Chapter Four
FROM NOVEMBER 1937 TO AUGUST 1938, Norma Jeane lived with cousins and a great-aunt in Compton, about twenty-five miles southeast of the San Fernando Valley but still in Los Angeles County. But instead of a pleasant new home, more challenges and trauma awaited.
First of all, there was in the house a general ambience of suspicion, constant whispers of something sinister and tragic about the family’s history. It was a milieu that could have sprung straight from the pages of a story by Edgar Allan Poe or Henry James—aptly described as Gothic were it not for the prevailing Southern California sunshine. And the aroma of dread that hung in the rooms had nothing to do with Gladys or her daughter.
The woman to whom Grace made irregular payments for Norma Jeane’s care was a divorcée named Ida Martin, who received sometimes five dollars a month, at other times ten or fifteen, often nothing. She was the mother of Olive Brunings, who had married Gladys’s younger brother Marion in 1924. Olive and Marion Monroe, so far as the family knew, lived for five years in the Central California town of Salinas, where he worked as a mechanic, and there they had three children: Jack, born in 1925; Ida Mae, in 1927; and Olive, in 1929. On the afternoon of November 20, 1929—when the youngest was nine months old—Marion Monroe left the house, telling his wife he was going to buy a newspaper and would return before dinner. He was never seen or heard from again.
The Bureau of Missing Persons failed to locate him, and local police could not trace his itinerary that afternoon. The California Department of Motor Vehicles was no help, nor were police in four neighboring states. Marion had not contacted anyone in his family, including Gladys, to whom the news was relayed the next day. His most recent employer, Joe Zerboni (owner of the Union Storage and Transfer Company), was equally surprised and had no idea of Monroe’s whereabouts, destination or fate. Ida Martin, Marion’s mother-in-law, engaged the prestigious Shayer Detective Service of Los Angeles; after three years they had not a single clue.
In 1934, Olive (“destitute and in need of State aid,” as her petition read) began legal proceedings to have her husband declared legally dead, so that her three children could be registered as half-orphans and thus eligible for public welfare funds. (Laws providing aid for single parents later changed, but this was Olive’s only recourse for financial aid at that time.) Still, the state required ten years of a spouse’s absence before a declaration of presumed death could be issued, and with it the concomitant financial benefits for the surviving family. Olive and her three children had no relief from a situation of grinding poverty until 1939.
When Norma Jeane arrived in Compton at the end of 1937, she met her three cousins for the first time, since Ida Martin was also caring for her three grandchildren while Olive worked with migrant farmers. The children were close in age—little Olive was then eight, Ida Mae ten, Jack twelve and Norma Jeane eleven. Years later, Ida Mae recalled one statement that Norma Jeane repeated: “I remember she said over and over again that she was never going to marry. She said said she was going to be a school teacher and have lots of dogs.”
Here again was a parentless household, with children trying to structure life after a father’s mysterious disappearance, of familial instability, of abandoned and displaced children. Just as in the lives of men linked to Della, Gladys and Grace, there was the impression that men were both necessary and capricious—untrustworthy, volatile, unknowable, unpredictable and still achingly missed. Life was imperfect with and without them.
And here was still another surrogate mother for Norma Jeane to know and to please. Ida Martin seems to have been an attentive provider, but she had no answer for Norma Jeane when she asked about her Uncle Marion’s absence and the distance of Aunt Olive from the family. “Once we decided to run away from home,” Ida Mae added. “We had the idea we’d go to San Francisco to look for my dad, because someone had once said they had seen him there. But we didn’t leave the house.” She remembered, too, that there was an odd and frightening lady who lived across the street—a demented woman named Dorothy Enright who sat on her porch, endlessly rocking in an old rattan chair. “Her family kept her occupied with piles of movie magazines to pore over, and we got the hand-me-downs.”
Later, Norma Jeane’s feelings of this period were complicated:
The world around me then was kind of grim. I had to learn to pretend in order to—I don’t know—block the grimness. The whole world seemed sort of closed to me. . . . [I felt] on the outside of everything, and all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend-game.
One of her more imaginative games was based on a movie-magazine story that showed a picture of winemaking, “and so she had the idea we would make wine,” Ida Mae recalled. “We had a big old, discarded bathtub in the back yard, and we gathered grapes and piled them into the tub, then stomped on them with our bare feet. This went on for three or four days, but we ended up only with a rotten smell in the backyard, and no wine!”
In the spring of 1938, Olive Monroe visited Ida Martin and together they told her children that thenceforth they had to consider their father dead, not just absent—only in this way could they have enough money to remain a family. This idea was at once picked up by Norma Jeane, for she told her schoolteacher that she was living with relatives because her parents had been killed in an accident (as indeed, for her, they might as well have been). Her instructor, a benign woman named Parker, was moved to tears and for the remainder of the sixth grade Norma Jeane was the object of special attention and concern. The student’s quietly dramatized account was remarkably effective.
Some of Norma Jeane’s other inspirations were more psychologically complex. In 1937, Grace had taken her twice to see Errol Flynn and the Mauch twins in the movie The Prince and the Pauper, and in early summer 1938 she saw it again with her cousins. The jaunty Flynn was a dashing leading man, but the identical boys were forever after fascinating to Norma Jeane:
Later, I thought it [the identical twins] was a little eerie, actually, but then I was very excited by seeing the two look-alikes, one a prince pretending to be a beggar-boy and the other an urchin pretending to be a prince.1
Flynn reminded Norma Jeane of Clark Gable (“I told Jack and Ida Mae that Gable was my real father, but they just laughed”), but the movie perhaps made its deepest impression on her because of the exchange-of-roles fantasy. A waif only pretends to be so: he is actually a prince, and after considerable effort he is recognized as heir to the throne of Henry VIII.
