Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Here again was a parentless household, with children trying to structure life after a father’s mysterious disappearance, of familial instability, of abandoned and displaced children. Just as in the lives of men linked to Della, Gladys and Grace, there was the impression that men were both necessary and capricious—untrustworthy, volatile, unknowable, unpredictable and still achingly missed. Life was imperfect with and without them.

  And here was still another surrogate mother for Norma Jeane to know and to please. Ida Martin seems to have been an attentive provider, but she had no answer for Norma Jeane when she asked about her Uncle Marion’s absence and the distance of Aunt Olive from the family. “Once we decided to run away from home,” Ida Mae added. “We had the idea we’d go to San Francisco to look for my dad, because someone had once said they had seen him there. But we didn’t leave the house.” She remembered, too, that there was an odd and frightening lady who lived across the street—a demented woman named Dorothy Enright who sat on her porch, endlessly rocking in an old rattan chair. “Her family kept her occupied with piles of movie magazines to pore over, and we got the hand-me-downs.”

  Later, Norma Jeane’s feelings of this period were complicated:

  The world around me then was kind of grim. I had to learn to pretend in order to—I don’t know—block the grimness. The whole world seemed sort of closed to me. . . . [I felt] on the outside of everything, and all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend-game.

  One of her more imaginative games was based on a movie-magazine story that showed a picture of winemaking, “and so she had the idea we would make wine,” Ida Mae recalled. “We had a big old, discarded bathtub in the back yard, and we gathered grapes and piled them into the tub, then stomped on them with our bare feet. This went on for three or four days, but we ended up only with a rotten smell in the backyard, and no wine!”

  In the spring of 1938, Olive Monroe visited Ida Martin and together they told her children that thenceforth they had to consider their father dead, not just absent—only in this way could they have enough money to remain a family. This idea was at once picked up by Norma Jeane, for she told her schoolteacher that she was living with relatives because her parents had been killed in an accident (as indeed, for her, they might as well have been). Her instructor, a benign woman named Parker, was moved to tears and for the remainder of the sixth grade Norma Jeane was the object of special attention and concern. The student’s quietly dramatized account was remarkably effective.

  Some of Norma Jeane’s other inspirations were more psychologically complex. In 1937, Grace had taken her twice to see Errol Flynn and the Mauch twins in the movie The Prince and the Pauper, and in early summer 1938 she saw it again with her cousins. The jaunty Flynn was a dashing leading man, but the identical boys were forever after fascinating to Norma Jeane:

  Later, I thought it [the identical twins] was a little eerie, actually, but then I was very excited by seeing the two look-alikes, one a prince pretending to be a beggar-boy and the other an urchin pretending to be a prince.1

  Flynn reminded Norma Jeane of Clark Gable (“I told Jack and Ida Mae that Gable was my real father, but they just laughed”), but the movie perhaps made its deepest impression on her because of the exchange-of-roles fantasy. A waif only pretends to be so: he is actually a prince, and after considerable effort he is recognized as heir to the throne of Henry VIII.

  Norma Jeane had already been transformed from a kind of weekday orphanage Cinderella into a Saturday-afternoon princess by the determined Grace McKee Goddard. Grace had primed her for stardom and said she would one day inherit the mantle of movie queen Jean Harlow. Norma Jeane then discovered that inventions about her family and her background both sweetened her own memories and occasionally made her lovable to others. No wonder the doubles of The Prince and the Pauper, with the neat replacement of a fantasy by a real royalty, long haunted her. She had only to meet the heroic father figure (a Clark Gable or an Errol Flynn) to set the matter right: the waif would be raised to the legitimate regal position.

  The need for fantasy may well have been underscored in light of two events that year. First, Grace visited in March and quietly told Norma Jeane that, after Gladys had tried to escape from the hospital at Norwalk, she had been transferred to a more secure environment—the state asylum at Agnew, near San Francisco.

