by Donald Spoto
In light of her clear dedication to Norma Jeane’s welfare and the grand scheme for adopting and guiding her toward stardom, it could not have been easy for Grace to tell the child that she would have to move into the orphanage that September. For Norma Jeane, here was another relationship suddenly ruptured, another promise broken; she was once again an unwanted commodity. As she had been told by Ida Bolender, her own mother had “dropped her off,” and Norma Jeane learned for herself that she could be turned away when she was an inconvenience. In adulthood, her lack of close female friends owed much to these early experiences: she had had no primary experience on which to base any trust of a woman, no experience (after the remote, obsessive Ida Bolender) of womanly constancy. Once again, any semblance of a normal pattern of early socialization was subverted.
On September 13, 1935, Grace packed Norma Jeane’s clothes and delivered her to the Los Angeles Orphans Home, at 815 North El Centro, Hollywood, where she was registered as the 3,463rd child in its twenty-five-year history. The place was nothing like a flophouse; on the contrary, it was an attractive and spacious red brick colonial mansion. Nevertheless, it was an institution for orphans.
The Home could accommodate fifty or sixty children, not all of whom were actually without parents: in the 1920s, fully a third of the residents were runaways or street urchins forsaken by the poor or immigrant workers incapable (or unwilling) to provide for unwanted offspring. In the 1930s, many poverty-stricken parents could apply for a child’s short-term lodging. These, like Norma Jeane, were classified as “temporary guests or students.” Her residency lasted until June 26, 1937 (just after her eleventh birthday), by which time Doc Goddard’s ship was still unberthed. “Doc had a lot of trouble during the Depression,” as Norma Jeane’s first husband later recalled. “This was unfortunate, because he really had a great mind and seemed to me able to do just about anything.”
At the Home, boys and girls were housed in separate wings, four, five or six in each neat, tidy room. From 1952, Marilyn Monroe’s statements to the press about the orphanage became more and more fantastic. By 1960, she said (among other embroideries) that she “slept in a room with twenty-seven beds,” and she added distressing tales of orphanage trauma: dreary accommodations, cold-water baths, rigid discipline and endless menial tasks such as toilet-scrubbing and washing hundreds of plates after meals. In fact, there was a team of adult employees to cook and clean at the Home, but, to encourage a sense of responsibility, the children were paid five or ten cents a week for less arduous, minor chores suited to the age and strength of each.
According to Eleanor Goddard, Norma Jeane was inspired by the accounts of the really dreadful and abused situations Eleanor herself had known in Texas, when at an early age her parents divorced and she was pitchforked from stranger to stranger and house to house, many of which situations were in fact miserable. But Norma Jeane’s time on El Centro was quite decent, and because the Home was nonsectarian, the supervisors, while encouraging children to attend church on Sundays, imposed no religious obligations.
Norma Jeane’s file noted that she was in 1935 “a normal, healthy girl who eats and sleeps well, seems content and uncomplaining and also says she likes her classes.” Formal education was not offered at the Home, but at the Vine Street Elementary School, a five-minute stroll away. Of her two years at Vine Street, in grades four and five, no records remain.
On Saturdays during these two years, Grace frequently appeared and took Norma Jeane for a day’s outing, which usually meant lunch and a movie—especially if there were an early evening premiere, when they both applauded the stars and joined the throngs in the cries of adoration typical of the time. Among the pictures Norma Jeane especially remembered was Mutiny on the Bounty, with Clark Gable; he reminded her of the dark-haired, mustached man whose photo had hung at Arbol Drive. Gable, she said repeatedly, was “the man I thought of as my father.” Grace often replied that she was still trying to “fix things up so you can come back with me where you belong,” by which, no doubt, she meant the Goddards’ legal guardianship.
On such days, Norma Jeane was often taken to Grauman’s Chinese, where she remembered “trying to fit my feet into the footprints—but my school shoes were too big for the stars’ slim, high-heeled ones. Then I measured my hands with theirs, but mine seemed too small—it was all very discouraging!”