Norma Jeane had already been transformed from a kind of weekday orphanage Cinderella into a Saturday-afternoon princess by the determined Grace McKee Goddard. Grace had primed her for stardom and said she would one day inherit the mantle of movie queen Jean Harlow. Norma Jeane then discovered that inventions about her family and her background both sweetened her own memories and occasionally made her lovable to others. No wonder the doubles of The Prince and the Pauper, with the neat replacement of a fantasy by a real royalty, long haunted her. She had only to meet the heroic father figure (a Clark Gable or an Errol Flynn) to set the matter right: the waif would be raised to the legitimate regal position.
The need for fantasy may well have been underscored in light of two events that year. First, Grace visited in March and quietly told Norma Jeane that, after Gladys had tried to escape from the hospital at Norwalk, she had been transferred to a more secure environment—the state asylum at Agnew, near San Francisco.
The attempted breakout had a concrete and tragically ironic cause. Gladys had been terribly upset and disoriented after receiving telephone calls from her last husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, who she believed had died in a motorcycle accident in Ohio eight years earlier. In fact, Mortensen was alive and well in California, but there had been a midwesterner with the same name and a similar background whose death had been mistakenly reported to her by relatives as that of her husband.
Still solicitous for Gladys’s welfare and willing to provide for some of her needs, Mortensen had tracked her to the hospital at Norwalk and put through several calls. Alternately confused and almost hysterical with relief that someone had remembered and was reaching out to her, Gladys tried to leave the Norwalk grounds to find her ex-husband. But the staff had been told Mortensen had died in 1929, and so Gladys’s report of the telephone calls and her subsequent escape attempt were regarded as grave schizophrenic delusions requiring the more sophisticated treatment available at Agnew. This was forthwith decreed, and Gladys and Martin had no further contact.2
This news of her mother’s condition Norma Jeane seemed to receive as virtually an announcement of Gladys’s death. Grace tried to soften the occasion with gifts (the details and sums for which were preserved by Grace’s family): a sunsuit for the beach, a new hat, and three new pairs of shoes. By that summer, to the consternation of Ida Martin and her grandchildren, Norma Jeane, poorest of the cousins, had no less than ten pairs, all of them supplied by Grace (and charged to Gladys’s dwindling account).
The second episode involved a violation that was even more traumatic than Doc Goddard’s crude and abusive advance. Not long before Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday in June 1938, a cousin forced her into some kind of violent sexual contact. According to her close friends Norman Rosten and Eleanor Goddard, among others, she was “sexually assaulted” (although her first husband claimed she was a virgin at the time of their wedding). The importunate cousin was thirteen-year-old Jack, of whose later life nothing is known; by his twenties he seems to have imitated his father’s disappearing act. This incident reinforced her sense that she was desired as an object, but she was left feeling abused; she was, after all, only eleven years old. As Ida Mae recalled, Norma Jeane bathed obsessively for days after.
As if on cue in her role as fairy godmother, Grace returned to celebrate Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday. After spending eleven dollars and seventy-four cents for Norma Jeane’s new dress and the then outrageous sum of six dollars for a hair treatment, Grace meticulously prepared the girl’s makeup and whisked her off for a professional photographic session. This was, she explained, the first step toward fame—toward growing up to become the new Jean Harlow. She also gave Norma Jeane a scrapbook in which to paste the photos.
But Grace’s constant fussing over Norma Jeane’s appearance, her obsession with the girl’s future and even the gifts were more endured than enthusiastically received by Norma Jeane—who had (especially after her experiences with Doc and Jack) good reason to regard herself as a mere object for someone’s pleasure. But she was legally subject to Grace’s decisions about where she would live, and she was as well dependent on Grace’s subsidies.
Another decision by Grace was soon announced. At summer’s end, she decided Norma Jeane should quit the Martin household and return to Los Angeles—not only to have her ward closer and thus keep an alert eye on her adolescent development and forthcoming career, but also to enroll her in a junior high school of which she approved. Norma Jeane would not, however, be returning to the Goddard household. Instead, she was to board with Grace’s aunt.
Edith Ana Atchinson Lower, always called Ana, was sister to Grace’s father. Born January 17, 1880, she was fifty-eight years old when Norma Jeane came to live with her. During the 1920s, she and her husband, Edmund H. (“Will”) Lower, had acquired a number of modest bungalows and cottages in various parts of Los Angeles County. They were then divorced about 1933, and so while Ana was by no means a rich divorcée, her settlement provided some rental income. (Will Lower died in 1935.) But Ana’s circumstances were imperiled during the depression, when a number of her lessees simply abandoned their residences.
By 1938, the Goddards were living virtually rent-free in one of Ana’s houses on Odessa Street in Van Nuys, while Ana lived in a two-family duplex she owned at 11348 Nebraska Avenue, West Los Angeles, whose ground floor she rented out. She would have the income of thirty dollars a month from the State of California for boarding Norma Jeane Baker. (After the unhappy business of the Mortensen telephone calls, Grace everywhere registered Norma Jeane under Gladys’s first married name, which Gladys herself had used most frequently.)
“Aunt Ana,” as Norma Jeane called her, was a plump, white-haired, grandmotherly soul. She was also a very devout Christian Scientist, having advanced to the level of healing practitioner.
“She was very religious,” recalled Eleanor Goddard,
but not at all a fanatic. In fact she was very sensible, compassionate and accepting of others. She looked severe and stern and had an imposing carriage, but she was putty inside, not the dominating matron she was often made out to be.
Ana was generous and outgoing; her good works and devotion to her religion took her to the Lincoln Heights jail once weekly, where she spent time reading the Bible to inmates.
Alone in the life of Norma Jeane, Ana Lower warranted undiluted loving praise.
She changed my whole life. She was the first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her [long since lost] and I showed it to somebody and they cried. . . . It was called “I Love Her.” She was the only one who loved and understood me. . . . She never hurt me, not once. She couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love.
Yet Ana Lower was, howsoever kindly, the latest in an ongoing variety of mother figures. She could enfold Norma Jeane in a blanket of loving commitment and take her for the daughter she never had. But there was no way to alter the fact that she was also another woman whose attitude toward men and marriage was undeniably tinted (like Gladys, Grace and Ida Martin) by her own divorce. “Talk about marriage and sex was certainly never on the agenda,” Marilyn Monroe said frankly years later.