  The attempted breakout had a concrete and tragically ironic cause. Gladys had been terribly upset and disoriented after receiving telephone calls from her last husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, who she believed had died in a motorcycle accident in Ohio eight years earlier. In fact, Mortensen was alive and well in California, but there had been a midwesterner with the same name and a similar background whose death had been mistakenly reported to her by relatives as that of her husband.

  Still solicitous for Gladys’s welfare and willing to provide for some of her needs, Mortensen had tracked her to the hospital at Norwalk and put through several calls. Alternately confused and almost hysterical with relief that someone had remembered and was reaching out to her, Gladys tried to leave the Norwalk grounds to find her ex-husband. But the staff had been told Mortensen had died in 1929, and so Gladys’s report of the telephone calls and her subsequent escape attempt were regarded as grave schizophrenic delusions requiring the more sophisticated treatment available at Agnew. This was forthwith decreed, and Gladys and Martin had no further contact.2

  This news of her mother’s condition Norma Jeane seemed to receive as virtually an announcement of Gladys’s death. Grace tried to soften the occasion with gifts (the details and sums for which were preserved by Grace’s family): a sunsuit for the beach, a new hat, and three new pairs of shoes. By that summer, to the consternation of Ida Martin and her grandchildren, Norma Jeane, poorest of the cousins, had no less than ten pairs, all of them supplied by Grace (and charged to Gladys’s dwindling account).

  The second episode involved a violation that was even more traumatic than Doc Goddard’s crude and abusive advance. Not long before Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday in June 1938, a cousin forced her into some kind of violent sexual contact. According to her close friends Norman Rosten and Eleanor Goddard, among others, she was “sexually assaulted” (although her first husband claimed she was a virgin at the time of their wedding). The importunate cousin was thirteen-year-old Jack, of whose later life nothing is known; by his twenties he seems to have imitated his father’s disappearing act. This incident reinforced her sense that she was desired as an object, but she was left feeling abused; she was, after all, only eleven years old. As Ida Mae recalled, Norma Jeane bathed obsessively for days after.

  As if on cue in her role as fairy godmother, Grace returned to celebrate Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday. After spending eleven dollars and seventy-four cents for Norma Jeane’s new dress and the then outrageous sum of six dollars for a hair treatment, Grace meticulously prepared the girl’s makeup and whisked her off for a professional photographic session. This was, she explained, the first step toward fame—toward growing up to become the new Jean Harlow. She also gave Norma Jeane a scrapbook in which to paste the photos.

  But Grace’s constant fussing over Norma Jeane’s appearance, her obsession with the girl’s future and even the gifts were more endured than enthusiastically received by Norma Jeane—who had (especially after her experiences with Doc and Jack) good reason to regard herself as a mere object for someone’s pleasure. But she was legally subject to Grace’s decisions about where she would live, and she was as well dependent on Grace’s subsidies.

  Another decision by Grace was soon announced. At summer’s end, she decided Norma Jeane should quit the Martin household and return to Los Angeles—not only to have her ward closer and thus keep an alert eye on her adolescent development and forthcoming career, but also to enroll her in a junior high school of which she approved. Norma Jeane would not, however, be returning to the Goddard household. Instead, she was to board with Grace’s aunt.

  Edith Ana Atchinson Lo
wer, always called Ana, was sister to Grace’s father. Born January 17, 1880, she was fifty-eight years old when Norma Jeane came to live with her. During the 1920s, she and her husband, Edmund H. (“Will”) Lower, had acquired a number of modest bungalows and cottages in various parts of Los Angeles County. They were then divorced about 1933, and so while Ana was by no means a rich divorcée, her settlement provided some rental income. (Will Lower died in 1935.) But Ana’s circumstances were imperiled during the depression, when a number of her lessees simply abandoned their residences.

