Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  Ida was a severe-looking woman with a long face, prominent nose, and coal-black haphazardly cropped hair. The Bolenders were members of the Unified Pentecostal Church. Della Monroe was also a member of this church, and they had Norma Jeane baptized at the church by Aimee Semple McPherson, the flamboyant and popular evangelist.

  These early years were confusing for Norma Jeane. She was surrounded by children—her foster brothers and sisters—but often these kids came and went. Norma Jeane became particularly close to a boy named Lester, who was born only a couple of months after her. Lester and Norma Jeane resembled each other, shared a bedroom, and became so inseparable that they were referred to as “the twins.” Ida often dressed them in matching outfits.

  The Bolenders adopted Lester and later said they seriously considered adopting Norma Jeane as well, but for one reason or another they never did.*

  * * *

  When Norma Jeane was one, Della Monroe had a mental snap and broke into the Bolender house looking for her granddaughter. Ranting and hallucinating, she elbowed through the glass of the front door. Muttering about sin and family, she found Norma Jeane slumbering in her bed and began to smother the child by pressing a pillow onto her face. In a fit of religious zeal, she was trying to destroy her daughter’s “sin.” Ida rushed in and saved Norma Jeane. The police were called, and a screeching, babbling Della was hauled out.

  Della was taken to Norwalk State Hospital, where she was plagued by hallucinations and delirium. She died at the hospital a month later. The death certificate lists the cause of death as myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle, with “Manic Depressive Psychosis” being a contributing factor.

  * * *

  “We treated her as our own child,” Ida Bolender said in 1966, “because we loved her.” By the standards of the era, her years with the Bolenders were not a time of extreme abuse toward Norma Jeane. But the little girl did not feel secure or at ease. Unfortunately for her, the Bolenders were the wrong kind of caretakers for the inquisitive, sensitive, imaginative child, who would ask questions like “Who is God?” “Where does He live?” And “How many people are there in the world?” In conjunction with their love, they were strict disciplinarians: Rules. Regulations. Schedules. Judgments.

  They raised her in a way they considered correct. There is no evidence that they were intentionally cruel to Norma Jeane. She was well dressed (Ida often made the children’s clothes) and well fed (most of the food came from their farm). But to her they were “terribly strict. They didn’t mean any harm—it was their religion,” Marilyn said. “They brought me up harshly and corrected me in a way they never should have: with a leather strap.”

  The Bolenders were certainly stern, but they were believed to be decent people. They felt they were doing what was best for Norma Jeane. “I was hard on her for her own good,” Ida would reason. Still, although she may have needed their guardianship, she didn’t feel their affection.

  Ida and Wayne Bolender have been described as being Pentecostals, Baptists, or Catholics. No one denies that they were extremely religious. Norma Jeane loved to playact, and her first desire was to be an actress when she grew up. Ida, however, was strongly against it, sternly admonishing the child that her ambition was sinful. Norma Jeane was not permitted to go to the movies. Ida vehemently warned the child, “If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies, do you know what would happen? You’d burn along with all the bad people. We’re churchgoers, not moviegoers.”

  Ida also denounced the sin of vanity. She railed against women who took time over their appearance or who seemed to be boastful about their looks. To Ida an abundance of pride was the devil’s work.

  With her stringent way of viewing all behavior through her religion, Aunt Ida complicated Norma Jeane’s feelings of what was right and wrong. Things that felt natural to her blurred with the idea of being sinful, ashamed, and wrong. For example, Ida apparently caught Norma Jeane involved in childhood sex play, either involving touching herself or perhaps exploring with her foster brother Lester. To Aunt Ida this was an abomination, interest in the human body was sinful.* Without explanation, Norma Jeane was made to be “afraid and ashamed” of her genitals.

  In response to the guilt she was forced to feel, Norma Jeane developed an overpowering fantasy while attending church. She “wanted desperately to stand up naked for God and everyone else to see.” She recalled: “I had to clench my teeth and sit on my hands to keep myself from undressing. Sometimes I had to pray hard and beg God to stop me from taking my clothes off.”

