Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  Recently Grace had become obsessed with the sensational twenty-two-year-old screen goddess Jean Harlow. Known as the “Platinum Blonde” and the “Blonde Bombshell,” Harlow was the biggest female star in the world. Although her private life was chaotic and troubled, she represented the sparkling life of beauty and fame that Grace had dreamed of. Grace was too old to become Jean Harlow—but Norma Jeane wasn’t.

  “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane,” Grace would say to her. “You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big. You’re going to be a movie star. Oh, I feel it in my bones.”

  In 1933 Harlow had starred opposite Clark Gable in the steamy melodrama Red Dust. It was probably Grace who took Norma Jeane to see Harlow films, and the actress became the child’s favorite star, too. Norma Jeane also began to fantasize that the handsome and charismatic Clark Gable was her father—he resembled the man in the photograph.

  Norma Jeane realized that Grace’s feelings were based more on who she would become rather than who she was. But it was attention, which she was starved for, and it represented a kind of love.

  Meanwhile Grace shuffled her ward here and there, always looking for someone who might adopt her, take her in, or keep her for a while until some other arrangements could be made. Because of this the timeline in this period of Norma Jean’s life is chaotic and muddled.

  Grace first placed Norma Jeane with her sister and brother-in-law, Enid and Sam Knebelkamp. The couple cared for Norma Jeane for a period of time at the end of 1934.

  After the child’s brief stay with the Knebelkamps, Grace placed her in the home of Harvey and Elsie Giffen, a well-to-do couple who came to love the child. Their daughter was a good school friend of Norma Jeane’s, and her time there was happy. They wanted to adopt Norma Jeane, but they had plans to move to New Orleans, and neither Gladys nor Grace wanted her living so far away.

  When the Giffens moved, Grace approached Reginald Carroll and his wife to adopt Norma Jeane. Carroll had been Gladys’s friend and coworker, and he and his family lived in Los Angeles. This family was also willing to adopt Norma Jeane, but Grace said that Gladys would not allow it. According to her, Gladys still had hopes of getting well and raising Norma Jeane on her own.

  Just how many foster families* Norma Jeane stayed with is confusing because, as she later explained, she stayed in some homes only briefly. “It was quite a few,” she said. (Marilyn’s final count was ten, including an orphanage.)

  * * *

  It was somewhere in this disorganized, murky period that she was sexually abused for the first time. In her autobiography Marilyn revealed that she was living in a boardinghouse at the time. The wealthiest resident of the house was an elderly Englishman she called “Mr. Kimmel.” One evening this man called Norma Jeane into his room and locked the door. “Now you can’t get out,” he told her, as if beginning a game.

  He put his arms around her. She kicked and fought, but he was stronger. She couldn’t break away. All the time he was abusing her he kept whispering, “Be a good girl. Be a good girl.” It has never been disclosed what exactly Mr. Kimmel did to Norma Jeane. Sometimes it has been labeled “rape,” other times “fondling.”

  When he finally released her, Norma Jeane ran out to tell what had happened to the woman who, at the time, she was calling “aunt.”**

  “I want to tell you something about Mr. Kimmel,” she said. “He … he…”

  Before she could get it out, the woman slapped her across the face.

  “Don’t you say anything against Mr. Kimmel,” she snapped. “He’s a fine man! He’s my star boarder!” At that moment the man came out of his room and gave Norma Jeane a nickel, advising her to go buy some ice cream. She threw the coin back at him.

  The following week Norma Jeane was at a religious revival meeting with the people she was staying with. There she witnessed Mr. Kimmel “praying loudly and devoutly for God to forgive the sins of others.”

  Years after the incident, when Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star in Hollywood, she told the story to her ghostwriter, Ben Hecht—one of the foremost journalists and screenwriters of his day—when they were working on her autobiography in 1953. She is often credited with being one of the first major celebrities to speak publicly about sexual abuse.

