by Lois Banner
Della swore in an affidavit attached to the marriage license that Gladys was eighteen. But she lied; Gladys was fifteen. The lie was necessary to get around the law requiring girls to be sixteen to engage in consensual sex. Before then intercourse was classified as rape, and the man involved could be brought to trial and sent to prison.18 Gladys and Jasper’s son, Jackie, was born seven months after their wedding. A daughter, Berniece, was born in 1920.
With Della and Gladys married, the Monroe women seemed stable. But the stability didn’t last. Both of them were difficult and moody, hard to live with. Della and Charles began arguing, and Della moved to a house they bought in the newly developed city of Hawthorne, southwest of downtown, not far from the beach and on the trolley line. It was a good investment, although Charles wasn’t there that much. Still, the 1925 Hawthorne City Directory lists him as living there with Della.19
In 1922 Gladys experienced a mother’s worst nightmare. She threw the pieces of a broken drinking class into a trash can, and Jackie rummaged through the trash and embedded a shard of glass in an eye, damaging it. Several months later, Jasper and Gladys drove to Flat Lick, Kentucky, his hometown, for a visit. On the way there they quarreled ferociously, failing to notice that a back door to their car had opened and Jackie had fallen out, injuring his leg. Jasper and Gladys didn’t have a good marriage, and they struggled with alcohol, violence, and appropriate parenting.20
Once in Flat Lick, Gladys went hiking with Jasper’s brother, unaware that she was violating the community’s strict moral code. When she returned from the hike, Jasper beat her publicly with a horse bridle, asserting his marital rights. No one stopped him; the Flat Lick residents approved his action. That was enough for Gladys. Once they returned to Venice, she filed for divorce. She charged that Jasper was a drinker who beat her, while he countercharged that she was an unfit mother who left her children with neighbors and went to the pier to have fun. He didn’t mention that she often went there to tend a concession that he owned. The judge accepted her version of their issues, giving Gladys custody of the children, with Jasper given visiting rights. (The decree also forbade Jasper from selling his concession on the pier without Gladys’s consent.)
But Gladys’s problems hadn’t ended. During a visit, Jasper kidnapped the children and took them to Kentucky to live with him. From his point of view Gladys wasn’t a good mother, and he had had it with the “pleasures” of Venice, which he now regarded as immoral. He wanted his children to be raised with conservative values. He married a Kentucky woman seventeen years his senior, saying he was fed up with child brides.
In an effort to get Berniece and Jackie back, Gladys moved to Kentucky, settled near her children, and found a job as a housekeeper and child tender. Unlike today, the courts didn’t track down children kidnapped by a divorced spouse. After a few months Gladys gave up and returned to Los Angeles. She ran out of money; she was afraid of Jasper; and she was only twenty years old. She may have already been involved with Stanley Gifford, and he may have wanted her back. Marilyn often criticized Gladys in later interviews, but in this case she preserved the fantasy that her mother, like Barbara Stanwyck in the movie Stella Dallas, gave up her children to their father so that they would have a better life. The truth is that their stepmother was kind to them, but Jasper had difficulty holding down a job. He did drink a lot, and he probably wasn’t a good father.21
Meantime, the middle-aged Della, involved in another difficult marriage and looking for uplift, became a follower of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who combined Hollywood spectacle with faith healing in her Foursquare Gospel Church. Sister Aimee’s Angelus Temple, located in Echo Park on the trolley line near downtown, drew crowds of worshippers. A Christian fundamentalist and millennialist who viewed Christ’s second coming as imminent, she used theatrical backdrops and mechanical devices to illustrate her sermons. Actors in costumes played out topics for moral instruction such as the fleshpots of Egypt and the temptations of the jazz age. The divorced McPherson had no use for marriage or for women’s traditional roles. Moreover, she ran a home for unwed mothers and a Big Sister League for wayward girls. Women were the majority of her congregation.
