform; to address the topic of decency, her outfit was a Victorian coverall. Lights, music and mirrors were routinely used for the right effects. The saxophone, for example, was played by a young man named Anthony Quinn, later a movie star. Dynamic and attractive, McPherson was much loved by her faithful, even after the collapse of her third marriage, the filing of at least fifty lawsuits against her and widespread scandals involving (separately) sex and money. (She had an affair with Charles Chaplin.) For all that, the impression made by the exuberant blond Sister Aimee, who used the tools of the acting trade to arouse her congregants, was unforgettable for those who saw her.3
At home, the Bolenders continued the ideals set before everyone at church. Dancing, smoking and card-playing were considered works of the demon, and neatness, order and discipline were marks of virtue; childhood sloppiness, back talk or poor manners were sinful. Routines for mealtimes, chores and playtime were meticulously observed; household regulations were dutifully observed and deviation from them was to be avoided at all cost. Ida’s face often bore an expression of exasperated disappointment over some minor childish foible: “It was hard to please them. Somehow I was always falling short, although I can’t remember being especially bad.” Standards were high for winning approval from Norma Jeane’s first mother figure, while Albert Bolender remained mostly a quiet backer of his wife’s domestic management, his silence severer than any open threat of punishment.
As a natural part of maturing, of establishing independence, of testing and claiming one’s own personality, every child finds a way of rebellion. For Norma Jeane, rigorous discipline at home firmly forestalled mischief, tantrums and rank disobedience. She could, she always insisted, only withdraw to an inner world for her escape. In this regard, there was so much emphasis on propriety that a peculiar type of recurring childhood dream was perhaps inevitable:
I dreamed that I was standing up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church, and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone.
The surreal scene was described and appropriately embellished in adulthood, and whether or not it actually haunted the pre-adolescent Norma Jeane is perhaps unimportant. More to the point, the dream represents what she later wanted the public to think of her childhood fantasies: that she had a kind of prophetic sense of who she would be and what effect she would have on others. She would be a woman to surprise and shock with a natural, guilt-free display of her body; she would also take care not to offend, and in some way this would be connected to her being (as she desired) accepted—even adored—with people lying at her feet. Dream or no, this became the reality.
The Bolenders would have been horrified to hear such a dream: the bathtub was the only situation of licit nakedness. And because cleanliness was not only next to godliness but virtually a sign of it, the Bolenders’ sole extravagance was the hot water lavishly poured for the children’s baths. In a household obsessed with the taint of sin, Norma Jeane was encouraged to soak and scrub. But she never felt that she emerged quite clean enough to please her foster parents. “You could have done better,” Ida or Albert said quietly as they brushed her hair and set out a clean dress. The religious injunctions of church echoed at home: perfection was the ideal to be ever kept before the growing child. Anything less—and of course everything is—deserves implicit belittling; and therefore nothing is more dangerous than praise, which can lead to complacency, idleness or spiritual torpor. She recalled that in her childhood she never felt quite ready, quite clean enough, acceptable, presentable for the Bolenders. “You can always do better.” It was a short route from a soiled blouse to eternal damnation.
She certainly could have done better than to be bored and distracted at a religious pageant into which she was corralled at Easter 1932. With fifty other black-robed youngsters arranged in the form of a living cross, she made her first public theatrical appearance at a sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl:
We all had on white tunics under the black robes and at a given signal we were supposed to throw off the robes, changing the cross from black to white. But I got so interested in looking at the people, the orchestra, the hills and the stars in the sky that I forgot to watch the conductor for the signal. And there I was—the only black mark on a white cross. The family I was living with never forgave me.
“I’ve got to get rid of that quiet little girl,” Norma Jeane overheard Ida Bolender say to her husband that night. “She makes me nervous.”
In 1932, the domestic atmosphere of discipline and achievement were reinforced in the new demands of school life. “Go down two blocks, turn left and keep going till you see the school,” Ida Bolender said one morning in early September, and with two older neighboring children to accompany her, Norma Jeane set off for first-grade class at the Washington Street School in Hawthorne, then located at the corner of El Segundo Boulevard and Washington Street (just south of the area that included Los Angeles International Airport). Classroom discipline was simply a variant on home for Norma Jeane, but in the schoolyard, she remembered, “I loved playing games, and everything seemed like it was pretending. Like all kids, we used to act out little dramas, exaggerate stories. But I loved to make things up—more than the others, I think—maybe because life with my foster parents was always so predictable.” On most days, Tippy followed her to school and waited outside for the return journey.