  When talking of childhood trauma, Marilyn admittedly changed names and locations so that the story couldn’t be traced. “I don’t want to hurt people or hurt myself sometimes. We all want to protect ourselves,” she explained. But because she altered some details of the incident, some journalists dismiss it, concluding that it never happened. They also cast doubt on Marilyn’s sexual abuse because of her tendency to be a fantasist, prone to exaggerating her hardships in order to create sympathetic publicity in the early stages of her career.

  There is no tangible evidence that Marilyn Monroe was sexually abused as a child (of course that is true in many cases of childhood sexual abuse). Most of the evidence is in what can be pieced together from what she said publicly and privately. For example, she told an early mentor, Lucille Ryman Carroll, that she was raped when she was eight years old and that “she wasn’t a virgin” when she married.

  During this period Norma Jeane was moved around a great deal. As a little girl without parental figures, often unsupervised, living with an ever-changing cast of characters, it seems likely that she would have been targeted and that something happened to her—rape or fondling or even an inappropriate kiss—that ravaged her religion-based upbringing.*

  Privately Marilyn told her doctors and close friends that she was sexually abused by others—not just the elderly English boarder. She revealed to her poet friend, Norman Rosten, and foster sister, Bebe Goddard, that she was assaulted by her older cousin when she was sent to live with an aunt for a period of time. She also confessed to Lucille Ryman Carroll that at the age of eleven she was regularly brought “behind the barn” for sex with one of her foster parents.*

  Yet perhaps the most persuasive proof of Marilyn’s childhood sexual abuse is in her fractured psyche, her divided adult self. We know that she began to stutter after the first attack, and she struggled with stuttering throughout her lifetime. Much of her adult behavior has the characteristics of someone who has been sexually abused in childhood: Shame. Low self-esteem. Depression. Nightmares. Substance abuse. Suicidal thoughts.**

  Marilyn herself admittedly added to the mysteries of her childhood. “I’ve never told all about my life. No one would believe it all could have happened,” she said. “They’d say I was talking for publicity. It was pretty terrible.”

  Whatever happened to Norma Jeane, time and success did not blunt her pain.

  * * *

  When the last few placements did not work out—and she was running out of options—Grace at last took Norma Jeane to live with her. But in this crucial time period, something came along that once again changed Grace’s priorities. In the spring of 1935 Grace met Erwin “Doc” Goddard, a handsome southern man, ten years her junior. The six feet five inches tall Doc literally swept Grace off her feet. She finally had her Hollywood ending.

  Doc was a fun-loving, heavy-drinking man who lived feverishly in the moment. The affair was immediate and intense. Grace married Doc in Las Vegas on August 10, 1935. The couple moved into a modest home in Van Nuys. Grace brought Norma Jeane to live with them, but it only lasted for a month.

  If there had been any chance at all of Norma Jeane permanently living with the newly married couple, it was destroyed when Doc (whom she was instructed to call “Daddy”) entered the nine-year-old’s room one night and kissed and fondled her. Rather than take a closer look at her new husband’s character, Grace decided that Norma Jeane had to go. With no foster families immediately available, Grace made the decision to put Norma Jeane in an orphanage.

  * * *

  Without a doubt one of the most defining moments in the life of Marilyn Monroe was when she was committed to the Children’s Aid Society Orphanage in September 1935. It affirmed all her worst fears: She belo
nged to no one. For Norma Jeane, whose main desire was to fit in and be loved, this was the worst possible place. It was a place of shame.

  Marilyn would never forget that day. Grace methodically packed up her few belongings in a box: underwear, a dress, a coat, shoes and socks. Of course she realized that she was being sent away again—she was familiar with the process by now.

  Grace put the box in the car; Norma Jeane sat on the passenger side. After a very short drive, Grace pulled up in front of the building. “This is where you will live,” she told the girl. “I’ll come and see you as often as I can. They’ll take good care of you here—better than I can at home.”

  They stepped out of the car. Norma Jeane looked at the building and saw the sign: “Orphanage.” Then realization seized her and she began screaming, “No! No! I’m not an orphan!” She didn’t belong in this place. Somewhere her mother was alive. “I’m not an orphan!” she screamed again. A panicked Grace tried to pull her in by the arm. Norma Jeane planted her feet hard on the sidewalk and made herself so rigid that the staff had to come out and carry her in, still screaming.

