Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe

ONE

In February 1962, when Marilyn Monroe was thirty-five, she moved into the first house she ever owned completely on her own. The Spanish-style house was modest, tiny even, with three small bedrooms and an apartment-sized kitchen. There was an alcove off the kitchen into which Marilyn had fitted a trestle table turning the small space into a breakfast nook. Marilyn’s special pride was a kidney-shaped swimming pool that came with the house.

Perhaps the most compelling motive behind Marilyn’s move into that particular cramped house was a telephone call from a friend in New York early that month, informing her that Arthur Miller’s new wife, the photographer Inge Morath, was pregnant.* Marilyn announced that she would entertain only special friends in her new home. She had become crotchety in recent years, and she took a dislike to some people almost on sight. For instance, her lawyer’s secretary was not allowed inside the house. When Marilyn had to sign a document, the secretary would bring it to the gate, and someone from the house would come out and take it in to Marilyn.

The house became an extension of herself. Marilyn occupied all of it, moving from room to room, often barefoot, and visitors often felt her movements were not so much from restlessness as from a desire to inhabit all of the house at the same time. It was a very personal place, suitable only for a single person. Much has been written about the possibility of Marilyn marrying again that last year of her life. But there was no room for another person to live in that house. Her general factotum-housekeeper stayed over only on rare occasions. There were no closets, no storage space. If the house continued to look as though Marilyn had just moved in, with a number of cartons standing in corners, there was a simple explanation. There was no place to conceal anything. The back study—a small, enclosed area off the pool patio—had no heat and was uninhabitable on a chilly day. The radiant heat in the floors was erratic, with entire rooms left out of the heating plan. Even the attractive St. Charles kitchen had no heat, and on cold days Marilyn lit the oven for warmth. There is no evidence that Marilyn or her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who was overseeing the renovation, made any effort to make the place more livable. The kitchen contained no cabinets for china, and they installed none. The second bathroom was disassembled and was still unusable when Marilyn died. The entire emphasis seemed to be on making the house authentically Mexican. It appeared Marilyn wanted a home that could not be shared with another person.

Her living room, one step down from the foyer, was snug, although its vaulted ceiling made it seem larger than it really was. It could accommodate about three pieces of furniture, one of which was to be a bright red sofa she had selected from a book of Mexican interiors. It arrived only after her death. That side of the house was very dark, with few windows. Sunlight never penetrated the room. Ivy, planted many years ago, covered the exterior wall of the living room and shaded what feeble light came through. The fireplace was in frequent use for both warmth and cheer.

Despite its obvious disadvantages, several things commended the house to Marilyn. Though much smaller, it was very similar to the house of her analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who, together with his family, played a major role in her life at this time. Both the Greenson house and Marilyn’s were authentic haciendas, and she had become enamored of Spanish decor and architecture during the past year. Among her first purchases for the new house were Spanish tiles for the kitchen and bath, and tin Mexican masks bought on one of several shopping excursions across the border. Also, the house was extremely private. A high brick and stucco wall screened it from any traffic passing Fifth Helena Drive; the street itself was a dead end.

The last six months of Marilyn’s life were chaotic. She was involved in the production of a film in which she had no faith at all. She was fired by the studio that had created her screen persona and given her name. She was drawn into a puzzling affair with Robert Francis Kennedy, attorney general of the United States, bewildering because she must have known in her rational moments that he would never leave his family, and equally confusing because his brother, the President, encouraged it. She was teetering between the sudden decline of her screen career and the lure of the Broadway stage, with her surrogate parents, the Lee Strasbergs, attempting to allay her fear of live audiences. She was suffering severe bouts of melancholia, and she was seeing her analyst and her internist several times a week. And she had accepted into her household a woman whom, despite the fact that she was a close friend of Marilyn’s analyst, she did not entirely trust. Except for the Strasbergs, who were not at the moment being paid by Marilyn for coaching services, Marilyn trusted no one who was not her hireling in one capacity or another.

As can be seen from this brief overview of her final months, nothing in Marilyn’s life was working. Her career was moving in fits and starts, and her fears and sleeplessness were out of her control and in the hands of doctors. She must have felt a desperate need for a strong lover to counsel and comfort her. As you will see, always before there had been a protective male to step in when a knight-errant was called for. The only two men on the scene who could conceivably have rescued her in the summer of 1962 were Robert Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio, and each was, for different reasons, unfitted for the part. Bobby Kennedy apparently had been backed into the tightest of corners by Marilyn’s strong affection for him and her problems, and he was not the sort of man his father had been. Joe Kennedy, Sr., had the guts or the cool—call it what you like—to take both his wife and his mistress, Gloria Swanson, on the same boat to Europe. As attorney general of the United States, Bobby was vulnerable to any breath of scandal and smart enough to want to avoid it. As for Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn knew that she could never remarry him. As a friend and lover, he was warm and concerned; as a husband, he was possessive and, at infrequent but terrifying times, capable of physical violence.

