The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Norma Jeane spent her first seven years with the strict but decent Bolenders. Better parents, by far, than Della and Gladys, they provided a proper home and did not mistreat her. Yet these respectable people were quite fanatical, imposed severe and inflexible discipline, and considered Norma Jeane a bastard, an outcast and a sinner. They constantly ordered her to stop doing anything that gave her pleasure, stifling her natural feelings and making her feel she was dirty. She learned to avoid conflict by being passive and docile, and as a child she retreated into a fantasy life. She said she had a powerful impulse to take off all her clothes, before all the pious worshippers in church, and stand up naked so God and everyone else could see her. (Obsessed with her own sensuous figure, Marilyn was never ashamed of nudity. She loved to show off her naked body at home and in public, in photographs and in films.)

  In 1933 Gladys qualified for a government-sponsored, low-cost mortgage. In the fall she reclaimed her daughter and moved into a modest, three-bedroom house just next to the Hollywood Bowl. To help meet expenses, Gladys took in tenants, a couple of English actors, George Atkinson and his wife. George played bit parts; his wife was an extra in crowd scenes and a stand-in for Madeleine Carroll. Like so many camp followers in Hollywood, the Atkinsons were infatuated with its glamor and fantasized endlessly about the big break that would make them great stars.

  Gladys' hedonistic regime, the complete antithesis of the Bolenders', transformed Norma Jeane's daily life and moral values. Gladys loved to indulge in cigarettes and alcohol, candy and perfume, frequent trips to dance halls and long nights at the movies. Norma Jeane, with her strict religious background, was shocked by her mother's wild life. She thought Gladys would be sent to hell and spent a lot of time praying for her. For the first seven years of her life she had never known a mother's tender voice or affectionate touch. She now lived with her mother, but did not feel close to her. Always self-absorbed, Gladys never gave her the love and care she sought. Her mother never smiled at her, never kissed or caressed her. She was so nervous, Marilyn recalled, that she'd become upset when she heard someone turning the page of a magazine.

  Gladys had attempted suicide several times, swung perilously between depression and mania, and had her first mental breakdown in January 1935. She suddenly started to laugh, scream and curse hysterically and, with a sudden outburst of violence, to shatter dishes against the wall. She would lie on the floor, stare up the staircase and yell that someone was coming down the steps to kill her. One night, after accusing her co-worker and best friend, Grace Goddard, of trying to poison her, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed her. The tenants called the police, and two officers finally overpowered her. She was taken to Norwalk state hospital, where in 1927 her mother had died in a straitjacket. The sight of Gladys' nervous collapse terrified the eight-year-old Norma Jeane and remained, for the rest of her life, a warning that the same thing might also happen to her. The memories of her promiscuous and unstable mother were disturbing and shameful.

  Norma Jeane's half-sister, Berniece, later explained the reasons for Gladys' breakdown: "divorce, desertion, the death of her mother, separation from two of her children, the frustration of dead-end dating, the toll of working overtime, and now a strike at her company just when she had taken on the huge financial obligation of a home." Apart from brief intervals when she seemed to improve and was temporarily released from confinement, Gladys spent the rest of her long life in insane asylums. Norma Jeane occasionally saw her, but since Gladys became a fanatical Christian Scientist and retreated into herself, they could never establish meaningful contact. Norma Jeane's first husband, who met Gladys during World War II, found her affectless, remote and withdrawn: "Gladys seemed to be reaching for something but there was nothing there to grasp. She couldn't find it. I never saw her angry and I never saw her laugh. She was very pious and apparently content."

  The Hungarian photographer André de Dienes, who drove up the coast to the Northwest with Norma Jeane in 1945, described another dutiful but dreary encounter. On that occasion, the forty-three-year-old Gladys failed to respond either to her daughter or to the presents she'd brought: "Norma Jeane's mother lived in an old hotel in the center of Portland, in a depressing bedroom on the top floor. The reunion between mother and daughter lacked warmth. They had nothing to say to each other. Mrs. Baker was a woman of uncertain age, emaciated and apathetic, making no effort to put us at our ease. . . . A silence ensued. Then Mrs. Baker buried her face in her hands and seemed to forget all about us. It was distressing. She had obviously been released from the hospital too soon." The visitors escaped as quickly as they could.

