Help soon arrived in the guise of death.
Della Grainger died nineteen days after the incident at the Bolenders’ house. Her heart failed during a manic seizure at the Norwalk Hospital for the insane, the same hospital where Norma Jeane’s grandfather, Otis Monroe, had died in 1909. Della’s death certificate lists “myocarditis” as the cause of death and cites a manic-depressive psychosis as the contributing factor.
On August 25, 1927, Della Grainger was buried in an unmarked grave next to Otis Monroe at Rose Dale Cemetery in central Los Angeles.
16
Runnin’ Wild
Runnin’ wild, lost control,
Runnin’ wild, mighty bold,
Feeling gay, restless too,
Carefree mind all the time,
Never blue…
—Joe Grey and Leo Wood,
“Runnin’ Wild,” 1922
At times the Bolenders boarded as many as five children. One of the children was a boy named Lester. Two months younger than Norma Jeane, he was later adopted by the Bolenders. At fourteen months, Norma Jeane would often mimic Lester, who began calling Ida Bolender “Mama.” But Gladys didn’t want her baby to refer to Ida as “Mama,” and Ida would scold Norma Jeane and say, “I’m not Mama. I’m Aunt Ida—Aunt Ida!” Hurt and bewildered that she couldn’t call Ida “Mama” as Lester did, Norma Jeane tried to understand, and one of her first complete sentences was “There goes a mama!” when she saw a woman holding a child by the hand.
When Gladys visited on Saturdays she would frequently take Norma Jeane on outings to the beach. Often they would ride the trams that traversed the colorful oceanfront from Venice to Santa Monica, and sometimes they would walk out on Santa Monica Pier, where Gladys would let Norma Jeane ride the merry-go-round; but for years Norma Jeane never knew exactly who the pretty lady with the red hair was.
Though she wasn’t to call Ida “Mama,” Norma Jeane assumed that Wayne Bolender was her father, and she called him Daddy. “I used to sit on the edge of the bathtub in the morning and watch him shave and ask him questions—which was east or south, or how many people there were in the world?” Marilyn Monroe later recalled. “He was the only one who ever answered the questions I asked.”
One day Ida Bolender said to Norma Jeane, “You are old enough to know that I’m not related to you in any way. Neither is Wayne.”
“But,” Norma Jeane protested, “He’s my daddy!”
“No, I’m not your mother, and Wayne is not your father. You just board here. Your mama’s coming to see you tomorrow. You can call her Mama if you want to.”
The next day was Saturday, and the woman she was to call “Mama” arrived. It was the woman with the red hair. “She was the pretty woman who never smiled,” Marilyn remembered. “I’d seen her often before, but I hadn’t known quite who she was. When I said, ‘Hello, Mama’ she stared at me. She had never kissed me or held me in her arms or hardly spoken to me.”
One Saturday Gladys picked up Norma Jeane and took her for a visit to her rooms in Hollywood. “I used to be frightened when I visited her and spent most of my time in the closet of her bedroom hiding among the clothes,” Marilyn remembered.
She seldom spoke to me except to say, “Don’t make so much noise, Norma.” She would say this even when I was lying in bed at night turning the pages of a book. Even the sound of a page turning made her nervous.
There was one object in my mother’s rooms that always fascinated me. It was a photograph on the wall. There were no other pictures on the walls, just this one framed photograph. Whenever I visited my mother I would stand looking at this photograph and hold my breath for fear she would order me to stop looking. My mother caught me staring at the photograph but didn’t scold me. Instead she lifted me up on a chair so I could see it better.
“That’s your father,” she said. I felt so excited I almost fell off the chair. It felt so good to have a father, to be able to look at this picture and know I belonged to him. And what a wonderful photograph it was! He wore a slouch hat a little gaily on the side. There was a lively smile in his eyes, and he had a thin mustache like Clark Gable. I felt very warm toward the picture…. I asked my mother what his name was. She wouldn’t answer, but went into the bedroom and locked herself in.
