The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  One day, she asked Grace to take them all to the home that Gladys’s father, Otis Elmore Monroe (who had died by hanging himself), had built by hand. But even this potentially nostaligic excursion failed to reach Gladys; she had no reaction to seeing the old homestead.

  Marilyn then asked Grace to take them all to the house in Hollywood that Gladys had bought so many years ago. It was here that Gladys had lived for a short time with Marilyn and the Atkinsons. Surely she would have some reaction to this place. It was also here that she had had the psychotic episode, and from here that she was taken to the mental hospital. The women sat in their car on the street in front of the house for a long time, telling stories of the furniture that had once been in there—the piano that Marilyn so loved and that Gladys promised she would one day play well, the flowers always in the living room, the sunny kitchen. Nothing. Gladys felt nothing.

  Getting Through to Gladys?

  On September 13, 1946, a few months after that ghastly confrontation with Jim Dougherty, Norma Jeane and the woman with whom she said she was living—a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Minnie Wilette—appeared in front of a judge in Reno, Nevada.

  In her suit for divorce, which was uncontested by Jim (and he could have fought it, actually, since Norma Jeane clearly had not spent the required six months in Las Vegas), she had said that he’d inflicted “extreme mental cruelty that has impaired [my] health.” Now, at the hearing, her attorney asked a few questions. Did she intend to make Nevada her home and permanent place of residence? Yes, Norma Jeane answered. Had that been her intention since she arrived there in May? Yes. Was it her plan to stay in Nevada for an indefinite period of time? Yes. Then, when asked to outline the way Dougherty had mistreated her, Norma Jeane responded by saying, “Well, in the first place, my husband didn’t support me and he objected to my working, criticized me for it and he also had a bad temper and would fly into rages and he left me on three different occasions and criticized me and embarrassed me in front of my friends and he didn’t try to make a home for me.” She said that his actions “upset me and made me nervous.” She maintained that she didn’t see the situation as ever improving and that there was no chance for reconciliation. The judge granted the divorce. The whole matter took about five minutes, and then Marilyn hopped on a plane back to Los Angeles.

  By the time Marilyn got back to Aunt Ana’s home, anyone could see that she was blissful. “She showed up at Aunt Ana’s, feeling terrific,” Berniece recalled. “As soon as she saw me, she threw her arms around me. ‘I’m a free woman again,’ Marilyn said, laughing. ‘I feel like celebrating!’ ”

  Marilyn then moved through the house and finally found Gladys, who was in a terrible mood, very angry for no apparent reason. Though she had tried to reach her mother countless times in the past and failed, this time Marilyn sensed she might be able to connect with her. Maybe it was because her spirits were soaring as a result of her new freedom and fledgling career that she believed she could get through to Gladys. Mother and daughter spent much of the afternoon and into the early evening preparing for their night on the town. As all the ladies of the house bore witness to Gladys’s seeming comeback, there was a feeling in the air that salvation from her never-ending misery might finally be possible. Every time Marilyn had seen any kind of slight improvement like this in her mother, she hoped it would last. She’d always held on to the belief that Gladys could remain in a healthy mental place, if she was “managed” properly—that is, if those around her acted a certain way, exuded a particular energy. She had tried so many different tactics in the past, but with little success. However, on this night, it was as if she had dug deep within and found a character that Gladys responded to—an upbeat personality that seemed to ignite a flame of life in her mother.

  That night, as the family walked into the Pacific Seas dining room in downtown Los Angeles, Marilyn continued with the persona she had created earlier in the afternoon—a mixture of confidence and naiveté… a dignified charm… a carefree exuberance. She was a little flirty… funny. Gladys seemed to enjoy watching her in action. Seated at the table that night were Gladys and Ana; Grace and her sister, Eunice; and Marilyn and her half sister, Berniece. Berniece’s daughter, Mona Rae, was also in attendance, and has shared both hers and her mother’s recollections of that evening.