  Despite her history of mental illness and apparent estrangement from the world, Gladys recovered sufficiently to find another husband. In April 1949, without bothering to get divorced, she contracted a third marriage to an electrician, John Eley. After his death three years later, she sent a sad and rather paranoid letter from a state mental hospital, which made Norma Jeane feel both guilty and distressed, as she always did whenever they had any contact: "Please dear child Id like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here & Id like to move away soon as possible. Id like to have my childs love instead of hatred. Love, Mother."3

  II

  After Gladys' violent crack up and sudden disappearance, Grace Goddard became Norma Jeane's legal guardian. From January to August 1935 she made temporary and increasingly desperate arrangements for the child. At first Norma Jeane lived with Gladys' lodgers, the Atkinsons, but when the house was sold they gave up their hopes of stardom and returned to England. She then moved in with new foster parents, the Harvey Giffens, and then with Grace's mother, Emma Atchinson. This proved equally unsatisfactory, and the little refugee must have been very troubled during these frequent displacements. In September 1935 Grace took the drastic step of putting her into a children's home, where she remained for the next two years. Her father, mother and sister were alive, but she had no one to care for her. Technically, she still had a family; practically, she did not. Condemned to be an orphan, she felt fear, loneliness and utter despair.

  Orphanages were then notorious for their poor food, onerous chores and harsh discipline, and seemed to punish children for their parents' disappearance or death. One authority, emphasizing the physical and mental deprivation, stated that orphanages

  were, quite literally, a last resort for almost all who turned to them. . . . [They] were often highly regimented institutions where children had relatively little positive interaction with adults and limited opportunity to develop emotionally or psychologically. . . .

  When disaster struck their families, such children were provided with food, clothing, shelter, companionship, and at least some education. . . . Such children probably lacked emotional warmth from a parental figure and the opportunity to act independently in society.

  During the Depression, as orphanages became increasingly overcrowded (as prisons are today), the food, facilities and adult supervision deteriorated, while neglect, punishment and abuse increased. The reputation of orphanages was so forbidding that many of them took names with pleasant connotations. The Jewish Orphan Asylum became Bellefaire, St. Mary's Female Asylum became Parmadale, the Protestant Orphan Asylum became Beech Brook. The orphans were eager to be adopted or taken into foster homes, where they would at least have the semblance of family life. When promising parents appeared, the children were exhibited like slaves on an auction block. In 1925, pedestrians looked up to see an institution with "barred windows, tiny hands clutching the bars, against which were placed listless white faces." One girl, lamenting the lack of affection, "felt so lonely and forlorn." Many children, not surprisingly, had chronic physical illnesses and severe psychological problems.

  But foster parents, especially during hard times, could be quite mercenary; and officials, desperate to place the children, often ignored the minimal standards required for proper care. Another authority noted that "in 1933 an estimated 120,000 children stretched the foster c
are system to its limits." The journalist Art Buchwald, who spent most of his youth in foster homes, observed that "the foster parents were more interested in the money they received than in the children." In Tennessee, two-year-old twins were placed "in the care of a seventy-nine-year-old blind woman who was losing her mind. . . . Sixteen children were living in the attic of a home that failed to pass a fire inspection."4

  In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest Lady Bracknell's memorably witty remark shows the absurdity of blaming the victim: "To lose one parent . . . may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." Yet children usually react to their loss by blaming themselves. Both Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling described traumatic experiences of abandonment in childhood that left them, like Norma Jeane, permanently angry and hurt. Dickens wrote that "my whole nature was so penetrated with grief and humiliation . . . that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I . . . wander desolately back to that time of my life." Kipling agreed that "when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge."5 Norma Jeane had been suddenly separated from her mother, her guardian and several foster families. Grace now told her they were going for a pleasant car ride, but she soon arrived at a strange, hostile and frightening place.