Another “pretend game” that year seems to have been inspired by a recurring motif on a radio detective serial the Bolenders allowed. A few times that year, Norma Jeane slipped off to school with Albert’s flashlight, prowling the route and (despite broad daylight) shining the lamp on the license plate of every auto and carefully jotting it down. Thus did she practice writing her numbers in early 1933.
And then, with the suddenness of the earthquake that rocked Southern California that March, life changed for Norma Jeane just after her seventh birthday. An angry neighbor, annoyed at Tippy’s barking, grabbed a shotgun and killed the dog, causing the child a spasm of grief. The Bolenders summoned Gladys, who arrived in late June, transported by her friend Grace McKee, who was by this time more than ever Gladys’s closest confidante, sometimes her emotional support, often her counselor, always the arbiter of difficult decisions and the adjudicator of Gladys’s personal and financial dilemmas. Then almost forty, single and childless after several marriages, generous, bohemian with an almost manic pertness, Grace was to become the most important influence in Norma Jeane’s life. For the present, however, Gladys was at the center of things.
Her mother helped Norma Jeane bury her pet. She then paid the Bolenders their last month’s fee, packed her daughter’s clothes and swept her off to a small apartment she had leased for the summer at 6012 Afton Place, Hollywood, near the studios where she and Grace worked as free-lance cutters. Thus Norma Jeane’s time in the sleepy fringe-village of Hawthorne had firmly ended, and with it the vigilant moralism to which the child had been subjected. At the same time, Gladys’s decision to reverse the pattern of her life and to take on the care of her daughter seemed almost a desperate act, one of foreign or imposed conscience.
However, on June 13—as part of President Roosevelt’s assault on the Great Depression—the Home Owner Loan Corporation had been instituted, and low-cost mortgages were now available to hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Gladys, as a single parent, easily qualified. At once she negotiated the purchase of a house into which she and her daughter moved that autumn. Life was changing very rapidly indeed, as Norma Jeane found when, during that summer, Gladys and Grace acted as her tour guides for Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.
A decade earlier, the city had a half-million people; now there were almost three times that number. This increase created an enormous suburban sprawl, with the emergence of various communities linked by the Pacific Electric streetcars; these traveled as far northeast as Pasadena and southwest as far as Long Beach for only twenty cents; out to the village of Lankershim (later North Hollywood) for fifteen cents; and out to Zelzah (Canoga Park) for a dime. Trolleys clanged along Hollywood and Santa Monica boulevards—two of the major east-west arteries—while travelers along Sunset Boulevard rode elegant double-decker buses.
The various sections of Los Angeles were characterized by the development of different industries and technology. Airplane factories were busy near the shore, opening up Los Angeles to a world from which it had been much isolated with deserts on the eastern and the ocean on the western frontiers. Wells were operating round the clock in the hills south of Hollywood, and the port of Los Angeles was the country’s largest oil terminal.
Ten miles inland was the epicenter of the motion picture industry, flourishing as never before with talkies, attracting technicians as well as hopeful actors from all over the world. Film companies owned more than two million dollars’ worth of real estate, studio space and equipment, while two hundred miles of new streets were being blocked out and paved with routes toward the studios. Los Angeles and Hollywood were, in the collective mind of the world, synonymous.
For all its business enterprises and efficient movie storytelling, there was little high culture—a fact at least partly due to the influx of migrant laborers to Los Angeles. From Iowa, Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas there came, in the words of one contemporary historian, “a people well stereotyped in American folklore—mainly derived from Low Church Protestant stock, puritan and materialistic to start with.” And from Central America came another kind of migrant worker: Hispanic Catholic, often with strong Indian roots—in other words, not European-American and, therefore, so far as the sturdy midwesterner judged, not American at all. With depression breadlines and Beverly Hills mansions, immigrant poor and movie-star rich, Los Angeles was evolving into an odd confusion of realms, a hedonistic hick town where the traditional American frontier values of hard work and land cultivation clashed with the allure of the fast buck, fame and a good life under perpetual sunshine.