But with Grace as tutor, Norma Jeane’s dejection could not last long. The girl was routinely taken to a beauty parlor, Grace standing by anxiously as curlers, irons and brushes attempted the proleptic glamorization of Norma Jeane. She was sometimes hauled into the ladies’ lavatory at a tearoom or movie theater and shown the proper application techniques of face powder and lip rouge; eyeliner and a delicate cologne completed a spectacle passersby could only have regarded as the slightly bizarre, premature display of a pre-adolescent. “Grace was something of a wizard with cosmetics,” according to Eleanor Goddard, “and she loved to sweep down on us with all kinds of advice about makeup.”
In 1935, two Harlow films opened in Hollywood—China Seas and Libeled Lady—and Grace reiterated her conviction that Norma was going to follow Jean Harlow, a vision in sparkling black-and-white pictures: platinum hair, a shimmering white wardrobe whenever possible, white decor and props. After seeing several Harlow pictures in 1935 and 1936, Grace dyed her own hair blond, went into a period when she was seen only in white, bought only white clothes for Norma Jeane and briefly considered dying the girl’s hair platinum but wisely reneged: the Home would not have admired such a change in a ten-year-old. As the New York Times reported, it was due to Harlow that platinum blondes “made their appearance everywhere, among actresses, dancers, show girls and blues singers . . . in the subways, in the streets and in the audiences at theatres.”
“Time after time, Grace touched a spot on my nose,” Norma Jeane said years later. “ ‘You’re perfect except for this little bump, sweetheart,’ she’d say. ‘But one day you’ll be perfect—like Jean Harlow.’ But I knew that no matter what, I would never be perfect—as anyone else, let alone myself.” Looking at the girl, Grace imagined a young Harlow and said so to Norma Jeane (who later told this to friends so often it became an obsession). Both had blue-green eyes and a slightly receding chin (that “could also stand fixing,” Grace said); the hair color would be altered in due course. Such early preparation and exhortation to become an imitation of a major movie star would naturally appeal to a child with a confused identity, a lack of normal home life and a pattern of needing to please so many mother figures. She was, in other words, primed to be the ultimate, manufactured facsimile of a culture’s fantasies.
There was also something of a stir in the gossip columns on June 1, 1936—Norma Jeane’s tenth birthday—when the blond star announced that after almost a decade of acting under her mother’s maiden name, she was at last formally changing her own to Jean Harlow. She would thenceforth no longer, after three marriages, be legally Harlean Carpenter McGrew Bern Rosson. About the same time, it was widely touted that Harlow was one of the celebrity volunteers campaigning vigorously for the reelection of President Franklin Roosevelt—a political involvement that much impressed Grace.
Saturdays with Grace were welcome breaks from school and communal living. But in a way it would have been surprising if Norma Jeane did not deem her “Aunt Grace” a variation of Gladys—a fantastic creature who arrived at her own convenience, one to whom she might gradually be unimportant, even negligible. Norma Jeane had, after all, been displaced by the arrival of Doc and one of his daughters.
In addition, Grace was not entirely reliable or predictable in her visits, although her account books (carefully preserved) reveal her regular payments to the Home and her purchase of clothes for the girl. (In 1936, for example, Grace paid the full fee to the Home, fifteen dollars monthly.) She spent almost the same amount on clothes, makeup and “expenses for minor.” Norma Jeane must have feared that Grace, like Gladys, might be taken away without warning. And so she seemed to
be, when Grace failed to come to the Home after five consecutive Saturdays in late 1936. That season, the girl broke into sobs of despair at the slightest provocation. If she was “almost perfect,” she may have reasoned, why was she abandoned? One of the administrators, a good-natured soul named Mrs. Dewey, reminded her that most of the children never had any visitors, but that was very cold comfort indeed. Years later, her third husband felt that “she was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents . . . or had spent time in orphanages.”
By early 1937, Norma Jeane’s mood darkened. “I was never used to being happy during those years,” she told a reporter later. Indeed, a supervisor that year noted that she occasionally seemed “anxious and withdrawn . . . and at such times she stutters slightly. Norma Jean [sic] is also susceptible to a lot of coughs and colds. . . . 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.”
