Norma Jeane’s fear of losing Grace quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doc felt that they didn’t have enough money to support the one child living with them, and he wanted to bring his other two children into the household at some point soon. “I think she has to go,” he said of Norma Jeane. Grace feared that if something didn’t change very quickly, she would end up alone again. She definitely didn’t want to lose her new husband. What she really wanted was to adopt Norma Jeane, bring her into the domestic fold, and have all of them live happily together. At a loss as to how to handle this complicated situation, she made a difficult decision. Taking Norma Jeane for a short, private walk, she explained to her that she would have to put her into an orphanage, “but just for a little while, I promise.” Of course, Norma Jeane didn’t understand. “I can be a good girl,” she said, crying. “Please don’t send me away.” Grace tried to calm her, but it was useless.
Somehow, it’s not known how, Ida Bolender heard that Norma Jeane was going to be sent to an orphanage. “ ‘Over my dead body’ was her reaction,” said a relative of hers. “She said that she simply wouldn’t allow it. She called Grace and said, ‘Please, I am begging you to now allow us to adopt that child. Or, at the very least, let us take care of her again. Don’t put her in an orphanage. Think of what’s best for her. Her brother and sisters miss her. We love her. She has a home here. Don’t do this!’ ”
It was clear that, by this time, Grace Goddard did not like Ida. In fact, she felt that Ida had been much too territorial where Norma Jeane was concerned. Besides, she had made a promise to Gladys that she would never allow Ida to have the girl again. Gladys had apparently told Grace that she was afraid that if they allowed Ida to ever take in Norma Jeane, they would never see her again. Of course, this was Gladys’s sickness talking, yet Grace allowed it to influence her. Thus the two women had it in their heads that Ida Bolender was the enemy, and there was nothing Ida could do to change that perception.
Ida Bolender wrote Grace Goddard a long letter at this time, reminding her of all she had done for Norma Jeane. “We loved her, we cared for her… when she was sick, we were there for her. My husband and I feel that we were the only family she had ever known and we would happily take her back rather than see her be sent to a frightening place like an orphanage.”
“Thank you for your kind offer,” Grace wrote back to Ida. “But we have already made suitable arrangements for Norma Jeane.”
On September 13, 1935, Grace packed up Norma Jeane’s things in one suitcase and one shopping bag and drove the little girl to her new home.
“I thought I was going to a prison,” Marilyn would remember many years later. “What had I done that they were getting rid of me? I was afraid of everything and afraid to show how scared I was. All I could do was cry.”
Norma Jeane was nine years old when she found herself in the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. The adult Marilyn Monroe would always paint her time there—roughly a year and a half, from 1935 to mid-1937—as one of the darkest periods of her life. “Do you know what it’s like to be forced into uncertainty?” she once asked. She would also recall that she did not feel like an orphan since her mother was still alive and she also had her Aunt Grace. She didn’t want to go to the orphanage, and she stood on the steps of the building crying out, “But I’m not an orphan. I’m not an orphan.” It was just another cruel twist of fate in a life already filled with this kind of despair.
Magda Bernard’s stepbrother, Tony, was at the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home at the same time as Norma Jeane. She recalls, “My family’s circumstances were such that Tony had to stay at the orphanage until we could take him in, but we went to visit him every week. I clearly remember Norma Jeane as being this pretty blue-eyed girl with a big heart who seemed to just want to be loved. She was a beautiful but somehow sad-seeming child.
“The orphanage wasn’t as bad as you might think it was if you judge it only on what Norma [as an adult] would say about it. Personally, I think they did a pretty good job with the kids. There were about sixty children there, twenty-five of them being girls. There were twelve beds to a room. The age range was from about six to fourteen.
“There were holiday parties, day trips to the beach. The orphanage actually had a beach house, so the kids got to go there quite often and play in the sand and ocean. There were presents for everyone at Christmastime. They had a bit of pocket money for sweets. They went to the circus, had many kinds of day trips like that… the Griffith Park Observatory, for instance. They went to the RKO film lot for tours, got to meet celebrities. During the week, they attended the Vine Street School in their gingham uniforms. On Sundays they would get dressed properly so that they could attend the Vine Street Methodist Church. It actually was quite nice for the kids, I think.