  Norma Jeane couldn’t get over the fact that she’d been placed in an orphanage. She never got over it. While there, she learned to cover her real feelings very well. By the age of nine, she had already discovered that survival meant adapting quickly. When placed in a difficult situation she had to make do to survive. Hide inner turmoil. Do what was expected. Present a contented front.

  The days were regimented and went by in an orderly, joyless fashion. Norma Jeane did one thing after the other as they were scheduled. She made her bed, ate her meals, played sports, and participated in the orphanage activities. She was polite, quiet, well-behaved. She was tall for her age and considered skinny and awkward. Sometimes she was called “Norma Jeane, the human bean.” Her stutter was more pronounced now, so she spoke very little.

  Her hatred of the orphanage festered. It was a harrowing, horrible experience aggravated by a suppressed hostility toward Grace. “When I came to the orphanage it seemed no one wanted me,” she said. “Not even my mother’s best friend.” The psychological horror for her was worse than hard labor or physical torture.

  After she was a star, the biographer Maurice Zolotow visited the orphanage, seeking an answer as to why the child had been forced to wash so many dishes. He encountered a Mrs. Ingram, who was still working there. “I really don’t know why Miss Monroe tells these terrible stories about us.” Mrs. Ingram sighed. “We don’t have to give the children any work assignments, we have a staff of twenty-one here.… We do give the children small jobs and pay them for it. We do this deliberately to give the child a feeling of being useful. Now, this story of Marilyn’s, that we made her wash dishes three times a day, is just plain silly.”

  Marilyn felt the emotional pain of the orphanage so deeply that she had a tendency to magnify the degradation she had been forced to endure there. Her mind transformed the psychological torment into physical drudgery.

  This use of hyperbole made Marilyn seem a canny publicity machine who made up stories to create sympathy from her adoring public. After she became a star, various reporters went out to investigate the awful conditions she had endured at the orphanage. What they found were professional people in a well-run facility who cared for the children.

  Yet Marilyn never revised anything she said about the orphanage. Instead she made sure that the worst version of her life was the official one. We will never know for sure how much of it happened as she recalled it. Was it her aching sense of being abandoned—to foster parents, to an orphanage, by Grace—that she saw as the real abuse? To her it was all the same.

  Marilyn’s second husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, observed that Marilyn could “walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents as a child or had spent time in orphanages. There is a ‘Do you like me?’ in an orphan’s eyes, an appeal out of a bottomless loneliness that no parented person can really know.”

  By the beginning of 1936 the staff was worried about her. Norma Jeane was anxious, withdrawn, stuttering. The matron wrote in her file: “If she is not treated with much reassurance and patience at such times, she appears frightened. I recommend her to be put with a good family.” The administrator conveyed this to Grace, and it seems she was shamed into action.

  * * *

  That February, Grace petitioned the Los Angeles Superior Court to become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian. Her petition was granted a month later, which meant she started getting government checks for Norma Jeane’s care, although the child remained in the orphanage until June 1937.

  Grace took eleven-year-old Norma Jeane to live with her and Doc once again. Why she would risk Norma Jeane living with Doc again if there had been an incident of abuse with her husband in the past is puzzling, but Grace didn’t have many options. As the girl’s legal guardian she was collecting a stipend from the state—from a legal standpoint it was up to her to keep a roof over Norma Jeane’s head. From her own point of view this living arrangement was only very temporary anyway; she was already on the lookout for a new place she could deposit the child

  She found a home within Norma Jeane’s own family—Norma Jeane’s aunt Olive, who had been married to Gladys’s brother, Marion. Gladys, of course, was still in a mental institution, and it is likely that Marion also had a psychotic breakdown: In 1929 he left for work, telling his wife that he would be home in time for dinner. He was never seen again.

  Olive took Norma Jeane in not out of a sense of family or even obligation but because they needed the money the state paid for her care. Grace agreed to give them half of the state’s stipend. Norma Jeane was not happy in this household either, and she would tell many miserable tales of her brief time spent there—without identifying the family. It was there that she was sexually assaulted by her cousin Jack, and it became necessary for Grace to move her yet again.

