by Lois Banner
“I was a shy little girl,” Marilyn stated. “While very young, I developed my make-believe world. Every afternoon when I took my naps, I would pretend things. One day, I would be a beautiful princess in a tower. Or a boy with a dog. Or a grandmother with snowy hair. And at night I would lie and whisper out, ever so softly, the situations that I had heard on the radio before bedtime.” She listened to The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. Those programs were about male adventure and bravado. But it wasn’t “the chases and the horses” that excited her. It was the drama she liked; she would pretend to feel what she imagined each character in the radio show had felt.38
Norma Jeane liked to play house because she could make her own rules. She could be mother, father, or child—whatever she wanted. She had control—unlike in real life, where she had to obey others. Sometimes she pretended to be Alice in Wonderland after she fell down the rabbit hole and wound up in an unreal world. She stood in front of her mirror, wondering if the image in the mirror was really she. “Could it be someone pretending to be me? I would dance around, make faces, just to see if that little girl in the mirror would do the same,” she said. She was a leader among the children, because she always thought up interesting games. “Even if the other kids were a little slow on the imagining part,” she asserted, “you could say ‘Hey, what about if you were so and so and I were such and such—wouldn’t that be fun?’ “39
She felt part of the Bolender family, but she knew that Ida and Wayne weren’t her parents. When she called Ida “Mother,” she was told not to. The “lady with red hair,” she was told, was her mother, but Gladys, sometimes responsive, sometimes not, came and went. Norma Jeane was allowed to call Wayne “Daddy”—because she didn’t have a real father, they said—and she and Wayne became close. He was gentle and caring, though not much of a talker, but he loved Norma Jeane, who was bright and inquisitive. She was always asking questions, always wanting to know about everything.
Still, Norma Jeane wanted her own father. She decided that the man in a picture on the wall of her mother’s living room was her father. Over the years she developed fantasies about this “father,” a male figure who spoiled her and made her feel safe. He wore a jaunty slouch hat. He never took it off, no matter how much Norma Jeane asked him to. When she was in the hospital in 1933 to have her tonsils removed, he was there with her in her daydreams. She gave him dialogue to say: “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.” The man in the picture looked like Clark Gable, and Norma Jeane developed the fantasy that Gable was her father.
In 1931, five years after Norma Jeane arrived at the Bolenders’, another child, Nancy, became a Bolender foster child. (Her surname is Bolender because, like Lester, they adopted her.) Nancy Bolender contends that Ida and Wayne were model parents and they didn’t spank the children. Faithful to the Bolenders, she may overstate her case. Children were spanked in this era, mostly with an open hand on the backside. The enforcement of discipline was especially important to evangelical families, who expected their children to “follow God’s rules.” More humiliating than painful, discipline was meant to curb rambunctious behavior. On the other hand, Marilyn later alleged in magazine interviews that she was beaten by the Bolenders (without mentioning them by name), and that description may also be an overstatement. Yet Ida told Marilyn biographer Fred Guiles that Norma Jeane was a mischievous child who had to be disciplined.40
The Bolenders were evangelist Christians who attended the Hawthorne Community Church, mostly Baptist in orientation. They took the children in their care to Sunday services and Sunday school and to prayer meetings during the week. On special occasions they attended the Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles. Located in a multistory edifice that dominated the skyline, that church was the center of evangelism in the West. Marilyn biographers have incorrectly identified the Bolenders as Pentacostal. On the contrary, they were followers of Dwight Moody, the Chicago evangelist.41
Unlike many evangelists, Moody didn’t practice faith healing or Pentacostal speaking in tongues, although he held mass revivals and sent missionaries throughout the nation from his Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Several Moody missionaries traveled to Los Angeles, and in 1920 they founded the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola) as a seminary for preachers. It evolved into Biola University, still in operation, located in Orange County. Nancy Bolender graduated from Biola with a B.A.42
Moody was a fundamentalist who attacked Darwinian evolutionism and the “new paganism” of the 1920s. He emphasized the “original sin” of every human—supposedly inherited from Adam and Eve when they took the forbidden fruit from the serpent in the Garden of Eden and ate it to gain knowledge of worldly matters. He anticipated a Final Judgment, when Christ would appear on earth to send believers to heaven and unbelievers to hell. In the words of Reuben Torrey, longtime pastor of the Church of the Open Door, hell was a place of utter agony that lasted for eternity.43
“What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” That verse from the Gospel of Mark was a favorite text of the adult Marilyn, as well as of Biola preachers. Reuben Torrey described individual souls—and the external world—as battlegrounds between good and evil, God and the devil, and described the devil as an invisible demon bent on seducing humans into violating God’s rules. The Moody god was unrelenting, but salvation could be gained through faith in Jesus Christ. He was the “good shepherd” who had been crucified on the cross to exonerate the sins of humans. He represented the gentle part of the deity. He showed by his example how humans should live their lives.
The Bolenders quoted scripture. They taught their children Bible passages and held family devotions, reading Bible passages and reflecting on them, every evening. They had their charges kneel by their beds to recite the prayer that generations of Christian children have recited every night over the centuries—before they ask God to bless each member of the family.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
That prayer is soothing, but its allusion to death can be disturbing. Marilyn didn’t forget that prayer when as an adult she dealt with her “sins,” with nightmares, and with insomnia—the inability to go to sleep and the fear of doing so. That prayer links sleep to death and asks God’s grace in keeping the supplicant safe. It also alludes to his possible vengeance in refusing what is asked for—ascent to heaven, not descent to hell.44
Marilyn biographers have overlooked the influence of evangelist religion on her, but Arthur Miller considered it a central factor in the creation of her adult self. In his autobiography, Timebends, he repeated a tale she often told him about sin and salvation. When she was six, she participated in a children’s chorus at an Easter sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl. The children stood in the shape of a cross, and they wore black capes. As the sun rose, they removed the capes to reveal the white clothes they wore underneath. Changing dark capes to white clothing symbolized that with the dawn—and Christ’s resurrection after he had died on the cross—darkness had become light; Christ had risen from the grave; purity had triumphed over sin. But Norma Jeane forgot to remove her black robe. She stood there, humiliated, the only child in black rather than white. Chastened by Ida for her mistake, she felt that God had abandoned her.45
When Marilyn told Arthur the story, she laughed with sympathy for the little girl caught in the wrong. Yet he sensed that anger and guilt lay beneath her laughter: guilt at having failed the assignment; anger because she felt unfairly condemned. No matter what she did, Miller stated, she had to deal with her sense that she had sinned and had to defend herself against the “condemnation of religion.” “And the stain kept reappearing like a curse,” he wrote.46 In After the Fall, Arthur’s play about their marriage, he identified Marilyn’s sin as refusing to admit her co
mplicity in acceding to men’s sexual demands, a complicity that made her as guilty as the men in the dishonorable sex behavior they had engaged in. But Arthur’s interpretation was colored by his own puritanism, his sense that honorable men and women had to admit guilt for bad behavior as a way of reattaining the innocence of the original state of grace—the purity accorded all humans at birth. Yet beneath Marilyn’s adult promiscuity lay the trauma of her childhood, a trauma that scarred her soul.
What was that trauma? Was it connected to Ida Bolender? In her stories about her childhood, Marilyn remembered the Bolenders as fanatical Christians who chastised her when she forgot to take off her black cape at the Hollywood Bowl Easter celebration. That sounds like a “screen memory”—a term coined by Freud, still in use today, that refers to the brain substituting a false memory for a real one to conceal trauma. Sex can be a difficult issue for evangelical Christians, particularly someone like Ida, raised in the Midwest Bible Belt. Nineteenth-century evangelists condemned masturbation as “the secret sin.” They believed it could cause insanity and send those who practiced it to hell. Such beliefs still existed in the mid-twentieth century.47
The recently published Fragments, containing scraps of Marilyn’s writings in the form of fugitive essays and autobiographical musings, provides insight into her Hollywood Bowl memory. In a piece dated 1955, Marilyn states that she had strong sexual feelings as a child. She also relates that she was caught in a sex act and was spanked and threatened with being sent to hell, where she would “burn with dirty bad people.” She felt as though she was one of the “dirty bad people.” The fragment refers either to masturbation or to childhood sex play. Marilyn wrote about such play in My Story, her autobiography, with a boy who may have been Lester Bolender. Such play is normal and innocent, but the evangelistic Ida Bolender may have punished Norma Jeane for it. In another fragment Marilyn wrote that Aunt Ida had whipped her for having touched “the bad part” of her body. She was left, she said, with a lifelong fear of and fascination with her genitals. She expressed such feelings in acts of public exposure in her later life.48
When Norma Jeane moved out of the Bolenders’ home in 1933, she was a loving child, still happy, still asking questions all the time, as she had with Wayne Bolender. Whatever flaws there were in Ida’s childrearing, it was more positive than negative for Norma Jeane. Ida realized that, given the child’s background—the mental instability in her family and her status as illegitimate, stigmas in the 1930s—Norma Jeane might have difficulties as an adult. She attempted to neutralize those difficulties by raising her to be self-reliant.
Ida had other sides. Both she and Wayne were antiracist, even though evangelical Christians often held racist views and the South Bay area in which Hawthorne was located was a center of the Ku Klux Klan. Wayne’s postal route was in Watts, which was becoming African-American by the 1920s. He delivered mail mainly to black households. A gentle man and a devout Christian, he became close to the people on his route. They gave him cards and gifts at Christmas, and he helped them when they were in need. Ida and Wayne believed that Christ’s love extended to all humans, regardless of skin color. They held no discriminatory attitudes. They were Democrats and enthusiastic supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. They were upset for a long time after Roosevelt died.49
Gladys didn’t desert Norma Jeane when she left her with Ida, as some biographers charge. Once her daughter moved in with Ida in 1926, Gladys moved in too, sharing a bedroom with Norma Jeane for a time. Perhaps she nursed her daughter and needed to be with her. When her workload increased in early 1927, six months after Norma Jeane’s birth, Gladys moved back to Hollywood. By then she may have weaned her daughter. Still, she visited Norma Jeane: She went to Hawthorne Saturday afternoons when she was finished with work and stayed overnight, attending church with the Bolenders on Sunday morning. Sometimes she took Norma Jeane on outings—to the beach, to Venice, to Hollywood. Nancy Bolender remembers Gladys often spending the night at their house.50 By 1927 Gladys and Grace were roommates again, and Grace sometimes went along with Gladys and Norma Jeane on their excursions. But Grace also spent time with two nieces, who functioned as her surrogate daughters until they moved away from the area in 1934.
Some people who knew Gladys during these years described her as cold, with little affect, seeming to exist in her own world. Yet Reginald Carroll, a coworker at RKO, recalled her as having twinkling green eyes and a lively spirit. Leila Fields, another cutter there, thought she was the most beautiful woman she had ever met. Gladys was delightful, Fields said, smiling and friendly. She always had a joke to tell to cheer you up if you were down.51 Both Carroll and Fields remembered Gladys bringing Norma Jeane to work with her as soon as the child could walk. She dressed her daughter in the style of Mary Pickford, in black Mary Jane shoes and fluffy dresses, fixing her hair in Pickford’s sausage curls. She often stated that Norma Jeane was destined to become a star.
Then the black cloud that stalked the Monroe family descended again, enveloping Della Monroe, Norma Jeane’s grandmother. Soon after Norma Jeane’s birth, Della exhibited symptoms of mental disturbance. She wasn’t present at the birth in June; she was chasing Charles Grainger to Borneo. By October, she was back in Hawthorne alone, angry at her husband, angry at the world. She ousted the family that was renting her house and moved back into it. She was observed muttering to herself, and she frightened the newspaper delivery boy with her rants. Gladys was concerned, and she moved in with her mother.