There were, then, oddly ambivalent circumstances at this time, for Ana’s broken marriage, her appearance of refined widowhood and the fact that she was the oldest of Norma Jeane’s custodians denied the girl an effective female confidante. And this set of particulars was doubtless made more complex by Ana’s earnest Christian Science faith and its impact on Norma Jeane—a sincere example, to be sure, but one set before the girl with considerable zeal. That August of 1938, Norma Jeane found herself at local Christian Science services, twice on Sunday and once during the week.
Ana Lower gently but somewhat simplistically guided Norma Jeane to see that only what was in the mind was real, and the mind could be uplifted. But the girl had already long sought refuge from insecurity in unreal movie images, a program of transformation into Jean Harlow enjoined by Grace and a cultivation of her own fantasy life. Ana’s brand of religion, in other words, complemented by a Victorian-Puritan sensibility and her seniority (with its implicit image, to youngsters, of sexlessness), was not altogether appropriate given Norma Jeane’s past experience and her present adolescent needs.
In 1938, there were in America about 270,000 members in about two thousand congregations of Christian Science.3 Founded in 1879 in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy, the religion is a system of therapeutic metaphysics. The vast majority of its adherents have always been middle-aged and elderly American women from the middle and upper classes, although the denomination is found in all countries with large Protestant populations. Central to its doctrine is a variation of subjective idealism: matter is unreal, there is only God (or Mind). The goal of Mrs. Eddy’s teachings (codified in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 1891) is to bring the unreal material body into a condition of perfect harmony with our real spiritual condition: made in the Divine likeness, we are geared for spiritual perfection.
In a kind of intense Gnosticism linked to traditional American transcendentalism (which originated and flourished in Mrs. Eddy’s home territory, New England), there is an optimistic attitude toward the perceived world, which may ever be brought closer to its fulfillment by effort as well as by spiritual healing. (It should be stressed, however, that Christian Scientists have never been encouraged to withdraw from the world: responsibility in public and social life was exemplified by its foundation and long maintenance of one of America’s great journals, the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper commanding worldwide respect.)
The godly human being, for this denomination, constantly strives for a spiritual condition in which the counterfeit flesh and the mortal, fallible mind can be overcome. Taken in its purest form, Christian Science denies the reality of the senses, although allowance is made for a human level at which improvement is sought and achieved by right thinking. We do not sin, suffer or die: we are victims of unhealthy delusions. Linked to this doctrine is that of “malicious animal magnetism,” evil thought that appears real and powerful only because people wrongly assert its actuality. Advanced Scientists—especially the accredited, elite cadre of teachers known as practitioners trained to read, pray and invoke therapeutic healing—learn how to counter the impact of this “animal magnetism.”
Furthermore, the disharmony of sin, sickness and death may be overcome by right prayerful thinking and a dutiful attentiveness to Mrs. Eddy’s commentaries on the Scriptures. Instead of drugs and medicines, spiritual truth must be affirmed, error denied and the distinction made between absolute being and the frail mortal life. The symbol of Christian Science is thus immediately compelling: a cross (without the figure of the dead or dying Christ) surrounded by a crown. Glory overwhelms suffering, which has no real relation to humanity.
Because by a complicated and intriguing paradox Christian Science does not share American fundamentalism’s contempt for the world and the flesh, recreation and entertainment are not forbidden, nor is the religion hostile to education (medical studies excepted). Because she chose not to seek any other employment, Ana Lower was eligible to be one of the Church’s official practitioners, and in this capacity she was permitted to take fee-paying clients.
But when Norma Jeane began seventh grade at Emerson Junior High School on Selby Avenue, between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards in West Los Angeles, Aunt Ana’s creed was at once challenged. That very September, the girl began to menstruate, and every monthly period for much of her life was a grueling time during which she rarely found relief from severe cramps. In 1938 there were no readily obtainable medicines to counter the effects of what was for Norma Jeane very real agony (and it is unlikely that Ana would have made them available in any case). Friends from this and later times of Norma Jeane’s life recall that each month she writhed on the floor, sobbing in pain. So began a lifelong history of gynecological problems, including chronic endometriosis. She had, then, another conflict, but neither the spiritual nor intellectual sophistication with which to cope: if there was no real body and if God was All Goodness and Mind, why this torture? Why was her own body playing her false? Aunt Ana comforted her, prayed with her, embraced her, “but nothing did any good. I just had to wait it out.”
At Emerson there were five hundred students in the seventh grade, and like those in the eighth and ninth they came from all parts of the western sector of Los Angeles. Some were chauffeured down from the gated mansions in the enclave known as Bel-Air, above Sunset Boulevard. Others were from the middle-class flatlands of West Los Angeles. And some—Norma Jeane among them—were within walking distance, from a poorer district known as Sawtelle.
A section of the so-called Western Front of the city, Sawtelle was bounded by four boulevards: Sepulveda on the east, Bundy on the west, Wilshire on the north and Pico on the south. The area was a jumble of populations—Japanese immigrants; longtime California pioneers from the East and Midwest; recent Dust Bowl “Okies” who had sought work and refuge in sunny California during the depression; Hispanics and Mexican-Indians; and older Los Angeles residents like Ana Lower.
“Los Angeles was a very divided, class-conscious society,” according to Norma Jeane’s classmate Gladys Phillips (later Wilson), “and this was unfortunately true of school life, too. All the students were immediately, unofficially classified according to where they lived. And Sawtelle was simply not the place to be from.” Indeed, Angeleños smiled and thought of beer halls when Sawtelle was mentioned, for there were many such gathering places for the working classes; the neighborhood seemed synonymous with illiterate or semiliterate poor. Ana Lower was neither illiterate, out of work nor on the dole, yet from her first day at school Norma Jeane Baker was marked by most of her classmates as (thus Gladys Phillips) “from the wrong side of the tracks.”