The person in the picture with the lively smile in his eyes, who looked like Gable, was a man Gladys had met in Venice Beach….
Known as “the Playland of the Pacific,” Venice was a Los Angeles tidal marshland that had been transformed by developers into a plaster facsimile of Venezia, complete with winding canals, Venetian gondolas, arched bridges, and the odor of sewage. In 1917, when the pretty woman with the red hair was only fourteen, she lived there with her mother, Della.
When the oily sulfuric scum that bubbled to the surface of the Venice canals proved to be black gold, one of the wildcatters who arrived in Venice was Charles Grainger. He met Della at a gala New Year’s Eve dance on the boomtown waterfront and became a frequent visitor to her apartment at 27 Westminster Street. Though they weren’t yet betrothed, Della was soon gondoliered into Grainger’s Venice bungalow. Young Gladys, who didn’t like the oily Mr. Grainger, proved to be an inconvenience. The problem was solved, however, when Gladys met Jasper Baker, an amusement concessionaire at Pickering’s Pleasure Palace on Ocean Park Pier. Attracted by Gladys’s beauty and youthful charms, Jasper soon gave Gladys an unanticipated amusement zone gratuity. When it was discovered that Gladys was pregnant with his child, a marriage was quickly arranged.
On May 17, 1917, swearing that her fourteen-year-old daughter was eighteen, Della was witness to Gladys’s marriage to the reluctant concessionaire, who was twelve years older than his child bride. Jasper never wanted the child, and demanded that she have an abortion. Nevertheless, Gladys insisted on having her baby, and six months after the wedding, on November 10, 1917, Robert “Jackie” Baker was born. A daughter, Berniece, was born in July 1919.
Gladys was barely out of childhood herself when she married, and her unstable childhood had ill prepared her for marital life and motherhood. From the beginning the marriage was fraught with problems. Jasper was prone to drink and fits of violence, and friends noted that Gladys often wore dark glasses to conceal blackened eyes. In later years, in one of his rare references to his wife, Jasper complained to his daughter Berniece, “She wouldn’t cook, and she wouldn’t clean house. She wouldn’t do anything. She just liked to get out and roam around…. She was a beautiful woman, but she was very young—too young to know how to take care of children.”
During a trip to visit Jasper’s relatives in Flat Lick, Kentucky, Gladys went hiking with Jasper’s younger brother. When they returned after dark, Jasper was in a drunken rage and beat Gladys across the back with a bridle until she bled profusely. Townspeople saw her running hysterically down the street, begging to be protected from her husband.
Shortly after the Bakers returned to California, Gladys left her husband. On June 20, 1921, she filed divorce papers accusing Jasper 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].” Taking the children, she moved into Della’s Venice bungalow. One weekend Jasper picked up the children for an outing, and little Jackie and baby Berniece never returned. Jasper took them back to his family’s home in Flat Lick. Determined to reclaim her children, Gladys hitchhiked to Kentucky, where she found that Berniece had been put in hiding and Jackie was in a Louisville hospital suffering from an unexplained injury. Berniece recalled that Jackie suffered a series of “unfortunate accidents” and had a “never-ending run of bad luck.” When Jackie was three and a half, he severely injured his hip. “Daddy told me that Jackie fell out of a car,” said Berniece. The truth was that Jasper abused the son he had never wanted.
“Daddy and my grandmother kept me hidden, and they told my mother that she had better not go to that hospital and bother Jackie,” Berniece recalled. “Of course, mother went anyway. Sh
e visited Jackie, but Daddy had told the doctors not to let her take him out. So she got a job in Louisville as a housekeeper while she waited for Jackie to get better.”