  By 1938, the Goddards were living virtually rent-free in one of Ana’s houses on Odessa Street in Van Nuys, while Ana lived in a two-family duplex she owned at 11348 Nebraska Avenue, West Los Angeles, whose ground floor she rented out. She would have the income of thirty dollars a month from the State of California for boarding Norma Jeane Baker. (After the unhappy business of the Mortensen telephone calls, Grace everywhere registered Norma Jeane under Gladys’s first married name, which Gladys herself had used most frequently.)

  “Aunt Ana,” as Norma Jeane called her, was a plump, white-haired, grandmotherly soul. She was also a very devout Christian Scientist, having advanced to the level of healing practitioner.

  “She was very religious,” recalled Eleanor Goddard,

  but not at all a fanatic. In fact she was very sensible, compassionate and accepting of others. She looked severe and stern and had an imposing carriage, but she was putty inside, not the dominating matron she was often made out to be.

  Ana was generous and outgoing; her good works and devotion to her religion took her to the Lincoln Heights jail once weekly, where she spent time reading the Bible to inmates.

  Alone in the life of Norma Jeane, Ana Lower warranted undiluted loving praise.

  She changed my whole life. She was the first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her [long since lost] and I showed it to somebody and they cried. . . . It was called “I Love Her.” She was the only one who loved and understood me. . . . She never hurt me, not once. She couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love.

  Yet Ana Lower was, howsoever kindly, the latest in an ongoing variety of mother figures. She could enfold Norma Jeane in a blanket of loving commitment and take her for the daughter she never had. But there was no way to alter the fact that she was also another woman whose attitude toward men and marriage was undeniably tinted (like Gladys, Grace and Ida Martin) by her own divorce. “Talk about marriage and sex was certainly never on the agenda,” Marilyn Monroe said frankly years later.

  There were, then, oddly ambivalent circumstances at this time, for Ana’s broken marriage, her appearance of refined widowhood and the fact that she was the oldest of Norma Jeane’s custodians denied the girl an effective female confidante. And this set of particulars was doubtless made more complex by Ana’s earnest Christian Science faith and its impact on Norma Jeane—a sincere example, to be sure, but one set before the girl with considerable zeal. That August of 1938, Norma Jeane found herself at local Christian Science services, twice on Sunday and once during the week.

  Ana Lower gently but somewhat simplistically guided Norma Jeane to see that only what was in the mind was real, and the mind could be uplifted. But the girl had already long sought refuge from insecurity in unreal movie images, a program of transformation into Jean Harlow enjoined by Grace and a cultivation of her own fantasy life. Ana’s brand of religion, in other words, complemented by a Victorian-Puritan sensibility and her seniority (with its implicit image, to youngsters, of sexlessness), was not altogether appropriate given Norma Jeane’s past experience and her present adolescent needs.

  In 1938, there were in America about 270,000 members in about two thousand congregations of Christian Science.3 Founded in 1879 in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy, the religion is a system of therapeutic metaphysics. The vast majority of its adherents have always been middle-aged and elderly American women from the middle and upper classes, although the denomination is found in all countries with large Protestant populations. Central to its doctrine is a variation of subjective idealism: matter is unreal, there is only God (or Mind). The goal of Mrs. Eddy’s teachings (codified in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 1891) is to bring the unreal material body into a condition of perfect harmony with our real spiritual condition: made in the Divine likeness, we are geared for spiritual perfection.

  In a kind of intense Gnosticism linked to traditional American transcendentalism (which originated and flourished in Mrs. Eddy’s home territory, New England), there is an optimistic attitude toward the perceived world, which may ever be brought closer to its fulfillment by effort as well as by spiritual healing. (It should be stressed, however, that Christian Scientists have never been encouraged to withdraw from the world: responsibility in public and social life was exemplified by its foundation and long maintenance of one of America’s great journals, the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper commanding worldwide respect.)

