by Lois Banner
When Marilyn posed for The Seven Year Itch photo in 1954, she was Hollywood’s preeminent star. She was “a national institution as well known as hot dogs, apple pie, or baseball” and “the nation’s celluloid H-bomb.” Her fan mail, some ten thousand letters a week, surpassed that of any other star. Reporters called her “The Monroe” and referred to the “Monroe Doctrine,” defining it as eroticism, shrewdness, lack of materialism—whatever might sell a story and not be too farfetched. Her sexual double-entendres, called “Monroeisms,” were famous. “What do you wear to bed?” photographers asked her. Her reply: “Chanel Number Five.”10 The Seven Year Itch photo ratified Marilyn’s fame. Within days it appeared in newspapers round the globe, from New York to Hong Kong, Los Angeles to Tokyo. It was called “The Shot Seen Round the World.” By the mid-1950s people everywhere could identify “Marilyn” and “MM.” She had become an American icon for the world.11
This book is about how Marilyn was created, how she lived her life, and how that life ended.
A Note on Sources
Readers familiar with the biographical tradition on Monroe will realize that I have not used memoirs by Hans Jürgen Lembourn, Ted Jordan, Lena Pepitone, Robert Slatzer, or Jeanne Carmen. In “Mimosa,” his unpublished memoir of Marilyn, Ralph Roberts, her masseur and best friend, exposed them as frauds. So did articles in Runnin’ Wild, an early Marilyn fan magazine.
These five individuals knew Marilyn, but they weren’t close to her. Danish journalist Lembourn was on a State Department fellowship that sent him nationwide and didn’t give him time for the liaison he describes. Ted Jordan, actor, was burlesque star Lili St. Cyr’s fifth husband. He claimed to have had a three-way affair with Marilyn and St. Cyr. But both St. Cyr and her biographer dismiss his claim. Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s cook for several years in her New York apartment, didn’t speak English and Marilyn didn’t speak Italian. Jeanne Carmen was a trick golfer and high-priced call girl who lived in her Doheny Drive apartment complex in 1961. After she held an all-night party, Marilyn wouldn’t speak to her. Carmen, Jordan, and Pepitone possess no photos of Marilyn with them, and Slatzer’s one photo with Marilyn looks staged. Slatzer’s claim that Marilyn married him in Tijuana in the spring of 1952 is unsubstantiated.12
Recent Marilyn biographers overlook excellent earlier Marilyn biographies, especially those by Maurice Zolotow (1960), Fred Guiles (1969), Carl Rollyson (1986), and Anthony Summers (1985). They often disregard Marilyn memoirs written by close friends such as Louella Parsons, Susan Strasberg, Norman Rosten, Milton Greene, and Sam Shaw. Realizing their worth, I have used these biographies and memoirs.
My special thanks go to Anthony Summers, who gave me access to his many interviews for Goddess, his 1985 biography of Marilyn. He is a gifted interviewer, writer, and interpreter of Marilyn. Although I don’t always agree with him, I respect his work. He put many of the puzzles about Marilyn into perspective, enabling me to construct my narrative of her life.13
Part I
The Matrix, 1926–1946
Persons of genius with mysterious gifts: in many cases a wound has been inflicted early in life, which impels the person to strive harder or makes him or her extra-sensitive. The talent, the genius, is the scab on the wound, there to protect a weak place, an opening to death. Men and women who come successfully out of misfortune, they have strength that is extraordinary.
Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life
Chapter 1
Mothers, 1926–1933
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in the charity ward of Los Angeles County General Hospital on June 1, 1926. Her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, was a poorly paid film cutter in a Hollywood editing studio. Her father never recognized her, and Gladys placed her in a foster home when she was three months old. In 1933, when Norma Jeane was seven, her mother brought her to live with her in Hollywood. Soon after, Gladys broke down emotionally, leaving Norma Jeane with her best friend, Grace Atchison McKee. When Gladys was declared paranoid schizophrenic and admitted to a state mental hospital, Grace became Norma Jeane’s guardian. During the next eight years, until Norma Jeane married in 1942 at the age of sixteen, Grace placed her in eleven foster homes and an orphanage. Why Gladys broke down and why Grace kept moving Norma Jeane are central issues in examining her childhood.
