by Donald Spoto
Her mother helped Norma Jeane bury her pet. She then paid the Bolenders their last month’s fee, packed her daughter’s clothes and swept her off to a small apartment she had leased for the summer at 6012 Afton Place, Hollywood, near the studios where she and Grace worked as free-lance cutters. Thus Norma Jeane’s time in the sleepy fringe-village of Hawthorne had firmly ended, and with it the vigilant moralism to which the child had been subjected. At the same time, Gladys’s decision to reverse the pattern of her life and to take on the care of her daughter seemed almost a desperate act, one of foreign or imposed conscience.
However, on June 13—as part of President Roosevelt’s assault on the Great Depression—the Home Owner Loan Corporation had been instituted, and low-cost mortgages were now available to hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Gladys, as a single parent, easily qualified. At once she negotiated the purchase of a house into which she and her daughter moved that autumn. Life was changing very rapidly indeed, as Norma Jeane found when, during that summer, Gladys and Grace acted as her tour guides for Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.
A decade earlier, the city had a half-million people; now there were almost three times that number. This increase created an enormous suburban sprawl, with the emergence of various communities linked by the Pacific Electric streetcars; these traveled as far northeast as Pasadena and southwest as far as Long Beach for only twenty cents; out to the village of Lankershim (later North Hollywood) for fifteen cents; and out to Zelzah (Canoga Park) for a dime. Trolleys clanged along Hollywood and Santa Monica boulevards—two of the major east-west arteries—while travelers along Sunset Boulevard rode elegant double-decker buses.
The various sections of Los Angeles were characterized by the development of different industries and technology. Airplane factories were busy near the shore, opening up Los Angeles to a world from which it had been much isolated with deserts on the eastern and the ocean on the western frontiers. Wells were operating round the clock in the hills south of Hollywood, and the port of Los Angeles was the country’s largest oil terminal.
Ten miles inland was the epicenter of the motion picture industry, flourishing as never before with talkies, attracting technicians as well as hopeful actors from all over the world. Film companies owned more than two million dollars’ worth of real estate, studio space and equipment, while two hundred miles of new streets were being blocked out and paved with routes toward the studios. Los Angeles and Hollywood were, in the collective mind of the world, synonymous.
For all its business enterprises and efficient movie storytelling, there was little high culture—a fact at least partly due to the influx of migrant laborers to Los Angeles. From Iowa, Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas there came, in the words of one contemporary historian, “a people well stereotyped in American folklore—mainly derived from Low Church Protestant stock, puritan and materialistic to start with.” And from Central America came another kind of migrant worker: Hispanic Catholic, often with strong Indian roots—in other words, not European-American and, therefore, so far as the sturdy midwesterner judged, not American at all. With depression breadlines and Beverly Hills mansions, immigrant poor and movie-star rich, Los Angeles was evolving into an odd confusion of realms, a hedonistic hick town where the traditional American frontier values of hard work and land cultivation clashed with the allure of the fast buck, fame and a good life under perpetual sunshine.
Late in August, Gladys and Norma Jeane moved into their house at 6812 Arbol Drive, a furnished six-room, three-bedroom house not far from the Hollywood Bowl. The item that settled Gladys’s mind on this particular residence was a Franklin baby-grand piano, painted white. It could have come straight from a scene that had passed through her fingers at the lab—Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire (on which she had worked at RKO that year), or Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. For Gladys, as for most moviegoers, a white piano was an omen of better times.
The house was negotiated and a $5,000 loan obtained from the Mortgage Guarantee Company of California—the note, interestingly, issued to “Gladys Baker, a married woman.” To facilitate the required payments, Gladys at once leased out the entire house to a married couple; she then rented back a bedroom for herself and her daughter, sharing the living room, bath and kitchen with the other family. In Gladys and Norma Jeane’s bedroom hung one small framed photograph—of Charles Gifford. From this fact sprang a subsequent false certitude, among several writers, of Norma Jeane’s parentage, but all the child knew (or her mother admitted) was Gladys’s residual affection for an old beau.
