by Lois Banner
In addition to Ginger Rogers films, she saw films starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Crawford and Davis had headed the list of actresses in the fantasy land of her imagination at the orphanage.13 Even in her early fantasies about stardom, Norma Jeane saw herself as a serious actress, not just a pinup girl.
Beyond schoolwork, dating, and going to the movies, Norma Jeane had a life with Ana Lower, who was with her before and after school and on the weekends. Ana was able to lift her spirits. She encouraged her foster child to read aloud to improve her diction, and she praised her singing and even her whistling. (Norma Jeane had a loud whistle.) She listened while Norma Jeane played the piano. Deciding that she needed a life goal, Ana encouraged her aspirations to become a film star. When she came home one day crying because the girls at school had made fun of her clothes, Ana soothed her by telling her that what the girls said about her didn’t matter, what mattered was how she felt about herself.14
Above all, Ana introduced Norma Jeane to Christian Science, taking her to Science Sunday services and sometimes Wednesday evening meetings. The services included singing hymns and listening to readings from the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. They were restrained, without a minister, a sermon, or the emotionalism of evangelical church services. At Wednesday evening meetings members testified about healing experiences. Norma Jeane and Ana read Science and Health aloud together in the evenings. The church became an important part of Norma Jeane’s life; meditating on Science and Health helped her to find purpose and meaning.15
Mary Baker Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. For many years she had been an invalid who suffered from mood swings and indeterminate pain; she was a nineteenth-century “hysterical woman.” By reading the Bible and asserting her will, she managed to take control over her illness, forging a powerful personality in the process. She wrote Science and Health and turned herself into a charismatic healer and leader, the founder of a major religion. She was a role model for women, and that would matter in Norma Jeane’s life.
Eddy was a voracious reader, without much formal education. As a result, Science and Health is a sprawling text. Filled with Eddy’s passion, however, it is inspirational. Its looseness encourages meditating on it to understand it, reading passages slowly until they make sense. In writing Science and Health, Eddy relied on the Bible, riffing on its meaning. She was also influenced by nineteenth-century mystical thinkers like the transcendentalists, who drew from Hindu and Sufi thinkers to posit that a spiritual connection existed between nature, the universe, and the individual. Norma Jeane, schooled in evangelical spirituality, was attracted to the mysticism implicit in Christian Science, as Eddy concluded that spirit is so powerful that the material world doesn’t exist. Spirit, emanating from God, is the only reality and God is defined by love. Flowing through the cosmos, God’s love is available to everyone. To become a whole person, one has only to access that force and apply it in one’s life.
In Eddy’s universe, death and the devil, heaven and hell don’t exist; they are illusions. There is no such thing as “original sin,” passed down to all humans because of Adam and Eve’s violation of God’s command not to eat the apple on the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Guilt is a futile human emotion. Christ didn’t die on the cross to vindicate human sins; rather, his life is a model for humans to follow. And if reality is illusion, then illness doesn’t exist, and doctors and drugs are unnecessary. Mind can overcome the material world, and anything is possible. To confound her detractors and link her ideas to modernity, Eddy used the word “science” in the name of her religion.
Christian Science doctrines propose that individuals can attain the grace of God’s love through reading and meditating on Science and Health and Eddy’s other texts. Reading is so important that separate reading rooms, with chairs, tables, and bookshelves containing those books, are built, usually close to Christian Science churches. Norma Jeane recommended the reading rooms to her half-sister, Berniece Miracle, calling them “little libraries.”16
Members become practitioners by taking a brief course with a successful healer and documenting three successful healings to the church board in Boston. The board then lists their names and addresses in the Christian Science Journal. Healers recruit people to the church and counsel individuals in physical and emotional crisis. But they aren’t psychiatrists: they help individuals align mind, body, and spirit with God’s love through prayer and reading Science and Health.
