Marilyn

by Gloria Steinem

  Only with one of Barris’s last questions did the emotion of her childhood memories return. “The thing I want more than anything else?” she repeated. “I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another,” she added, as if hoping to help a child like the one who still lived inside her.

  “But I don’t think a single person should adopt children. There’s no Ma or Pa there,” she said sadly, “and I know what that can be like.

  “I hate living alone,” she added, sounding herself like that child again, “but I’m doing it.

  “I’d like to be a fine actress,” she said finally, returning to defiance and pride. “Acting is my life. As far as I’m concerned, the happiest time is now. There’s a future and I can’t wait to get to it.”

  George Barris left this small white house, where Marilyn now stayed secluded except for visits to her psychiatrist and a few friends—and for a few sporadic forays to try and salvage her career. Her outings on photographic sessions for their book project had been one of the few major commitments of the last weeks, and he sensed that his trips to her home were visits to a strange place that had become isolated from the world.

  In that small, one-person house she was so proud of, the first home she had ever owned, Marilyn had insisted on showing Barris through each room—except one. “I’m sorry I can’t show you my bedroom,” she said of that place where she had suffered so many nights of painful insomnia or drug-induced sleep, “but it’s a mess.”

  That was the room where police found her a few weeks later: face down on the bed, her body bare under a rumpled sheet, her hand clutching the phone as if reaching out to some invisible friend.

  It was there that they photographed her for the last time.

  A world-famous actress was dead. So was an unknown young girl.

  Norma Jeane Baker, the real Marilyn Monroe, was born on June 1, 1926, to a Gladys Baker Mortensen, a beautiful, delicate twenty-four-year-old who was divorced from a first husband, separated from a second, and making a tenuous living from a job in a film lab that was part of Hollywood’s hidden working-class world.

  To Gladys, this daughter was already a symbol of hardship and rejection. She could not keep both her job and the baby, so she boarded the infant Norma Jeane for five dollars a week with a hardworking, religious family who lived across the street from Gladys’s mother. Norma Jeane’s real father, C. Stanley Gifford, was a salesman at the film lab. He had left Gladys on Christmas Eve after she told him a baby was on the way. He had offered her money and the advice that she was lucky to be married to Ed Mortensen. The baby would have a name. But Gladys loved this dashing, Clark Gable-looking salesman whom she had hoped would marry her after her divorce. She proudly refused his money, and was heartbroken by his advice. Though Marilyn would later tell Barris and other interviewers that her father had been killed in an accident after her birth, that was apparently the fate of Mortensen, and it was the story Gladys originally told her. Only years later did Marilyn learn that her real father had been Stanley Gifford, and that his was the face in the photograph on her mother’s wall. Norma Jeane had fantasized about the handsome man in that photograph since Gladys first identified him as her father one day when five-year-old Norma Jeane had come to visit. When she was older and learned about both her illegitimacy and the name of her real father, she tried to track him down twice. When she called as Norma Jeane, Gifford simply hung up on her. When she called as Marilyn, Gifford sent his new wife to the phone with the name of his lawyer in case Marilyn had “some complaint.” Famous or not, his daughter was nothing to him. Neither she nor Gladys was ever to see this object of their fantasies again.

  Gifford’s desertion wasn’t the first crushing loss Gladys had suffered. After marrying Jack Baker in Mexico when she was fifteen, and having two children by him, she had come home early from work one day to discover her husband in bed with another woman. The week she was legally separated from Baker, he kidnapped their two children. “My mother spent all of her savings trying to get her children back,” Marilyn later wrote. “Finally, she traced them to Kentucky and hitchhiked to where they were… living in a fine house. Their father was married again and well off. She met with him but didn’t ask him for anything, not even to kiss the children she had been hunting for so long… Like the mother in the movie Stella Dallas, she went away and left them to enjoy a happier life than she could give them.”

  Gladys listed her first two children as dead when she entered the hospital for her third and last childbirth. Her medical bills were paid by coworkers who cared about her tragedy enough to take up a collection at the lab. Clearly, her prideful refusal of money from Gifford hadn’t come from having enough money of her own. Her rejection by Gifford had already sent her into profound depression. The birth of a baby she couldn’t afford combined with the loss of her first two children must certainly have deepened her despair. Depression was something she would alternately fear and succumb to for the rest of her life.

  Now that parental kidnappings, women without custody, impoverished single mothers, and illegitimacy are problems that can be admitted and understood, we can only guess how much their penalty was increased by silence, isolation, and blame. Indeed, the blame goes on. Norman Mailer, Monroe’s most famous biographer, condemns Gladys for listing her first two children as dead, thus proving, “it was clear she was not sentimental about babies.” Even Fred Guiles, a more sympathetic writer and the biographer who has put the most effort into documenting Marilyn Monroe’s childhood, hypothesizes on no evidence that Gladys might have reversed her story of infidelity, that she might have been discovered with a lover, thus giving her husband an “excuse to ‘kidnap’ his children and keep them.”