Gladys continued to work as a cutter, and her housemates were English film actors with great spirit but uneven fortunes: George Atkinson had small roles in a few George Arliss films, his wife was an extra in crowd scenes, and his daughter was a sometime stand-in for Madeleine Carroll. It was not surprising, therefore, that the talk at home was usually about movies: writing them, acting in them, editing them, going to see them. Suppers of hash, chipped beef or melted cheese on toast—usually prepared by Grace, the constant visitor—were spiced by industry news, movie-star gossip and studio schedules. That year, liquor prohibition was repealed state by state, and on long, hot summer nights Gladys, Grace and their friends lingered on the porch after the evening meal, smoking cigarettes and sipping from tall beakers of lager. Norma Jeane often collected the empty beer bottles and filled them with flowers from the tiny backyard garden; into one bottle she poured some of her mother’s lavender water for herself. Movies, cigarettes, beer, sweet lotions: nothing could have been more different from the years with the Bolenders, as she later recalled.
Life became pretty casual and tumultuous, quite a change from the first family. They worked hard when they worked, and they enjoyed life the rest of the time. They liked to dance and sing, they drank and played cards, and they had a lot of friends. Because of that religious upbringing I’d had, I was kind of shocked—I thought they were all going to hell. I spent hours praying for them.
For a disciplined, quiet seven-year-old girl, this new adult conduct must have seemed more disorienting than refreshing. Most awkwardly, she had to adjust to a second mother. “Aunt Ida was not my mother,” she kept saying to herself. “The lady with the red hair is really my mother”—the woman who without hesitation dealt out a card game for her friends, poured beer, rolled back the carpet and danced. Here was a new woman to please, one completely different from Ida Bolender, and someone she really did not know.
Among the most remarkable differences was the acceptability—even the necessity—of the movies. When they guided Norma Jeane on weekend tours of Hollywood, Gladys and Grace naturally emphasized the great Hollywood movie palaces, those cathedrals of diversion that variously rivaled the Parthenon, Versailles, Far Eastern temples, Gothic churches and European opera houses. These theaters, the women said, were the places that showed “our movies.” Sparing no expense, designers filled vast interior spaces with paintings and antiques, sculpture and splashing fountains. “No kings or emperors have ever wandered through more luxurious surroundings,” boasted theater decorator Harold Rambach.
Imaginations soared along with the construction fees. East of Vine Street on Hollywood Boulevard was the fabulous Pantages Theatre, built in 1930 as a movie palace to accommodate 2,288, where uniformed ushers with flashlights conducted patrons past a miasma of Art Deco columns and vaults, sunbursts and statuary to a gilt-edged auditorium. Impresario Sid Grauman, inspired by the excavations of King Tut’s tomb in 1922, built the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard that year. Eleven years later, the place was in pristine condition: patrons walked down a long, dramatically decorated courtyard with stucco walls featuring mock tombs and vast effigies of ancient Egyptian gods, pharaohs and mummy cases, sphinxes, vultures and fancy grill-work. Grauman’s most famous achievement was the Chinese Theatre, a bit farther west on Hollywood Boulevard, with the exterior of a Buddhist temple, the interior of a Chinese palace, elaborate chinoiserie throughout, and a great go
ng to herald the start of the feature movie.4 Here Grauman assured his immortality along with that of movie stars by inviting them to imprint their hand- and footprints into wet cement with appropriate greetings to him.
That year and the next, Norma Jeane—who had once been told she belonged to a family of “churchgoers, not moviegoers”—was taken each weekend to these temples of the imagination, where she saw not dour preachers or the eccentric Sister Aimee, but self-reliant Katharine Hepburn as Jo in Little Women; Mae West sparkling with sexual self-confidence in She Done Him Wrong; Claudette Colbert bathing nude in Cleopatra; and Raquel Torres vamping Groucho Marx in Duck Soup. Most of all, she remembered how Gladys and Grace adored an incandescent blonde named Jean Harlow, a brazenly sexy social-climber in Dinner at Eight. “There’s a movie star!” Grace whispered to Norma Jeane, pointing at Harlow and echoing the sentiments of millions of Americans—and from that moment, as Norma Jeane later said, “Jean Harlow was my favorite actress.”