Frustrated in her attempts to regain custody of her children, Gladys returned to Venice Beach in May 1923 and moved to the Westminster Apartments, where she met Stan Gifford, a salesman for the Consolidated Film Laboratories in Hollywood. A great deal had changed since she last lived in Venice. Her mother, Della, had married Charles Grainger and moved to nearby Hawthorne, and the Venetian community had become engulfed by oil derricks, roller-coaster rides, and all-night dance halls. The canals of the “Playland of the Pacific” led to speakeasies, jazz joints, brothels, and card rooms frequented by celebrants of the Jazz Age. Among the flaming youth was Gladys Baker, who hoped to forget her melancholy memories in the company of Stan Gifford.
In a 1923 divorce action filed by Gifford’s wife, Lillian, she complained:
He associated with women of low character; boasted of his conquests; showed her marks of hypodermic injections of addictive drugs; caroused with fellow workers in the film labs; visited friends in Venice, California, and didn’t return for extended periods of time.
Gifford obtained employment for Gladys in the negative-assembly department at Consolidated, where her supervisor was Grace McKee, a young divorcée and casual acquaintance of Gifford’s. According to Olin Stanley, a coworker, Grace McKee and Gladys became close friends. “They did, as you’d say, lots of fast living, lots of dates with fellows at the lab or from the studios. They frequently went down to gin joints at Venice with Gifford.”
Olin Stanley recalled that Gladys was very much in love with Stan Gifford and hoped to become his wife. But, disillusioned by Gifford’s refusal to commit himself, Gladys began seeking the companionship of other men. In the summer of 1924 she met Edward Mortensen, an itinerant laborer of Norwegian descent. Mortensen offered Gladys the stability and security that Gifford denied her, and they were married in a civil ceremony on October 11, 1924. It wasn’t long, however, before Gladys realized she had made a mistake. Stating to Grace McKee that her life with Mortensen was unendurably dull, in February 1925 Gladys walked out on her husband of four months and resumed her relationship with Gifford.
In late 1925, many months after she had left Mortensen, Gladys became pregnant with Gifford’s child. Grace McKee recalled that Gladys desperately wanted Gifford to marry her and hoped the child would bring about the wedding. But on Christmas Eve there was a confrontation and Stan Gifford refused to marry Gladys.
And so it was that a Gemini child, destined to become the most celebrated film star of the twentieth century, was born on June 1, 1926, at 9:30 A.M. in the charity ward of the General Hospital in Los Angeles—and Martin Edward Mortensen, address unknown, was named as the father. On Norma Jeane’s birth certificate it states that the infant was the mother’s third child; however, Gladys indicates that the first two born were “no longer living.” Perhaps to her broken heart it was as though Jackie and Berniece were, indeed, dead.
Years later, when Gladys lifted little Norma Jeane up on a chair to see the picture of her father, Gladys wouldn’t answer when Norma Jeane asked the name of the man with the lively smile in his eyes who looked like Gable. Instead, she went into her room and locked the door. His name was Stan Gifford.
“It must have hurt my mother very, very much. I don’t think she ever got over the hurt,” Marilyn Monroe commented in July 1962. “When a man leaves a woman when she tells him she’s going to have his baby, when he doesn’t marry her, that must hurt a woman very much, deep down inside. A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child under those circumstances—I mean especially when she’s not even married to him.”
Always goin’, don’t know where,
Always showin’, I don’t care;
Don’t love nobody, it’s not worthwhile;
All alone, runnin’ wild…
—“Runnin Wild”
17
Into the Abyss
I gave her Christian Science treatments for approximately a year—wanted her to be happy and joyous.
—Gladys Baker
The Bolenders took the children to Sunday school each week, and Norma Jeane learned to sing “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” It became her favorite song and Ida Bolender recalled her singing it constantly. “Nearly everybody I knew talked to me about God,” Marilyn remembered. “They always warned me not to offend him…but the only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn’t see or hear or touch. I used to draw pictures of God whenever I had time. In my pictures he looked a little like Aunt Grace [McKee] and a little like Clark Gable.”