“I know in later years Marilyn complained about all of the chores she had to do at the orphanage. I remember reading that she said she had to wash hundreds of dishes and was stuck doing laundry for hours and hours at a time. She said she had to clean toilets and wash floors. She was exaggerating!”
After Marilyn was famous, an orphanage official named Mrs. In-graham was quoted as saying, “I really don’t know why Miss Monroe tells these awful stories about it. And people print them, whatever she says. This story of Marilyn washing dishes is just silly. She never washed any dishes. She never scrubbed toilets. She dried dishes an hour a week. That’s all. She had to make her own bed and keep her section of the girls’ cottage tidy, and that was all.”
“I used to wake up and sometimes I’d think I was dead,” Marilyn once told her friend Ralph Roberts of this time, “like I had died in my sleep, and I wasn’t part of my body anymore. I couldn’t feel myself and I thought that the world had ended. Everything seemed so far away and like nothing else could bother me.”
Perhaps what’s most interesting about these terrible days in her childhood is the way Marilyn described how she would pass the time. She would fall back into her fantasy world, and now her dreams were about being picked from the lot of other children as something special. “I dreamed of myself becoming so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed,” she would recall. “I dreamed of walking very proudly in beautiful clothes and being admired by everyone—men and women—and overhearing words of praise. I made up the praises and repeated them aloud as if someone else were saying them.” *
Grace v. Ida
Grace Goddard felt that she had no choice but to place Norma Jeane Mortensen in an orphanage, but she was still devoted to her. Life just hadn’t worked out the way she had hoped, but she remained determined to one day find a way to bring Norma Jeane back to the Goddard home. Meanwhile, she visited Norma Jeane every week, bringing her presents and new clothing. Often she would take the little girl off the property and to the movies. “She felt terrible about it,” said Bea Thomas. “Every time she went, she’d leave crying. But while she was with her they would talk about movies and Grace used to tell Norma Jeane, ‘One day you’ll be just like Shirley Temple. Just wait and see.’ She still had this idea that Norma Jeane was going to be in films, but she had switched her ideal from Jean Harlow to Shirley Temple.”
An interesting twist occurred in Norma Jeane’s daily activities at the orphanage when Ida and Wayne Bolender began visiting her. It was no surprise that they wanted to see her, given their strong feelings for her. Norma Jeane was overjoyed to see them. She still thought of them as her parents, and if it had been up to her, she no doubt would have very much preferred living with them and her foster siblings rather than with strangers in an orphanage. As it happened, each time Ida came to the orphanage with warm chocolate chip cookies and hand-me-down clothing from one of Norma Jeane’s siblings, the girl would parrot back to her the notion that she was one day going to be the next Shirley Temple. Soon, even Ida began encouraging her in her Shirley Temple fantasies. When Norma Jeane mentioned as much to Grace, she became suspicious. She felt it strange that the religious and often sanctimonious Ida Bolender had su
ddenly begun endorsing Norma Jeane’s show business aspirations. The more Grace thought about it, according to her relatives, the unhappier she became about it. After all, times were tough. Wayne Bolender was a mailman and government jobs were in jeopardy during the Depression. Did Ida think that she might have an opportunity to one day exploit Norma Jeane for profit? The girl was uncommonly pretty and maybe even talented. Grace speculated that if she was so convinced that it could happen—that the girl could one day become famous—who was to say that Ida didn’t think so as well?
“When Grace would ask Norma Jeane what she and Ida talked about, it was always ‘Shirley Temple, Shirley Temple, Shirley Temple,’ ” said Bea Thomas. “Grace didn’t like it. She disliked Ida already, and for Ida to now take an interest in Norma Jeane’s movie star aspirations was just a little too strange. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Grace herself wanted to exploit her in films, but… well, all I can say is that she didn’t want Ida visiting Norma Jeane, that’s for sure.”