Typically, Norma Jeane’s yearning for solace evoked a vivid fantasy life. “I sometimes told the other orphans I had real wonderful parents who were away on a long trip and would come for me any time, and once I wrote a postcard to myself and signed it from Mother and Daddy. Of course nobody believed it. But I didn’t care. I wanted to think it was true. And maybe if I thought it was true it would come true.”
Inventing idealized fantasy-parents may sometimes have briefly eased the loneliness; later (even when she admitted the truth) she found relations with women difficult to negotiate. Just as she found contradictory the injunctions set by Ida and Grace, just as they gently reminded her that she could always “do better” and “be perfect,” so no one could match the expectations aroused by her lost parents. In addition to a pitiable cycle of search and inevitable disappointment, she sometimes chose unsuitable partners for friendship, romance or marriage—perhaps in the unacknowledged belief that in repeating the unhappiness of the past she might at last reverse its effects.
There was another outlet for her longing and her fantasy. To her first husband and to many friends, she later said that she often
went up to the roof [of the Home] to look at the water tower at the RKO Studios a few blocks away, where my mother had once worked. Sometimes that made me cry, because I felt so lonely. But it also became my dream and my fantasy—to work where movies were made. When I told this to Grace, she almost danced for joy.
The child’s bleakness and daydreams are easy to understand. The Home cared diligently for its young charges, but in the custodial manner of institutions and enforced communities. There was necessarily an atmosphere of impersonal affection that strictly discouraged particular friendships between children and mentors, to avoid unhealthy dependence as well as the erotic attachments inevitable in close quarters when adults are placed in loco parentis. As a result, there is often found in institutionalized children a paradoxical indifference to the welfare of others. Each child is, after all, but one of dozens, and because the staff strives to act without favoritism, there is a kind of emotional insipidity. However dedicated the supervisors, orphanages are not usually happy places. Everyone implicitly understands the artificiality of the milieu, and children know very quickly that there has been something woefully incomplete about their lives.
There was one notable exception to the general impersonality. Mrs. Dewey saw Norma Jeane returning from a Saturday outing with Grace. Primped and fluffed, with new ribbons in her curled hair and makeup freshly applied, the girl approached the building. Later she remembered:
I suddenly stopped. I knew we weren’t allowed to wear makeup [at the orphanage], and I forgot until that minute that I was wearing the makeup Grace had put on my face that day. I didn’t know whether to go in or just run away. Another girl had been given some kind of punishment or de-merit . . . for wearing lipstick, which the teachers thought was pretty trashy.
But Mrs. Dewey surprised Norma Jeane. “You have very lovely skin,” she said, “and you don’t want to have a shiny face, but sometimes you hide it with a little too much rouge.” And with that she toned down Grace’s handiwork without embarrassing Norma Jeane.
Grace kept her promise to bring Norma Jeane home. Her final papers for guardianship were filed on February 26, 1936, and (with the slowness typical of bureaucracies) the petition was finally granted in the spring of 1937. She left the Los Angeles Orphans Home and arrived at the Goddard bungalow in Van Nuys on June 7, 1937—a week after her eleventh birthday. Just as she was climbing into Grace’s car that evening, radio bulletins announced the death of Jean Harlow, who died suddenly of uremic poisoning at twenty-six. Louis B. Mayer, Harlow’s boss at MGM, summarized the consensus of those who knew her and those who simply admired her: “This girl, whom so many millions adored, was one of the loveliest, sweetest persons I have known in thirty years of the theatrical business.” As one reporter wrote, “She added little that was new to comedy, but she intensified in her person several comical ideas of her day: the gold-digger type, the under-educated, utilitarian, quick-tongued, slightly unaware females then in vogue among cartoonists, magazine writers, jokesters.” Grace was torn, according to Marilyn years later, between grief at the death of this beautiful young woman and her conviction that this made Norma Jeane’s future all the more certain.
