by Donald Spoto
On June 20, 1921, Gladys filed for divorce, accusing Baker of “extreme cruelty by abusing [her] and calling her vile names and using profane language at and in her presence, by striking [her] and kicking [her],” all this despite the fact that she had been “a good and loyal wife.” Her virtue was not unchallenged by Baker, however, who counterclaimed Gladys’s lewd and lascivious conduct. The court forbade her from taking her children away from Los Angeles.
While this legal melodrama proceeded, so did the precarious affair between Della and Charles. By March 1922, Della had returned to him and again departed, moving with Gladys to a four-bedroom rented bungalow at 46 Rose Avenue, Venice—another street only as wide as an alley, and a few steps from the shore. Signing a lease as “Della Monroe,” she agreed to rent out two of the bedrooms, earn a wage as housekeeper there and pay one hundred dollars a month to the absentee owners, Adele Weinhoff and Susie Noel. But as late as June, not even the first rent check had been posted. This caused a furious dispute between Della and Gladys, each accusing the other of squandering or stealing cash. Neither of them held jobs, most of their funds came from Grainger (with only the remnant of a small final sum from Baker), and these amounts the two women spent on good times, for Della and her daughter had gentlemen admirers. Their brief span as roommates ended in July, when a formal eviction notice arrived. With Grainger’s permission, Della moved away from the beach to an empty bungalow he owned in Hawthorne.
The Bakers’ final divorce decree took effect in May 1923. That same month, John Baker took Berniece and Jack and went back to his native Kentucky. Gladys traveled there once, about a year later, but the children were strangers to her and she left them in the permanent custody of their father. Perhaps from guilt and remorse for her negligence, Gladys made only infrequent attempts to contact them over the years. Jack never saw his mother again (he was reported to have died in his twenties), and it would be several decades before Berniece was reunited with her. Gladys, who had not much experience of emotional stability with Della, could not provide it for her own children.
Free of every family encumbrance and obligation, Gladys then moved east to the section known as Hollywood, where she took a job on the fringe of the movie business—as a splicer (or cutter) of negative film stock at Consolidated Film Industries, located at the corner of Seward and Romaine streets.
No matter how mechanical the work may have seemed to Gladys, she saw at her bench each day many of the images that were produced to entertain America. In 1923, 43 million people (forty percent of the country’s population) paid an average of ten cents each to see a total of 576 silent, black-and-white films released that year. This was the era of stars like glamorous, sophisticated Gloria Swanson and demurely heroic Lillian Gish; audacious Douglas Fairbanks and sensual Rudolph Valentino; exotic Pola Negri and comic Marion Davies. Among the biggest hits of the year were Lois Wilson and Ernest Torrence in The Covered Wagon; Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Mary Pickford in Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita; Edna Purviance in Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris; Cecil B. De Mille’s first version of The Ten Commandments; and Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. Gladys was one of a vast working population flooding into Hollywood: four years earlier, 35,000 people worked in some capacity for the movie industry; by 1923, the count was 130,000.
Consolidated was one of several labs developing and printing the dailies or rushes, the first rough reel of scenes for viewing by producers, directors and executives the morning after filming. Working six days a week in a crowded room, Gladys, wearing white gloves to protect the negative film stock, cut the pieces of film marked by studio editors and passed them along to those who patched together the sections ordered for the final release negative.
Not long after she began work, Gladys was befriended by a supervisor named Grace McKee, who was soon to become the most important influence on Gladys after her mother. Even more significantly, Grace deeply affected the life of Gladys’s next child, Norma Jeane. By the end of the summer of 1923, Grace and Gladys were sharing an apartment at 1211 Hyperion Avenue, east of Hollywood, in the section later known as Silver Lake.