Marilyn’s terminal frustration was frighteningly obvious to all those close to her that final summer. Those who saw her frequently were joined in a holding operation that was close to a constant vigil. Those who wished her well prayed for a miracle.

* Miller and Marilyn had been divorced a year earlier, in January 1961. Rebecca Miller was born on September 15,1962, more than five weeks after Marilyn’s death. Miller, in an interview with the author, discounted Inge’s pregnancy as a possible motive for Marilyn’s suicide, calling it a red herring. He added, She knew I was a father before; she knew the children. She knew it wasn’t anything wrong with me that kept us from having children. But here, inadvertently, Miller may have given us the reason for Marilyn retreating to the womblike environment—she knew that she was the reason they never had any children together. Inge Miller was the whole woman she-could never be.

TWO

There were no miracles for Della Monroe, Marilyn’s grand-mother, thirty-five summers earlier. Her hell had cracked open, and she had been pitched into the abyss in July 1927, when Norma Jeane was thirteen months old.

The 1920s annihilated as many souls as it liberated. Della Hogan Monroe was one of the casualties then, just as her granddaughter would be in the 1960s. She was born on a farm in Missouri in 1876, and hard times had dogged her family much of her life, as did congenital melancholia. The rugged rural life drove the Hogans west to California late in the 1890s. In about 1899 Della married Otis Elmer Monroe, whose mental stability was as delicate as her own. They moved to Mexico in 1900, where their first child, a daughter they called Gladys, was born later that year. Monroe found it difficult to hold down a job, but living was cheap in Mexico, and they survived on small remittances horn his family back in California.

So a pattern of clinging to a lifeline, however tenuous, was established in the Monroe line two generations away from the child who would become Marilyn. When, late in 1925, Marilyn’s mother, Gladys Pearl Baker Mortensen, realized that she was pregnant, Della’s first reaction was polite rejection. Gladys’s husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, whom she had married in 1924, had, Gladys told friends, gone off on his motorcycle only months after the ceremony, sending his regrets from San Francisco. Now, Della did not offer to take her daughter into her own home in Hawthorne, California, or even steer her into the interested hands of relatives. Rather, she suggested that Gladys talk to the Bolenders across the street, who boarded very young children.

On Christmas Eve in 1925, Gladys told her lover, C. Stanley Gifford, a divorced salesman for the film laboratory where she was head negative cutter, of her condition. She chose a moment when they were alone in his house.

In her divorce complaint earlier that year, his wife had charged that:

He associated with women of low and dissolute character; boasted of his conquests; showed her marks of hypodermic injections of addictive drugs; caroused with fellow workers in the film lab, with one instance mentioned of visits to friends in Venice, California, in 1922 [Gladys and Della shared a home there in that year]; and leaving their house and not returning for hours.

Gladys, apparently unaware of her lover’s true character, thought Gifford might be touched by her situation. She was also in love with him and was now quite willing to divorce Mortensen.

Gifford’s immediate reaction to Gladys’s condition and proposal was flinty. He offered her some cash, which she refused, and remarked on how wise she had been not to have divorced Mortensen. His callousness plunged her into a profound depression. It was the first crisis with which she could not cope, the first known hint that she might have inherited her parents’ mental illness.

Money was never a problem in Gladys’s life, so it was not financial security she sought from Gifford. It was simple affection. She loved him; she was about to bear his child, and she wanted desperately for him to marry her. But Gifford, recently set free and enjoying a liberated bachelor existence, would have none of it.

On June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles General Hospital, Gladys gave birth to a daughter whom she named Norma Jeane. Gifford was nowhere in sight.

As women’s skirts began to creep up to just above the knee in the 1920s, the God-fearing were trying to halt the erosion in morality that they seemed to see everywhere. Flappers and their escorts with their hip flasks had to be sold on salvation. This was a decade of intense merchandizing of everything from Model A Fords to God. Foremost among God’s salespersons was Aimee Semple McPherson, an evange¬list of dubious personal morality who made her fortune as founder of the Four Square Gospel Church with its headquarters at Angelus Temple in Los Angeles.

