One of her tragedies may have been growing up in a time when Freudian theory had convinced many people (perhaps Marilyn’s own later psychiatrists) that female children wanted and so fantasized rape by fathers or father figures. It was also a time when the Depression had focused American attention more on the physical suffering of children who lacked food and shelter than on the damage caused by emotional neglect. As a result, children’s sexual testimony largely was disbelieved, and sincere efforts to help children were focused on providing nutrition, safety, and shelter.
During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself—all those turn out to be as important to a child’s development as all but the most basic food and shelter.
It was exactly these emotional basics that Norma Jeane lacked. And she was deprived of them in the earliest years of her life, when the resulting damage to a sense of self is most difficult to repair.
Once she found her first brief but never-forgotten taste of unconditional love with her beloved Aunt Ana, Marilyn’s memory seems to have exaggerated the time that it lasted, as if this rare and bright light in her life had made the shadows around it disappear.
In fact, she was not taken directly to Aunt Ana’s house from the orphanage, as she told Barris. In late June 1937, when Aunt Grace made good on her promise of rescue, she took the eleven-year-old Norma Jeane to live with a husband and wife in Compton who ran a small business out of their home. Grace had married Doc Goddard, a divorced man ten years younger than she was, while Norma Jeane was in the orphanage. His three children were living with them, and Grace did not feel she could also take in Norma Jeane.
For a long summer, Norma Jeane helped her new “mother” in Compton load and deliver cartons to small stores throughout Los Angeles County. When she complained to her Aunt Grace that she was spending all her time riding in her new family’s battered car, Aunt Grace found her another home with a couple who made their meager living by keeping several other “county children.” There, an alcoholic husband presented another problem of instability. Grace was finally forced to take Norma Jeane into her own home, and into the bedroom of her stepdaughter, who was two years younger than Norma Jeane. She entered junior high a term behind her classmates. The irregularity of Norma Jeane’s life had caused her to fall back in school. In the seventh grade, but already tall and well developed, she became even more self-conscious.
But Norma Jeane was befriended by an aunt of Grace McKee Goddard’s. Her name was Ana Lower. Though she lived some distance away, Norma Jeane began spending every Sunday with this woman in her early sixties, accompanying her to Christian Science services, and eagerly drinking in her philosophy and affection. Though Ana Lower had never married or had children, she instinctively seemed to understand the support Norma Jeane needed, and to nurture the child inside this teenager who looked so deceptively mature.
In fact, Norma Jeane was a young girl who might not betray her presence in a room by so much as a cough, and so was called “Mouse” by the Goddards; yet in junior high school she found herself the object of fervent male attention. For all her “precocious curves,” as Marilyn later wrote, “I was as unsensual as a fossil. But I seemed to affect people quite otherwise.” Norma Jeane’s refuge was Aunt Ana’s house or the movies. At the Goddards’, she would close herself into her bedroom alone, and act out all the parts in any movie she had just seen. With the encouragement first of the orphanage matron, then of Aunt Grace, she also had begun experimenting with makeup that reminded her of the movies, but increased her oddly grown-up looks.
It was into this same bedroom that the drunken six-foot-two-inch Doc Goddard barged one evening, bestowing the “French kiss” for which Guiles reported he was sorry when sober. But this treatment from a man Norma Jeane had regarded as a substitute father and called Daddy was shocking enough to confide in Aunt Ana. Whatever the discussion with Grace and her husband, Aunt Ana then decided to take the fourteen-year-old into her own home.
Norma Jeane spent only a little more than a year living with Aunt Ana in the top half of a modest two-family house, but she had a loving, focused presence in her life for the first time. She was still a county child with public-support checks paying for her keep, her legal guardian was still Aunt Grace, and her own mother was still in a mental hospital, but Norma Jeane would remember this time as one of the happiest, and Aunt Ana as her most important influence, for the rest of her life.
This happy period was cut short when Doc Goddard was about to move his family to West Virginia, and Aunt Grace began to look for an alternative for Norma Jeane. Whether Grace’s motive was keeping her ten-years-younger husband from straying, protecting Norma Jeane, honoring her friend Gladys’s desire to have her daughter nearby, or all three, she never proposed taking the fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane with them. Whether Aunt Ana was persuaded by Grace’s arguments that Norma Jeane needed the protection of marriage, or by her own feeling of being too old to take over the responsibility of legal guardianship for a teenager, she didn’t stop Grace’s new plan. In later life, Marilyn never blamed Aunt Ana for arranging her teenage marriage—but she did blame Aunt Grace.
After suggesting the marriage to the Dougherty family, with whom the twenty-year-old Jim was still living—and after a few dates between Jim and Norma Jeane—Aunt Grace instructed the teenager to explain her illegitimacy to Jim in case this still shameful status was a bar to the marriage. It was not; but later, Marilyn said this was the first time she had been sure that her father and mother were not married, or known that the name Mortensen on her own birth certificate belonged to her mother’s second husband.