  In fact, even if one accepts the sexual double standard by which a wife’s infidelity becomes an excuse to deprive her of her children, there are no facts to support that theory. Guiles himself notes that Gladys’s colleagues and friends did not consider her to be “promiscuous” but to be a woman of good moral character. By her own testimony to Norma Jeane, Gladys had done her desperate best to regain her two children. By other people’s testimony, she also did her fragile best to keep the custody of and maintain her third child. She made weekly payments to the Bolender family, who boarded Norma Jeane; she went to see her regularly on weekends, bought material for the little dresses that Ida Bolender made on her sewing machine, and took Norma Jeane to visit her furnished room in Hollywood, or to visit the lab where she worked. When Norma Jeane was only five or six, Gladys paid extra to give her daughter piano lessons. When she had whooping cough, Gladys deserted her job for days to nurse her daughter around the clock. In spite of the Bolenders’ interest in adopting Norma Jeane and taking over her responsibility completely, Gladys steadfastly refused to take this easier way out.

  It was while visiting her mother’s furnished room that Norma Jeane noticed the one and only picture on the wall—a handsome dark-haired man with a mustache and a slouch hat—and was told, “That’s your father.”

  “I felt so excited, I almost fell off the chair,” Marilyn wrote in her autobiography. “It felt so good to have a father, to be able to look at his picture and know I belonged to him… That was my first happy time…” From then on, she conjured up fantasies that she would replay in her mind over and over again. When Norma Jeane walked home from school in the rain, she imagined her father waiting at home and worrying that she had not worn her rubbers—though in fact she owned no rubbers. Lying in the hospital with complications after having her tonsils out, his abandoned daughter imagined this handsome man entering the ward “while the other patients looked on with disbelief and envy… and I gave him dialogue, too. ‘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.’”

  But her fantasies had no more power to rescue than the photograph. As Marilyn remembered, “I could never get him in my largest, deepest daydream to take off his hat and sit down.” />
  Gladys had a dream about her daughter, too. “One day my mother came to call,” Marilyn wrote of a time when she was still with the Bolenders. “I was in the kitchen washing dishes. She stood looking at me without talking. When I turned around, I saw there were tears in her eyes, and I was surprised. ‘I’m going to build a house for you and me to live in,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be painted white and have a backyard.’ And she went away.”

  By borrowing money, working double shifts at the lab, furnishing sparsely and on the installment plan, and renting most of it to an English couple who were playing minor parts in movies, Gladys actually managed that house. It was a small white bungalow, and even had a secondhand white piano for Norma Jeane to play. She finally moved there when she was six.

  Suddenly, Norma Jeane discovered a very different world from that of the churchgoing, puritanical Bolenders. They had loved her, but they also ran a very strict household in which she did chores, was chastised with a razor strop, attended church twice a week, and learned to sing only such acceptable songs as “Jesus Loves Me.” She was also conscientiously reminded that the Bolenders were not her real parents whenever she hopefully referred to them as Ma and Pa. In the new white bungalow, she lived with her real mother for the first time. The fun-loving English couple taught her to juggle and dance, to sing many popular songs, and to speak without the working-class “ain’ts” and “it don’ts” of her early years. The white piano had the added glamour of having once belonged to Fredric March. This shy little girl was encouraged to talk, to sing, and to emerge from her quiet shell.

  Most magically of all, Norma Jeane discovered the movies. Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre was nearby, and children were admitted to this exotic palace for only a dime. It was a cheap baby-sitter that eased the busy schedules of Gladys and the English couple. Soon the movies were Norma Jeane’s passion: a daydreaming refuge from her past, from the shy inferiority she still felt with other children at school, and from her mother’s occasional moodiness.

  The next year was a more carefree time than Norma Jeane had ever known. She discovered Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and all the shimmering giants of the fantastic screen. She especially loved musicals, and would sit through them over and over again, sometimes missing dinner. Aside from Clark Gable, who reminded her of her father’s photograph (and who she sometimes told other children was her father), she loved the blonde and glamorous Jean Harlow. Years later, Anita Loos, who wrote scripts for Harlow and had met Monroe, saw so much of Harlow in Marilyn’s screen presence that she felt it could not have been an accident.

  The little white bungalow with white furniture and the white piano came to symbolize a new freedom and happiness to Norma Jeane. White would remain her favorite color—used for houses, rooms, and costumes in her most important films—for the rest of her life.

  But this idyll was brief. Working double shifts to pay the bills, keeping up the household and a cheerful face for her daughter had put an extra strain on Gladys. She could feel the depressions she feared so much coming back. In fact, she had rented the whole house to the English couple, with only two rooms reserved for herself and Norma Jeane, so that her daughter would have a home even if those depressions kept Gladys from functioning. As her private terrors increased, she tried to conceal them by working the night shift and staying away from home even on weekends.

  One rainy morning in January 1934, Gladys called the lab to say she was not able to work. She finally had become immobilized in her own interior world. On the advice of Gladys’s friend and coworker, Grace McKee—the Aunt Grace who soon would become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian—the English couple called an ambulance to rescue Gladys from the staircase where she had hidden herself, hysterical and inconsolable. Attendants forcibly removed her and strapped her to a stretcher. She was taken first to the nearby hospital where her daughter had been born, then to the same mental hospital where her own mother, the beautiful Delia Monroe, had died of a manic seizure barely two years after Norma Jeane’s birth. Except for brief periods, Gladys would not emerge from an institution for the rest of her daughter’s life.