This was a transitional era after the women’s suffrage amendment had finally passed in 1920. Women’s reform groups proliferated, while the sexual revolution of the decade both advanced and impeded women’s progress, as it substituted sexual freedom for legal and political gains. Gladys and her friend Grace didn’t think of themselves as feminists, a new term for that age, although they were working women, belonging to unions. Nor did Della, despite her woman-centered faith.22
Back in Los Angeles from Kentucky, Gladys found work as a cutter and paster of film negatives at Consolidated Film Industries. Directed by a senior editor—always male—the cutters removed unwanted frames from reels and pasted the reels back together again in an approved order. The work was monotonous and poorly paid. When the production schedule was heavy, cutters worked ten hours a day and a half day on Saturdays. The editing labs were dark, without windows, to prevent light from damaging the negatives. The cutters wore white gloves so that perspiration on their hands wouldn’t harm the film. The darkness of the labs could cause depression, as could the smell of the glue. Almost all film cutters were women.23
In its early days the film industry was composed of independent producers in small studios who hired men and women equally as production assistants, screenwriters, editors, and the like. But in a process of consolidation typical of the growth of monopoly capitalism in many industries, by 1920 smaller companies were being combined into larger ones. By the late 1920s Wall Street money was financing films, and film studios were listed on the stock exchange. By the 1930s the hundreds of studios that had existed in the industry’s formative years had been reduced to five major studios—MGM, Twentieth Century–Fox, RKO, Warner Brothers, and Paramount—and three minor ones, Columbia, United Artists, and Universal, with others, such as Republic Studios and Samuel Goldwyn, mainting their ground. The majors had larger production facilities and more employees than the minors, and they owned both the agencies that distributed their films and the theaters that showed them. The minors didn’t. They had to use independent theaters or make deals with majors to show their films.
Driven by the profit motive, the studios became like factories, with films their products, and employees, including actors, their workers. Most of the studios were run by East European Jews who had been born to poor families in Poland and Russia and had migrated to New York in the 1890s and 1900s. With little education or money but with immense intelligence and drive, they realized the potential of the nickelodeons that were opening in immigrant enclaves and of the flickering images of the film reels shown on large screens at these places. They raised the money to buy both nickelodeons and film reels. As the images were developed into feature films, these entrepreneurs marketed and distributed them. Finally, they created chains of movie theaters, and they built studios in Hollywood. Thus the movie industry was born. Shrewd and combative, men like Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Joe Schenck at Fox, and Harry Cohn at Columbia consolidated the industry and ruled their studios with iron hands, turning themselves into what film historians call “the moguls.”24
As often occurs during the process of monopolization, the film business became gendered. Men took over supervisory positions, with women their subordinates—aside from departments like makeup and costume design, associated with female activities. By the early 1920s the negative film cutters were women and the editors who decided on the cuts were men, a division that continued through the 1950s.
Gladys seemed content with her job; she remained a film cutter for the next ten years, shifting to the editing studio at Columbia shortly before Norma Jeane’s birth and later to the one at RKO. She was a good worker, but she wasn’t ambitious and wasn’t promoted. After losing her children to her husband, a shattering experience, she liked routine, the security of repetition. She tolerated the dark editing studios an
d the smelly glue.
There were compensations. In his 1922 novel Souls for Sale, screenwriter Rupert Hughes celebrated Hollywood’s female film cutters as models for the “new women” of the age who were entering the workforce and, adopting flapper behavior, were rebelling against Victorian conventions. Watching film fantasy all day on the reels they cut, they saw “battles in Chinese opium dens; Lon Chaney as the monstrous Frankenstein; glamorous women living in luxury.” By the mid-1920s they were cutting and pasting the many films being made about “flappers.”25
According to Hughes, the film cutters lived like men, scorning convention. They participated in what was called the “new paganism,” evident in avant-garde communities like Hollywood and Venice. They drank, danced, and wore makeup and the new, daring short skirts that rose above the knees. This was, after all, the “roaring twenties.” But there were limits. According to Hughes, the film cutters respected their “health” and “personal reputation.” (I read “health” as meaning venereal disease and “personal reputation” as meaning avoiding pregnancy and the reputation of being a “slut.” The implication is that they used birth control.)26
Gladys was especially drawn to the “new paganism” once she met Grace McKee, one of the few women to hold a supervisor position at Consolidated. Twice divorced, five years older than Gladys, Grace was a leader among a group of Hollywood workers who went out after hours to night spots and dance halls in Hollywood and Venice. In Gladys’s eyes Grace was dazzling. She was energetic, birdlike, and tiny, hardly five feet tall, with a high voice and peroxide blonde hair, a daring color in that era. A coworker at Consolidated called her “a sparkling lady.” “Her energy and cheerfulness bubbled at you, and her laugh was contagious, so even if you didn’t know what you were laughing about, you were still laughing.”27 Both Gladys and Grace were passionate about films, and both read the movie fan magazines. Two months after Gladys began at Consolidated, they were sharing an apartment.