Weekdays that summer, while Gladys and Grace worked at film labs, their very livelihoods dependent on the gods and goddesses they saw, Norma Jeane was given money to stay cool and safe at the movies. “There I’d sit, all day and sometimes way into the night—up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I didn’t miss anything that happened—and there was no [money for] popcorn, either.”
In September, when Norma Jeane entered second grade at the Selma Avenue elementary school, she was registered as Norma Jean; this may have been a clerical error, but one which reoccurred with such frequency that it is easy to imagine Gladys and Grace comparing their girl to both Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow.
That autumn, Gladys received news from Missouri. Her grandfather Tilford Hogan, the sympathetic and self-educated farmer whose divorce had caused a great emptiness in his life, had been dealt a great blow by the news of Della’s death. The following year, when he was seventy-seven, two things happened: his health, never robust, suddenly began to fail, and he married a shy, generous, hardworking widow named Emma Wyett. She, too, soon became ill with heart disease.
From the stock market crash of 1929, hunger and hardship had become pandemic in the United States, and to its worst effects Tilford Hogan was not immune. Hundreds of suicides were reported daily across the country as families lost great fortunes or modest savings; in 1933, no less than fifteen million men were jobless—one of every four heads of households. Scores of banks closed, factories failed every week, countless rural folk became migrant workers and complacent middle- and upper-class families in large cities were living in tar-paper shacks, sifting through garbage dumps for food scraps. In February, the nation seemed on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown when President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, visiting Miami, narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet. He was inaugurated in March and, although he and his new government announced radical steps to cure the country’s dreadful health, everyone knew this was not the quick task of a week. In this time of widespread heartache and panic, Tilford Hogan was simply worn down after years of misfortune. By May 1933, his lungs and kidneys failing as quickly as the farm he tenanted, he was unable to provide for himself and Emma. That month came the final stroke of ill fortune: he was to be evicted from his farm.
Early on the afternoon of May 29, 1933, he waved from the window of the small house in Laclede as Emma cranked their ancient jalopy and went on a shopping errand to a nearby village. When she returned two hours later, she called to her husband but there was no reply in or near the house. Emma then walked toward the crumbling barn. As she entered the cavernous darkness, she saw him swinging by the neck, suspended from a rope thrown over a high beam. An inquest ordered by the Missouri State Board of Health had no difficulty confirming the doctor’s report: Tilford Marion Hogan, bereft of pride and hope, was simply another suicide statistic in Linn County during the worst year of the Great Depression.
Although she had never known Tilford, Gladys (learning of his death in an October letter from a cousin) took the news as a terrible shock and fell into a stupefied depression. Her father, she had been incorrectly told, had died of lunacy; her mother’s death had been erroneously reported as caused by manic-depressive psychosis; now, her grandfather’s death by his own hand convinced her that there was virtually a blight of mental illness on the family tree. From this belief Gladys could not be dissuaded. In the evenings, she stalked the rooms of the house, muttering prayers and reading aloud from a family Bible. Inconsolable, she refused food and sleep, despite Grace’s ministrations. Frightened by her mother’s unusual and protracted grief, Norma Jeane brought tea and held Gladys’s hand, begging her to rest, imploring her to stop weeping.
After several weeks of Gladys’s depression, Grace took matters into her own hands and called in a neurologist. According to Eleanor Goddard (later Norma Jeane’s foster sister), “This doctor prescribed some pills for Gladys. But she had a violent reaction to them.” Psycho-pharmacology had not, it must be emphasized, a sophisticated history in 1933—much less was it then (nor has it ever been) a precise science. The effects of certain psychotropic drugs simply cannot be foreseen, and without careful monitoring and the swift administration of antidotes, medications that are harmless to most patients may cause dangerous, permanent and in some cases lethal side effects.