  The Los Angeles Orphans Home Society – now called Hollygrove and still standing at 815 North El Centro in Hollywood – was not as forbidding as it first seemed to a small child. The privately endowed, nonsectarian home was founded in 1880, and its colonial-style, two-story red-brick building was set back on a wide lawn. The dormitories, dining room and play areas were clean and neat. Inside, there was a large recreation room with toys and games, radio and phonograph, auditorium and stage. Outside, on five acres, were swings, seesaws, exercise bars, sandboxes and even a swimming pool. The Home housed fifty to sixty children, a third of them street urchins or runaways, the rest actual orphans. Norma Jeane lived with twenty-five other girls, aged six to fourteen, in a high-ceilinged dorm, with large windows, behind the main building. The boys slept in a separate dorm, but all the meals, sports, games, activities and schooling were coeducational.

  According to her over-optimistic file, which reads as if she were on holiday and trying to please her keepers, Norma Jeane seems to have adjusted remarkably well. Her dossier states that her "behavior is normal. . . . She is bright and sun-shiny. . . . The school reports on her are good. . . . She is quiet. . . . She sleeps and eats well. . . . She is well behaved. . . . Her grades are good. . . . She participates in all activities willingly. . . . She is co-operative." But – like Jay Gatsby watching the alluring lights across the sound – she dreamed of escaping to a glamorous life in the movies."When I was nine," she recalled, "I used to look out of the orphan asylum window at night and see a big lighted-up sign that read 'R.K.O. Radio Pictures.'"

  Some notable orphans have left poignant accounts of their life in institutions. Charlie Chaplin's experiences in London were remarkably similar to Norma Jeane's in Los Angeles. His father abandoned the family soon after Charlie was born; his mother retreated into her own world of silence and indifference. She sent Charlie and his brother to a school for "Orphans and Destitute Children." While they were in the orphanage, she had a mental breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum. Like Norma Jeane, Charlie was not actually an orphan, since both his parents were alive, but psychologically he felt he was one. In his autobiography, he observed that though "we were well looked after, it was a forlorn existence. Sadness was in the air."6 His head was shaved and stained with iodine for ringworm; he was mocked by the village boys as an inmate of a "booby hatch"; and, too terrified to protest, he was severely beaten for a crime he didn't commit.

  The American poet Elizabeth Bishop, born in 1911, was also a damaged orphan. Her father died when she was eight months old; her mother was committed to an insane asylum when Elizabeth was five, and she never saw her mother again. Brought up by her paternal grandparents, she suffered from severe eczema, asthma and numerous childhood diseases. As an adult, she became an alcoholic and experienced suicidal depressions.

  Eileen Simpson – a psychotherapist, once married to the poet and suicide John Berryman – has written perceptively about her experiences with the "drab surroundings, ill-fitting clothing, and inadequate diets" of an orphanage, with the children who "cried incessantly, refused to eat, slept poorly, were alternately clinging and detached." As with Norma Jeane, "there had always been a broad vein of sadness" in her character and very little talent for happiness. She "knew what it was like . . . to cry out for reassurance that she was not alone, and to hear only the opaque, tomblike silence that, in the middle of the night, isolated me from the living."

  Simpson explained why "foster care was as problematical as institutional care had been. A successful match between child and surrogate parents was not easy to arrange, especially since many foster families were more interested in augmenting their income than in looking after someone else's child. Few of the children were adopted by their families, and far too many were shunted from one household to another, with predictable results."7 Chaplin and Simpson had the comfort of a sibling, Bishop lived with sympathetic relatives; but Norma Jeane, rejected by everyone, was absolutely alone. Like Chaplin and Simpson, she was severely damaged by her years in the orphanage.