Grace McKee had been born in Montana on New Year’s Day 1895 and christened Clara Grace Atchinson. By 1915, divorced and living in Los Angeles, she married a twenty-one-year-old garage mechanic named Reginald Evans. She longed for a career as a movie actress, but this never seemed a possibility despite a winsome smile and irrepressible ambition. Standing only five feet one inch tall, Grace was a spirited peroxide blonde who settled for her role as (thus the idiom of the day) “a good time girl,” which meant that she was sometimes considered a bad one. Claiming that Evans had gone off to the Great War and died in 1918 (a fact that cannot be substantiated), Grace sliced three years off her age and, in 1920, conveniently forgetting about her first husband from Montana as well as Reginald Evans, she wed a draftsman two years younger than herself named John Wallace McKee. They did not remain together long, although it would be years before they divorced.
Grace, a woman without inhibitions, felt free to dart from one relationship to another. “She was a birdlike creature”—thus her volatile emotions, her small stature and her perky manner were aptly described years later by Olin G. Stanley, who worked with Grace at Consolidated.
She was freewheeling, hard-working and fast-living. Ambitious to succeed. A busybody. Whoever and whatever she wanted, she went and got. Partying and booze seemed the most important things in her life, and work was just means to that end.
As friends, Stanley added, Grace and Gladys were ever on the lookout for dates. “They did, as you’d say, lots of fast living, lots of dates with fellows at the lab or from the studios.” The women and their beaux hauled cartons of bootlegged liquor, widely available in the movie capital, for weekend jaunts to log cabins in the mountains, or to beach parties. When they cavorted an extra day and missed work or drifted off from the lab for an afternoon of fun, co-workers assumed Grace’s and Gladys’s responsibilities in exchange for a dollar or a drink. Gladys Baker and Grace McKee were typical “flappers” of the Roaring Twenties who chose to extend the recent women’s suffrage amendment to include the various social and sexual autonomies long claimed by men.
In their way, they were simply imitating the more exotic and controversial movie stars whose startling images passed before them daily at their workbenches. On Grace’s advice, Gladys lightened her brown hair to an almost defiant cherry red in 1924. “Until Grace took her in hand,” according to Olin Stanley, “Gladys was really nondescript—a plain Jane. I wouldn’t have given her a second glance in a crowd of three before that.”
One who gave more than a second glance was a meterman for the Southern California Gas Company, named Martin Edward Mortensen, who met Gladys during the summer of 1924. Born in California in 1897, son of a Norwegian immigrant, he too had ended a first marriage several years earlier and now, at twenty-seven, was ready to settle down and start a family. He was instantly attracted to Gladys’s pert, fey humor and her good nature. In addition, Mortensen, raised a devout Lutheran, was impressed by Gladys’s interest in religion, although he perhaps did not know how novel and transitory a concern this was for her. That year, Grace had attended several Christian Science services with a boyfriend who visited their apartment on Hyperion Avenue and spoke of his creed. As usual, Grace’s curiosities were at once shared by Gladys—although in neither case did the women consider joining the faith.
To Mortensen, then, Gladys seemed the ideal mate. For her part, she found him handsome, generous, stable and flatteringly jealous; he also looked more than five years older and bore a slight facial scar (and so perhaps unconsciously she identified something with her father). In any case, she saw no good reason to reject his proposal of marriage and security.
But their marriage on October 11, 1924, was ill considered, for, perhaps predictably, Gladys could not long match her husband in the area of marital fidelity. As she told Grace, Gladys found life with Martin respectable, secure and unendurably
dull. Four months later, Gladys—as if taking a cue from her mother’s relationships—simply left her husband and moved back with Grace. On May 26, 1925, Mortensen reluctantly filed a divorce petition in California Superior Court, claiming that Gladys “wilfully and without cause deserted [him] and ever since has and now continues to . . . desert and abandon [him].”
Gladys tarried in her response, and her husband several times tried to win her back. According to Olin Stanley, Mortensen often defended Gladys against detractors. Once, as Stanley arrived for work, he observed a co-worker leering at Gladys and overheard him say to another man, “I sure would like to have some of that.”