By February 1934, Gladys was still withdrawn and depressed—although once again there were no sure signs of outright psychosis: her inability to cope seems to have derived more from her background (and perhaps, too, from guilt and remorse over neglect of her children) than from real psychiatric illness. She had also taken on the burden of a house, even as she continued to work six days each week, and she was trying to know her youngest child, hitherto a stranger. Her hopes for the future, in other words, seemed suddenly to collide with the past and even with a large dose of remorse for her lifestyle and her early neglect of Norma Jeane. She also seems to have drunk excessively on at least two occasions—as did many people when bottles and kegs were broken open to celebrate the end of Prohibition—and liquor would interact perilously with any mood-altering medication.
Gladys obviously required more sophisticated medical care than she was receiving, and psychological counseling was scarcely available at all in Los Angeles at that time. The assertion of insanity, established soon after under curious circumstances, became the unquestioned truth only much later; by then, it was the patched invention of the movie star’s ace publicists, a brilliant reporter and a legendary writer—all of them committed to the creation of a Hollywood tale in Hollywood terms. The simpler, more poignant facts of Gladys’s mismanaged care were the first casualty of the truth.
“The doctor who prescribed the drugs couldn’t have known what effect they’d have on Gladys, and her condition was thought to be irreversible by 1935,” recalled Eleanor Goddard. “Her attempt to care for herself and Norma Jeane was out of the question. Up to that point she did a really remarkable job.”
And so Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker Mortensen, not yet thirty-two years old, was taken to a rest home in Santa Monica in early 1934. There she remained, sedated and forlorn, for several months before being transferred to Los Angeles General Hospital, from which she was sometimes released for weekends to determine her ability to cope with “reality” (the word used in one of the few remaining medical reports from that year). Never offered anything like competent psychiatric care, Gladys gradually crept into the dark refuge of a lonely, solitary world from which, increasingly, she seldom emerged. At the same time, the care of her daughter was readily assumed by the childless, concerned, formidable Grace McKee—Norma Jeane’s third mother figure in eight years.
For most of 1934, Norma Jeane remained at Arbol Drive, cared for by the Atkinsons but supervised by Grace, who visited almost daily. Again there were major changes and fresh expectations to bewilder her, and, inevitably, new patterns of behavior to which she had to conform. Ida Bolender had regarded movie stars and their world as sinful: when Norma Jeane report
ed to Ida that her mother had taken her to a movie, she had been told this was a dangerous pastime. After that, Gladys had given her daughter the idea that movies were innocent entertainment—and thank God for them, for they brought a decent wage.
But Grace went further. One neither condemned nor merely watched Clara Bow or Jean Harlow: they were to be emulated. For a child not yet eight, this was an astonishing contradiction of creeds to absorb and, successively, to heed. Much of her childhood was defined, then, by a sequence of contradictions that could only cause guilt. The proper young lady formed by Ida tried to avoid wickedness and remain pure. The child visited by Gladys wanted to make herself agreeable, to comfort and to please; the girl taken in hand by Grace was encouraged to put all that aside and to become someone entirely new—an invention written, designed, produced and directed by Grace McKee herself. Until 1934, Grace’s maternal instincts (and much of her money) had been lavished on two nieces. Then these children moved away from Los Angeles. But from the sadness of Gladys’s departure came the sudden fortune of Grace McKee—she now had a child to raise, to form and shape.
“Grace loved and adored Norma Jeane,” recalled McKee’s coworker Leila Fields.
If it weren’t for Grace, there would be no Marilyn Monroe. . . . Grace raved about Norma Jeane like she was her own. Grace said Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star. She had this feeling. A conviction. “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane. You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big—an important woman, a movie star.”