  Feeling that there was nothing wrong in her behavior, in her dreams she was naked. Norma Jeane envisioned herself entering the church “wearing a hoop-skirt with nothing under it. The people would be lying on their backs in the church aisle, and I would step over them and they would look up at me.” The impulse to appear naked in her dreams had no sense of sin about it. Imagining people looking at her made Norma Jeane feel less lonely.

  * * *

  Norma Jeane never felt as if she belonged, and she was uncertain if she was loved. She was a very bright, intuitive little girl. She had a strong sense of people, places, and things. She understood the structure of a family, and learned early on that she really wasn’t part of one. When she was very young she would call every woman she’d see “Mama.” “There’s a mama!” she would exclaim. When she saw a man she’d say, “There’s a daddy.”

  One morning when Norma Jeane was three, while Ida was giving her a bath, Norma Jeane called her “Mama.”

  “I’m not your mother!” Ida said. “The woman who comes here with the red hair—she’s your mother. Don’t call me ‘mother’ anymore. Call me Aunt Ida.”

  Norma Jeane was stung and confused—but the one she was really concerned about was Ida’s husband, Wayne. This was the man she thought was her father. Norma Jeane spent her life obsessed with a father figure. “But he’s my daddy,” the child said, panicking, pointing to Wayne Bolender.

  “No,” Ida replied. “You call him Uncle Wayne.”

  It was a moment she would always remember. It hurt her profoundly. Why didn’t she belong? Why didn’t she live with her mother? Why couldn’t she have a daddy?*

  Something in her broke. At a very early age she had a sense of being different, of belonging to no one. For Norma Jeane this was a defining moment—very damaging to her sensitive heart, to her fragile sensibilities.

  Learning that the woman with the red hair was her mother came as quite a shock. She knew of the woman, but she wasn’t aware that she was her mother. Gladys did try to visit Norma Jeane at the Bolenders’ on some weekends, but her appearances there were sporadic. Anyway, the little girl did not relish these visits. She recognized her mother as “a pretty woman who never smiled.” The first time Norma Jeane said, “Hello, Mama,” Gladys stared at her daughter. Even after she knew she was her mother, the woman with the red hair remained elusive and a little scary to Norma Jeane. There was something strange about her: Silent. Tense. Detached.

  Gladys, like her mother, Della, was a weird mixture of modesty and religion with hedonistic passions. During the times she led a promiscuous life, Gladys always had the consequences of sin in the back of her mind. Gladys and Della chased men, got married, divorced, abandoned children, went on the hunt for a new man, and then went to church on Sunday.

  On some occasions her mother would have Norma Jeane stay over at her place for the evening. By this time Gladys was living alone in a small apartment. Marilyn would remember hiding in Gladys’s closet, frightened of her mother. She tried to be as quiet as possible, to disappear, to vanish within the wardrobe. She remembered that at night, when she was reading a book, her mother would complain, “Norma, must you turn those pages so loudly?” Even the sound of a page turning frazzled and unnerved her.

  For Norma Jeane there was never a feeling of stability or permanence. Everyone and everything was not what it seemed; what was familiar and safe was actually strange and transitory and could be
taken away from her at any moment. These feelings were reinforced again and again.

  Shortly before she was seven, a small black-and-white dog followed Wayne Bolender home from work. Norma Jeane loved animals, and the Bolenders allowed her to keep the rambunctious mutt, which she named Tippy. Foster siblings remembered Norma Jeane playing with the dog for many happy hours.

  One day Norma Jeane returned from school and found Tippy’s bloody corpse next to a garden hoe. A neighbor, infuriated by the dog’s incessant barking, had cut the dog in half. This was another devastating event. Ultrasensitive from her earliest years, Norma Jeane could not bear to see anything die. (When Marilyn Monroe was thirty-five years old, she was contracted to act in Something’s Got to Give, a comedy about a woman who is reunited with her family—including the family dog—after an absence of five years. Marilyn requested that the dog in the script be named Tippy. By then a Method actress, she knew that saying the name of her beloved childhood pet would stir up intense emotions that would enhance her performance.)