  Marilyn emphasized that she was brought up very differently from the normal American child and never believed she would have a happy life. Natasha Lytess criticized Marilyn's habit of frequently referring to her miserable childhood, excusing her bad behavior and appealing for sympathy. But she had suffered terribly, and felt justified in embellishing her story to advance her career. A publicist at Twentieth Century-Fox, writing a brief account of her early life, noted that the first money she ever earned was five cents a month for setting tables at the orphanage; and that she later spent at the local drugstore the ten cents a month she got for washing dishes. She began to stutter in the orphanage and continued to stutter as an adult whenever she was nervous. Her happiest childhood memory, an image of freedom, was "running through high grass in a vacant lot in Hawthorne." Her saddest memory was "disappointment in people when she was a little girl."

  Norma Jeane was released from the orphanage in June 1937 and lived for the next year with a series of foster parents: first with Grace's sister and brother-in-law, Enid and Sam Knebelcamp; then with her own elderly great-aunt, Ida Martin; next with her guardian, Grace Goddard; finally with Grace's aunt, Ana Lower; and with other foster families when Ana's health was poor. Ana, divorced and living on rental property, was fifty-eight when the twelve-year-old Norma Jeane came to live with her in 1938. She looked plump, white-haired and grandmotherly, but her manner was stern and severe. A devout Christian Scientist (like Gladys), she went to church several times a week. Norma Jeane's grandmother, her mother, her guardian, her great-aunt, and even the sensible and compassionate Ana, all had had – and warned Norma Jeane to beware of – untrustworthy husbands and disastrous marriages.

  Norma Jeane had to adjust not only to many different families, moods, rules, beliefs and ways of life, but also to nine different schools, for her first ten grades, between 1932 and 1942. Hardened to being the least important person in her foster family, she nevertheless remembered the disgusting humiliation on her weekly bath night: "I never minded coming 'last' in these families except on Saturday nights when everybody took a bath. Water cost money, and changing the water in the tub was an unheard of extravagance. The whole family used the same tub of water. And I was always the last one in." No wonder that she later luxuriated in long, perfumed and purifying baths.

  Norma Jeane, a pretty and obedient girl, was never beaten. But she had to endure something far worse than repulsive bath water. When she was a child, most psychiatrists believed that "sexual abuse was rare and that children often lied about it. In 1937 two prominent American psychiatrists not only denied that sexual assault traumatized most childr
en but argued that 'the child may have been the actual seducer rather than the one innocently seduced.'"8 By the time she was twelve years old, Norma Jeane – with no one to protect her – had been sexually assaulted at least three times. At the age of eight, she was molested by a boarder in a foster home. When she tried to explain what had happened to her, the foster parent became very angry and – following the current belief – blamed her: "Don't you dare say anything against Mr. Kimmel. Mr. Kimmel's a fine man. He's my star boarder! . . . Shame on you, complaining about people!" After she left the orphanage and entered puberty, she was again molested by adult predators: by a cousin when living with Ida Martin and by Grace's husband, "Doc" Goddard, a six-foot five-inch drunkard.

  Though Marilyn claimed she'd been raped as a child, her first husband stated she was a virgin when they married. She later gave a more accurate, though equally repulsive account of what actually happened: "I wasn't really raped, but he forced me to do something, and I had a shock. . . . He forced me to take him in my mouth." Virginia Woolf was also sexually molested, at six years old, when her adult half-brother, George Duckworth, lifted her onto a table and fingered her private parts. As an adult, Woolf always associated sex with degradation and contempt. She became sexually frigid, had several mental breakdowns and finally committed suicide.

  But at the age of twelve, showing no outward signs of her emotional scars, Norma Jeane looked in the mirror at her smooth, shapely body and was pleased by what she saw. She first aroused the attention of young boys by wearing a tight sweater to show off her breasts, and soon realized that her well-developed body was the key to popularity and success. Though sexy, she repressed her sexual feelings, and recalled "that with all my lipstick and mascara and precocious curves, I was as unsensual as a fossil."9