Della Monroe joined Sister Aimee’s church, possibly in an effort to put some stable religious props into a life that was coming apart. It was an unfortunate choice. By mid-1926, Sister Aimee was exposed as an adulteress and the perpetrator of an elaborate hoax on the public, in which she tried to conceal a desert fling with one of her married employees by claiming she had been kidnapped. In 1944, the evangelist would die of an overdose of sleeping pills, just as Norma Jeane, whom she baptized.

This assault upon her faith by Sister Aimee, combined with her marital problems, was more than Della could tolerate, and she had been too overwhelmed by her own difficulties to offer Gladys any assistance, even though she did not condemn her daughter for her miscalculation. Thrice married herself, she believed that she had made only two mistakes since her first husband died—her second and third husbands. If Gladys had behind her three disastrous relationships with men within a much shorter space of time, at least she still seemed to be emotionally intact. But her daughter would be exposed from infancy to a basic mistrust of nearly all men that would cripple her in adulthood.

Though she had once been beautiful, the ravages of Della’s mental instability had coarsened her features, giving her at fifty-one the look of a fierce-tempered schoolmarm. A year of cataclysmic events led Della to be committed to Norwalk State Hospital on August 4,1927, thirty-five years to the day before her famous granddaughter died.

To enumerate these events does not begin to suggest their effect upon Della’s delicate hold on sanity. First there was the cold indifference of her third husband, Grainger, an oil engineer who fled the country in an effort to put some distance between himself and his wife. Della followed him to India, but whatever she found in that remote land, it was not peace of mind, and within months she was back in Hawthorne, California, in the grip of a frightening psychosis that would get progressively worse. She reclaimed her bungalow across the street from the Albert Wayne Bolenders, where Ida Bolender was caring for her daughter’s illegitimate child, Norma Jeane.* She was shaken to learn upon her return that her son, Marion, had deserted his wife and children and, as she told Ida, He can’t take care of himself.** Insanity and the fear of it would plague this family with the same ferocity as the fear of abandonment and loss of love.

When Della’s grip on sanity was broken in July 1927, the first strong warning that it was happening was experienced by a helpless, inarticulate witness—Norma Jeane. Della had seen Ida Bolender taking a strap to Norma Jeane after the child threw a bowl of cereal to the floor. Della’s anger was understandable, but her look was murderous as she shouted at Ida, Don’t ever do that again! That afternoon Della took Norma Jeane across to her own home, and Ida was too embarrassed to protest. It was there in Della’s bedroom that, in Marilyn’s words, I remember waking up from my nap fighting for my life. Something was pressed against my face. It could have been a pillow. I fought with all my strength. One of the characteristics of manic-depressive psychosis, in some extreme cases, is the victim’s determination to kill his or her progeny, whom they see as extensions of themselves, evil and needing to be destroyed. Marilyn said this was her first memory, but some who heard her tell the story could not believe that an event that happened to a thirteen-month-old infant could be recalled by that person in adulthood.***

What strengthens the probability is that something else as bizarre happened that same week. Early on the morning of August 4, Albert Wayne Bolender heard a commotion in his front yard. Even forty years later, he recalled the details vividly. Della was hurrying up the walk toward the porch. She seemed to be in a rage, and Albert Wayne slammed the front door and bolted it. No one could make out a word Della was saying, but it was obvious that the subject was Norma Jeane; she had no other reason to be there. Ida came into the living room from her kitchen and peered out at her neighbor. Ida said that Della had the look of a madwoman. The pounding on their door terrified her. Call the police, Wayne, she said. Hurry!

It took less than half an hour for a black patrol car to pull up in front of the Bolender home, but to Ida Bolender the wait seemed an eternity. Della had spent the interval pacing up and down the porch, banging on the door and on the front window, finally breaking a panel of the front door and injuring her hand. Albert Wayne was concerned about the blood spurting from the wound but was afraid to go outside to help her. Both Bolenders were praying for help to arrive soon.

Two policemen subdued Della and dragged her to a police car. Albert Wayne remembered that her head was thrown back as though beseeching God’s help.

Nineteen days later, on August 23, Della died of heart failure during a manic seizure at the Norwalk asylum. It was the one terrible detail in her background that most frightened Marilyn—that quick death in the state hospital. It suggested to her that madness could swoop in suddenly and carry one off—a madness that could be homicidal, that isolated its victim from everyone, and that Marilyn feared could be in her genes. Her own mother suffered bouts of madness throughout Marilyn’s lifetime, her uncle suffered from it, and both grandparents had died insane.