Coming to Hollywood from Montana in the 1910s, Grace joined the legions of young women from throughout the nation who moved to the film capital hoping to become stars, following the mythology of the American Dream: anyone could make it if they had talent and gumption. Like most of them, Grace didn’t succeed in the movies; but she found work in the industry and didn’t have to wait on tables or enter the sex trade, which was flourishing in Hollywood. Grace was a take-charge person, and she took Gladys under her wing. During her years in Hollywood Grace had learned how to copy the dress styles and makeup of the stars, and she liked to make over her friends. Gladys welcomed Grace’s control, but she sometimes became angry at her domineering ways.
When Gladys first came to Consolidated, she was depressed over her failure to retrieve her children. Her coworkers remembered her as mousy, with straggly brown hair—until Grace persuaded her to dye her hair red and to dress in the latest fashions. Male coworkers charged that she and Grace smoked, drank to excess, and were promiscuous.28 Women coworkers said they were hardworking and conscientious. But their work was volatile: layoffs were called when film production was slow; the studios closed down during the month of March to avoid California taxes; and the cutters frequently switched from one editing studio to another.
Gladys was ambivalent about the “new paganism” of the 1920s, just as she had been of two minds about the pleasures of the Venice pier when she married Jasper Baker. Once settled in Hollywood, she looked for a husband. Her best bets were Edward Mortensen, a meter reader for the Southern California Gas Company who hung out with the film crowd in Venice, and Stanley Gifford, a supervisor at Consolidated Films, where Grace and Gladys worked. Both became involved with Gladys; on their death beds, each claimed to have sired Marilyn.29
In the competition between the two men, Stan won hands down. Mortensen was good-looking, but he was only a meter reader. Tall, dark, and handsome, Stan came from Rhode Island wealth. He owned his home in Culver City and was on the Santa Monica equestrian polo team. Two of his sisters worked in film editing, one of them at Consolidated, with Gladys and Grace. By 1923, however, he was going through a messy divorce. His wife charged that he drank and abused her, neglected their children to party in Venice, and was a heroin addict. Stan denied the charges and filed countercharges, but his wife won and he had to pay her alimony and child support. He was in no position to make a commitment to Gladys.30
In October 1924, Gladys married Mortensen. Della, worried about Gladys’s up-and-down moods, advised her to do so because he was stable; Grace advised her against the marriage because he was boring. Grace was right. After a few months of marriage, Gladys walked out. An angry Mortensen filed for divorce in May 1925, charging that she had “willfully and without cause deserted [him].”31 The final decree wasn’t granted until 1928, because Gladys paid no attention to the divorce action and Mortensen let it ride, hoping she would go back to him.
