Evasively he said, “The deal is pending. Russell has to be lent by another studio.”
“Yes, but how much?”
“The figures aren’t finalized.”
“How much?”
“They’re asking one hundred thousand.”
“One hundred thousand!” Norma Jeane felt a stab of hurt in the pit of her belly. Baby, too, was insulted. But Baby’s sleep would not be disturbed. For Norma Jeane felt mostly relief. She said, laughing, “If the film takes twelve weeks to make, then my salary would be eighteen thousand dollars. And Jane gets a hundred thousand? ‘Marilyn Monroe’ has to have pride, doesn’t she? That’s an insult. Jane Russell and I went to high school together in Van Nuys. She was a year older and got more roles in school plays than I did, but we were always friends. She would be embarrassed for me!” Norma Jeane paused. She’d been speaking rapidly; though she wasn’t upset, her voice sounded angry. “I—I’m going to hang up now. Goodbye.”
“Marilyn, wait—”
“Fuck Marilyn. She isn’t here.”
There was the morning an emergency call came from Lakewood. Gladys Mortensen was missing!
During the night she’d slipped away from her room, and from the hospital, and (they’d come to the reluctant conclusion now that they’d searched thoroughly) from the hospital grounds. Could Norma Jeane come as quickly as possible? “Oh yes. Oh yes.”
She would tell no one. Not her agent, not Cass Chaplin, not Eddy G. Hoping to shield them. This heartbreak that is my own, only. And she feared the obvious lack of interest in her lovers’ eyes whenever she alluded, however elliptically, to her sick mother. (“We all have sick mothers,” Cass remarked lightly. “I’ll spare you mine if you spare me yours. Deal?”)
Norma Jeane threw on clothes, one of Eddy G’s straw fedoras, a pair of dark-tinted sunglasses. She contemplated, but finally didn’t take, a mineral-blue Benzedrine tablet from Cass’s stash in the bathroom. She was sleeping as many as six hours a night, a deep restful sleep, for pregnancy agreed with her as her doctor assured her, beaming like a father-to-be so that Norma Jeane had begun to worry he’d recognized her. What if he took photos of her while she was anesthetized, delivering her baby?
She drove to Lakewood in morning traffic. Anxious about Gladys, for what if Gladys had injured herself? Somehow she knows about the baby. Is it possible? She knew she must guard against attributing omniscient thoughts to Gladys; she wasn’t a little girl any longer, and Gladys wasn’t her powerful all-knowing mother. Yet somehow she might know. And that’s why she has run away. Driving to Lakewood, Norma Jeane passed one, two, three movie houses in which Niagara was playing. Stretched across the top of the marquee of each theater was MARILYN MONROE, her skin creamy and luminous, MARILYN MONROE in a low-cut red dress that barely contained her swelling breasts. MARILYN MONROE was smiling provocatively with glossy-sexy pursed lips at which Norma Jeane glanced shyly.
The Fair Princess! Never before had Norma Jeane quite realized how the Fair Princess both mocked her admirers and enhanced them. She was so beautiful, and they were so ordinary. She was the source of emotion, and they were in thrall to emotion. Who was the Dark Prince worthy of her?
Yes, I’m proud! I admit it. I worked hard, and I’m going to work harder.
That woman in the poster isn’t me. But she’s the work I created. I deserve my happiness.
I deserve my baby. This is my time!
When Norma Jeane arrived at the private hospital at Lakewood, by magic it seemed Gladys had been returned. She’d been found sleeping in a pew in a Catholic church less than three miles away, on busy Bellflower Boulevard. Confused and disoriented, but unresisting, she’d been brought back to the hospital by Lakewood police. When Norma Jeane saw Gladys she burst into tears and embraced her mother, who smelled of wetted ashes, damp clothing, urine.
“But Mother isn’t even Catholic. Why on earth would she go there?”
The director of the Lakewood Home apologized profusely to Norma Jeane. Carefully he called her “Miss Baker.” (It was strictly confidential that Gladys Mortensen was the mother of a certain film actress. “Don’t betray me!” Norma Jeane had begged.) He insisted that patients were checked in their rooms every evening at 9 P.M.; windows and doors were checked; there were security guards at all times. Quickly Norma Jeane said, “Oh, I’m not angry. I’m just so grateful that Mother is safe.”
Norma Jeane spent the remainder of the day at Lakewood. It was a blessed day after all! She pondered how to tell Gladys her news. A mother is not always prepared to hear happy news from a daughter for a mother is most herself when mothering a daughter. Yet now Norma Jeane was mothering Gladys, who seemed so frail and tentative in her movements, blinking and squinting at Norma Jeane as if uncertain who she was. Several times she said, worriedly rather than accusingly, “Your hair is so white. Are you old like me?”