Norma Jeane’s courses, those designed for seventh-grade girls not enrolled in the college prep track, were not overwhelmingly impressive from an academic standpoint, and her achievements were neither remarkably good nor bad:
AUTUMN 1938
Social Living (history, civics, geography): C
Physical education (gym class): B
Science: C
Office practice: A
Journalism: B
SPRING 1939
Life Sciences (elementary biology): C
English: B
Bookkeeping: B
Physical education: C
“She was very much an average student,” recalled Mabel Ella Campbell, who taught the Life Sciences class. “But she looked as though she wasn’t well cared for. Her clothes separated her a little bit from the rest of the girls. In 1938 she wasn’t well developed. Norma Jeane was a nice child, but not at all outgoing, not vibrant.”
Marilyn elaborated twenty years later:
I was very quiet, and some of the other kids used to call me The Mouse. The first year at Emerson, all I had was the two light blue dress-suits from the orphanage. Aunt Ana let them out because I’d grown a little, but they didn’t fit right. I wore tennis shoes a lot, because you could get them for ninety-eight cents—and Mexican sandals. They were even cheaper. I sure didn’t make any best-dressed list. You could say I wasn’t very popular.
Reserved in her new environment, embarrassed about wearing the same uniform every day, and with no experience of socialization outside the confines of the orphanage, Norma Jeane found friendships difficult. “She was neat but plain, as I remember,” recalled Ron Underwood, another classmate. “She was also somewhat shy and withdrawn, and apparently had few friends.” Marian Losman (later Zaich) remembered that “she always seemed to be alone.” Gladys Phillips agreed: “She really wasn’t close to anyone at all.” Norma Jeane’s isolation was intensified by the fact that Ana Lower had no telephone.
Close attachments to women were made even more problematic after her thirteenth birthday (June 1, 1939), when Grace took Norma Jeane by train to San Francisco, where Gladys was living (as she would for several years) in a clinic-supervised boardinghouse. Her mother was not violent or unkind; she did not seem irrational or sedated; she was clean and evidently well attended. But she spoke not a word, neither during the initial meeting nor during lunch—nothing until Norma Jeane and Grace prepared to depart. Gladys then looked sadly at her daughter and said quietly, “You used to have such tiny little feet.”
Life with Ana was hardly exciting, and Norma Jeane had, as yet, nothing like a social life—but at least the girl felt secure with Grace’s aunt. As ever, she returned to what was “home” with no sense of family.
But as she entered eighth grade, beginning in autumn 1939 at Emerson, her social life began to change, specifically because her body shape did, too. And her interest in classes—cooking, office practice, elementary Spanish and mathematics—suddenly faded into virtual oblivion, like a child’s watercolor exposed to the sun. As if someone had thrown a switch over the summer and fall, Norma Jeane, as 1939 drew to a close, had grown to her full adult height of five feet, five and a half inches. And there was a figure emerging—pertly rounded breasts, which she exhibited (without a brassiere) beneath a tight tan sweater (“and without an under-blouse, which was a no-no,” added Gladys Phillips).
Because there was no money for new clothes, her blue skirt was rather too tight about the hips, and Ana could alter it only so much. But the girl was resourceful: she bought an inexpensive pair of boy’s trousers, reversed a front-button cardigan for a completely different (and more alluring) look on top, and in one week that autumn caused such a sensation that (trousers being forbidden to girls) twice she was sent home to pour herself back into the tight skirt—which of course had exactly the same effect. She was, therefore, no longer “Norma Jeane the String Bean” (an alternate classmate sobriquet to “The Mouse”).
“Suddenly, everything seemed to open up,” she said later of that season.
Even the girls paid a little attention to me just because they thought, “Hmmm, she’s to be dealt with!” I had to walk to school, and it was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn—you know, workers driving to work, waving, and I’d wave back. The world became friendly.
More than friendly, it was positively, energetically responsive. And Norma Jeane was ready to cooperate with the new geniality that attended her. The bus fare from Nebraska Avenue to Emerson was only five cents, but she preferred to walk to school, surrounded by two, three or more boys arguing over who would carry her books and lunch bag. And it was the same way in the afternoon.
“Physically, she developed earlier than most of us, and she had no shame about displaying her figure,” according to Gladys Phillips.
Her body just seemed to show through that sweater. And it was unusual for girls to wear bright red lipstick and makeup to school, but Norma Jeane did. This led some of the girls to consider her indiscreet, which she wasn’t—but of course they were jealous. There was nothing vulgar about what she wore, but when her name was mentioned in class, boys smiled and raised their eyebrows, and sometimes you’d hear some of the boys humming “Mmmmmmmm!”—I’ll never forget it! Suddenly she just seemed to stand out in a crowd.
It was as if her childhood dream of adorers all round her, had in a way come true. After years of Grace’s tutelage, Norma Jeane knew how to attract attention with cosmetics; but now, aware of her figure and the new, frankly sexual allure she suddenly projected, she rose early in the morning, devoting hours to primping before school. Once there, according to Gladys Phillips, Norma Jeane stood for a long time before the mirror in the girls’ lavatory, brushing her light brown hair again and again, running her fingers through every curl. Something of a school canard began to circulate: it seemed every time a girl entered the washroom, there was Norma Jeane Baker, refreshing her makeup.
She was indeed trying to rise above a confused and confusing past; refining her appearance before the mirror, she was reshaping, in a way “covering up” and dismissing, the forlorn and abandoned child—refashioning herself into someone new, as Grace often reminded. And the means to do this were ready to hand, for in Los Angeles there were more colorful, experimental, dramatic, inexpensive cosmetics than anywhere in America. On weekends, Hollywood Boulevard was crowded with hawkers, distributing free samples of new lipsticks, rouges, face powders, eyeliners and colognes. At thirteen, then, Norma Jeane Baker became immediately aware of her ability to attract and to fascinate, and this she wished to do in an innocent way, without the threat of scenes such as she had had with Doc and Jack. In fact, she may have felt, this was all she had to offer, to display; no one had seemed to regard her opinions or feelings terribly much, so her body was meant to be praised, prized—just as by the worshipful adorers of her childhood dream.