But Marilyn also convinced herself that insanity was triggered as much by the circumstances of one’s life as by genetic flaws. Her grandmother and her mother had not been loved enough. She determined as a child to shore up that weak comer of her life. She vowed to be loved by everyone she could find, beginning with the Bolenders.

Unfortunately, the Bolenders reserved most of their love for Jesus. They were fundamentalists who thought it was more important for Norma Jeane to be saved than to be loved. In his spare time, Albert Wayne cranked out tracts on salvation on a little printing press in a workshop behind their kitchen. They considered the nearby Community Church their true home. What Norma Jeane sought from them was their affection; what she remembered of her first seven and a half years of life was the Bolenders’ preoccupation with salvation and the strap.

Although the Bolenders tried not to favor one child over another, they became aware that Norma Jeane was different from the others. This had little to do with her physical appearance. She was no more attractive than their adopted Lester, and when she grimaced with her broad mouth, she might even have been called homely. It was her vocabulary that first set her apart. When the Bolenders went to Manhattan Beach over what Norma Jeane called the roller coaster road in their Model A Ford, she clapped her hands spontaneously at her first glimpse of the ocean. It’s a big wet! she cried, her senses giving her the words. And she was forever asking questions, mostly directed to Albert Wayne as he was shaving. She would perch on a stool next to the tub and ask how many people there were in the world, who was God, and where He lived. She called Albert Wayne Daddy, although Ida would not allow her to say Mama because of Gladys’s visits. I’m not your mother, Ida told her once. Don’t call me Mama. The woman with red hair is your mother.

But, Norma Jeane protested, he’s my Daddy, pointing to Albert Wayne.

No, Ida said. You must call him Uncle Wayne. This was something Norma Jeane never could bring herself to do, or perhaps she forgot these admonitions. She continued calling Albert Wayne Daddy, but she never called Ida Mama again.

The world outside was far more tempting to this fearless little girl than to any of the other children. Nothing daunted her. Ida’s bemused eye was frequently on her, wondering what she might do next, hoping she wouldn’t try again to open the front door and run into the street. Norma Jeane wasn’t running away; she merely wanted to see what lay beyond the shrubbery next to the sidewalk. She could hear the red car, the trolley, that connected Hawthorne with downtown Los Angeles, and that was a magnet. Twice before she was four years old, she ran to the trolley line.

Sometimes Gladys picked her up and took her back to her furnished rooms in Hollywood for a visit. In the only sustained memoir of her life that Marilyn ever wrote,* she said:

I used to be frightened when I visited her and spent most of my lime in the closet of her bedroom hiding among her clothes. She seldom spoke to me except to say, Don’t make so much noise, Norma. She would say this even when I was lying in bed at night and turning the pages of a book. Even the sound of a page turning made her nervous.

Four years after Marilyn’s death, Ida Bolender declared that she had loved Norma Jeane just like my own. Norma Jeane’s little-bulldog stubbornness, her quick mind, and her homely grin had made the Bolenders consider adopting her as a sister to Lester, but two things ruled against this. There was no way Gladys could be persuaded to give up her child; and she was faithful in her payments of twenty-five dollars a month for Norma Jeane’s care, money that was important to the Bolenders. Four months after Norma Jeane’s third birthday, the Great Depression officially began. Ida remembered the deprivations; it was hard to find the money for little gifts for the children at Christmas; they were reduced to nickel offerings at church; house trim went unpainted, and wallpaper faded and peeled; rugs wore out and could not be replaced. But there were no soup lines in Hawthorne, nor men on corners selling apples. Albert Wayne never lost a day’s work. He was a letter carrier, you know. That went on, Ida said later. And if the house showed signs of wear and tear that could not be repaired, the children themselves remained neatly clothed and clean at all times. Gladys supplied her with the material, and Ida ran up little dresses and blouses for Norma Jeane on her Singer.

A year before the onset of the Depression, Gladys heard that Mortensen had drifted back into Los Angeles County. But he made no effort to contact her and went to work as a repairman for a local utility company, a job he was to hold for nearly fifty years, until his retirement in 1978. If she had had any illusions about a reconciliation with Mortensen helping to find them a home where they could all live, that dream was shattered now. Charging desertion, Gladys filed for divorce, and got one.

The only outward sign of strain Ida observed in Gladys on her visits was her appearance. At about this time, she showed up one Saturday for an afternoon with Norma Jeane wearing dark glasses. Ida caught a glimpse of Gladys’s face when she removed the glasses to adjust her makeup. One eye was bruised and half closed. Had she sought out Mortensen, demanded that they straighten things out for the girl’s sake? Had he, knowing that Norma Jeane was not his, slugged her? The chronology of these events suggests this possibility.