Five women dominated Norma Jeane’s childhood. They included Gladys and Grace, plus Della Monroe, Gladys’s mother; and two of Norma Jeane’s foster mothers, Ida Bolender and Ana Atchinson Lower, Grace McKee’s aunt.1 All five women were working class or lower middle class, with little money or education. All moved to Los Angeles with their families from the Upper South and the Midwest between 1900 and 1920, during the great migration to the city. That movement turned a small provincial city into a major metropolis, with suburbs and cities radiating out from a downtown core.
Della Monroe, Marilyn’s grandmother, came from Missouri by way of Mexico in 1902, with her husband, Otis Monroe, and her daughter, Gladys, then two years old; they settled near downtown Los Angeles. Grace came from Montana in the 1910s in her late teens, looking for a film career; she settled in Hollywood. Ida, an Iowa farm girl, arrived with her husband, Wayne, in the early 1920s and settled in Hawthorne, in the South Bay area southwest of downtown. Ana, considerably older than the other four, was born in 1880 in Washington State. She came to Los Angeles by way of Sacramento, eventually settling in the Sawtelle area on Los Angeles’s West Side.
Like most participants in the great migration to Los Angeles, these five hoped for better lives in the Southern California paradise of beaches, mountains, exotic vegetation, and a Mediterranean climate. The Hollywood film industry was there, with its ethic of leisure and pleasure. So was a major evangelical movement, among the largest in the nation, with imposing churches and a doctrine that promised individual rebirth through renouncing sin and uniting with Christ. The pulpit and the screen—an uneasy pair—would profoundly influence Norma Jeane.2
The story of Marilyn’s childhood, like much of her life, contains texts and counter-texts, with hidden episodes beneath surface narratives. Most families have secrets; alcoholism, marital discord, and mental issues are possibilities. The Monroe family had all these, and more. Della and Gladys had up-and-down moods. Both were divorced several times; in divorce petitions both accused husbands of alcoholism and physical abuse. Ida, Norma Jeane’s first foster mother, between 1926 and 1933, disciplined her for childhood sexual experimentation, and Grace couldn’t prevent her from being sexually abused in several foster homes. Della, Grace, Gladys, Ana, and Ida clashed over religion. Ida was an evangelical Christian; Della was a follower of evangelist maverick Aimee Semple McPherson. Ana, who provided foster care for Norma Jeane between 1938 and 1942, was a Christian Science healer, while Gladys and Grace were flappers who lived sexually free lives and didn’t faithfully attend any church during Norma Jeane’s early childhood. She got caught in the middle, a pawn for a while in a rivalry among the five of them.
Marilyn’s paternal ancestry is obscure because of uncertainty over the identity of her father. The best candidate is Stanley (Stan) Gifford, a supervisor at the Hollywood editing firm where Gladys worked. Stan was Gladys’s boyfriend and bed partner, although she had a husband from whom she was separated, not divorced—Edward Mortensen, a meter reader for the gas company. Stan was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of a wealthy shipbuilding family whose ancestry went back to the founders of Providence and beyond them to Pilgrims on the Mayflower. If Stan was Marilyn’s father, she came from revered American roots.3
Gladys Monroe, Marilyn’s mother, also claimed distinguished descent. Her heritage came through her father, Otis Monroe, who traced his roots to James Monroe of Virginia, fifth president of the United States. But Otis can’t be trusted. Born in Indiana in 1866, he spent much of his adult life as an itinerant painter, traveling through the Midwest and the Upper South, painting buildings to make money and occasionally selling his landscapes and portraits. Wearing fancy c
lothes, he passed himself off as a gentleman and spun fantasies of moving to Paris and living on the Left Bank. His death certificate lists his mother and father as unknown. Something of an eccentric, he was not the last unusual character in Marilyn’s ancestry.4
On a swing through Missouri in 1898, Otis met Della Hogan. Born in 1878, she was twenty-two, still living with her mother and siblings. Her childhood had been difficult. Her father, Tilford Hogan, was an itinerant farm laborer who worked long hours for low wages, following the harvests and doing odd jobs. He married Jennie Nance, a Missouri farm girl, in 1870. Living in tenant cabins and farm shacks, they nonetheless had three children in eight years.