Before leaving for West Virginia, Aunt Grace arranged to have the wedding performed in the home of friends. The winding staircase in their front hall would make the ceremony “just like in the movies,” she assured Norma Jeane. With both this guardian and her mother absent, and no known father in sight, it was Ana Lower who gave her “niece” away. Marilyn had exaggerated when she recalled “six mothers weeping” at her wedding, but the Bolenders did come for the occasion. It was the last time Norma Jeane would ever see them. The marriage ceremony was conducted by a minister of the Christian Church who had taught Jim to hunt and shoot when he was a boy.
Having been born “Mortensen,” and gone to school as “Baker,” she was now “Norma Jeane Dougherty.” Later she would revert on occasion to “Baker,” the name of her mother’s first husband; and she also used “Jean Norman,” at the suggestion of her modeling agency. Later still, as a starlet, she would choose “Monroe” for its alliteration with the studio-chosen first name of “Marilyn.” Ironically, she became famous with the family name of both her maternal grandmother and her mother, whose shared fate of desertion by men and depression would be continued to the third generation.
In early 1946, Gladys called Grace Goddard, who had returned with her husband to California, to say that she would like to try living outside an institution again. It was decided that mother and daughter could live together in the downstairs apartment of Ana Lower’s house—Jim Dougherty was away at sea. The nineteen-year-old Norma Jeane was making her living as a model in the absence of her husband, and trying to become a starlet.
They slept in the same bed, and Gladys tried to make herself useful to her daughter by looking after the small apartment, answering the phone, and taking messages of modeling assignments and studio casting calls. Once, she even got pai
nstakingly dressed in a white dress, white shoes, and a new picture hat to make a surprise call on Emmeline Snively, whose modeling agency she believed had rescued her daughter. After fervently discussing Norma Jeane’s career with the astonished Miss Snively, Gladys shook her hand and said, “I only came so I could thank you personally for what you’ve been doing for Norma Jeane. You’ve given her a whole new life.”
But that was probably one of Gladys’s few outings on her own. It was hard for the long-institutionalized Gladys to be alone. Norma Jeane was gone from the apartment most of the day. When she decided to move out of the apartment and into the Studio Club, a rooming house for starlets, Gladys’s only company was the elderly Aunt Ana who lived upstairs. Gradually, she even stopped going upstairs.
And it must have been hard for Norma Jeane, too. There was the pressure on her starlet’s small salary of helping to support her mother, and the occasional shopping sprees that Gladys’s mood swings produced. Before her mother’s arrival her small earnings had barely paid for her own food and professional expenses, and Dougherty had angrily cut off her allotment as soon as she wrote him about a divorce. There were also fearful memories. “I kept hearing the terrible noise on the stairs and my mother screaming and laughing as they led her out of the home she had tried to build for me,” Marilyn later said. Each time she came home to that apartment, she must have worried about what she would find.
However, when Norma Jeane moved into the Studio Club, Gladys seemed to accept this as necessary to her daughter’s career. Dougherty had met his mother-in-law for the first time earlier that year when he was on leave. In August he saw her again when he met Norma Jeane at the apartment instead of the Studio Club to discuss signing the divorce papers. If the dissolution of this marriage had not been already inevitable on personal grounds, Gladys seemed to approve it as a work necessity. Miss Snively had made clear that movie studios did not want to hire a starlet who was married and might waste their investment by getting pregnant.
Norma Jeane sometimes stopped by to see her mother between studio appointments, and was alarmed that Gladys was withdrawing more and more into one of her refuges: an obsession with religion.
After just seven months of living outside an institution, Gladys asked the hospital to take her back. Norma Jeane was relieved. She was free now to begin a new life. This ghost from her childhood, a ghost whose fate she feared she would share, has outlived her by many years. First Marilyn, and then money left in Marilyn’s will, have supported Gladys in and out of institutions; she was never to live an independent life again.
In her notes for an autobiography, Marilyn recalled being told to say “Mama” to “a pretty woman who never smiled” and who visited her at the Bolenders’. “I’d seen her often before, but I hadn’t quite known who she was.
“When I said, ‘Hello mama,’ this time, she stared at me. She had never kissed me or held me in her arms or hardly spoken to me. I didn’t know anything about her then, but a few years later I learned a number of things.
“When I think of her now, my heart hurts twice as much as it used to when I was a little girl. It hurts me for both of us.”
In 1963, the year after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Dr. W. Hugh Missildine, a psychiatrist, published a book called Your Inner Child of the Past. It was an analysis of adult emotional problems based on his nine years as director of the Children’s Mental Health Center in Columbus, Ohio. Without the artificial language or gender-based theories of Freud, he simply wrote what he had concluded from observation.