As the 1920s moved toward their ignominious end, while nothing seemed to change in the Bolender household, Gladys reflected what was happening outside. She took up smoking and she bobbed her hair. Ida decided that if this was the worst of the decadence she read was going on in the world, she could take it. Saturdays were Gladys’s days in the house, and it was not for Ida to judge either how she looked or spent them. Gladys had a new beau who sometimes took mother and daughter to the beach, and Gladys bought Norma Jeane a striped bathing suit. The beau took their picture together, our only glimpse of him a shadow on the sand in front of them.

The huge film lab on Melrose Avenue where Gladys worked caught fire. One of the executives at Consolidated Film Labs recalled that Gladys was the only truly calm woman on the premises. She herded her girls down the stairs to the street and, as it appeared that the place was going to burn to the ground, took a trolley back to her rented rooms. That this sort of calamity, terrifying to others, was taken in stride by Gladys may have been a symptom of the illness that was about to overtake her.

Within a week, CFI, Consolidated Film Industries, an aggressive, tightly managed firm, was back in business processing film, moving into Bennett Film Labs, a subsidiary rather far out on Santa Monica Boulevard. Gladys returned to work, but then she suddenly gave notice. The new location required two changes on the trolley, and this was more than she could cope with. She was out of work for a month or so, yet Ida cannot remember her ever falling behind in Norma Jeane’s board bill. Ida thought that there might have been a small inheritance from Della.

Music played an important role in Marilyn’s life, as it had in the life of the young Norma Jeane. The kind Marilyn liked best was basic American pop, and she would befriend a number of singers she admired—Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, and Judy Garland. Marilyn liked to sing it herself, and she was good enough to do her own vocals in all of her films. At home or in her dressing room, she liked to have music in the background when she was relaxing. A stack of Sinatra records was playing during her last hours on earth. But popular music had been banned from the Bolender home. The first song to enter Norma Jeane’s consciousness and make her smile was Jesus Loves Me, This I Know. By the age of four she knew all the words, and she sang the song, or snatches of it, whenever the mood struck her, which was often—once, Ida remembered, in a crowded cafeteria, and always in the Bolender Ford on their way to the beach.

Her constant companion at that time was Lester, who was within days of being the same age as Norma Jeane. Their relationship was precious to both of them, and in later years Lester would refuse to discuss it, not wishing to exploit something private. But Ida volunteered a few things. She said that the children were given a tricycle one Christmas; there was no name tag on it. It was intended as communal property, and bitter fights erupted over whose turn it was to ride it. Once, Norma Jeane overturned the vehicle with Lester on it. An egg-shaped bump rose on his head, and Norma Jeane was given a whipping with Albert Wayne’s razor strap. Marilyn often told interviewers that she was raised by stern, religious zealots. In truth, church was an entertainment for her, where the choir sang lustily and the organ penetrated her bones. And she was not especially picked on by the Bolenders; in one interview years afterward, she conceded that she got into more trouble than the other kids. She was certainly no Dickensian victim, resigned to punishment. Moreover, she kept no hurt, real or imagined, to herself. Even at four and five years, she would hoard her little declaration of abuse until her next visit with her mother. Ida remembers that Norma Jeane always tattled on them to Gladys when she was punished.

The two children’s first exposure to kindergarten at the age of five was also their first exposure to the world’s germs, and during that first term at the Washington Street School both of them got whooping cough. Lester came down with it first and gave it to Norma Jeane—they shared a bedroom with twin beds. Gladys’s usual calm in the face of calamity was shaken. Phoned the news late one evening, she wanted to come at once, but Ida persuaded her to wait until morning.

Gladys had recently taken a job as a film cutter at Columbia Pictures Studio on Gower Street, not far from her old job at CFI. She had been befriended at Columbia by a film librarian named Grace McKee.* It was the policy of Jack and Harry Cohn, brothers who ran Columbia, to keep their staff from moving on to another studio. As a result, Gladys was allowed time off to stay in Hawthorne to nurse Norma Jeane back to health, two of her weeks away from the job paid as holiday time. Grace McKee, a resourceful woman, probably had a hand in these arrangements.