Yet Tilford’s financial woes weren’t unusual in post-Reconstruction Missouri. The building of railroads as well as a dramatic population growth through immigration caused a rise in prosperity in the state—for those able to exploit it. Most Missourians remained tenant farmers or landless laborers employed part-time to harvest crops or do odd jobs. Pro-slavery and secessionist during the Civil War, Missourians remained loyal to the South for decades. Jennie Nance, Marilyn’s maternal great-grandmother, was raised in Chariton County, settled by migrants from the Upper South who owned slaves. It was called “Little Dixie.” As Tilford’s wife, Jennie moved with him as he sought employment, often in Ozark hillbilly country, moving her children from school to school.5 When Marilyn played Cherie, the hillbilly singer in Bus Stop, she could draw on her family’s past to create the character.
Tilford had a quirky independence and a love of learning. He taught himself to read and write so that he could read the classics of Western literature. In an era when ordinary people memorized Shakespeare and distinctions between high and low culture weren’t rigid, such learning wasn’t that unusual.6 He suffered from chronic arthritis but remained pleasant and well liked. But it wasn’t enough for Jennie. In 1890, after twenty years of a difficult marriage, Jennie and Tilford divorced, violating the strictures against divorce in a region dominated by conservative Baptists. Each moved in with a relative; the children went with Jennie, who showed an independent streak in divorcing Tilford—a streak that would run through the Monroe women.
Nearly nine years after the divorce, in 1898, Otis Monroe appeared in Della’s town and swept her off her feet with his rakish, upper-class air, fashionable clothing, and fantasies about moving to Paris. He was ten years older than she. He offered her a way out of Missouri, where she seemed stuck as an old maid at the age of twenty-two. Captivated by him, disregarding the objections of her parents, she overlooked the reality that he was, like her father, an itinerant laborer.7
The marriage was disappointing. Instead of moving to Paris, they moved to Mexico, to the town of Porfirio Díaz, now Piedras Negras, on the border with Texas. Otis found a job there painting railroad cars for the Mexican National Railway. The town was dirty, with poor sanitation, and Della didn’t like it. Family lore held that, despite her discontent, she served as a midwife for impoverished Mexican women. Once her daughter, Gladys, was born in 1902, she and Otis moved to Los Angeles, where he found a job as a painter with the Pacific Electric Railway. That company operated the “red line” trolleys that ran throughout the Los Angeles region, linking its far-flung, expanding communities. Otis and Della’s son, Marion, was born in 1905. Shortly thereafter, Otis was promoted, and they bought a small house near downtown—or Otis built it himself.8 They seemed to be achieving the American Dream.
Then it fell apart. Otis began to suffer from memory loss, migraines, and bouts of mania. Seizures and paralysis followed. Della thought he was going insane. He was admitted to Patton State Mental Hospital in San Bernardino, a sprawling structure that housed several thousand patients. It was one of seven such hospitals in the state built in the late nineteenth century to house the insane, chronic alcoholics, aging people with dementia, and individuals with syphilitic paresis, the final stage of syphilis, in which the infection destroys the connective tissues in the brain. Overcrowded, with insufficient doctors or trained staff, the hospitals provided minimal treatment.9
Otis was diagnosed with syphilitic paresis, probably of the endemic variety, caused by a bacteria spread by mosquitoes, not through sexual intercourse. He probably picked up the bacteria in Piedras Negras, with its poor sanitation. He died in 1909. To hide two shameful diagnoses—syphilis and psychosis—Della claimed that he had died from breathing paint fumes.10
With two children to support, Della cleaned houses and rented rooms in her house to male boarders, while she looked for another husband. In 1913 she married Lyle Graves, one of Otis’s coworkers at the trolley company. A year later she divorced him on the grounds of “habitual intemperance” (alcoholism) and failure to provide financial support. The charge may have been true or trumped up to obtain the divorce. Adultery, physical abuse, and alcoholism—these were the only legal grounds for divorce in this era. Spouses wanting a divorce often colluded in making up tales of bad behavior, and wives brought most of the actions because of the belief that men were more likely to be abusers and alcoholics than women. Della won by default, since Graves skipped town. He may have had a nasty streak. According to Gladys he killed her cat by throwing it against a wall. Della then married a man named Chitwood, and she and her children moved with him to a farm in Oregon. Gladys liked Chitwood and the farm. She had happy memories of picking blueberries in Oregon as a child. But Della soon divorced her third husband. The charge was alcoholism, which again may have been true or trumped up, as was the custom, to provide a legal grounds for divorce.11