  The seven-year-old Norma Jeane came home from school to find her mother “gone to hospital for a while,” as the English couple gently put it. The little girl seemed almost resigned, as if she had known this time of freedom could not last. As Gladys had requested, the couple kept her with them. They sold some of the furniture to help maintain mortgage payments as long as they could; then moved to furnished rooms when they finally had to let the expensive house go. Grace McKee also helped pay Norma Jeane’s expenses, a generous gesture toward a little girl who was only the daughter of a friend, but a year later, the makeshift arrangement came to a halt. The English couple could not find enough work in movies, and had to return home.

  According to the detailed research by Guiles in Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jeane’s path to the orphanage wasn’t as direct as her own foreshortened memory of it. In addition to that year with the English couple, there were a few more months with another family found by Grace McKee. They were drawn to this quiet, uncertain, love-hungry eight-year-old who was close to their own daughter’s age, and wanted to adopt her before moving to New Orleans. There was also a former coworker of Gladys’s at the lab who was willing to adopt Norma Jeane and keep her in California where she could visit her mother. But the idea of legally giving up her third and last child, the only family she had left, only increased Gladys’s depression. From the hospital, she refused the legal permission necessary for either adoption. She could neither take care of Norma Jeane nor bear to let her go.

  On September 13, 1935, Grace, who was now Norma Jeane’s legal guardian, took the nine-year-old girl on that terrifying, long-remembered trip to the orphanage. To a grown-up, it may have seemed a sad but only temporary solution. To a little girl, it loomed as the indefinite, doom-struck future. After six years of having to be reminded by the Bolenders that her real mother was the red-haired lady she saw on weekends, and then learning from that lady that her father was only a photograph, after less than a year of living with her mother, followed by nearly two years with two other temporary “families,” her tenuous sense of belonging anywhere collapsed.

  In later years, when the famous Marilyn Monroe talked about her painful childhood, the Bolenders would protest that she had been well cared for, that they had treated her as they did their own adopted son who was close to her own age. The orphanage where she felt so deprived and abandoned would point out that children there were regarded as members of a big family, with no more regimentation or deprivation than any other family that size. Many of Marilyn Monroe’s biographers would accuse her of lying about her childhood suffering because she sometimes exaggerated facts: for instance, that she had been in “a dozen” foster homes, when the reality was a half dozen; or that her mother’s nervous breakdown had occurred when she was only five, as she had told Barris, instead of the reality, seven; or that she had hidden Gladys’s life in a mental institution by telling reporters for the first few years of her Hollywood starlet days that her mother was dead. Even Jim Dougherty, who had reason to know and believe Norma Jeane’s family abandonment, objected in his book, The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe, to the idea that Norma Jeane had been deprived. The Dougherty family had lived in a tent during the Depression, and his wife’s childhood in foster homes seemed to him better fed and better housed than his own had been.

  But of all Marilyn’s stories of her early years, the account of rape by an elderly boarder when she was eight was most disbelieved. Guiles, the careful researcher, discounted the story because he could not find one of Norma Jeane’s foster families who also ran a boardinghouse. On the other hand, he did support through interviews the fact that Aunt Grace’s husband, Doc Goddard, once stumbled drunk into the teenage Norma Jeane’s bedroom, and terrified her by sitting on the bed and giving her what Guiles described as a “French kiss.”
Though that episode took place several years later than Marilyn’s account of a rape, Guiles allows that she might have disguised her attacker if he was indeed married to the woman who was her legal guardian. Neither he nor other biographers pursued the possibility of the Englishman, though he and his wife could have been considered boarders in the white bungalow, and Norma Jeane was then an eight-year-old. In many cases, the tendency to disbelieve Marilyn’s story is reinforced by Jim Dougherty’s remembrance of his sixteen-year-old bride as a technical virgin, and thus someone who could not have been raped. Norman Mailer flatly asserts that her virginity as a bride makes the story of her childhood rape impossible. He seems unaware of the statistics that show many rapes, especially those of very young children, consist of oral and other sexual humiliations, not intercourse. Dougherty and Mailer especially seem to depend only on their own imaginations of what a rape should be.

  In any case, childhood memories are prisms, not panes of glass. Details may loom large in the eyes of our smaller selves, while important events lie beyond our vision or understanding. Most of what Marilyn told Barris and other reporters differs in detail but is consistent in emotion. What impressed friends and lovers who actually listened to her—as opposed to biographers like Mailer and Guiles who never met her—was her emotional honesty. Facts may have been forgotten, or exaggerated to account for strong feelings, but Marilyn remained true to her memories of Norma Jeane’s emotional experience. From Arthur Miller and from friends, there comes a sense that, even when she tried to pretend an emotion—for instance, to be confident or gay when she did not feel it—some underlying honesty still gave her away. Whatever its facts, her memory of being sexually humiliated as a child, and then of being humiliated again by disbelief, seemed too full of pain to be artificial. Certainly, the stammering she attributed to that trauma was real.