Norma Jeane’s lifelong quest for affection and love was fulfilled temporarily during that illness. Gladys was given a rear bedroom, and she brought her daughter into the room with her. No longer was Gladys just the red-haired woman who took her to the beach on Saturdays. After that illness there was no mistaking who Norma Jeane’s mama was. While her fever raged, Gladys was beside her with cold compresses for her forehead. She bought several changes of pajamas for her daughter and spent much of her free time doing the child’s soiled laundry. She cut herself off from her few friends, her beaux, her work. Even Lester, who was as ill as she, didn’t get the kind of concentrated attention and affection Gladys was showering upon Norma Jeane. I could see how much she loved Norma Jeane, Ida recalled of that time. When the child was finally well enough for Gladys to return to her furnished rooms in Hollywood, Norma Jeane knew for certain how much her mother loved her. The episode reinforced the girl’s life-long quest for love. Unfortunately, it also left her open to a sense of enormous betrayal a short time down the road, when her mother disappeared behind the walls of a state hospital. The profound bitterness she felt then was to last her whole life.

Neither Ida nor Albert Wayne was aware of the impact Gladys’s long stay had on her daughter. But they were much moved by this gesture of devotion, and the atmosphere in the house became more indulgent. Soon after Gladys’s departure, Albert Wayne was followed home one night from the trolley line by a small black-and-white mongrel dog. By this time, Norma Jeane was allowed out of bed much of the time, and she spent nearly all of it playing with the dog, whom she called Tippy.

With the advent of Tippy, Norma Jeane learned that a dog could be even a better companion than another person, such as Lester. Tippy’s bark was music, his warm body the first touch of another creature that mattered to her. When Gladys told Norma Jeane that she was saving to buy them a home where they could be together permanently, she assured her that Tippy would be a part of that future. When the children were well enough to return to school, Tippy followed Norma Jeane, hanging around the schoolyard, waiting for recess and then for three o’clock. He made Norma Jeane unique for the first time in her life. None of the other children had a dog in the schoolyard. When she and Lester were given their first roller skates, they would race along West 134th Street with Tippy running after them.

Gladys gradually began to become as much a part of her daughter’s life as the Bolenders were. She would take her to El Segundo Beach on outings, and to Columbia Studios on Gower Street in Hollywood, where Norma Jeane saw the women with their long trails of film and got dizzy from the fumes of film cement. She was always well dressed, in ruffled dresses and black patent leather Mary Jane shoes. They attended Saturday matinees at the big Los Angeles movie palaces, and Marilyn remembered that she once heard Chevalier sing Louise in a film.

Albert Wayne recalls one warm Saturday early in 1932 when he was up on the roof of their bungalow fixing a leak and Norma Jeane was playing with Tippy in the front yard, and a single-engine biplane buzzed low over the house and the pilot, clearly visible, wearing traditional headgear and goggles, waved at her. Norma Jeane, astonished, waved back. Later, Albert Wayne learned that the pilot was a friend of Gladys in the movie business who had promised that on his next solo flight from nearby Municipal Airport he would say hello to her daughter.

The tranquility of Norma Jeane’s childhood was about to end. There was no thought then of neutering a dog, especially in the Bo lenders’ world. Every night Tippy could sense the rutting desires of nearby bitches and would howl at the door to get out. Terrified that the Bolenders might paddle him for disturbing their sleep, Norma Jeane would tiptoe to the kitchen door and let the dog out. The child knew sleeplessness for the first time as she lay in bed fretting over her dog as he ran through the darkness. And then it happened. There was a blasting sound and the cut-off cry of an animal. The milkman found Tippy’s body shortly after dawn that morning. Marilyn’s own recollection of this traumatic event varies from Ida Bolender’s in one detail. Marilyn was to tell journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht that her first dog was killed by a man next door [who] started chasing him and ordering him to shut up. The man had a hoe in his hand. He swung the hoe. It hit my dog’s back and cut him in half. However Tippy died, the Bolenders accepted his execution in silence, and Albert Wayne carried the dog’s body back to their yard for burial. Norma Jeane’s emotional injury was a lasting one.

* All of Norma Jeane’s infancy and early childhood were spent here in Hawthorne, a working-class flatland near what is now Los Angeles International Airport. Most of its verandaed bungalows had been built during and just after World War I. Between them were vacant lots filled with weeds; the streets were gravel then, easily turned to mire in a cloudburst. Still, it was a congenial, friendly place and far from being the slum so many future journalists would insist it was.

** Marilyn believed that her Uncle Marion had committed suicide, but his daughter told genealogist Roy Turner that he never returned to his (amity and died many years later.