  The loss of Tippy was so overwhelming to Norma Jeane that the Bolenders grew alarmed at the extent of her grief. At a loss what else to do, they called Gladys. Visiting the farm to console Norma Jeane over the death of her pet brought out maternal feelings in Gladys. Observing the living situation, she no longer felt comfortable with the strict, confining way the Bolenders were raising her daughter. She recognized that Norma Jeane was being stifled. She saw the girl’s sullenness, her uncertainty, her inability to really connect with others. Norma Jeane, she felt, needed to be exposed to the real world. She announced to the Bolenders her intentions to take back her daughter, and although they didn’t approve, they were powerless to do anything about it. Norma Jeane would have to go.

  The idea of leaving the only home she had known to be with this puzzling red-haired woman was terrifying to Norma Jeane. The day in late June 1933, when Gladys arrived to pick up Norma Jeane and collect her things, the child was found cowering in a closet.

  THREE

  BE A GOOD GIRL

  Gladys took Norma Jeane to live with her in her small apartment near the Hollywood Bowl, not far from Consolidated Film Industries. Very soon, however, she began doubting her ability to care for a child. Reality set in. Gladys quickly realized that she had rushed into her decision. The apartment was too small. She was working full-time. Mother and daughter were virtual strangers.

  One day Gladys showed Norma Jeane a gold-framed photograph of Charles Stanley Gifford, explaining, “This is your father.” Norma Jeane was enthralled by the handsome man staring from the photo with piercing eyes and a thin mustache, rakishly wearing a fedora and a trench coat with the collar turned up. He was a mystery, a fantasy. To Norma Jeane her mother was weird and distant. It was the man in the photo to whom she related. She could project onto him everything she needed at the time. It was her father who might swoop in at any moment, recognize her sadness and confusion, and rescue her. Norma Jeane would spend a lifetime looking for this man in others, wanting to know him, loving him, passionately wanting him to love her back.*

  * * *

  Gladys became aware that she wasn’t acting like a mother toward Norma Jean. Coworkers who mostly knew Gladys to be fun loving—always ready with a joke—began to notice that each day under the pressure of caring for her daughter, she was becoming more sullen and depressed.

  Gladys turned to her friend Grace McKee for advice. Grace still had tremendous influence in all of Gladys’s decision making and was well aware of her fragile, unbalanced phases. Grace was a practical, take-charge person. She did everything in her power to keep Gladys functioning. Grace convinced Gladys that living with Norma Jeane was possible—it was the tiny apartment that was the problem.

  Gladys agreed. If only she had a house, then she could begin to make it a home. But while Gladys concentrated on finding a suitable place, Norma Jeane would have to live elsewhere. Grace suggested the child live with a theatrical couple from England, the Atkinsons, who were now in Hollywood. Both Grace and Gladys were friends with “the English couple,” and so the decision was made that Norma Jeane could board with them.

  George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie, all worked on the fringes of the movie business but kept busy making a living in extra work and bit parts. Living with the Atkinsons introduced Norma Jeane to an entire new world. The couple smoked, drank, and liked to laugh, play cards, and have a good time. They gave Norma Jeane a grass skirt and taught her how to dance the hula, to juggle oranges, and to throw knives. She found them “happy, jolly, and carefree.” It was confusing for Norma Jeane because she had been taught by the Bolenders that this kind of behavior was sinful. With her first foster family she hadn’t even been allowed to sing and dance.

  What puzzled her more is that the Atkinsons were kind to her. She liked them. Ideas of what was sinful and what was fun, what was good and what was bad, who was nice and who was evil, were all being jumbled in Norma Jeane’s head. She found herself praying for them before going to bed.

  * * *

  Against tremendous odds, Gladys managed to put a down payment on a house at 6812 Arbol Drive, near the Hollywood Bowl. It was not a modest house—it had six rooms, including four bedrooms, a large living room with a fireplace, and a back porch. She used all of her savings and, in a tremendous display of determination, secured a loan from the New Deal Home Owners Loan Corporation. The purchase was an astonishing accomplishment for a single working woman in 1933.