She was not, as each of her schoolmates testified, an unusually beautiful girl; there was nothing striking about her hair or features. But she radiated, as Mary Baker Eddy said in quite another context, “animal magnetism.”
It must be stressed, however, that in 1939 such a display of candid, forthright sensuality was not equated with an announcement of sexual availability—although she seems to have been regarded as (thus Gladys Phillips) “a bit racy.” Even as she attracted attention, there was neither promise nor threat. She was in control.
High-school sex was not, after all, the commonplace it later became. Birth control pills were unknown, the simplest devices for men and women were not easily available (in fact, they were still officially illegal under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1933) and there was widespread fear of venereal disease—for which in 1939 antibiotics like penicillin were not yet refined for general public benefit. A furtive kiss on a back porch at night, necking in a borrowed car way up on Mulholland Drive, with the city lights twinkling below: that was the extent of sex for the vast majority of Los Angeles adolescents. The fantasies of some high-school boys may have smoldered at the sight of a “whoo-whoo girl,” and movie ads talked of “hot-blooded passions,” but the only fires raging out of control that winter blazed in the newsreels chronicling the outbreak of war in Europe. As Gladys Phillips and others recalled, there was the occasional rumor about one or another “bad” girl or “wild” boy, but there were no such tales about Norma Jeane.
She was, in other words, at last beginning to live up to Grace’s expectations of her, for at Emerson Junior High School during the winter of 1939/40, she began to be something of a star. The school was a large, impersonal factory, and she did what she could to be noticed. Long neglected by those to whom she had the right to look for security, she was even now “performing,” pretending to be a siren when in reality she was a naïve adolescent simply yearning for a little applause.
Norma Jeane wanted desperately (so classmates Phillips, Underwood and Losman recalled) to be liked, admired and even respected by them—but there were no opportunities to realize those goals at home. Ana’s sedate, cramped quarters on Nebraska Avenue, without telephone or space to receive guests, disallowed Norma Jeane the chance to extend invitations to classmates for an after-school glass of lemonade, or to visit and enjoy her Glenn Miller records on the windup portable Victrola Grace had given as a Christmas present. “Norma Jeane was really awfully nice and sweet,” Gladys Phillips said, “but she also seemed a little pathetic, because she was constantly ashamed of her background.”
During summer 1940, Norma Jeane, fourteen, blossomed even more fully. She had one colorful print blouse around which she invented several outfits. Tucked into her blue skirt, it was proper enough for Sunday services with Ana; worn outside her trousers, it was comfortable for riding with a boy on the handlebars of his bicycle; tied high above her waist, it exposed her midriff. Thus did she stop traffic and turn heads when she went to the popular Westwood hangouts—at Tom Crumpler’s, a popular soda parlor across from the Westwood Village movie theater; at Mrs. Grady’s, on the southeast corner of Westwood and Wilshire boulevards; at Albert Sheetz, where she also met boyfriends who bought her Coca-Colas and hovered for hours; and at the Hi-Ho drive-in, a little bit cheaper and a trifle less tidy. At the Hi-Ho, boys looking for trouble could find it without too much difficulty.4
It was apparently at the Hi-Ho, that summer of 1940, that Norma Jeane first met an older Emerson student named Chuck Moran—a wisecracking, rebellious fellow who borrowed cars (sometimes without permission) to take girls on dates to Ocean Park Pier, between Venice and Santa Monica. Popular with the boys because he was a natural leader and a good athlete, and with the girls because he was a freckle-faced redhead quick to flatter and sweet-talk, Chuck favored Norma Jeane that summer. She was shapely, she laughed at his jokes and smiled back at his winks, and she seemed shy—a confederation of qualities he found irresistible. When she walked into a soda parlor, Chuck Moran called out, “Here comes the Mmmm Girl!”
Several times that summer, Moran squired Norma Jeane in his father’s old jalopy, and they often drove out to the dance hall at the pier, where Lawrence Welk led his orchestra while actress Lana Turner and her husband, bandleader Artie Shaw, danced the night away. Later, she recalled long, hot summer evenings at the pier:
We danced until we thought we’d drop, and then, when we headed outside for a Coca-Cola and a walk in the cool breeze, Chuckie let me know he wanted more than just a dance partner. Suddenly his hands were everywhere! But that made me afraid, and I was glad I knew how to scrape [i.e., fight back] with the best of them—life at the orphanage [and with Doc and Jack] taught me that. Poor Chuck, all he got was tired feet and a fight with me. But I thought, well, he isn’t entitled to anything else. Besides, I really wasn’t so smart about sex, which was probably a good thing.
That she “wasn’t so smart about sex” and had no untidy reputation among her schoolmates is further indicated by a notation in the school newspaper’s prophecy (“A Peek into the Future”) that Norma Jeane would one day be “the smiling and beaming Chairman of the Beverly Hills Home for Spinsters.” This report appeared despite the fact that she was no wallflower, was quite adept at the rumba and the conga and, by graduation time, was “doing something really modern, The New Yorker”—considered the most sophisticated, languorous new dance to reach California.
Moran’s charm somehow kept him out of trouble—both with the police (regarding cars he “borrowed”) and with the families of several Emerson girls (whom he often failed to deliver back home until dawn). His dates with Norma Jeane ended when classes resumed in September 1940: she was back at Emerson for ninth grade, and he was off to the tenth, at University High School.
In the group photograph of his graduating class, students smile attentively, trying to look dignified for posterity. But there is Chuck Moran, impolitely raising the middle finger of his left hand toward the camera. The reaction of school authorities and parents when this managed to slip past proofreaders can only be imagined. In any case, Chuck sent Norma Jeane a card on Valentine’s Day for the next two years. Dismissed from senior high school eighteen months later for misconduct, Moran then vanished briefly before volunteering for army service. He was shipped off to war, where he was killed a month after his twentieth birthday.