Indeed, on December 5, 1935, Grace wrote a stern letter to the orphanage’s headmistress, Sula Dewey—a kindly older woman who looked like a prototype grandmother—to tell her in no uncertain terms that no one was allowed “to see or talk to little Norma Jeane Baker unless you have my written permission to do so.” (Sometimes Norma Jeane was called Baker; no one was ever consistent with her last name, not even Grace.) Moreover, Grace was very specific in her letter that one person who was definitely barred from visiting the girl was Ida Bolender. She wrote that Norma Jeane was very upset every time Ida came to call. It might have been true. Mrs. Dewey wrote back to Grace and confirmed, “Norma is not the same since Mrs. B. visited with her. She doesn’t look as happy.” In the end, the headmistress concluded, “I’ll do as you have requested.” However, in a follow-up letter, Mrs. Dewey seemed to have a change of heart: “I think that it’s probably not in her best interest to evaluate Norma Jeane’s moods based on her visitors. We have noticed that this is a child who can sometimes be very unhappy for no apparent reason. In thinking about it, maybe it is not best to keep her from Mrs. B. I had a long conversation with Mrs. B yesterday when she telephoned me. I am convinced that she is not the problem. I would like to have a meeting with you to discuss Mr. and Mrs. B’s future visitations.” Grace responded immediately with a very terse note: “Please do as I say. I have good reason for my wishes. Thank you for honoring them.”
“I think all of this business said much more about Grace, than it did Ida,” Bea Thomas posited. “Please. Ida had no thought of trying to get Norma Jeane into the movies in order to exploit her. How would she have gone about it? She had no connections. It was Grace who had all the connections. In my mind, this just spoke to Grace’s own very strange paranoia.
“It got extremely contentious between the two ladies, especially when Ida found out she was barred from visiting Norma Jeane. You can imagine her reaction when she got to the orphanage one day and was told in no uncertain terms by Mrs. Dewey that she could not visit the little girl. Let’s just say she did not go quietly into the night.”
Finally, on June 26, 1937, Norma Jeane left the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home to live once again with Grace and Doc Goddard. A month earlier, the young actress whom Grace had hoped to fashion Norma Jeane after—Jean Harlow—had died at just twenty-six. With typical flair for the dramatic, Marilyn Monroe recalled many years later that she had a “strange feeling I was being set free into a world in which Jean Harlow no longer lived.” *
Grace had hoped that when Norma Jeane moved back into her home, she would be able to convince Doc that she belonged there. However, it was not meant to be. The second time Norma Jeane was with the Goddards, there was enough domestic turmoil to convince Grace that, again, her marriage could be in jeopardy. It’s difficult to believe that one little girl could cause so much havoc, and in retrospect it sounds like Grace experienced problems with Doc that probably had nothing to do with Norma Jeane. He was drinking heavily at this time, and Marilyn would recall many years later that he made her feel extremely uncomfortable. “A couple of times he said, ‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’ I would sneak out of the room. He scared me.” However, six months after she got to the Goddards’, her bags were being packed and she was on the move once again. “But I really want to stay here,” she told Grace. “I know,” Grace responded. “But it’s time for you to go.” Indeed, it was always time for Norma Jeane to go, wasn’t it? Perhaps Grace should have just left her in the orphanage. However, every time she went to visit her, the girl was so clearly miserable.
In December 1937—around the time eleven-year-old Norma Jeane was enrolled in the Lankershim Elementary School—Grace asked the girl’s aunt, Olive Monroe, to take her into her home in North Hollywood. Olive Monroe had her own problems. Ten years earlier, her husband, Marion Otis—Gladys’s brother, the one who had been banished from the family by Della—had deserted her and her three children. Her mother, Ida Martin, a strict disciplinarian, had moved in with her and the two did not get along well. The broken family had little money and was barely scraping by. It’s a wonder that Olive agreed to take in Norma Jeane, and that Grace asked her to do so suggests that Grace must have been quite desperate to find a home for her little charge. Once she got there, Norma Jeane didn’t like living with the Monroes at all. “The other kids knew I was related to them,” she recalled, “but I felt on a desert island with natives or primitive people out of the hills of Appalachia. I was more alone and separated from anything than I had ever been. I was feeling the predicament of my life, and that frightened and depressed me so much I would get sick and couldn’t eat. When I did I would often throw up.” As an adult, Marilyn would later recall that she was last in line after her cousins for “everything from breakfast to play time to bath time and then bed.”