Some other guy then replied, “I hear all you have to do is ask,” and with that a man sprang to his feet and grabbed this guy by the throat, shouting, “Don’t ever let me hear you say anything like that about her again!” You know who that was? Why, it was Mortensen. He was still crazy about that gal.
Mortensen waited and hoped, but when Gladys never replied to his repeated overtures for reconciliation, he at last requested a final decree of divorce, which was handed down uncontested on August 15, 1928. In 1929, Gladys learned from friends in Ohio that a man named Martin Edward Mortensen was killed in a motorcycle accident. And that, she thought, was the end of it.
But in late 1925, almost ten months after she had left Mortensen, Gladys had learned she was pregnant. No longer living with Grace, separated from her husband and cited in a divorce petition, she turned to her mother for help. While every man in Gladys’s life was keeping a far distance (and several of them were married), no one could have been less responsive to Gladys’s abandoned condition than Della. With righteous indignation—all the more ironic since she claimed to be Mrs. Grainger—she ignored her daughter’s pleas and plight and simply went ahead with her scheduled grand tour of Southeast Asia with her lover, who was to travel on business at the expense of Shell Oil.
For years it was asserted by biographers that Gladys’s pregnancy was the result of her affair with Charles Stanley Gifford, foreman of the day shift at Consolidated Film. He had been separated from his wife, Lillian Priester, in October 1923 and a final divorce was granted to her in May 1925. Handsome and arrogant, he was known at home and at work as a wild philanderer, a designation of which he was frankly proud: his wife’s uncontested divorce petition noted that he “shamelessly boasted of his conquests with other women.” Among them was Gladys Baker.
But when her child was born, Gladys never claimed privately or publicly that Gifford was the father, nor did she ever seek from him relief or support for herself or the child. The simple truth is that the father could have been any of her boyfriends in 1925—Harold Rooney, a co-worker who was besotted with her; or the adoring Clayton MacNamara; or, perhaps most likely of all, Raymond Guthrie, a film developer who ardently courted her for months that year.
As for Gladys’s child, she never met Gifford and was never certain he was her father. To be sure, she tried to contact one or two men she said might have been her father (and Gifford may have been among them), but the accounts of her attempts at a meeting are notoriously contradictory. Evidence that Charles Stanley Gifford was the father of Gladys’s child is, on the contrary, utterly lacking. When asked if Gladys and Gifford even had an affair, Olin Stanley, who knew them both well in 1925 and 1926, was unsure. “Gladys was always shacking up with somebody. But Gifford as the father? Only God knows.”
The child was born June 1, 1926, at 9:30 in the morning, in the Los Angeles General Hospital, and the birth certificate identifies her as the daughter of Gladys Monroe of 5454 Wilshire Boulevard. So easy was it, then as now, to omit, invent and alter one’s record, that Gladys simply claimed that her two earlier children had died. She added creatively that the residence of her husband, a baker she designated as “Edward Mortenson,” was unknown. The child’s birth registration in the California Board of Health’s Bureau of Vital Statistics stated her name as Norma Jeane Mortenson. In her youth, she was sometimes known as Norma Jeane Baker. From the age of twenty, she was Marilyn Monroe, but she declined to make that her legal name until seven years before her death.
Chapter Two
JUNE 1926–JUNE 1934
IN 1917, beautiful, doe-eyed Norma Talmadge, then twenty, married the thirty-eight-year-old independent producer Joseph M. Schenck, who founded a corporation named for his wife and molded her career with astonishing success. By 1926, when the couple separated, Norma Talmadge had appeared in more than sixty films, most of them a series of somewhat damp melodramas with titles like Smilin’ Through and Secrets, over which the star’s luminous, expressive beauty somehow triumphed. For a film lab worker like Gladys, who coveted glamour and routinely saw images of Talmadge everywhere, the name was more than an imitation: “Norma” expressed a kind of totemic longing, a benediction on her daughter’s future. Double names for girls were popular at the time, and Gladys found “Jeane” a suitable addition.1
Within two weeks of the child’s birth, Gladys gave Norma Jeane over to a foster family sixteen miles away. The reasons for this are not difficult to fathom.