Born on June 1, 1926, Norma Jeane was conceived in late August or early September 1925, three months after Mortensen filed for divorce. Mortensen claimed paternity on his death bed, and so did Stan Gifford, as he lay dying. Gladys maintained that Gifford was Norma Jeane’s father. The truth depends on the extent of Gladys’s promiscuity after she left Mortensen, and the reports we have on that subject are conflicting. But Marilyn was convinced that Gifford was her father. She was thus “illegitimate,” a terrible stigma in that day. Marilyn called herself a “love child” and a “mistake,” indicating that if Gladys and her partner had used birth control, it hadn’t worked.32
The emotional Gladys made a hash of Norma Jeane’s birth certificate when filling it out at the hospital after giving birth. She listed Edward Mortensen as Norma Jeane’s father—although she spelled his name Mortenson, causing confusion in her own day and ever since, because an Edward Mortenson lived in Venice at the time and was no relation to Edward Mortensen. And she listed her children in Kentucky as dead, although they were very much alive. Having relinquished them, this may have been how she dealt with her guilt for failing to retrieve them. She didn’t derive Norma Jeane’s name from film stars Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow, as is often assumed. Norma Jeane was the name of the child Gladys had cared for as a nanny in Kentucky and had left behind when she returned to Los Angeles—a child to whom she had been close. Now she had her own Norma Jeane.33
According to Stan Gifford’s relatives, he loved Gladys, but she didn’t give him time to sort out his feelings. During the winter of 1925, he took her to the Gifford home to meet his family. Her pregnancy upset Stan’s mother and sister, who were deeply religious. They reminded Stan that he had just gone through a difficult divorce and that Gladys was the mother of two children being raised by someone in another state. Torn between his loyalty to his family and his love for Gladys, Gifford didn’t know what to do. In an attempt to keep everyone happy he refused to marry Gladys, but he offered her money. In a moment of anger, he made the mistake of telling her she was fortunate she was still married to Mortensen, so she could use his name on the birth certificate and register the child as legitimate.34
That callous statement made Gladys so angry she refused the money and walked out on Stan. Stubborn, sometimes set in her ways, she engaged in a defiant gesture that only hurt her. She bore the child by herself and didn’t allow Stan to see the baby. Della missed the birth, since she was in Borneo, chasing Charles Grainger, who had gone there for an oil-drilling job. Grace also was absent, although one of Gladys’s coworkers may have been present, since the cutters at Consolidated Films took up a collection for the baby.35 Stan seems to have been devastated by the situation. He gave up regular work, floated for a while, and drank heavily, until he settled down, married, and bought a dairy farm in Hemet, near Palm Springs, which he operated until he died many years later. Gladys never saw him again, and he refused to see the adult Marilyn when she contacted him. He was sorry not to see her, he stated on his deathbed, but he didn’t want his wife to know he had an illegitimate daughter.
The birth shook Gladys, who dev
eloped such a severe post-partum depression that she neglected her baby. When Grace chastised her, Gladys became so angry she picked up a knife and tried to stab her. Grace took the knife away from her before anything happened and calmed her down, but the episode was alarming. Della then suggested that Gladys board Norma Jeane with Ida Bolender. Della lived in Hawthorne, forty minutes by the Red Car trolley from Hollywood, and Ida ran a foster home across the street from her. The efficient Ida, Della thought, would be a good caretaker for Norma Jeane. Della could help with her care, and Gladys could visit on the weekends. Placing the child in day care didn’t seem a possibility. In 1926 day care centers were few and far between; they were associated with Soviet communism, already feared and despised in the United States. Foster care was the most available option.36
For the next seven years, until Gladys took Norma Jeane to Hollywood to live with her, the child lived with the Bolenders. During those years, Gladys never missed paying Ida twenty-five dollars a month for her care. And Gladys clung to the dream that she could save enough money from her salary to buy a house, bring her children together, and establish a family.
In 1926, when the Bolenders began caring for Norma Jeane, Hawthorne had open fields, small farms, unpaved roads, and excellent trolley service. Children roamed at will; I remember that halcyon freedom from my childhood in nearby Inglewood. Marilyn biographers who describe Hawthorne as a slum are mistaken. I was there; I walked its streets. Small frame bungalows sat on large lots. Like my family and many others in the area who had been farmers before they moved to Los Angeles, the Bolenders raised vegetables and chickens to supplement the food they bought in a local store. They weren’t wealthy, but they weren’t poor. Wayne was a postman; he had a secure civil service job throughout the Great Depression.
Enterprising and hardworking, the Bolenders took in children partly for the money but also because they loved children and Ida seemed unable to conceive. Their house wasn’t fancy, but it had six bedrooms, enough to accommodate a number of children if they shared bedrooms, a common practice in that era. During the six years she lived with the Bolenders, Norma Jeane usually shared a bedroom with Lester Bolender, a foster child who had been born the same week as Norma Jeane and who looked like her. The family called them “the twins”; Lester’s last name was Bolender because they adopted him. Norma Jeane played with the Bolender brood and with children in the neighborhood. They climbed trees, built forts, and played fantasy games.37