One day when Gladys wasn’t there, Della went to the Bolenders’ house, angry because she had seen Ida spank Norma Jeane. There were other issues between them. Gladys and Ida were at odds over the relative merits of Aimee Semple McPherson and Dwight Moody. It may seem a trivial argument, but it was important to these two true believers. Della had won an important round when Norma Jeane was baptized by Sister Aimee instead of by Ida’s minister. Della pounded on the Bolenders’ door; when they didn’t answer her knocking, she broke a glass pane in the door and opened it herself. Entering the house, she went into the room where Norma Jeane was sleeping and tried either to rearrange her blanket or to smother her. The Bolenders called the police, who took Della to Norwalk State Mental Hospital. Norma Jeane was eighteen months old.
As an adult she claimed that she remembered Della trying to smother her. Remembering an experience from the age of one and a half years seems improbable: it may have been a screen memory derived from stories others told her. Perhaps, though, the trauma was severe enough to imprint the memory in her brain. No record exists of Della’s thoughts about the “smothering episode.”
Della was either hysterical or incoherent, and she was admitted as a patient to Norwalk State Mental Hospital. She was diagnosed as manicdepressive. Two weeks later she died. The cause of death listed on her death certificate is myocarditis. Biographers allege she had heart disease. That diagnosis is debatable, as is the assumption that her up-and-down moods were related to heart issues. No known heart disorder causes bipolarity. And myocarditis refers to the heart having been attacked by a virus, not to a mental condition.52 Norma Jeane was later told that Della died from malaria. That is a more probable cause of her death, since she had traveled to Borneo the previous year. Malaria is common to Borneo, especially a rare strain known as falciparum. Della could have been bitten in Borneo by a tropical bug carrying the disease. Resistant to quinine, falciparum usually caused death in the 1930s. Even today, travelers to Borneo are warned to be vaccinated against it. All forms of malaria cause high fevers and hallucinations. Such fevers may have caused any hallucinations Della experienced during the weeks before she died.53
Marilyn sometimes claimed that her mother locked her in a closet when she visited her in Hollywood and didn’t permit her to make any noise because it made her anxious. In her 1962 interview with photographer George Barris, however, she reversed her narrative of maternal abuse by stating that she loved to visit her mother because Gladys and her friends were carefree. “
When I was with my mother and her friends,” Marilyn said, “it felt like one big happy family.” On Saturdays they went for a walk and to the movies; Sunday mornings they went to church. “It was heaven when we went to church. The singing and services always excited me. I was in a sort of trance.” Then they returned to Gladys’s apartment. “We always had a chicken lunch with our family—mom and her friends. Then off we would go for a stroll, looking in the fancy store windows at things we couldn’t afford.” She finished: “We were dreamers.”54
Was Marilyn fantasizing when she told Barris this story? In fact, she was relating one strain in her mother’s behavior. Gladys could be paranoid and controlling, but she could also be carefree. The problem for Norma Jeane was that she saw Gladys in too many negative moods and situations not to be troubled by her.
Yet by 1930, four years after her daughter’s birth, Gladys seemed stable. She managed to handle her mother’s death in 1928 without falling apart, and she didn’t break down the next year, when her brother, Marion, disappeared, after telling his wife he was going to the store to buy a paper and failing to return. Gladys continued on with her life, even taking on a more modern look. She bobbed her hair, began smoking, and resumed dating. She took a boyfriend with her to the Bolenders’, and the two of them took Norma Jeane to the beach. Grace and a boyfriend, plus her favorite niece, Geraldine, were along. Gladys showed courage when a fire broke out in Consolidated Film Industry in 1929. Keeping from panicking, she led the women in the editing studio out of the building, saving a lot of lives. The fire, which the Los Angeles Times called a “holocaust,” gutted the building.55