Late in August, Gladys and Norma Jeane moved into their house at 6812 Arbol Drive, a furnished six-room, three-bedroom house not far from the Hollywood Bowl. The item that settled Gladys’s mind on this particular residence was a Franklin baby-grand piano, painted white. It could have come straight from a scene that had passed through her fingers at the lab—Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire (on which she had worked at RKO that year), or Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. For Gladys, as for most moviegoers, a white piano was an omen of better times.
The house was negotiated and a $5,000 loan obtained from the Mortgage Guarantee Company of California—the note, interestingly, issued to “Gladys Baker, a married woman.” To facilitate the required payments, Gladys at once leased out the entire house to a married couple; she then rented back a bedroom for herself and her daughter, sharing the living room, bath and kitchen with the other family. In Gladys and Norma Jeane’s bedroom hung one small framed photograph—of Charles Gifford. From this fact sprang a subsequent false certitude, among several writers, of Norma Jeane’s parentage, but all the child knew (or her mother admitted) was Gladys’s residual affection for an old beau.
Gladys continued to work as a cutter, and her housemates were English film actors with great spirit but uneven fortunes: George Atkinson had small roles in a few George Arliss films, his wife was an extra in crowd scenes, and his daughter was a sometime stand-in for Madeleine Carroll. It was not surprising, therefore, that the talk at home was usually about movies: writing them, acting in them, editing them, going to see them. Suppers of hash, chipped beef or melted cheese on toast—usually prepared by Grace, the constant visitor—were spiced by industry news, movie-star gossip and studio schedules. That year, liquor prohibition was repealed state by state, and on long, hot summer nights Gladys, Grace and their friends lingered on the porch after the evening meal, smoking cigarettes and sipping from tall beakers of lager. Norma Jeane often collected the empty beer bottles and filled them with flowers from the tiny backyard garden; into one bottle she poured some of her mother’s lavender water for herself. Movies, cigarettes, beer, sweet lotions: nothing could have been more different from the years with the Bolenders, as she later recalled.
Life became pretty casual and tumultuous, quite a change from the first family. They worked hard when they worked, and they enjoyed life the rest of the time. They liked to dance and sing, they drank and played cards, and they had a lot of friends. Because ofthat religious upbringing I’d had, I was kind of shocked—I thought they were all going to hell. I spent hours praying for them.
For a disciplined, quiet seven-year-old girl, this new adult conduct must have seemed more disorienting than refreshing. Most awkwardly, she had to adjust to a second mother. “Aunt Ida was not my mother,” she kept saying to herself. “The lady with the red hair is really my mother”—the woman who without hesitation dealt out a card game for her friends, poured beer, rolled back the carpet and danced. Here was a new woman to please, one completely different from Ida Bolender, and someone she really did not know.
Among the most remarkable differences was the acceptability—even the necessity—of the movies. When they guided Norma Jeane on weekend tours of Hollywood, Gladys and Grace naturally emphasized the great Hollywood movie palaces, those cathedrals of diversion that variously rivaled the Parthenon, Versailles, Far Eastern temples, Gothic churches and European opera houses. These theaters, the women said, were the places that showed “our movies.” Sparing no expense, designers filled vast interior spaces with paintings and antiques, sculpture and splashing fountains. “No kings or emperors have ever wandered through more luxurious surroundings,” boasted theater decorator Harold Rambach.
Imaginations soared along with the construction fees. East of Vine Street on Hollywood Boulevard was the fabulous Pantages Theatre, built in 1930 as a movie palace to accommodate 2,288, where uniformed ushers with flashlights conducted patrons past a miasma of Art Deco columns and vaults, sunbursts and statuary to a gilt-edged auditorium. Impresario Sid Grauman, inspired by the excavations of King Tut’s tomb in 1922, built the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard that year. Eleven years later, the place was in pristine condition: patrons walked down a long, dramatically decorated courtyard with stucco walls featuring mock tombs and vast effigies of ancient Egyptian gods, pharaohs and mummy cases, sphinxes, vultures and fancy grill-work. Grauman’s most famous achievement was the Chinese Theatre, a bit farther west on Hollywood Boulevard, with the exterior of a Buddhist temple, the interior of a Chinese palace, elaborate chinoiserie throughout, and a great gong to herald the start of the feature movie.4Here Grauman assured his immortality along with that of movie stars by inviting them to imprint their hand- and footprints into wet cement with appropriate greetings to him.