He believed that the child we used to be lives on inside us. It is difficult for us to change that child’s patterns because they feel like “home.” Recognizing this compelling self of the past can help to keep us from repeating history. Otherwise, we may continue to treat ourselves—and others—as that child was once treated. At worst, such repetition is destructive. Even at best, we are following a pattern we did not choose for ourselves.
In identifying common excesses experienced by children, and so reported by them as adults, he used postwar studies on the damage caused by emotional neglect—damage that can occur even among the well-to-do without physical neglect. One chapter outlined the characteristics of an adult who is still controlled by the neglected child inside. Here is Missildine’s “Index of Suspicion” for such an adult. He could almost be speaking about and to Marilyn:
If you have difficulty in feeling close to others and in “belonging” to a group, drift in and out of relationships casually because people do not seem to mean much to you, if you feel you lack an identity of your own, suffer intensely from anxiety and loneliness and yet keep people at a distance, you should suspect neglect as the troublemaking pathogenic factor in your childhood. An additional clue suggesting neglect: prolonged separation from your parents, particularly your mother, by death, divorce, hospitalization or because of parental activities and interests.
Missildine described other common characteristics of such women, as well as men, though using the generic “he” of the day:
The childhood of persons who suffered from neglect usually reveals a father who somehow wasn’t a father and a mother who somehow wasn’t a mother. Thus, in adult life, the neglected “child of the past” maintains the security of this familiar emptiness… The relationships of persons who suffered from neglect in child hood resemble those of an actor to his audience. In childhood such a person may have discovered that he could win… momentary attention and love, through his achievements… In such circumstances a child learns to expect nothing but applause. More than momentary warmth and love do not exist… Closeness threatens the security of neglect on which his “child of the past” has been nourished. To such a person, closeness is frightening, binding and entrapping…
Superficially, the famous movie star with her numerous conquests and marriages, the world statesman and his lonely, melancholy wisdom, and the woman whose life consists of serving others do not seem to have been particularly neglected… Yet often they are deeply unhappy in their continuing self-neglect…
… It is not at all unusual for the individual who has suffered the loss of a parent for any reason… to create in his childhood fantasies a highly idealized parent. In his imagination this idealized and loving parent would correct all the difficulties he encounters, would appreciate his efforts, indulge him endlessly…
However, if continued into adolescence and adult life, the idealized fantasy parent may prevent formation of close relationships with members of the opposite sex… A girl who has lost her father may idealize him and reject men who might make excellent marriage partners because she feels they are lacking in the finer qualities of a gentleman and a scholar.
… Most individuals who suffered from neglect in childhood… actively seek social participation, sexual love and affection—“can’t get enough of it,” as one such girl declared. Once they have overcome an initial timidity, they may plunge into any relationship that seems to promise companionship, affection, closeness or excitement.
The lack of mothering in childhood tends to dominate the sexual activities… Such a person is interested in and wants tender, mothering love—not sexuality—and tends to convert the partner into a mothering figure…
The inability of the person who has suffered from neglect in childhood to contribute much emotionally to a relationship often causes its disintegration. Its maintenance is left to the other partner—and he tends to move off because he is tired of the burden…
Earlier in the work, Missildine noted:
Often the person whose childhood has been scarred by neglect becomes expert in exploiting others… He knows just how to stimulate interest and sympathy in himself. And he will demand love and affection, constant attention and emotional support… But this is a one-way street…
… Many such people, particularly women, are drawn into theatrical and movie work because, in this work and atmosphere, they can create a fantasy identity. Their inner feelings about themselves are so despairing tha
t they do not feel they can pay attention to these feelings. As one such woman once put it: “When you’re a nobody, the only way to be somebody is to be somebody else.”
As you read and think about Marilyn, remember Norma Jeane.
Work and Money, Sex and Politics
I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.
—Marilyn Monroe
THAT FAMOUS DICTUM OF Marilyn’s was quoted to Pete Martin, a journalist writing a book about her in the 1950s, by a man in the legal department of Twentieth Century-Fox. In advising her on a new contract she was bargaining for, he had suggested that she sign it in the existing tax year rather than waiting until the following one, thus saving herself money—and she refused.
Marilyn was obsessed with her career, with becoming a good actress as well as a famous movie star, but she cared very little about money and possessions. She wanted not power but love. Indeed, she sometimes acted against her own financial self-interest, and showed concern for business by forming her own production company only when she feared she was being exploited by Hollywood. To the end, her life-style and habits were fairly simple.
That she often ignored her own security was more than just the neglected Norma Jeane recreating a feeling of “home” by treating herself as she had been treated. It was also part of her emotional connection to ordinary people like those of her childhood—working-class families who were struggling through the Depression, people for whom poverty was no shame and the chance to work hard was a gift.
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