By the 1920s, Christian Science was a major religion in Los Angeles. It had large congregations and church buildings that rivaled in size those of the evangelical churches. Many still stand. Then, as now, the church’s membership was largely female. It had many features that appealed to female worshippers. Mary Baker Eddy’s god is both female and male. The central church in Boston is called the “mother church.” The majority of its practitioners have always been women. In his study of Los Angeles religion in the early twentieth century, Gregory Singleton found that the transfers from evangelical Christianity to Christian Science were mostly women, many of them divorced.17 Grace Goddard, Gladys Baker, and Ana Lower each had been divorced twice. Like Della Monroe, who joined Aimee Semple McPherson’s church, they turned to a religion of women after men disappointed them.
After a year with Ana, Norma Jeane’s mood improved considerably. Her humor emerged; she had learned from Sam Knebelkamp, Grace Goddard’s brother-in-law, how to joke as a way of coping with life and pleasing others. She developed a winning laugh, joy and playfulness, and the same sense of curiosity that Wayne Bolender had seen in her as a child. A natural mimic, she was influenced by Grace Goddard’s “sparkling characteristics.”18 Grace covered over discontent with laughter. Norma Jeane did the same.
She also internalized Ana Lower’s dignity and spirituality, generating her own ability to charm. She later stated that Ana had been the most positive influence on her in her childhood. “She changed my whole life. She was a wonderful human being. She showed me the path to the higher things of life and she gave me more confidence in myself. She never hurt me, not once. She couldn’t. She was all kindness and love.” She and Ana became like a mother and daughter. “I can’t help calling [you] cousin,” a relative of Ana’s later wrote Marilyn, “because dear aunt Ana—my favorite aunt, considered you her girl.”19
Nonetheless, Norma Jeane’s underlying issues didn’t go away—the demons in her dreams, her shyness and insecurity, her deep sensitivity. She would later maintain that her sweet, giggly personality was a facade she developed to hide the terror inside her. She made fun of herself, she said, before others could make fun of her. Both Grace and Ana had experienced difficulties: alcoholic husbands, the lack of children, financial setbacks. Ana had turned to Christian Science to put her life together, and it had worked. Her serenity was achieved through struggle and asserting her will. She was an example to Norma Jeane. In 1939 Grace Goddard joined the church, a commitment that acknowledged its importance to her. In 1944, at age eighteen, Norma Jeane followed their example and joined the church.
She didn’t have temper tantrums during the years with Ana. Focused on healing, meditating daily with Ana, she wasn’t plagued by anger, which would slowly emerge as she delved deeply inside herself to become an actress and a mature human being. She had shut down her emotions as a child and now, with Ana, she was beginning to open them up. Under the impetus of Christian Science, the positive parts of her split self emerged first. Her air of innocence remained a part of her self, as well as a maturity beyond her years. She developed the ability to look people in the eye—a remarkable achievement, since many shy individuals can’t do that. Eyes are a major means of human communication. We express emotions through our eyes, exert control over others through them, hide ourselves behind them. Norma Jeane had beautiful, large blue eyes; when she focused them intently on others she could mesmerize them. She transmitted an extreme vulnerability through her eyes, a vulnerability that made people want to help her.
She was the child that is in everyone, expressing the hurt and longing we all feel, needing to be loved and nurtured.
To a Christian Scientist anything is possible through God’s love; the “power of positive thinking” connects to divinity. Without Christian Science, Norma Jeane wouldn’t have had the nerve to try for stardom. With the positive attitude Ana taught her and the power transmitted through Ana’s healing, Norma Jeane was able to access the tough and determined part of her self. Her antimaterialist attitudes, her dislike of jewelry, her love of nature, her lack of concern about money, wanting only to be “wonderful”—these ideas came from Ana Lower.