That year and the next, Norma Jeane—who had once been told she belonged to a family of “churchgoers, not moviegoers”—was taken each weekend to these temples of the imagination, where she saw not dour preachers or the eccentric Sister Aimee, but self-reliant Katharine Hepburn as Jo in Little Women; Mae West sparkling with sexual self-confidence in She Done Him Wrong; Claudette Colbert bathing nude in Cleopatra; and Raquel Torres vamping Groucho Marx in Duck Soup. Most of all, she remembered how Gladys and Grace adored an incandescent blonde named Jean Harlow, a brazenly sexy social-climber in Dinner at Eight. “There’s a movie star!” Grace whispered to Norma Jeane, pointing at Harlow and echoing the sentiments of millions of Americans—and from that moment, as Norma Jeane later said, “Jean Harlow was my favorite actress.”
Weekdays that summer, while Gladys and Grace worked at film labs, their very livelihoods dependent on the gods and goddesses they saw, Norma Jeane was given money to stay cool and safe at the movies. “There I’d sit, all day and sometimes way into the night—up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I didn’t miss anything that happened—and there was no [money for] popcorn, either.”
In September, when Norma Jeane entered second grade at the Selma Avenue elementary school, she was registered as Norma Jean; this may have been a clerical error, but one which reoccurred with such frequency that it is easy to imagine Gladys and Grace comparing their girl to both Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow.
That autumn, Gladys received news from Missouri. Her grandfather Tilford Hogan, the sympathetic and self-educated farmer whose divorce had caused a great emptiness in his life, had been dealt a great blow by the news of Della’s death. The following year, when he was seventy-seven, two things happened: his health, never robust, suddenly began to fail, and he married a shy, generous, hardworking widow named Emma Wyett. She, too, soon became ill with heart disease.
From the stock market crash of 1929, hunger and hardship had become pandemic in the United States, and to its worst effects Tilford Hogan was not immune. Hundreds of suicides were reported daily across the country as families lost great fortunes or modest savings; in 1933, no less than fifteen million men were jobless—one of every four heads of households. Scores of banks closed, factories failed every week, countless rural folk became migrant workers and complacent middle- and upper-class families in large cities were living in tar-paper shacks, sifting through garbage dumps for food scraps. In February, the nation seemed on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown when President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, visiting Miami, narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet. He was inaugurated in March and, although he and his new government announced radical steps to cure the country’s dreadful health, everyone knew this was not the quick task of a week. In this time of widespread heartache and panic, Tilford Hogan was simply worn down after years of misfortune. By May 1933, his lungs and kidneys failing as quickly as the farm he tenanted, he was unable to provide for himself and Emma. That month came the final stroke of ill fortune: he was to be evicted from his farm.
Early on the afternoon of May 29, 1933, he waved from the window of the small house in Laclede as Emma cranked their ancient jalopy and went on a shopping errand to a nearby village. When she returned two hours later, she called to her husband but there was no reply in or near the house. Emma then walked toward the crumbling barn. As she entered the cavernous darkness, she saw him swinging by the neck, suspended from a rope thrown over a high beam. An inquest ordered by the Missouri State Board of Health had no difficulty confirming the doctor’s report: Tilford Marion Hogan, bereft of pride and hope, was simply another suicide statistic in Linn County during the worst year of the Great Depression.
Although she had never known Tilford, Gladys (learning of his death in an October letter from a cousin) took the news as a terrible shock and fell into a stupefied depression. Her father, she had been incorrectly told, had died of lunacy; her mother’s death had been erroneously reported as caused by manic-depressive psychosis; now, her grandfather’s death by his own hand convinced her that there was virtually a blight of mental illness on the family tree. From this belief Gladys could not be dissuaded. In the evenings, she stalked the rooms of the house, muttering prayers and reading aloud from a family Bible. Inconsolable, she refused food and sleep, despite Grace’s ministrations. Frightened by her mother’s unusual and protracted grief, Norma Jeane brought tea and held Gladys’s hand, begging her to rest, imploring her to stop weeping.
After several weeks of Gladys’s depression, Grace took matters into her own hands and called in a neurologist. According to Eleanor Goddard (later Norma Jeane’s foster sister), “This doctor prescribed some pills for Gladys. But she had a violent reaction to them.” Psycho-pharmacology had not, it must be emphasized, a sophisticated history in 1933—much less was it then (nor has it ever been) a precise science. The effects of certain psychotropic drugs simply cannot be foreseen, and without careful monitoring and the swift administration of antidotes, medications that are harmless to most patients may cause dangerous, permanent and in some cases lethal side effects.
By February 1934, Gladys was still withdrawn and depressed—although once again there were no sure signs of outright psychosis: her inability to cope seems to have derived more from her background (and perhaps, too, from guilt and remorse over neglect of her children) than from real psychiatric illness. She had also taken on the burden of a house, even as she continued to work six days each week, and she was trying to know her youngest child, hitherto a stranger. Her hopes for the future, in other words, seemed suddenly to collide with the past and even with a large dose of remorse for her lifestyle and her early neglect of Norma Jeane. She also seems to have drunk excessively on at least two occasions—as did many people when bottles and kegs were broken open to celebrate the end of Prohibition—and liquor would interact perilously with any mood-altering medication.
Gladys obviously required more sophisticated medical care than she was receiving, and psychological counseling was scarcely available at all in Los Angeles at that time. The assertion of insanity, established soon after under curious circumstances, became the unquestioned truth only much later; by then, it was the patched invention of the movie star’s ace publicists, a brilliant reporter and a legendary writer—all of them committed to the creation of a Hollywood tale in Hollywood terms. The simpler, more poignant facts of Gladys’s mismanaged care were the first casualty of the truth.
“The doctor who prescribed the drugs couldn’t have known what effect they’d have on Gladys, and her condition was thought to be irreversible by 1935,” recalled Eleanor Goddard. “Her attempt to care for herself and Norma Jeane was out of the question. Up to that point she did a really remarkable job.”
And so Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker Mortensen, not yet thirty-two years old, was taken to a rest home in Santa Monica in early 1934. There she remained, sedated and forlorn, for several months before being transferred to Los Angeles General Hospital, from which she was sometimes released for weekends to determine her ability to cope with “reality” (the word used in one of the few remaining medical reports from that year). Never offered anything like competent psychiatric care, Gladys gradually crept into the dark refuge of a lonely, solitary world from which, increasingly, she seldom emerged. At the same time, the care of her daughter was readily assumed by the childless, concerned, formidable Grace McKee—Norma Jeane’s third mother figure in eight years.
For most of 1934, Norma Jeane remained at Arbol Drive, cared for by the Atkinsons but supervised by Grace, who visited almost daily. Again there were major changes and fresh expectations to bewilder her, and, inevitably, new patterns of behavior to which she had to conform. Ida Bolender had regarded movie stars and their world as sinful: when Norma Jeane reported to Ida that her mother had taken her to a movie, she had been told this was a dangerous pastime. After that, Gladys had given her daughter the idea that movies were innocent entertainment—and thank God for them, for they brought a decent wage.
But Grace went further. One neither condemned nor merely watched Clara Bow or Jean Harlow: they were to be emulated. For a child not yet eight, this was an astonishing contradiction of creeds to absorb and, successively, to heed. Much of her childhood was defined, then, by a sequence of contradictions that could only cause guilt. The proper young lady formed by Ida tried to avoid wickedness and remain pure. The child visited by Gladys wanted to make herself agreeable, to comfort and to please; the girl taken in hand by Grace was encouraged to put all that aside and to become someone entirely new—an invention written, designed, produced and directed by Grace McKee herself. Until 1934, Grace’s maternal instincts (and much of her money) had been lavished on two nieces. Then these children moved away from Los Angeles. But from the sadness of Gladys’s departure came the sudden fortune of Grace McKee—she now had a child to raise, to form and shape.
“Grace loved and adored Norma Jeane,” recalled McKee’s coworker Leila Fields.