In 1933, Gladys’s grandfather on Della’s side, Tilford Marion Hogan, committed suicide; but far more devastating was the news that her son “Jackie” had died at the age of fourteen. Though Gladys had tried to blot out the memory of Jackie and Berniece, her son’s death was a terrible shock. According to Berniece, Jackie received an injury that led to tuberculosis of the bone, and he was hospitalized. Jasper Baker took Jackie out of the hospital against the doctor’s recommendations. When his condition grew rapidly worse, and it became apparent that Jackie was dying, Jasper attempted to catheterize Jackie himself at home. Subsequently the boy died in extreme agony on August 16, 1933.
The news threw Gladys into bouts of depression. Blaming herself for Jackie’s death, she turned to Christian Science for spiritual support, spending long hours at night reading her “science” and the Bible. According to Inez Melson, who in later years would become Gladys’s conservator, “The underlying problem that led to the deterioration of Gladys’s mental state was guilt and self-recrimination.”
Recalling an incident that occurred shortly after the news of Jackie’s death, Marilyn later related, “One day my mother came to call. I was in the kitchen washing dishes. She stood looking at me without talking. When I turned around I saw there were tears in her eyes, and I was surprised. ‘I’m going to build a house for you and me to live in,’ she said, ‘It’s going to be painted white and have a back yard.’”
Determined to establish a conventional home for Norma Jeane, and dreaming of regaining custody of Berniece, Gladys began working double shifts—at Columbia during the day and at RKO in the evening. Grace McKee tried to advise Gladys against taking on the burden of a home at the height of the recession—the economy was in turmoil and employment had become tenuous.
By 1933 the American public had lost faith in the banking system, and Friday, March 3, was marked by a run on the banks. President Roosevelt called a “bank holiday,” and with the banks closed the Hollywood studios couldn’t meet their payrolls. On March 9, Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Relief Act and the banks reopened; however, Hollywood producers announced that all employees’ wages would have to be reduced by 25 to 50 percent because of the hard times. The seismic news hit the film industry like the major earthquake that rocked Los Angeles on March 12, 1933—Hollywood trembled. For the first time in the history of Hollywood, on March 13, the IATSE unions went out on strike and the studios were closed.
During the Hollywood labor disputes and prolonged strikes of 1933, Grace McKee elected not to cross the picket lines, but among the strikebreakers was a desperate young woman who was scrimping and saving every penny she could to put a down payment on a house. According to fellow IATSE member Olin Stanley, Gladys was pictured in the newspaper as she jumped over the fence at RKO Studios to avoid the picket line and maintain her employment.
By February 1934, Grace McKee became concerned about Gladys’s mental state. Suffering from anxiety and insomnia, Gladys wasn’t eating, and she was obviously exhausted and depressed. Grace persuaded Gladys to see a neurologist, who placed her in a Santa Monica rest home where she remained for several weeks before returning to work. Though Grace tried to convince Gladys that the cost of owning a home was beyond her means, Gladys’s determination to start a new life for herself and Norma Jeane had become obsessiv
e.
“I told her not to buy it. I begged her not to buy it,” Grace stated, but Gladys purchased a six-thousand-dollar house with a down payment of $750 on October 20, 1934. Norma Jeane was told to pack her things. Now eight years old, she was to move to her new home in Hollywood with her mother.
The handsome two-story house in Hollywood had a Georgian portico in front and stood at 6812 Arbol Drive in the Cahuenga Pass, not far from the Hollywood Bowl. True to the promise, it was painted white and had a back yard.
“My mother bought furniture, a table with a white top and brown legs, chairs, beds, and curtains,” Marilyn remembered. “One day a grand piano arrived at my home. It was out of condition, but it had once belonged to the movie star Fredric March. It was for me. I was going to be given piano lessons on it. ‘You’ll play the piano over here, by the windows,’ my mother said, ‘and here on the sill by the fireplace there’ll be a love seat. As soon as I pay off a few other things I’ll get the love seats, and we’ll all sit in them at night and listen to you play the piano!’”
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 13