  The godly human being, for this denomination, constantly strives for a spiritual condition in which the counterfeit flesh and the mortal, fallible mind can be overcome. Taken in its purest form, Christian Science denies the reality of the senses, although allowance is made for a human level at which improvement is sought and achieved by right thinking. We do not sin, suffer or die: we are victims of unhealthy delusions. Linked to this doctrine is that of “malicious animal magnetism,” evil thought that appears real and powerful only because people wrongly assert its actuality. Advanced Scientists—especially the accredited, elite cadre of teachers known as practitioners trained to read, pray and invoke therapeutic healing—learn how to counter the impact of this “animal magnetism.”

  Furthermore, the disharmony of sin, sickness and death may be overcome by right prayerful thinking and a dutiful attentiveness to Mrs. Eddy’s commentaries on the Scriptures. Instead of drugs and medicines, spiritual truth must be affirmed, error denied and the distinction made between absolute being and the frail mortal life. The symbol of Christian Science is thus immediately compelling: a cross (without the figure of the dead or dying Christ) surrounded by a crown. Glory overwhelms suffering, which has no real relation to humanity.

  Because by a complicated and intriguing paradox Christian Science does not share American fundamentalism’s contempt for the world and the flesh, recreation and entertainment are not forbidden, nor is the religion hostile to education (medical studies excepted). Because she chose not to seek any other employment, Ana Lower was eligible to be one of the Church’s official practitioners, and in this capacity she was permitted to take fee-paying clients.

  But when Norma Jeane began seventh grade at Emerson Junior High School on Selby Avenue, between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards in West Los Angeles, Aunt Ana’s creed was at once challenged. That very September, the girl began to menstruate, and every monthly period for much of her life was a grueling time during which she rarely found relief from severe cramps. In 1938 there were no readily obtainable medicines to counter the effects of what was for Norma Jeane very real agony (and it is unlikely that Ana would have made them available in any case). Friends from this and later times of Norma Jeane’s life recall that each month she writhed on the floor, sobbing in pain. So began a lifelong history of gynecological problems, including chronic endometriosis. She had, then, another conflict, but neither the spiritual nor intellectual sophistication with which to cope: if there was no real body and if God was All Goodness and Mind, why this torture? Why was her own body playing her false? Aunt Ana comforted her, prayed with her, embraced her, “but nothing did any good. I just had to wait it out.”

  At Emerson there were five hundred students in the seventh grade, and like those in the eighth and ninth they came from all parts of the western sector of Los Angeles. Some were chauffeured down from the gated mansions in the enclave known as Bel-Air, above Sunset Boulevard. Others were from the middle-class flatlands of West Los Angeles
. And some—Norma Jeane among them—were within walking distance, from a poorer district known as Sawtelle.

  A section of the so-called Western Front of the city, Sawtelle was bounded by four boulevards: Sepulveda on the east, Bundy on the west, Wilshire on the north and Pico on the south. The area was a jumble of populations—Japanese immigrants; longtime California pioneers from the East and Midwest; recent Dust Bowl “Okies” who had sought work and refuge in sunny California during the depression; Hispanics and Mexican-Indians; and older Los Angeles residents like Ana Lower.

  “Los Angeles was a very divided, class-conscious society,” according to Norma Jeane’s classmate Gladys Phillips (later Wilson), “and this was unfortunately true of school life, too. All the students were immediately, unofficially classified according to where they lived. And Sawtelle was simply not the place to be from.” Indeed, Angeleños smiled and thought of beer halls when Sawtelle was mentioned, for there were many such gathering places for the working classes; the neighborhood seemed synonymous with illiterate or semiliterate poor. Ana Lower was neither illiterate, out of work nor on the dole, yet from her first day at school Norma Jeane Baker was marked by most of her classmates as (thus Gladys Phillips) “from the wrong side of the tracks.”

  Norma Jeane’s courses, those designed for seventh-grade girls not enrolled in the college prep track, were not overwhelmingly impressive from an academic standpoint, and her achievements were neither remarkably good nor bad: