by Lois Banner
The Bolenders wanted to adopt Norma Jeane but Gladys, who wanted her daughter to live with her eventually, wouldn’t permit it. Ida resisted the possibility of Norma Jeane moving in with her mother just as firmly, worried that the unmarried Gladys, with her complicated emotions, demanding work schedule, and search for a husband, wouldn’t be a good mother. In the spring of 1933 Gladys took several weeks off from work when Norma Jeane came down with whooping cough. She moved in with the Bolenders and nursed her daughter, displaying a maternal affection that Ida thought had too often been absent in her dealings with the child. Perhaps she could be an effective mother, after all. That same spring an earthquake nearly leveled the nearby city of Long Beach and severely damaged Norma Jeane’s school. Then a car ran over and killed Norma Jeane’s beloved dog Tippy, a stray that the Bolenders had allowed her to keep.
These events were decisive for Grace, a take-charge person who decided that Norma Jeane’s future had to be settled. Grace, a modern woman, liked neither Ida’s childrearing methods nor her evangelical religion, and in the end Gladys had the definitive claim. Grace persuaded Gladys that Norma Jeane had to be moved. Given the disappearance of both Norma Jeane’s school and her beloved dog, it may not have been the best time to move her from her regular home, but Ida gave up. The bickering among the adult women wasn’t good for her. Grace and Gladys drove to the Bolender home and picked up Norma Jeane, taking her to Hollywood to live. As their car approached the Bolender house, Norma Jeane hid in a bedroom with the other children. She looked at them as her family, and she didn’t want to leave them.
Once Gladys brought Norma Jeane to Hollywood in June 1933, she placed her with a family of English actors who were friends of Grace and hers. George Atkinson, the father in the family, was a standin for the eminent English actor George Arliss. Maude Atkinson, his wife, played bit parts. Their daughter, Nellie, was the standin for English actress Madeleine Carroll. Norma Jeane lived with the Atkinsons for the next two years, acquiring overtones of an English accent from them. The family seemed carefree. Former vaudeville performers, they bought Norma Jeane a grass skirt and taught her the hula, as well as how to play cards. After her years with the religious Bolenders, Norma Jeane prayed for the English family and worried that they were going to hell.56 But she learned secular values from them, which is what Gladys and Grace wanted.
Gladys continued taking Norma Jeane on outings. They spent a weekend on Catalina, an island in the Pacific forty-five minutes by ferry from Long Beach. Catalina had—and still has—a large casino–dance hall, a picturesque town, and a huge nature preserve. Glass-bottom boats moving slowly in the ocean near the island reveal the fishes swimming underneath. It’s a child’s paradise. Lester Bolender remembered Gladys taking Norma Jeane and him one July Fourth to Catalina on a big white steamship that had a dance floor. Norma Jeane got on the floor by herself and danced until she was dizzy. Everyone on the ship watched her, according to Lester. Norma Jeane returned to live on Catalina in 1944 with her husband Jim Dougherty when he was stationed there with the merchant marine.
Gladys and Norma Jeane also went to Gay’s lion farm, a favorite tourist place in El Monte, east of downtown Los Angeles, where lions were bred, raised, and trained for the movies, and lion shows were put on. Reacting to a show, Norma Jeane revealed a confused sense of self. It was worse than being Alice in a Wonderland down a rabbit hole and in a magical world, she said, for the lions were located in a real world, and they were being trained as show animals. She thought that the lions were being trained “in ways that were not natural for them if they’d been left on their own.” She said, “That thought scared me because I saw if I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing, then I would have no idea what I was supposed to [have been] doing since I was born.”57
Her favorite activity, though, was watching movies in the palatial movie theaters on Hollywood Boulevard—with her mother, with Grace, and, when she was old enough, by herself. It was not uncommon in those days for working mothers to use movie theaters as babysitters for children old enough to be admitted by themselves. Sometimes Norma Jeane sat there all day and into the night, watching the matinee and evening shows. The two major theaters on Hollywood Boulevard, Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theater and his Chinese Theater, weren’t far apart, and they were in the center of the city of Hollywood. They were ornate and fantastical, places for dreaming, palaces for the people. The Egyptian Theater, which opened in 1922, had columns with hieroglyphs in the interior. Its large forecourt contained huge statues of an elephant with bespangled trappings and of a man with a dog’s head—the Egyptian god Anubis protecting his temple.58 Norma Jeane remembered the monkeys in cages in that forecourt.
Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which opened in 1927, was built in the shape of a pagoda, with a large sculpted dragon on its exterior. Antique heaven dogs stood at either side of the entrance, guarding it. The interior was painted flame red with gold accents. A large sunburst pendant chandelier hung from the ceiling, and a massive proscenium curtain had red figures on a peacock-blue background. In its courtyard were the famed footprints and handprints of stars imprinted in cement, a tradition initiated by Norma Talmadge in 1927. Following the tourist custom, Norma Jeane compared the size and shape of her hands and feet with those of the stars in cement.
The actresses she saw in the films she watched influenced Norma Jeane—Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra; Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel; Katharine Hepburn in Little Women. They were spunky women, “fast-talking dames,” meant to appeal to unmarried working women, who constituted the major audience for Hollywood films in this era. Many spoke in clipped tones and moved with precision and pride. Jim Dougherty claimed that Norma Jeane picked up her ladylike quality partly from these stars, not just from Gladys and Della.59 Take a look at Marilyn’s stance, aside from the hip-swinging walk. She stands tall, with her shoulders high and her chest forward, following the day’s rule that women should look regal and not slouch.
Norma Jeane loved the films of Clark Gable, her fantasy father, and of Jean Harlow, the day’s platinum-blonde sex goddess. As a young child Norma Jeane’s hair was nearly white. She hated the color because other children teased her for it, calling her a towhead. But Jean Harlow’s hair was that color, and she felt vindicated. At Grauman’s Egyptian and Chinese theaters, Norma Jeane saw the extravagant live prologues staged before each movie. A mixture of vaudeville and revue, they were themed to the movie being shown. Scores of showgirls and dancers wore elaborate costumes and moved and danced on spectacular sets. Grace and Gladys took Norma Jeane to the movie premieres held at night, as searchlight beams crisscrossed the sky and the stars arrived in limousines and walked to the theater on a red carpet, lined by thousands of fans. Flashbulbs popped; the crowd roared.
Grace dreamed of being Jean Harlow, and she projected that dream onto Norma Jeane. Grace pointed out to her how she could change her face and hair to more closely resemble Harlow. “Grace would touch the bump on the end of my nose,” Marilyn remembered. “‘You’re perfect except for this little bump, sweetheart,’ she’d say to me.” Norma Jeane had a receding chin similar to Harlow’s that Grace also thought could be fixed. “There’s no reason you can’t grow up to be just like her, Norma Jeane,” Grace said, “with the right hair color and a better nose.”60 Yet in praising Jean Harlow, Grace did Norma Jeane a disservice. Harlow was the nation’s major sex symbol, erotic and enticing, hardly an appropriate model for a little girl. Grace was sexualizing Norma Jeane, making her even more vulnerable to unwanted attention from men.
In the summer of 1933, Gladys bought a house. It was an astonishing purchase for a woman in this era, when banks rarely extended them credit. Determined to realize her dream of bringing her children together in her own home, Gladys had saved money from her salary, and she secured a loan from the New Deal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established in June 1933. She bought furniture at auctions, including a baby grand piano that Fredric March had owned. She told Norma Jeane
that she dreamed of sitting in front of the fireplace in their living room, listening to her play the piano.
The location and size of the house are important to understand Gladys and her dreams. It was located off Highland Boulevard, near the Hollywood Bowl, a mile or so up the hill from Hollywood Boulevard. It was easy walking distance from the two Grauman theaters and Norma Jeane’s elementary school. It wasn’t a small house. It had four bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace, and enough space to hold the baby grand piano. There was a porch on the back of the house and a Georgian portico on the front. Music from the nearby Hollywood Bowl could be heard in the evenings.
It was next to the exclusive Whitley Heights Tract. In the 1910s, H. J. Whitley, who developed much of Hollywood, purchased a huge tract of land in the Hollywood Hills, up from the center of Hollywood. By the 1920s he subdivided it into plots for homeowners. It was luxurious land, with winding roads and breathtaking views of the ocean. Major stars lived there, including Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, William Powell, Marie Dressler, Charlie Chaplin, and Bette Davis. The homes were in Mediterranean style: stucco painted creamy white, red tile roofs, terraced yards, and arched doorways.61 It was a short walk from Gladys’s home on Arbol Drive. Taking that walk, Gladys and Norma Jeane might catch a glimpse of Jean Harlow in her yard or Carole Lombard welcoming guests. The Arbol Drive home made Norma Jeane’s dreams of stardom vivid. She was now living among the stars.
To be certain that she could pay the mortgage and provide after-school care for Norma Jeane, Gladys persuaded the Atkinsons, Norma Jeane’s most recent foster family, to move in with them. In fact, she rented much of the house to them, keeping two bedrooms for herself and Norma Jeane.
Then disaster struck, as Gladys went into a tailspin in January 1934, three months after they had moved into the Arbol Drive house. One morning before breakfast she came down the stairs screaming that men were trying to kill her. An ambulance was called, and Gladys was taken to a rest home in Santa Monica for several months before being transferred to Los Angeles County General Hospital, where Norma Jeane had been born. A year after the breakdown, in January 1935, at the recommendation of Gladys’s doctors, Grace had the court declare Gladys an “insane incompetent” and commit her to Norwalk State Mental Hospital (sometimes called Metropolitan.) It was where Della Monroe, her mother, had died. Her doctors diagnosed Gladys as paranoid schizophrenic. Grace took over her affairs, becoming her guardian, so that she could sell the house and Gladys’s possessions, in order to pay her bills. She also took over managing Norma Jeane.
Was Della manicdepressive? Was Gladys schizophrenic? The relationship between individual behavior and categories of mental illness was as fuzzy in the 1930s as it is today. No physical tests existed to determine the kind and degree of illness, nor do such tests exist today. Diagnosis was—and is—based on the application of categories devised by experts to the symptoms subjects display.
The major text used by psychiatrists in mental hospitals from the early 1930s on was Modern Clinical Psychiatry by Arthur P. Noyes. Surprisingly modern in his approach, Noyes warned that it was difficult to distinguish schizophrenia from manicdepressive disorder and from temporary emotional states. Noting correctly that Austrian neurologist Emil Kraepelin had invented the categories in the 1890s, he implied that they were out of date. Noyes concluded that there were many gradations between them. Yet he drew distinctions between the categories in terms of behavior and treatment. A manicdepressive syndrome could be healed by exercise, diet, and removal from stress. But such treatment had no effect on schizophrenics, with their hallucinations and paranoia. Unless they suffered from alcoholism, syphilis, or were elderly people with severe dementia, inhabitants of mental institutions were always diagnosed as either manicdepressive or schizophrenic. The worst form of the latter was the paranoid variety.62
Della heard voices, and she sometimes thought that people were following her. Gladys had similar symptoms. Hearing voices, however, is common in the general population. We all hear voices in our heads; the issue is whether they stay in our brain or appear to come from outside of us. The former is ordinary; the latter is not. Indeed, according to Patricia Traviss, the head of the Rockhaven Sanitarium during the years that Gladys lived there (from 1953 to 1967), Gladys didn’t think she had anything wrong with her. Thus she didn’t think that the voices she heard came from outside her.63 Moreover, some paranoia is healthy. It’s part of an evolutionary development to keep humans alert to external threats.
Both Della and Gladys had difficult lives, with enough traumas to wreak havoc with their brain chemistry. Until recently, most people drew a sharp distinction between sanity and insanity, believing that individuals with mental issues stood apart from everyone else. Della and Gladys were women who sometimes operated on the borderline between ordinary and antisocial behavior; they were easily singled out as disorderly.