  Beverly Kramer’s father, Marvin, managed the Pacific Seas dining room in Los Angeles. He was a good friend of Grace’s husband, Doc. As it happened, Beverly worked at the restaurant as a waitress; she was about eighteen. “Grace brought the family into the restaurant a lot,” Beverly recalled. “I have seen pictures of that night, so I remember it well.”

  “Celebrate we did,” Berniece recounted. “That night, we all enjoyed a nice celebration.”

  Marilyn lifted a glass. “Let’s have a toast! To the future, everyone,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, to the future,” Grace agreed.

  “To the future,” everyone chimed in.

  Smiling warmly at Gladys, Marilyn repeated, “To the future, Mother.” It was then that Gladys raised her own glass in the direction of her daughter. And there it was. It was just a flash. But there was no mistaking it. Gladys smiled.

  “I know that everyone was always concerned about Gladys,” said Beverly Kramer, “and that anytime they brought her into the restaurant, she seemed unhappy. This night, I remember she was upbeat. She was smiling. She seemed to be getting along with everyone, especially with Norma Jeane.”

  During the evening, a Polynesian-style band played island music, with a group of girls singing, surrounding a single microphone. At one point, the girls fanned out into the sea of tables to find volunteers to join them onstage for a hula dance. “I remember that before she could even be chosen, Marilyn popped out of her chair and stood front and center, waiting for the rest of the gang to be gathered,” recalled Beverly Kramer. “It was a mostly comic ritual, with the patrons giving a halfhearted effort and the dining room applauding their attempts. Marilyn, however, was familiar with the song the band was playing, ‘Blue Hawaii’ from the Bing Crosby film Waikiki Wedding, and she began to sing it.” Kramer remembers that Marilyn did so with such conviction that the moment became awkward for some of the others onstage. Most of the women drifted away and back to their seats. “Gladys seemed to love it, though,” Kramer remembered. “I just remember her smiling. She had such a nice smile.”

  Just days after it seemed that Marilyn had made some headway in connecting with her mother, Gladys made a stunning announcement. Over breakfast, she looked at Marilyn with very sad eyes and said, “You know, you can’t keep me here forever, Norma Jeane.” It was a confusing statement. Marilyn didn’t know how to react. Gladys then went to her room and started to pack her things. When Marilyn followed her, Gladys told her that she had made up her mind and that she was going to return to her Aunt Dora’s in Oregon. “Won’t you please stay here with me, Mother?” Marilyn said, begging her. Though she told her that she would be worried about her and didn’t want her to go, Gladys was adamant. There was no talking her out of it. Marilyn asked if she would wait at least one day. Gladys agreed.

  The next day, Marilyn went to a store and bought a present for her mother. She put it in a box and wrapped it gaily. That night, she presented it to her. Gladys opened the box and pulled from it a crisp white nurse’s uniform. “I thought you’d like this, Mother,” Marilyn said, tears in her eyes. Gladys held up the uniform and inspected it. “Are you sure this is my size?” she asked skeptically. Marilyn said that she was certain it would fit her. Gladys smiled and put it back into the box. “Then, it will do nicely,” she said.

  The next day, Marilyn and Berniece took their mother to the bus station, bought her a ticket to Oregon, and tearfully sent her on her way. Berniece was sure they would see her again, but Marilyn wasn’t.

  Two weeks later, Marilyn called Aunt Dora in Oregon to speak to her mother. Maybe what Dora had to say wasn’t so surprising but, still, it was a shock. Gladys had never shown up.<
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  Wayne Bolender’s Fatherly Advice

  Marilyn Monroe didn’t know what to make of her recent time with her mother, Gladys Baker. She didn’t know if she had made any difference in her life at all. She just hoped the time they’d spent together had done Gladys some good. However, as she would later say, she knew that Gladys wouldn’t miss her or Berniece in the least, and that was a reality that penetrated her heart like a steel blade. Interestingly, she turned to her ex-husband, James Dougherty, for comfort during this time—at least in correspondence. Martin Evans, Dougherty’s friend, recalled, “Jim told me he received a very impassioned letter from Norma Jeane saying that she had recently spent a lot of time with her mother and that it hadn’t been easy. He said that she wrote that the woman was very mentally ill and that she had vanished without a trace. She wanted to know if it were possible for the police to begin a search for her… what steps they should take to have the West Coast combed in order to find her. Jim wrote back and told her that he would be happy to discuss it with her in person. He said it was too complicated to get into in a return letter. However, as far as I know, that discussion never took place.”