Della, not yet forty, was adventurous. Moving back to Los Angeles, she settled in Venice, a town on the Pacific Ocean twelve miles west of downtown. A fantasy place dreamed up by developer Abbot Kinney, Venice combined the look of Coney Island in New York with Venice in Italy. Neo-Renaissance buildings bordered canals where gondoliers plyed gondolas. There was a St. Mark’s Square with jugglers and mimes, a promenade along the beach, and a pier jutting into the ocean, containing a large dance hall as well as concessions: rifle shoots, ring tosses, pretty-girl dunks, and penny arcades. Until the late 1920s, Venice had the largest amusement zone on the West Coast.12
It wasn’t entirely honky-tonk. Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford had second homes on the canals, and film scenes were shot there. Elite groups held dances in the dance hall on the pier, and film stars mingled with ordinary people on the streets. Colored eggs were handed out on Easter and flowers to mothers on Mother’s Day. There were bathing-beauty contests, boxing matches, bicycle races, and a Mardi Gras festival each year.
Once in Venice, Della got a job managing a small apartment building. She sent her son, Marion, to live with a relative in San Diego; as a single mother she found raising a son difficult. Such arrangements weren’t uncommon in that era. Child-care experts of that time didn’t regard bonding with parents as necessary for a child’s healthy development; living in an intact family was their only requirement.13 Della, like her daughter, Gladys, and her granddaughter, Marilyn, was prone to emotional highs and lows. Marion was also moody. Whatever mental issues Gladys and Marion inherited, their tumultuous childhoods didn’t help them to cope with emotional ups and downs.
On New Year’s Eve 1917, Della met her fourth husband, Charles Grainger, at the dance hall on the pier. Marilyn claimed that Della was the real beauty in the family, and she did, indeed, attract men. Grainger was an oil driller for Shell Oil. A smooth talker, well dressed, he had just returned from drilling jobs in India and Burma. Like Otis Monroe he was adventurous, with a similar air of distinction. Some Marilyn biographers contend that Della and Charles never married, but on a 1925 passport application Della gave the date of their marriage as November 20, 1920.14
Angry over her father’s death, the two stepfathers, and the moving, Gladys became difficult. Fifteen years old in 1917, she was a full-fledged adolescent. Like her mother, Gladys was small—five feet tall—and she was beautiful, with a voluptuous body, green eyes, and reddish-brown hair. She also had a ladyl
ike quality attractive to men, a quality that Marilyn internalized. Della had been raised in Missouri, a border state influenced by the Southern tradition of tough women with genteel veneers. She passed this gentility to Gladys. In 1946, Emmeline Snively, the head of Marilyn’s first modeling agency, described Gladys as the most ladylike woman she had ever met.15
The Venice pier, with its temptations, was not far from their apartment, and Gladys often went there. In the 1910s urban adolescents, especially working-class girls, rebelled against Victorian conventions by going to dance halls and amusement zones to meet men. The 1920s flapper, independent and free, already existed before World War One, and female screen stars shaped her behavior. Gladys was passionate about films, and she avidly read movie fan magazines. Like many girls of her era, she patterned her behavior after the stars.16
Then Gladys became pregnant. The father, John Newton Baker, called Jasper, was twenty-six years old and the owner of the apartment building Della managed. They married on May 17, 1917. Why a fifteen-year-old girl would marry a twenty-six-year-old man is puzzling, although Jasper had been an officer in the army cavalry and a trick horseback rider; he had dash. In addition, bearing an illegitimate child was a disgrace in that era. Even in the 1920s, when young people “parked” in cars with their dates and “petted,” which could mean more than simply kissing, mainstream society scorned unmarried women who became pregnant. They were considered outside the bounds of respectability.17