Before 1940 ended, Norma Jeane at last had a friend her own age. Another of Doc Goddard’s daughters, Eleanor, arrived to live with her father and Grace on Archwood Avenue, Van Nuys. At the same time, Ana Lower began to suffer from severely impaired circulation and other cardiovascular problems, and so Norma Jeane returned to the Goddards and befriended Eleanor, always called by her nickname, Bebe.
Just six months younger than Norma Jeane, Bebe Goddard was a winsome, pretty girl who turned fourteen a week before Christmas. She was also brave—as she had to be, for her childhood was truly appalling. When she was eighteen months old, her parents divorced. For a time she and her siblings lived with their mother, but then Mrs. Goddard became mentally ill, and dangerously so. “It was tragic,” Bebe Goddard recalled years later. “She was a true sociopath—no conscience, no knowledge of right and wrong—charming and believable when she wanted to be, but then she turned suddenly violent and menacing.” Booted hither and thither from relatives to strangers to a dozen foster homes all over Texas, Bebe matured, caring for her brother and sister while enduring and somehow surviving the most dreadful insecurities and the apparent indifference of her father until 1940.
It is important to detail these unhappy events in Bebe’s early life, for much of what Marilyn later claimed to be her childhood history was actually Bebe’s. The legend of her twelve or thirteen foster homes, the whippings, the near-starvation—all these were borrowed from Bebe’s past and conveniently grafted onto her own when they became helpful in winning press and public sympathy. “What I told Norma Jeane that winter made a great impression on her. She felt enormous pity for me, and we became friends very quickly.”
The two girls were full of fun and vitality. With exactly the same height, weight and hair color, they shared clothes and makeup, and Grace was ever vigilant with cosmetic advice. For the first time in her life, according to Bebe, Norma Jeane developed an unfettered sense of mischief and learned to laugh: “Everyone adored her. She had such a sense of fun.”
Norma Jeane continued to attend Emerson Junior High until her graduation from ninth grade in June 1941. Her final grades in Spanish, Social Living, science and physical education were unimpressive, and she nearly failed Rhetoric and Spoken Arts because so often fear of seeming verbally inept and socially unacceptable paralyzed her throat and silenced her.
But in Miss Crane’s journalism class she showed a remarkable aptitude and humor. The name Norma Jeane Baker often appears that year in the school newspaper, The Emersonian, for she was a contributor to the “Features” columns. Given her later success (especially in a certain film), it is interesting to note that she provided this little story to the paper:
After tabulating some 500-odd questionnaires, we have found that fifty-three percent of the gentlemen prefer blondes as their dream girl. Forty percent like brunettes with blue eyes, and a weak seven percent say they would like to be marooned on a desert island with a redhead. . . . According to the general consensus of opinion, the perfect girl would be a honey blonde with deep blue eyes, well molded figure, classic features, a swell personality, intelligence, athletic ability (but still feminine) and she would be a loyal friend. Well, we can still dream about it.
She was in fact writing a description of herself—mostly as she was, but with some qualities she longed to develop.
One of these was better speech. Notwithstanding Norma Jeane’s increasing popularity and her growing sense of her power to attract and charm, there was a basic insecurity she never overcame. This had recently been exhibited by her poor performance in Rhetoric and Spoken Arts, in which her teacher, Mr. Stoops, was driven nearly to distraction by her shyness and anxiety about public speaking. As the teacher cajoled and the student grew ever more reticent, there developed an unfortunate sequel—the beginning of Norma Jeane’s lifelong tendency to stutter. As a member of the school newspaper staff, she was asked to be class secretary, “and I’d say, ‘M-m-m-minutes of the last m-m-m-meeting.’ It was terrible.”
But just as she could exploit a meager wardrobe to superb advantage, so did Norma Jeane turn a slight impediment to her social benefit. She is listed among only a few young men and women singularized for a class alphabet in June 1941: “A for Ambitious: John Hurford . . . G for Glamorous: Nancy Moon . . . R for Radical: Don Ball . . . V for Vivacious: Mary Jean Boyd,” and—at her own witty insistence, simply “M-m-m-m: Norma Jeane Baker.” In and out of school, she was “the Mmmm Girl.” Capitalizing on her stammer, she linked it to the sound she heard the boys mutter. Vulnerable, cautious and shy she always was—but sufficiently resourceful to turn a liability into an asset.
Norma Jeane spent her first term of tenth grade (sophomore year, beginning September 1941), at Van Nuys High School, which was closer to the Goddard house than University High in West Los Angeles. Her report card was even less distinguished here than at Emerson. She found it difficult to apply herself to academic matters, for Norma Jeane was distracted by the presence of a handsome, five-foot-ten, brown-haired, blue-eyed young man with a thin, rakish mustache. His name was James Dougherty, and his family occupied a house just in front of the Goddards’ bungalow, set back a way from Archwood Street in Van Nuys.
Born in Los Angeles on April 12, 1921, Jim Dougherty at twenty had a very different reputation from Chuck Moran. The youngest of five children in a family that had endured hard times during the depression, he had once lived in a Van Nuys tent, working long hours as a fruit picker before he and his parents could afford to rent a small bungalow. At Van Nuys High, he acted in high-school plays, starred on the football team and won election as student body president. He also found time to contribute to the family’s income by holding odd jobs—shining shoes, making sandwiches in a delicatessen and assisting in a local mortuary, work he continued after graduation. He deferred his chance to attend college on a football scholarship in order to help his mother and siblings.
By late 1941, Jim was working at Lockheed Aircraft, driving a snappy blue Ford coupe and dating several girls; in fact, he was particularly serious about one named Doris Drennan—until she dropped him because, as she said, “You couldn’t support me.” When he met Norma Jeane that year, Jim was working the night shift at Lockheed (among his co-workers was a beefy, heavy-lidded chap named Robert Mitchum) and living so close to Van Nuys High that his mother Ethel and her friend Grace Goddard asked him to drive Norma Jeane and Bebe home from school—which was now a greater distance for the girls than before, since the Goddards moved in October to Odessa Avenue, into another small house owned by Ana Lower. That year, Bebe suffered several illnesses that kept her out of class, and Jim remembered that Norma Jeane seemed to take advantage of the daily opportunity “to sit a little closer to me.”