If it weren’t for Grace, there would be no Marilyn Monroe. . . . Grace raved about Norma Jeane like she was her own. Grace said Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star. She had this feeling. A conviction. “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane. You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big—an important woman, a movie star.”
And to advance the cause, Grace dressed Norma Jeane in a handmade gingham dress, curling her hair and urging her to smile and pout like Mary Pickford. Eleanor Goddard, who knew Norma Jeane before she was Marilyn Monroe, agreed:
Grace was very perceptive. From this very early time she had the idea that Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star. And she did everything in her power to bring it about. Grace could have no children of her own, and so she lavished her affection on Norma Jeane, whom she considered to be as much or more hers than Gladys’s.
“More hers than Gladys’s”—precisely because Gladys was now regarded as incompetent and ineffectual. One must presume, given the financial sacrifices Grace made on Norma Jeane’s behalf for so long, that the conscious motives animating Grace were benevolent; to be sure, she allowed the child more freedom than had the Bolenders, and provided more luxuries. But the freedom, pleasure and advantages Grace provided were not without benefit to Grace herself. “Grace Goddard was nice enough—if she could benefit,” said Norma Jeane’s first husband, tempering his otherwise high praise for her generosity and sacrifice.
The woman Norma Jeane now had to please, to whom she owed her safety, her bed and board, did not merely enjoy working in a sector of the so-called dream factory—she supervised one of its most important departments. In Hollywood social life and in the celluloid stories she helped assemble for the public, Grace saw people in real life and characters in stories renamed and reinvented—just as she did for herself in her own capricious youth and whimsical bohemianism, in her airy unconcern for adding or subtracting a name here or losing a husband there.
If ever a girl was primed for Hollywood, it was Norma Jeane, watching Grace’s own hair color and hemlines alter. From her work, Grace knew how a woman’s appearance could be changed by makeup, lights, filters and shadows; how, with a quick snip of scissors, an unflattering image could be eliminated. She knew by profession what the studios successfully marketed, what “worked,” what the public wanted. The infinite varieties of cosmetic surgery, later one of Los Angeles’s most heavily advertised and lucrative professions, became perhaps the logical term of the movie world’s craving for an impossible ideal. It was, in other words, Grace McKee’s job to help perfect illusions. And with greater frequency and intensity during the next several years, Norma Jeane became the beneficiary of Grace’s experience. In taking on the child’s care and education, she had at last an opportunity to create the daughter nature had denied her.
In 1934, Olin G. Stanley was working as a temporary cutter with Grace in the Columbia Studios editing lab. As he recalled, cutters worked four hours on Saturdays, and for months Grace asked a friend to bring Norma Jeane to the lab an hour before noontime closing. “We workers were introduced to her, and every introduction was the same, over and over. Grace said, ‘Baby, I want you to meet Olin—Olin, isn’t she pretty?’ ”
Thus far, this was ordinary pride. But Grace went further: “Norma Jeane, turn around and show the nice man the big bow on the back of your dress. Now walk down that way and turn around. Good, now walk back here again . . . Oh, here comes Ella, Norma Jeane! You met Ella last month. Tell Ella again—she’s probably forgotten, but you haven’t forgotten! Tell Ella what you’re going to be when you’re all grown up. Say: ‘a movie star,’ baby! Tell her you’re going to be a movie star!’ This brainwashing continued every week for months and months.” Another worker confirmed Stanley’s recollections: “It was just a plain fact with Grace,” recalled Charlotte Engleburg. “Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star, and that was that.”
Toward this goal there could be only one model. “Grace was captivated by Jean Harlow,” said Norma Jeane, “and so Jean Harlow was my idol.”
1. Contrary to popular belief, Gladys could hardly have bestowed the second name in honor of Jean Harlow, for Harlean Carpenter did not change her name until 1928.
2. An important national study conducted during the 1920s suggested many parents who gave up their children “were themselves children emotionally . . . and manifested this in their disinterest in and hostility toward their own offspring as children who needed to be reared.”
3. McPherson died of a barbiturate overdose in 1944 at the age of fifty-three.
4. Other notably fantastic creations—some of them downtown, on Broadway—included the Warner Brothers, the El Capitan, the Vine Street, the Palace, the Los Angeles Theater, the United Artists Theater and the Mayan.