In the Roaring Twenties, moral and aesthetic standards were challenged in deed as well as discourse—not only in America, but round the world. After the horror of the Great War, there were extraordinary explosions of creativity as well as bolder (and sometimes dangerous) amusements everywhere. Along with New York, Berlin and Paris seemed simultaneously to inaugurate the “Jazz Age,” and life for a time seemed a cycle of uninhibited fun, excitement and experimentation. Europeans heartily imported the works of Americans like Hemingway, Dreiser, Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton—but not the dark, imprecatory religious sentiments so deeply rooted in the American tradition.
The United States, however, was caught in the conflict between the new moral turmoil and the old Puritan repressions. In the 1920s, there were higher hemlines seen and more coarse language heard in public than ever before; there was widespread use of drugs as recreational gear (especially cocaine and heroin); and plays and movies routinely dealt with the dark underside of life. Contrariwise, by that peculiarity known as Prohibition, alcohol was then illegal. As the voices of moral vigilance became more strident, the country’s penchant for the bogus remedy of extreme moralism (as distinct from authentic morality) led to the emergence of thumpingly righteous fundamentalist religions—in California as in the South.
Other factors encouraged Gladys to place the baby with a “decent” family: she could not quit her job, there was no one to care for Norma Jeane while she worked, and her restless, nomadic life (like her mother’s, as she may have apprehended) was unsuitable for mothering.
And there were less tangible, more elusive, perhaps unconscious (but nonetheless potent) reasons to deliver Norma Jeane to the care of others. Gladys had seen her father’s deterioration and death, which (she had been wrongly told) were due to madness—a condition poorly differentiated but, it was then believed, invariably inherited. Disappointed, like Della, in marriage, Gladys had also found herself incapable of effective mothering. Hostile toward Della on account of the past and Della’s recent abandonment of her during the latter part of her pregnancy, Gladys may have been, in a way, a classic type of parent who resents an offspring of the same sex.2 In addition, she was plainly terrified by the physical responsibilities of caring for an infant. Further seasoned by sharing her friend Grace McKee’s dedication to an unfettered life of gaiety (as if it were a vocation), Gladys had developed the habit of an essentially selfish life.
She was, then, ill prepared to be a diligent, effective and constant mother, and she knew it. Of this Gladys’s own mother, Della, was similarly convinced, for as soon as she returned from her exotic South Seas adventure—when her granddaughter was a week old—she urged Gladys to place Norma Jeane in the care of a sober, devout couple named Bolender; they also lived on Rhode Island Street, the address of Della’s bungalow in Hawthorne. (The street name was changed several times as Hawthorne and adjacent El Segundo became busines
s extensions of the Los Angeles International Airport.) “I was probably a mistake,” Norma Jeane told a friend years later. “My mother didn’t want me. I probably got in her way, and I must have been a disgrace to her.”
Like many families of that time, the Bolenders supplemented their income by caring for foster children, a responsibility for which they were paid twenty or twenty-five dollars a month either by the natural parents or by the State of California.
And so, on June 13, 1926, Norma Jeane Mortensen (her name variously noted on official forms as Mortensen, Mortenson or Baker) was delivered to Albert and Ida Bolender. He was a postman, and she devoted herself to mothering (she had one son), foster-parenting, housekeeping and local Protestant parish life of the Low Church type. Among the many dramatic presentations of Norma Jeane’s life was the account of her being shuttled to over a dozen foster homes before she was ten. Like so many other tales of her childhood, however, this bit of manufactured autobiography conveniently fed the legend of a miserable, Dickensian childhood—a theme beloved of Hollywood publicists and sentimentally cherished by many people. But Norma Jeane’s earliest years were actually rather geographically stable, for she resided seven years in the Bolenders’ modest four-room bungalow.
One unhappy event occurred during Norma Jeane’s early years—something she could have hardly recalled from the age of one, but about which she learned from the Bolenders, Gladys and Grace.