Christian Scientists consider themselves rational, not mystical. That stance is apparent in a letter Ana wrote to Norma Jeane in 1944. Norma Jeane had gone to Detroit to meet her half-sister, Berniece Miracle, and to Chicago to see Grace, who was living there for a time. On the train ride she suffered from motion sickness, and she wrote Ana asking for help. In the letter Ana sent in reply, she called the motion sickness “nonsense.” You do not cease to be God’s perfect child because you take a train ride, Ana wrote. Norma Jeane’s self-control was out of alignment and it needed fixing. God’s love was always present. “I’ll pray God to so fill your consciousness with his presence that there will be no room for error.” In Ana’s Christian Science view, Norma Jeane’s anxiety didn’t exist. “The divine understanding reigns, is all, and there is no other consciousness.”20
Christian Science had other impacts on Norma Jeane. Despite its claims to rationality, there is a mysticism inherent in connecting to the “divine understanding,” a state that can produce emotional highs. At peak moments in life, the brain can produce a feeling of oneness with the universe. Freud called it the “oceanic feeling”; Jung called it “the numinous.” It’s not surprising that Norma Jeane, raised in an evangelical religion and then in Christian Science, experienced transcendent highs.
It first happened in 1940 when she was fourteen and in her second year at Emerson. Her body had developed; she had made new friends. She went to the beach with a boyfriend, wearing a skimpy bathing suit for the first time. It was a sunny day, and the beach was crowded. She felt as though she were in a dream. She stared at the ocean. It was full of gold and lavender colors, blue and foaming white. Everybody on the beach seemed to be smiling at the sky. Then she walked down to the water’s edge. Young men followed her, and they whistled at her. But she paid no attention. In fact, she didn’t hear them. “I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage, who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”21 It was out of that passion and sense of empowerment that the actress we know as Marilyn Monroe would be born.
There were downsides in Christian Science for Norma Jeane, especially its ban on taking medicine for illness. After she began menstruating in the fall of 1938, she suffered severe menstrual cramps and irregular periods. As a Christian Scientist, she wasn’t supposed to take even aspirin for pain. In fact, she suffered from endometriosis, a condition where the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, resulting in great pain during menstruation. Exactly when she was diagnosed with the condition is unclear. Endometriosis can’t be diagnosed vaginally and often worsens over time; in the 1950s it would have only been diagnosed by abdominal surgery. The scar above her pubic hair in the drawing of her body at the time of her autopsy indicates that at some point the abdominal surgery was performed, probably not before her mid-twenties. (Jim Dougherty contended that her menstrual pains weren’t that bad during their marriage.) The abdominal incision could subsequently be reopened to access the interior of the abdomen and cut out endometriosis.22
Endometriosis often causes pain during intercourse. Opening the incision to remove the endometriosis can cause the formation of scar tissue, which can also cause pain. Marilyn was often hospitalized over the years for operations; the first one occurred on November 4, 1953. The newspapers usually described these operations as gynecological procedures, and sometimes as “cleaning out the fallopian tubes.” That is a misleading term that can mean many things, including removing detritus left from a miscarriage or an abortion. It can also mean surgical treatment for an infection produced by gonorrhea or chlamydia.23
Marilyn told actor Robert Mitchum, who had been Jim Dougherty’s workmate at Lockheed Aircraft and became a friend of hers in Hollywood, that whenever she was in crisis, her period began. She made the same statement to Henry Rosenfeld, a New York manufacturer of clothing who was a close friend. On the other hand, she told both Mitchum and Rosenfeld she could go for months without a period. In later years she had false pregnancies, when her body assumed the physical symptoms of pregnancy, without the existence of a fetus.24 Such a condition is unusual, but not unknown. Thus even Marilyn’s magical body, the body of the world’s great sex queen, was riddled with paradox. Externally flawless, it was flawed in its internal anatomy, requiring surgical procedures to make her whole.