*** Marilyn’s third husband, Arthur Miller, believes the story to be true.

* Afy Story, by Marilyn Monroe with Ben Hecht, written for Doubleday. was serialized in part. May through August 1954, in The Empire News, England, and first published as a book (1974) in the United States by Stein and Day.

* Although Columbia Pictures was still one of several low-budget places along Poverty Row," it was making headway by borrowing stars from other studios. This was three and a half years before the company made It Happened One Night, the comedy that would alter the company’s fortunes overnight, making it a famous studio.

THREE

In March 1953, a major earthquake leveled much of Long Beach, just a few miles southeast of Hawthorne. There was so much damage to the Washington Street School that temporary classrooms had to be found several blocks farther away from the Bolender house. There was an interval of about two weeks’ enforced vacation for the children, but, in Ida’s words, I don’t think Norma Jeane ever went back to school here in Hawthorne. I’m trying to remember why. I think her mother came and took her up to Hollywood. Norma Jeane had found her way into the hearts of both Bolenders; she was lively, imaginative, and even troublesome, but when the taxi pulled away with Gladys and her daughter, they wept and felt some apprehension. We prayed for her, Ida said.

Gladys had finally made good on her promise to Norma Jeane. After nearly a year of saving and scrimping on everything, she had enough money put aside for a down payment on a white bungalow in Hollywood, near the present site of the Hollywood Bowl.

Today the house is gone, bulldozed to make room for a parking lot for concert goers; then, it was one of the most attractive houses in a community of new homes just off Highland Avenue. Gladys set about furnishing it with pieces bought at auction, among them a white baby grand piano that would become Norma Jeane’s (and later Marilyn’s) particular pride. Norma Jeane had spent a year at Ida’s studying piano with a Miss Marion Miller, Gladys paying for the lessons. But, so far as is known, she never again took piano lessons, primarily because her life was soon in tumult, and the upsets and peregrinations would last nearly three years.

But for Norma Jeane as well as for Marilyn later on, that white piano, which Gladys was told had belonged to film star Fredric March and his wife, became a symbol of the life Gladys dreamed they would have together. More than a dozen years later, the piano, lost following foreclosure on the house, was located again by Marilyn when she was furnishing her luxury apartment on North Doheny Drive.

It was Gladys’s intent to take her child not just into a new house but also into a life purged of the errors of the past. She was flirting with Christian Science, a creed that banishes evil as erroneous thinking. Gladys had two children, Berneice and Jack, by her first marriage to Jack Baker, who had their custody. She figuratively killed both Jack and Berneice by declaring them dead on Norma Jeane’s birth certificate. She was never known to mention Norma Jeane’s half brother and half sister after their father had kidnapped them and taken them with him to Kentucky the week of their separation. Marilyn said later that her mother went to Kentucky to get them back.

She met with him but didn’t ask him for anything, not even to kiss the children she had been hunting for so long. But like the mother in the movie Stella Dallas, she went away and left them to enjoy a happier life than she could give them.

In the 1950s, when Marilyn felt secure enough with her new identity to seek out her roots, she located Berneice, who had married a Mr. Miracle and was living in Florida. The half sisters got together on a number of occasions, during one of which Berneice met Joe DiMaggio.

There is one other possibility that might explain why Gladys never reclaimed her older children. She told Norma Jeane* that she had found her first husband, Jack Baker, with another woman and there had been a row. Gladys was a beautiful woman and popular with men. It is conceivable that it was Gladys who was found with another man by Baker, which would give him an excuse to kidnap his children and keep them. Similarly, in her later relationship with Mortensen, it is possible that Mortensen found her together with Gifford and rode off, never to return. Overriding all of this would be the testimony of the Goddards, Jim Dougherty, and Gladys’s colleagues at CFI that she was a woman of a high moral character and no one ever thought of her as promiscuous.

In 1933, Hollywood’s mood was essentially upbeat; it felt that it had a mission to keep the world from losing heart altogether. While studio workers took a salary cut that year, including most of the stars, interest rates on mortgages were low and the handsome two-story house with its Georgian portico in front was easily affordable by Gladys. The movies, making them and seeing them, became a part of their lives, the biggest part, just as religion had been back in Hawthorne. Jean Harlow was the most talked-about actress of the day and became one of Norma Jeane’s early idols. Seeing this platinumed, wisecracking dame in such films as Hold Your Man and Dinner at Eight, some seed had to have been planted. Harlow’s leading man was frequently Clark Gable, who greatly resembled the smiling man in the fedora framed over the mantle in the new house, identified without shame by Gladys as your father. Anita Loos, who wrote three of Harlow’s scripts, and the original book, play, and musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, one of Marilyn’s major hits, got to know both actresses two decades apart and said, There was so much of Harlow in Marilyn, it couldn’t have been by chance.