It’s possible that Gladys’s behavior didn’t become psychotic until she entered a state mental institution: that’s what she later claimed.64 She had a point. California mental hospitals were overcrowded, with insufficient doctors and nurses and poorly trained attendants. By the 1930s physical restraints weren’t used much anymore, but they were replaced by baths in which patients were strapped into large tubs, with water running over them for as long as eight hours a day. It’s not surprising that hysterical individuals calmed down after that treatment—or that Gladys often tried to run away from the hospitals.
By 1939 electroshock therapy was in use. It produced such strong convulsions that bones could break. It was the new utopian treatment for mental illness, as water baths had once been. Gladys told Emmeline Snively, the head of Marilyn’s modeling agency, that she had been given electroshock therapy. That’s not surprising, since it was applied to most patients in California state mental hospitals from 1939 on. The Snake Pit, a fictionalized depiction of California mental institutions, filmed in 1948, includes graphic scenes of treatments including restraints, water baths, and electroshock therapy.65
In those hospitals, placement in wards was first by sex and then by docility. If patients followed orders and didn’t act out, they could be moved to wards with greater privileges, to walk in the grounds and work in hospital industries. If a patient became especially difficult, he or she could be sent to another state hospital, since individuals committed to state mental hospitals had few rights. Gladys attempted to escape from Norwalk State in the winter of 1935. She was captured and returned to the hospital, and she was moved that spring to Agnews State Hospital near San Jose, which had better security, but which was far away from Grace and Norma Jeane. The tragedy of the escape was that Gladys had arranged it with Edward Mortensen, who had phoned her. But the authorities confused him with Edward Mortenson, who had died in a motorcycle accident in 1929. Thus when Gladys told the attendants she was meeting Mortensen, they thought she was talking about a dead man and was delusional.
In a letter Grace wrote to a friend, she stated that a doctor took X-rays of Gladys’s brain and decided that one third of it had disintegrated. Recovery was impossible, although she might stabilize if she were placed in a home environment under supervision, removed from stress. Metropolitan was so overcrowded, he said, that they would release Gladys to a family member or close friend. In her letter Grace stated that neither she nor anyone she knew could afford to keep Gladys in their home.66 So she remained in state institutions for the next eight years, all in Northern California, away from Norma Jeane.
Largely abandoned by family and friends, Gladys developed her own world. Her ability to work long hours at negative film editing suggests she had an obsessive side. She now turned that side of herself toward religion. Ana Lower, Grace’s aunt and a Christian Science healer, visited her at Agnews State Hospital. Ana gave Gladys a healing and encouraged her to read Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health in order to access God’s love. Gladys did so, and she developed the fantasy that she was a Christian Science nurse who could cure illness. She began to wear
a nurse’s white uniform, and she continued to do so the rest of her life. The figure she created combined Ana Lower, kind and authoritative, with the hospital nurses, who both served and controlled the patients. Gladys thus gained a sense of independence and power over her environment.
She constantly wrote letters—to the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston; to the government; to whoever might listen. I possess letters she wrote when she was in Rockhaven Sanitarium, near Glendale. In those letters she is gentle and concerned about others, but also paranoid and delusional. She thinks that radio waves are destroying her brain and that her nurses are plotting against her.
Once Gladys was sent to Agnews, she didn’t hear from Edward Mortensen again. Grace and Norma Jeane rarely visited her. Narcissism can be the product of vanity and insecurity, a soul that can’t find itself. That was Gladys, so hurt by others that she couldn’t relate to them, mostly passive, fixated on her fantasies, engaging in occasional outbursts of rage. But questions remain. Why did Gladys break down completely in 1934? What caused her to fall apart after she had bought the house on Arbol Drive and brought Norma Jeane to live with her? Moreover, Grace’s treatment of Norma Jeane needs to be evaluated. Eventually she placed her in eleven foster homes and in an orphanage. Why did she do so, repeating Gladys’s seeming abandonment of Norma Jeane so many times? The answers to these questions aren’t simple. They require a fuller exploration of Gladys’s breakdown and its impact on Grace and Norma Jeane’s lives.