Like her mother she was proud, and she thought of herself as a lady. Aside from close friends, she kept her menstrual and reproductive issues to herself. Ralph Roberts claimed that she had a clause in her contract stating that she didn’t have to perform if she had her period, but it may have been a separate agreement, since such a clause isn’t in her Twentieth Century-Fox contract.25 Her later vomiting and tendency to nervous disorders like hives and skin rashes, in addition to false pregnancies, seems to indicate that Marilyn’s body was especially sensitive to her emotional state.
By the age of eighteen, Norma Jeane was taking drugs for pain—often codeine with aspirin, sometimes stronger medications. Barbiturates had been prescribed to Grace Goddard, who had a heart condition as well as cancer of the liver and needed to be calmed down. Grace gave some to Norma Jeanne, although they aren’t a medication for pain. They eventually caused a serious addiction problem for her, as she took them for insomnia and general anxiety once she encountered the rigors of film shooting schedules.
It was hard for Norma Jeane to remain faithful to Christian Science, given its strictures on taking medicine. And its negative views on sexual intercourse created other issues for her. Sex outside of marriage is wrong, according to Science and Health, and physical passion within marriage should be controlled. Mary Baker Eddy was a Victorian woman, influenced by the Victorian spiritualization of sex and by the belief that the male sex drive needed to be constrained. “The senses confer no real enjoyment,” she wrote in Science and Health. “The harmony between man and woman is in spiritual oneness. The broadcast powers of evil so conspicuous today show themselves in the materialism and sensualism of the age. Spirit will ultimately claim its own, all that really is, and the voices of physical sense will be forever hushed.”26 Ana Lower and her Christian Science doctrines liberated Norma Jeane while constraining her. Her mind was freed by its discourse about spirituality, which brought her transcendent experiences. But her adolescent body was restrained from sex.
Yet Christian Science neither barred Hollywood film people from its churches nor attacked the industry’s liberal sexual behavior. Many film people were attracted to the church because of its validation of ambition and its focus on practical measures to achieve personal serenity, which was appealing to individuals in an industry prone to anxiety, where failure was common. Mary Pickford, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Doris Day, and others attended Christian Science churches. Joan Crawford and Marilyn first met at a Christian Science church. But its restraints on sexual expression ratified Norma Jeane’s guilt over the sexual abuse she had undergone, no matter how Ana tried to teach her how to neutralize that guilt. Those constraints gave her pause about the sexual practices standard in the day’s dating scene and pointed her toward marrying the first appropriate man. It was a complex mixture to absorb as she moved toward adulthood.
By her last year at Emerson, Norma Jeane was dating a number of boys
, not just Bob Muir. Like Bob, they were mostly older than she. She went dancing and to the movies with them. She roughhoused with them on the beach, but she didn’t permit them liberties with her body. “The boys knew better than to get fresh with me,” she stated. Even after a date, “the most they could expect was a good-night kiss.” Because of her sexy clothing, the students at Emerson called her “racy,” but they considered her a “good girl.” She followed the precepts of Christian Science, but even at fourteen, she pushed the bounds of what might be considered appropriate. She started dating Harry Keel after meeting him at the Howells’. Already attracted to older men, she developed a crush on him. Twenty-three years old in 1940 and an aspiring Hollywood actor, he was attracted to her, but he rejected her because she wasn’t yet sixteen, the legal age of sexual consent. At fourteen she was, in his eyes, “jail bait.” His rejection hurt; she cried for several weeks after he stopped seeing her.27 Keel was tall, dark, and imposing. With a booming voice, he later became a musical comedy star.
Later, when she and Jim Dougherty were engaged to be married in the spring of 1942, they parked their car and “necked” on Mulholland Drive, which is high in the Santa Monica Mountains and was a favorite place for “parking” in that era. Thus they engaged in the long kissing bouts that were standard for dating couples in the 1940s. According to Jim, however, Norma Jeane “expertly managed his sexual advances.” Grace and Ana had raised her to be a good girl, according to Jim’s sister.28 And the “double standard” was still in force: good girls were supposed to keep their male partners in check.