Norma Jeane was bewildered by the great change in her life at first, but she was an adaptable person throughout her life, conforming as she thought others would expect to each new happening in her life. Now when she sang Jesus Loves Me, she seemed to make everyone uncomfortable; so she never sang it again, learning instead the lyrics of songs from the films of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, then just starting their long career together. This was the beginning of Norma Jeane’s liberation—a tiny step, to be sure.

The changes in her life were not so small. Not everyone, she realized, prayed every day and went to church twice a week. Whiskey was allowed in Gladys’s house and regularly drunk by her guests—and a British family who were invited to share the new home.

Despite Gladys’s difficulties with men, she had a practical side. She lived in constant fear of nervous collapse or worse, with good reason, and she wanted to make certain that Norma Jeane would never lose her new home and be forced to live the life of an orphan or foster child. So she rented the entire house to a British couple and their grown daughter. The wife was a registered dress extra, often used as a walk-on in drawing-room comedies. Her husband had a permanent job as stand-in for the aging but very successful star, George Arliss, who was at that time in the middle of making The House of Rothschild for Darryl Zanuck’s new Twentieth Century Pictures. Their attractive daughter, barely twenty, got steady work through Central Casting and within two years would become stand-in for major star Madeleine Carroll. Gladys leased back two rooms on the second floor of the house for Norma Jeane and herself, and they shared the family’s kitchen and bathroom.

Norma Jeane was not made immediately aware of the great difference between the Bolenders’s total condemnation of most worldly pleasures—movies, card games, drinking—and the native reserve of the British family. Still, she had to learn to sit down at the table and start eating without anyone saying grace.

Although Norma Jeane was an imaginative child and, therefore, an interesting playmate, other children found her hard to befriend because she felt herself to be different. Probably she sensed already that there was something very wrong with her mother and feared bringing other children home. Her isolation, though, was never a burden to her. Moviegoing became Norma Jeane’s passion. The dime admission charge for children was a cheap investment for either Gladys or the British couple, who would rather have the child at nearby Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre—where, as Marilyn recalled, they had monkeys out front in cages—than underfoot, where she was forever asking George Arliss’s stand-in questions, most frequently about history or geography.

That autumn of 1933, Norma Jeane saw both Little Women with Katharine Hepburn and Grand Hotel with an all star cast including Joan Crawford. Crawford became another of Norma Jeane’s early favorites, although she later confessed that she didn’t understand the picture. The following summer, she saw Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra and was impressed by her bath in asses’ milk. Norma Jeane loved musicals and often stayed for more than one showing, seeing them, in her words, over and over again, missing dinner. As winter came, she had to walk the one or two miles home along dark streets.

Norma Jeane never abused her newly discovered freedom. She remained a good girl who remembered her manners, who believed that older people were to be deferred to and respected—the precepts of Ida Bolender would never really leave her and would become a lifelong code of ethics. Her English was improving, too, under the guidance of the Britisher, who gently corrected her when she said ain’t or used don’t incorrectly. She was always a little awed in his presence, because she knew he expected her to use the right word, and therefore if she were uncertain, she might begin to stutter. Although Marilyn later would use an occasional malapropism and look blank upon hearing certain words, her daily speech was usually proper and grammatically correct, marred by her occasional stuttering, a difficulty that would never leave her altogether.

Once Marilyn began stuttering during a scene being shot by a director who shouted at her and frightened her a great deal. The director came roaring up at her upon hearing her delivery and said, But you don’t stutter.

Th-th-that’s what you th-think! Marilyn replied.

Marilyn wrote later that she had many daydreams at this time about her missing father. It was always Gifford, of course, the man in the fedora and the thin moustache whose photo hung on the living room wall. She said that when she had her tonsils removed that winter, her daydream of her father visiting her lasted the entire week she was in the hospital. I kept bending him over my bed and having him kiss my forehead and I gave him dialogue, too. ‘You’ll be well in a few days, Norma Jeane. I’m very proud of the way you’re behaving, not crying all the time like other girls.’ In her daydreams Gifford could be the decent man she wanted for a father. As she grew older and learned the truth about Gifford—confirmed when, even after she was a star, he turned coldly away from her—she became as distrustful of men as her mother.

Gladys’s relief and sense of achievement at finally getting Norma Jeane into a home of their own was brief. She soon felt a malaise,