  In those years Norma Jeane had a strong bond with Grace—and that bond would continue into her young adulthood. Not having many affectionate experiences to compare it to, she relied on her connection to Grace. She wasn’t much of a mother figure, but she was all the girl had.

  When Marilyn became a celebrity, after a while she stopped mentioning Grace in interviews. By then she felt anger and resentment toward her. Marilyn felt tremendously betrayed by this woman who had showed her kindness but at the same time kept her at a distance so that she never had to take full responsibility.

  Grace never got to revel in Marilyn’s success—the dream they shared that Norma Jeane would one day be a huge star like Jean Harlow. In September 1953, when Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was playing in packed movie theaters, Grace killed herself at the age of fifty-nine, her body ravaged by cancer and addicted to alcohol and drugs. Like Marilyn, the cause of her death was ruled to be an overdose of barbiturates.

  But it was because of Grace McKee-Goddard that in 1937, Norma Jeane got the one lucky break of her young life. Grace took her to live with her own aunt, Ana Lower, who lived in the nearby Los Angeles suburb of Sawtelle.

  FOUR

  THE WORLD BECAME FRIENDLY

  “Aunt Ana” was a fifty-eight-year-old white-haired woman who had been divorced for many years and had no children of her own. She did have a modest income from renting bungalows and cottages she had bought with her former husband. The state was still paying thirty dollars a month for Norma Jeane Baker’s care—but that isn’t why Ana took her in. The gentle, grandmotherly Ana and the preteen Norma Jeane adored each other.

  Up until the last years of her life—even when talking about the horrors she had experienced in foster care—Marilyn was always to single out her time with Aunt Ana as the exception. “I did enjoy that period,” she’d say. “I loved her very dearly.”

  Aunt Ana was a Christian Scientist, and although Norma Jeane’s mother and grandmother also practiced this religion, this was the first time she would be around it for an extended period of time. Christian Science’s basic principle is that
all healings—as they occurred in the Bible—can be claimed for ourselves and our friends and families. Because of its belief that sickness is an illusion and can be healed by prayer alone, the church had its own “healers” and did not believe in medical intervention. Ana Lower was a healer in the church—an official practitioner.

  Norma Jeane began menstruating in the fall of 1938. It was the beginning of another lifelong struggle for her. She experienced abnormally painful, irregular periods (later she would be diagnosed with endometriosis). As a Christian Scientist, Norma Jeane was not permitted to use any kind of medication that might relieve the pain—even aspirin was forbidden. Prayer was the only medication allowed. She would writhe on the floor in agony or curl up in a fetal position while Aunt Ana did her best to comfort her by holding her in her arms and praying.

  When Norma Jeane turned twelve an additional physical change occurred. The skinny awkward girl, “Norma Jeane, the human bean,” became beautiful. She developed breasts and hips and an amazing physical presence; for the first time she felt visible.

  Being beautiful meant attention and power and maybe even love. Her dream of being so beautiful that people would turn to look at her when she passed by had come true. In private Norma Jeane started to think that her beauty might be a ticket out of boredom, drudgery, and despair. She was becoming aware of her female power—and she reveled in it. Suddenly she started showing up at school wearing lipstick and tight sweatshirts.

  Up until then she felt “outside of the world,” she would explain. “Now the boys started paying attention. Even the girls took notice because they thought ‘Hmmm, she’s to be dealt with.’ I had this long walk to school—two and a half miles.… It was just sheer pleasure! Every fellow honked his horn. And workers driving to work were waving, you know? And I’d wave back. I thought, ‘Gee, what happened?’ The world became friendly. It opened up to me.”

  * * *

  Gladys was in touch with Grace from time to time. She was now a patient at Agnews State Hospital and had written to her friend asking her to inform Norma Jeane that she had a half brother, Robert, who had died, and a half sister named Berniece, who was now nineteen and who had recently married a man named Paris Miracle. The half sisters—each totally surprised to discover the existence of the other—began to correspond.