For Norma Jeane, Jim was (as she later said) “a dreamboat” most of all because of his mustache (“she was fascinated by it,” according to Dougherty); indeed, it must have reminded her of Gladys’s mysterious boyfriend, of Clark Gable and of Errol Flynn, and the mustache made him look both older and distinguished. “What a daddy!” Norma Jeane said significantly to Bebe after arriving home from school one afternoon.
As for Dougherty, “I noticed she was a pretty little thing, and she thought I looked angelic in white shirts, but she was only a child so far as I was concerned, and five years was a great difference in our ages.” Admired chauffeur he was willing to be, but serious dating seemed out of the question.
But neither Jim, his mother nor Norma Jeane fully estimated Grace Goddard, who now assumed the role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, the Yonkers matchmaker. She swung into action as soon as she saw the proverbial stars in her ward’s eyes, “expertly maneuvering [Norma Jeane] into my awareness,” as Dougherty realized later. A few days after the shock of Pearl Harbor and America’s precipitous entry into the war, Grace asked Ethel Dougherty if Jim would escort Norma Jeane to a Christmas dance at Adel Precision Products, where Doc was then employed. Jim agreed, as he later said, partly because he was flattered by Norma Jeane’s adoration and partly because his romance with Doris Drennan had not survived the two challenges of her move to Santa Barbara and his inability to support her.
The Christmas party was a major moment in the relationship. During the slow dances, Norma Jeane leaned against Jim (as he recalled) “extra close, eyes tight shut, and even Grace and Doc saw that I wasn’t just being Good Neighbor Sam, so to speak. I was having the time of my life with this little girl, who didn’t seem or feel so little any more.”
But Grace, eager to accelerate Norma Jeane’s advance to womanhood, abetted the process. She paid for the girl to go to movies with Jim; she suggested they hike in the Hollywood Hills; they took boat rides on Pop’s Willow Lake; and occasionally they drove north to Ventura County, visited Jim’s sister Elyda and drove out to Lake Sherwood. Grace packed picnic lunches for them and so, with the help of both makeup and Grace’s friend Ethel Dougherty, Jim found himself happy to spend weekends with the pretty, admiring and undemanding Norma Jeane.
Frequently in the evenings, the couple parked on Mulholland Drive, atop the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains. According to the later testimony of both, their intimacy remained chaste: “She very neatly held things in check” was Jim’s summary. They talked of the war, and of school, and Norma Jeane told Jim quite frankly that she was born illegitimate; this evoked neither his pity nor repugnance. He drew her closer, and she rested her head on his shoulder as the car radio, crackling with static, picked up the season’s hit tunes: “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” . . . “That Old Black Magic” . . . “Moonlight Becomes You.” Most of all, Norma Jeane liked to hear Frank Sinatra crooning “I’ll Never Love Again” and “Night and Day.” She was “awfully sweet to be with,” as he said; she was more physically developed than most fifteen-year-olds (and was made up to resemble a smart young thing); she seemed to rely on Jim’s strength; and she admired everything he did. He found this attention extremely flattering.
At the start of the new year 1942, Adel Precision announced that Doc Goddard was to be transferred to their West Virginia plant as East Coast head of sales. “To tell the truth,” Bebe said years later, “he had just been messing around, trying to be an actor and tinkering with all sorts of things—so finally he knew he had to settle down. He was a hell of a salesman, and at last here was a good promotion at a steady job.” Grace and Bebe would accompany him, but not Norma Jeane, whom they could not afford to keep. Grace informed her of this quite matter-of-factly one morning—but, she added, she was “working on something wonderful for [Norma Jeane].”
Whatever Grace’s secondary plans, this was devastating for the girl, who immediately perceived that she was once again simply an expendable commodity. As Dougherty confirmed,
her respect for Grace altered from that moment on. It seemed to her like another rejection, that she was being tossed out of another foster home. . . . Grace had told Norma Jeane that she would never feel insecure again, and now the poor girl felt that Grace had gone back on her word.
The first sequel occurred immediately after, in late January. Ana Lower’s health had somewhat improved, and so as the second term of sophomore year began and the Goddards prepared to move, Norma Jeane returned to Ana on Nebraska Avenue and attended University High School, an attractive, Spanish-style building at the corner of Westgate and Texas avenues. During February and March (with Grace and Ethel’s constant encouragement), Jim continued to date Norma Jeane, chugging through the Sepulveda Pass or negotiating the tortuous drives through the canyons linking the Valley to the West Side (the Los Angeles freeways were not even on the drawing boards).
For the rootless and rejected fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane, Jim Dougherty’s attention was welcome. She had, after all, no sense of herself—no parental background with or against which to grow, no emotional harbor to which she could unfailingly return; she effectively lacked every normal ingredient of a teenager’s life except school and a rapid physical development that outpaced her psychological growth.
At University High, some of her classmates noted a change in Norma Jeane’s personality: “she was loud,” according to classmate Tom Ishii. “She talked loud, and some began to consider her wild.” But anyone aware of her life that spring of 1942 would not have been surprised that concentrated attention from a handsome, older man inevitably fed her ego. Both her emotionally deprived past and her uncertain present were factors encouraging her dependence on Jim as Norma Jeane prepared for the Goddards’ departure (which also meant the absence of her new friend Bebe). To further complicate matters, it was clear by March that Norma Jeane’s residence on Nebraska Avenue would have to be temporary, for Ana fell ill again with heart disease.
And then it happened. The question came not from Jim or Norma Jeane—not even directly from Grace, who was too crafty to pose it herself.
Ethel Dougherty approached her son with a blunt proposition: “The Goddards are going to West Virginia, and they’re not taking Norma Jeane. She can’t stay with Mrs. Lower, and that means she goes back to the orphanage until she’s eighteen.”
“I’m listening,” Jim said.
“Grace wants to know if you’d be interested in marrying her. She turns sixteen in June”—the legal age in California.