  In a manic phase of encouragement, Gladys bought furniture at auction—attempting to make the house the cozy domicile she had envisioned. Especially meaningful to her was a baby grand piano that had been owned by the actor Fredric March.*

  Gladys invited the Atkinsons to board with them. Gladys and Norma Jeane would have two rooms, the Atkinsons would take the other two bedrooms, and the rest of the space would be shared.

  Unfortunately the pressure of taking responsibility for her daughter, buying a new home, and making a complete life change was too much for Gladys’s already tenuous state of mind. The cracks in her stability started to show almost immediately.

  If the stress of all these life changes weren’t enough pressure on Gladys, two events crashed through any hopes she had for a peaceful life. In August she received word that her son, Jack, her firstborn child, had died of a kidney infection at the age of fifteen. This brought to the forefront her earlier failure as a mother.

  The second bit of news came in a phone call from a cousin who informed her that her maternal grandfather, Tilford Marion Hogan, had gone mad and hanged himself at the age of eighty-two in Linn County, Missouri. Her mother and father had mental problems; now she learned that her grandfather had suffered the same fate. She was self-aware enough to know that she herself had always been unstable. The recent drastic changes she had made to her life had left her shaky and unsure. After three months of living in the house, Gladys fell apart.

  Like her mother, Gladys started having hallucinations. She would lie on the sofa in the living room kicking and screaming that someone was coming down the stairs to murder her.

  Norma Jeane witnessed her mother’s final break with reality. She was having breakfast with the Atkinsons in the kitchen when Gladys threw herself down the staircase—seemingly to try to inflict the maximum amount of damage on herself, with frightening bangs and thuds as she hit each step.

  Atkinson went to investigate. “Is it my mother?” Norma Jeane asked. “Yes,” he said. “But you can’t see her. Just stay in the kitchen like a good little girl. She’s all right. Noting serious.” But Norma Jeane saw her mother on her feet, screaming and laughing. An ambulance was called, and two men wrestled with her screaming, out-of-control mother. Finally they subdued Gladys and took her away. She was taken to Los Angeles County General Hospital and later transferred to Norwalk Mental Hospital.

  Gladys’s doctors diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. The chief medical officer’s report states: “Her illnesses have been charact
erized by (1) preoccupation with religion at times, and (2) at other times deep depression and agitation. This appears to be a chronic state.”

  * * *

  Grace decided to let Norma Jeane continue living with the Atkinsons until definite decisions could be made regarding the newly purchased house. Because they were busy at the movie studio all day, in the early mornings the Atkinsons dropped her off on Hollywood Boulevard, where two movie theaters—Grauman’s Chinese and the Egyptian—became her day care. From morning to night in the summer Norma Jeane sat in the front row, watching the feature again and again. Her own world was gloomy and grim—here she found laughter, adventure, music, and love.

  It was a solitary world, one that existed alone in darkness, but her imagination opened and expanded with regular visits to the movies—which now were not considered sinful but a glorious, magical part of life.

  A year after Gladys was committed, Grace had the court declare her an “insane incompetent,” and became her legal guardian. This also meant that she would make the decisions on what would happen to Norma Jeane. In the fall of 1934, with Grace now in control of Gladys’s estate, the Arbol Drive house was put up for sale. She auctioned off the furniture to cover expenses. The Atkinsons moved to a new house. Norma Jeane was not their legal responsibility, and they did not take her to live with them. It was once again necessary to find her a place to live.

  Although there is no doubt that Grace McKee loved and cared about Norma Jeane in her way, her own life and happiness as a divorced single woman still came first. Approaching forty, she was a working woman and was still fascinated by the world of movie stars and acting. Although she would eventually petition the courts to become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian, she didn’t want the full-time responsibility of a seven-year-old. It was much easier to be a part-time mother and a sort of agent-in-waiting, until the time Norma Jeane was old enough to become a girlfriend who could really help Grace fulfill her Hollywood dreams.