  Complicating matters at this time for Marilyn was that, during a recent gynecologist’s exam, certain problems were discovered that might make having children difficult. She hadn’t been able to make up her mind about whether or not she wanted a child. On some days she thought she shouldn’t. What if she couldn’t take care of the baby and it ended up as she had—in an orphanage? On other days she felt that she would be an excellent mother and that she would be able to do for the child what her own mother had not been able to do for her: love and nurture the baby and give him or her a good life. But then there were days when a different thought would haunt her: What if her child were to end up like her grandmother and mother? In fact, there had been times recently when she began to doubt her own sanity. Was it a good idea to bring a baby into the world under such troubling circumstances? She wasn’t sure what to think about it. Therefore, she decided to go back to the place where she really felt genuine love as a young girl—to the Bolenders’—and ask for some guidance. As an excuse for her visit, she said that she needed to ask her foster brother, Lester, if he would help move some furniture that she still had at Jim Dougherty’s house. She drove out to Hawthorne by herself. When she got there, Ida was not home. Wayne answered the door and let her in, and she met one of his nieces, also visiting. Her foster sister Nancy Jeffrey quoted a letter that niece wrote regarding Marilyn’s visit:

  “I came to see Wayne one day and Norma Jeane came in. She had asked Lester to help her move after her separation from her first husband. She had a very deep conversation with Uncle Wayne, some things that were bothering her. Her deepest thought that day was having a child and whether it would turn out like her mother. She needed to, I guess, have Uncle Wayne’s blessing. He was the only stable man in her life, as far as I know.”

  After Marilyn explained her worry, Wayne was very clear in his advice. “You are nothing like your mother or your grandmother,” he told her, according to a later recollection. “I knew Della and I know Gladys and I can tell you that you are nothing like them.”

  Marilyn could only hope that what her “Daddy” had told her was the truth.

  Shortly after her divorce, Marilyn moved out of Aunt Ana’s and into her own apartment in Hollywood. In that respect, the rest of 1946 and the whole of 1947 had moments of both frustration and exhilaration. First, the studio prepared her biography, to be sent out to the media. It said that she was an orphan who’d been discovered by a 20th Century-Fox executive while she was babysitting his child—classic movie studio malarkey. There would be other untrue press tidbits, as well—years of them, actually. It was, according to Berniece Miracle, Grace Goddard’s idea to say that Marilyn’s parents were both dead. What she wanted to avoid—and Marilyn certainly agreed with her about it—was the possibility of any reporter tracking down Gladys. This tactic worked… for a while, anyway.

  Giving Up Her Soul

  Despite the speed at which the actress was signed to a deal, there were no movies in the offing for the newly named Marilyn Monroe. In February 1947, Fox renewed her contract for another six months, though she hadn’t done anything other than pose for photographers in bathing suits and negligees for press layouts.

  By the time she made her first film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), she was almost twenty-one years old and more beautiful than ever with her cobalt blue eyes and head of hair so silky smooth and golden blonde. There was not much of Marilyn in Miss Pilgrim, just a quick (and uncredited) shot of her as a telephone operator; most fans haven’t been able to spot her in this film. She would be (barely) seen again in 1947’s Dangerous Years. (“For heaven’s sake, don’t blink,” she wrote to Berniece, “or you’ll miss me!”)