Norma Jean’s residence with the Goddards was brief—because of a singularly unpleasant and even traumatic event for the young Norma Jeane. According to her first husband, James Dougherty, Doc Goddard was very drunk one night. He grabbed the girl and, fumbling and fondling her crudely, tried to force himself on her. She managed, however, to disengage herself from his embrace and dashed off, shaking and crying. Especially for so vulnerable and fatherless a girl, this incident was alarming and repellent, and she repeatedly described it throughout her life. Norma Jeane’s initial experience of physical contact with a man dissociated sex from the context of affection: what may have at first seemed like a gesture of tenderness turned ugly and abusive.
At once, Norma Jean complained to her “Aunt Grace,” who must have thought her husband’s drunken advance portended more serious trouble. “I can’t trust anything or anyone,” Grace muttered. And so, in November 1937, Grace shipped the girl away again—this time to board with relatives. “At first I was waking up in the mornings at the Goddards’ and thinking I was still at the orphanage,” Norma Jeane told friends eighteen years later. “Then, before I could get used to them, I was with another aunt and uncle, waking up and thinking I was still at the Goddards.” She concluded the reminiscence poignantly: “It was all very confusing.”
1. Harlow’s image was attempted by or forced on stars as various as Marion Davies, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Betty Grable, Constance Bennett, Lyda Roberti, Alice Faye and Joan Blondell.
2. Jody Lawrance assumed minor roles in six films between 1951 and 1962. She took her life soon after finishing the last.
Chapter Four
NOVEMBER 1937–JUNE 1942
FROM NOVEMBER 1937 TO AUGUST 1938, Norma Jeane lived with cousins and a great-aunt in Compton, about twenty-five miles southeast of the San Fernando Valley but still in Los Angeles County. But instead of a pleasant new home, more challenges and trauma awaited.
First of all, there was in the house a general ambience of suspicion, constant whispers of something sinister and tragic about the family’s history. It was a milieu that could have sprung straight from the pages of a story by Edgar Allan Poe or Henry James—aptly described as Gothic were it not for the prevailing Southern California sunshine. And the aroma of dread that hung in the rooms had nothing to do with Gladys or her daughter.
The woman to whom Grace made irregular payments for Norma Jeane’s care was a divorcée named Ida Martin, who received sometimes five dollars a month, at other times ten or fifteen, often nothing. She was the mother of Olive Brunings, who had married Gladys’s younger brother Marion in 1924. Olive and Marion Monroe, so far as the family knew, lived for five years in the Central California town
of Salinas, where he worked as a mechanic, and there they had three children: Jack, born in 1925; Ida Mae, in 1927; and Olive, in 1929. On the afternoon of November 20, 1929—when the youngest was nine months old—Marion Monroe left the house, telling his wife he was going to buy a newspaper and would return before dinner. He was never seen or heard from again.
The Bureau of Missing Persons failed to locate him, and local police could not trace his itinerary that afternoon. The California Department of Motor Vehicles was no help, nor were police in four neighboring states. Marion had not contacted anyone in his family, including Gladys, to whom the news was relayed the next day. His most recent employer, Joe Zerboni (owner of the Union Storage and Transfer Company), was equally surprised and had no idea of Monroe’s whereabouts, destination or fate. Ida Martin, Marion’s mother-in-law, engaged the prestigious Shayer Detective Service of Los Angeles; after three years they had not a single clue.
In 1934, Olive (“destitute and in need of State aid,” as her petition read) began legal proceedings to have her husband declared legally dead, so that her three children could be registered as half-orphans and thus eligible for public welfare funds. (Laws providing aid for single parents later changed, but this was Olive’s only recourse for financial aid at that time.) Still, the state required ten years of a spouse’s absence before a declaration of presumed death could be issued, and with it the concomitant financial benefits for the surviving family. Olive and her three children had no relief from a situation of grinding poverty until 1939.
When Norma Jeane arrived in Compton at the end of 1937, she met her three cousins for the first time, since Ida Martin was also caring for her three grandchildren while Olive worked with migrant farmers. The children were close in age—little Olive was then eight, Ida Mae ten, Jack twelve and Norma Jeane eleven. Years later, Ida Mae recalled one statement that Norma Jeane repeated: “I remember she said over and over again that she was never going to marry. She said said she was going to be a school teacher and have lots of dogs.”