“The thought ran through my mind,” Dougherty said later, “that at sixteen she was far too young for me. I had no thought of marrying her at the time, and I really wouldn’t have . . . but I agreed to it because I was going into the service soon and I figured she’d have a home with my mother. And of course I thought she was an adorable girl who was fun to be with. I didn’t really think much beyond that. And Norma Jeane went along with the idea.”
But she did so only because she had no choice: as she later said, she married Jim “so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage.” In mid-March, two days after the Goddards left California for West Virginia, Norma Jeane shocked her teachers and classmates by informing them she was quitting school to get married that June; from that day she was no more to be seen in class, and thus her formal studies ended in the middle of her second year of high school. This aborted education later haunted her, causing an inferiority complex others would be only too glad to exploit.
It might be too severe to judge Grace and Ethel’s motives as calculating; at the same time, their manipulation of Norma Jeane cannot be easily excused. They effectively communicated to her the dangerous notion that her liberation and sustenance were connected to life with a man. Also, in a sense, the Goddards’ relocation to West Virginia and the forthcoming marriage provided another neat parallel to Grace’s obsession, the transformation of Norma Jeane into Jean Harlow: at sixteen, Harlow had withdrawn from high school to marry a handsome twenty-one-year-old socialite named Charles McGrew. Jean Harlow—this was the identity Grace had imagined for the girl, the image in whose reflection Grace had groomed her.
“Grace McKee arranged a marriage for me,” Marilyn Monroe said years later. “I never had a choice. There’s not much to say about it. They couldn’t support me, and they had to work out something. And so I got married.” It later seemed, she said, “like a dream that never really happened. It didn’t work out—just like Jean Harlow’s didn’t work out. I guess we were too young.”
Too young indeed, despite the promptings of Grace, who simply ignored the girl’s age and concentrated on the role. Even the teenager’s innocence was blithely dismissed, as Jim recalled. One afternoon he, his mother, Norma Jeane and Grace were sipping Coca-Colas. Suddenly the girl asked haltingly if she could marry Jim “but not have sex.” The question was not so much naïve as, more likely, designed to force everyone to reconsider the imminent marriage. But Grace leaped in with an answer: “Don’t worry. You’ll learn.” This reply might have been no different had Norma Jeane expressed anxiety about an algebra test.5
Her hesitations were not merely sexual. “After all, I had never seen any marriage work out,” she said perceptively years after, and in that regard she was on the mark. Della, Gladys, Ana, Grace, Ida and Olive provided only examples of failed marriages and the emotional inconstancy of spouses.
As for Dougherty, he “tried to make her feel desirable and worthy of everyone’s respect and admiration. But by doing so, I may have been undermining my own future with her.” He took her shopping to select a ring before remembering the custom of asking her to marry him—a mere formality in this case, since the decision had already been made for her. Almost distractedly, she accepted, and with the cast and the scenario ready, a date was set for the event.
On June 1, 1942, Norma Jeane turned sixteen. The following Sunday, she and Jim found a one-room bungalow in Sherman Oaks, at 4524 Vista Del Monte. Despite the tiny quarters, they agreed to sign a six-month lease; the owner offered to supply a new “Murphy bed,” which could be easily retracted into a wall cabinet and enlarge the living space. Their few possessions were moved in before the wedding.
The final preparations bore marks of inconsistencies and evasions of truth, which of themselves seem negligible but which actually reveal the tissue of insecurity in which the marriage was wrapped. The invitations had been sent by “Miss Ana Lower” for the wedding of her “niece, Norma Jean Baker,” but on the marriage certificate the bride had signed “Norma Jeane Mortensen.” She wrote that she was the daughter of “E. Mortensen, birthplace unknown” and of a woman named “Monroe, born in Oregon.” She did not supply her mother’s first name; like all her relatives and even the Goddards, Gladys would not attend. Albert and Ida Bolender said they would drive up from Hawthorne, although they disapproved of both the wedding and its setting.
At eight-thirty on Friday evening, June 19, 1942, the ceremony was performed by a nondenominational minister named Benjamin Lingenfelder, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chester Howell (friends of Grace’s), at 432 South Bentley Avenue, West Los Angeles. Everything was slightly surreal and improvised. A girl Norma Jeane knew only slightly at University High was her matron of honor; Jim’s brother Marion was best man, and Jim’s nephew Wesley bore the ring on a velvet pillow. The groom recalled how his bride “liked the winding staircase in the front hall, just like in the movies. But she was shaking so she could hardly stand.” Jim, too, was a mite unsteady—“feeling a little undone, because my brother had given me a double shot of whiskey before I arrived.”
A modest reception was held at a nearby restaurant, where a showgirl entertaining another wedding party dragooned Dougherty onto a makeshift stage for a dance. But when he returned to his table, he found his bride “not very happy. She thought I’d made a monkey out of myself, and I did.” About four in the morning, the newlyweds arrived home in Sherman Oaks.
Within and beyond all the details, tasks and tensions of the wedding day, Jim Dougherty retained one memory clearer than any other: his bride “never let go of my arm all afternoon, and even then she looked at me as though she was afraid I might disappear while she was out of the room.”
1. The story is somewhat more complicated, but this later statement represents her girlhood résumé of it, and her impression is more significant than in her accurate retelling of the plot.
2. Mortensen died on February 10, 1981, in Mira Loma, Riverside County, California.
3. As one scholar of the religion has noted, “The controversy about the origins of Christian Science, the obscurity of periods of Mrs. Eddy’s life, and the inaccessibility of the archival materials of the Mother Church are together responsible for the absence of completely reliable standard works on the movement.”
4. According to Gladys Phillips Wilson, “She never went to fancy places or country clubs because the rich boys just didn’t date her. They probably wanted to, because she was a dish, but it wasn’t done.”
5. Once Norma Jeane had asked Ana Lower about sex, and she was simply handed an ancient manual. What Every Young Lady Should Know About Marriage was a book so coy and evasive that its hottest topic concerned ironing a man’s shirts.