  There would be four more films (these would be released in 1948), if you count You Were Meant for Me, a Jeanne Crain–Dan Dailey musical, one that some sources maintain is part of Monroe’s filmography. Marilyn can also be spotted in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!—a Technicolor bit of nonsense set in the Hoosier state in which June Haver vies for the affections of Lon McCallister with a pair of prize-winning mules, while a ten-year-old Natalie Wood, as Haver’s bratty kid sister, just adds to the overall foolishness. It’s been published many times over the years—and even Marilyn had said it and, for that matter, even Fox had claimed it!—that her one little scene was cut from the film. Not true. It’s there. Just two words, but both present and accounted for. (She’s also seen in a distant shot with her back to the camera, on a rowboat.)

  “She was a scared rabbit,” said Diana Herbert, whose father, F. Hugh Herbert, wrote the screenplay. “On the sly, I snuck her into a screening room where my father was viewing for editing, and Marilyn got to see herself in the bit part before it was trimmed. She’d had one line and whispered to me, ‘Do I sound that awful?’ My father, using the old adage, told me Marilyn photographed like a million dollars. He told me she was going to be a big star.”

  That same year, 1947, Fox exchanged bucolic Indiana for the Wyoming countryside and a pair of mules for a wild white stallion in Green Grass of Wyoming, with Marilyn again uncredited as an extra at a square dance. Then, in August 1947, the studio decided not to renew her contract. Her agent Harry Lipton once recalled, “When I told her that Fox had not taken up the option, her immediate reaction was that the world had crashed around her. But typical of Marilyn, she shook her head, set her jaw and said, ‘Well, I guess it really doesn’t matter—it’s a case of supply and demand.’ She understood the film business already, and she was just a novice. She knew that the studio signed many contract players and the ones who struck gold overnight stayed while those who struggled usually ended up being cut. Still, the show had to go on.”

  Meanwhile, there were a couple of strange incidents in Marilyn’s life in 1947 that may have pointed toward some of the emotional trouble she would experience later in her life. One is told by Diana Herbert. The same age as Marilyn, Herbert got to know her while Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! was being filmed and remained friendly with her. She recalled that when the film was completed, she hosted a pool party at her family’s mansion in Bel Air attended by her friends from UCLA. Marilyn said she would love to attend. She said that on that day, she and her new friend, actress Shelley Winters, had a class at the Actors’ Laboratory—a workshop for actors, directors, and writers, mostly from New York. Afterward, she would go to the party.

  On the appointed day, Marilyn arrived very late. “She came quietly with her beach bag,” recalls Diana Herbert. “I got out of the pool to direct her to the dressing room. A lot of time passed… and no Marilyn. So I became concerned and went and knocked on the door. ‘Marilyn?’ I called out. ‘Are you okay?’ And she said, ‘Yeah,’ in a voice that was barely audible. ‘I’ll be right out, I just have to change.’ So I went back in the pool. An hour went by, and no Marilyn. So, again, I went back to the dressing room and knocked on the door.
‘I’ll be right out,’ she said. By this time, everyone was getting out of the pool, drying off, and going home. More time passed. I again went to the dressing room and knocked on the door. But… she was gone. She never even came out of the dressing room—except to leave.” Over the years, there would be numerous incidents like this in Marilyn’s life.

  At the end of the year, she would very briefly engage the services of new “managers,” Lucille Ryman and John Carroll. However, they weren’t exactly managers. Carroll was a film actor with connections, and Lucille was director of the talent department at MGM—with connections. It’s unclear as to what the terms of the arrangement were—either she was paying them to represent her (unlikely, since she didn’t have much money), or they were taking a percentage of her work (also unlikely, since she didn’t have any). It doesn’t make any difference, really, because they came and went from her life quickly, but not before bearing witness to some unusual moments.

  Lucille, Carroll’s wife, has insisted that Marilyn told her and her husband that she was working as a prostitute at this time, having quick sex with men in cars in order to get money for food. “She told us without pride or shame that she made a deal—she did what she did and her customers then bought her breakfast or lunch.” Lucille also said that Marilyn told her she’d been robbed in the small apartment in which she was living and that she was afraid to stay there. Things were so bad, Marilyn told her, she’d have to just continue working the streets. Moreover, she told her that she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven. “It was her way of getting us to take her in, and it worked.” They offered to allow Marilyn to live in an apartment they owned.