Norma Jeane Learns She Has a Half Sister
By the winter of 1938, Gladys Baker was more desperate than ever as she continued her unhappy life, now as a patient in the Agnews State Hospital in San Jose, California. In fact, she almost managed to escape. Precipitating her attempt was a series of telephone calls from Edward Mortenson, her former husband and the man she’d listed on Norma Jeane’s birth certificate as the child’s father. Gladys actually thought Mortenson was dead by this time, but he was alive and well and telling her he was interested in resuming their relationship. How could that occur, though, if she was locked up? Gladys—who would prove with the passing of the years to have the greatest determination when it came to trying to gain her freedom—somehow got her hands on a nurse’s uniform, put it on, and then slipped out of the sanitarium. It was hours before she was found, walking down the street with no apparent destination. She later explained that Mortenson had promised to meet her at a specific location if she managed to escape, but that he didn’t show up. She was returned to the facility with no trouble, though she was heartbroken. Later that same week, when Grace Goddard arrived for a visit, Gladys begged her to “get me out of here.” However, Grace knew better. Gladys was obviously mentally incompetent and was exactly where she needed to be at that time in her life. Grace had no choice but to turn down her friend’s pleas. However, Gladys then decided to try another route. She wrote to her long-lost daughter, Berniece. Of course, she didn’t know exactly how to locate her, so she sent the letter to the address of one of her ex-husband’s relatives in Flat Lick, Kentucky. Somehow, the correspondence ended up in Jasper’s hands. He wasn’t sure how to proceed, but after discussing the matter with his wife he reluctantly decided to give it to Berniece. By this time, Berniece was nineteen. She’d just been married, was living in Pineville, and was pregnant with her first child—Gladys’s grandchild.
Berniece was stunned to receive a letter from her mother, a woman she had long ago decided was probably dead. Though she didn’t know much about Gladys, what she did know was not favorable. For years, her stepmother, Maggie, had criticized Gladys for leaving her children behind, as if Gladys had had a choice in the matter. Berniece’s daug
hter, Mona Rae Miracle, says that anything her mother learned about Gladys had to be “squeezed like water from a stone from Jasper and Maggie.” Berniece, however, was still always curious about her mother and kept a small framed photograph of her on her dresser. Often she would remark to Jasper about Gladys’s beauty. Jasper agreed that, indeed, Gladys was a gorgeous woman, but, he said, she was also an irresponsible woman. It seemed clear to Berniece that she would never have much of a relationship with her mother, and so after many years of wondering, she had made up her mind that Gladys was dead. Then, out of the blue, she received a letter from her. Most of Gladys’s missive was a long rant begging her daughter to help her get out of the mental hospital. She asked Berniece to get in touch with an aunt of Gladys’s, Dora, in Oregon and ask her to also try to get a release for her. Then she gave Berniece some stunning news. She told her that she had a twelve-year-old half sister named Norma Jeane. Gladys also sent Norma Jeane’s and Grace Goddard’s addresses to Berniece and suggested that she contact both of them.
Berniece was surprised: She was amazed that her mother was alive, stunned to learn that Gladys was in a mental hospital, and shocked to learn that she had a half sister. There was no question about it: She wanted a relationship with her. She decided to first write to Grace. A week later, she received a return letter from Grace, who was elated to hear from her. She suggested that Berniece write to Norma Jeane. Then Grace told Norma Jeane that she had a half sister. “Grace decided that it might do Norma Jeane some good to know that she wasn’t really alone in the world,” recalled a relative of Grace’s, “that she had a family member who wanted to know her. It all seemed to come together at the same time, Gladys’s letter to Berniece, Grace’s decision that it was the right thing to do to have Berniece contact Norma Jeane, and then telling Norma Jeane about Berniece.”
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 8