Norma Jeane helped bathe her mother, washed Gladys’s matted hair herself, and carefully combed it out. She spoke brightly to Gladys, hummed and sang as if to a small child. “Everyone was so worried about you, Mother. You won’t ever run away again, will you?” Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Gladys had managed to unlock not one but several doors (unless just possibly these doors hadn’t been adequately locked, despite the protestations of the staff) and make her way undetected across the front lawn of the Home; once on the street, she’d managed to make her way undetected two and a half miles to St. Elizabeth’s Church, where she was found the next morning when parishioners entered the church for seven o’clock mass. She was wearing a beltless beige cotton dress with a drooping hemline and no underwear beneath. She’d had on corduroy bedroom slippers when she left the hospital but seemed to have lost them during her journey; her bony feet were covered in shallow cuts. Tenderly Norma Jeane washed her mother’s feet and applied iodine to the cuts. “Mother, where were you going? You could have asked me, you know. If you wanted to go somewhere. Like to a church.”
Gladys shrugged. “I knew where I was going.”
“You could have been injured. Hit by a car, or—lost.”
“I was never lost. I knew where I was going.”
“But where?”
“Home.”
The word hovered in the air, strange and wonderful as a neon insect. Norma Jeane, shaken, had no idea how to reply. She saw that Gladys was smiling. A woman with a secret. Long ago in another lifetime she’d been a poet. She’d been a beautiful young woman to whom men, including powerful Hollywood men like Norma Jeane’s father, had been attracted. Before Norma Jeane’s arrival at the hospital, Gladys had been given a drug to “quiet her nerves.” She showed little sign now of agitation or even of embarrassment for having caused so much commotion. Sleeping on the hard wooden pew, she’d wet her clothes but hadn’t been embarrassed about that either. She’s a child. A cruel child. She’s taken Norma Jeane’s place.
Gladys’s once-beautiful eyes were shadowed and as without luster as stones, and her skin had a grainy, greenish cast; yet oddly, for all that she’d been wandering in the night barefoot, she didn’t look much older than Norma Jeane recalled. It was as if a spell had been cast upon her years ago: others around her would age but not Gladys. Norma Jeane said, gently reproving, “Any time you want, Mother, you can come home with me. You know that.” There was a pause. Gladys sniffed and wiped at her nose. Norma Jeane imagined she could hear the woman’s derisive laughter. Home! With you? Where? Norma Jeane said, “You’re not old. You shouldn’t call yourself old. You’re only fifty-three.” Slyly Norma Jeane said, “How’d you like to be a grandmother?”
There. It was said. Grandmother!
Gladys yawned. A craterous yawn. Norma Jeane was disappointed. Should she repeat her question?
Norma Jeane had helped her mother into bed, where she lay in a clean cotton nightgown amid clean cotton sheets. The sour, sad odor of urine was gone from Gladys’s person but remained, faint as an echo, in the room. Gladys’s private room, for which “Miss Baker” paid a heft
y sum each month, was the size of a large closet, with a single dormer window overlooking a parking lot. There was a bedside table, a lamp, a single vinyl chair, a narrow hospital bed. On the aluminum bureau amid toiletries and items of clothing were several stacks of books, gifts from Norma Jeane over the years. Most of these were volumes of poetry, pretty, slender books with the look of having rarely been opened. Comfortably settled in bed, Gladys looked as if she were about to drift into sleep. Her metallic-brown hair had dried in snaky tufts. Her eyelids drooped and her bloodless lips hung slack. Norma Jeane saw with a pang of loss that her mother’s ropy-veined hands, Nell’s hands, once so fretful, so alive with an angry volition of their own, were now limp. Norma Jeane took these hands in hers. “Oh, Mother, your fingers are so cold. I’ll have to warm them.”
But Gladys’s fingers resisted warming. Instead, Norma Jeane began to shiver.
Norma Jeane tried to explain why she hadn’t brought a present for Gladys today. Why they wouldn’t be going into town, to take Gladys to a hairdresser and to a nice tearoom for lunch. She tried to explain why she couldn’t leave much spending money for Gladys—“I have eighteen dollars in my wallet! It’s so embarrassing. My contract pays me fifteen hundred dollars a week but there are so many expenses. . . .” It was true: often Norma Jeane was forced to borrow money, fifty dollars, one hundred dollars, two hundred dollars from friends or friends of friends. There were men eager to lend Marilyn Monroe sums of money. And no I.O.U.s. Gifts of jewelry—and Norma Jeane had no use for jewelry, much. Cass Chaplin and Eddy G, practical-minded young men, weren’t offended. As fathers-to-be, they had to think of the future, and you can’t think of the future without thinking about money. Each had been disinherited by his famous father, so it seemed only logical that other older men, fathers of another kind, should support them. They were always trying to convince Norma Jeane that this was true for her, too. She too had been cheated of her inheritance. It was their idea that the three of them should move into the Hollywood Hills for the duration of Norma Jeane’s pregnancy. If they couldn’t locate a suitable house for no rent, they would have to have money for rent. It was their idea also that each of them insure himself for $100,000—unless maybe $200,000—naming the other two as beneficiaries. “Just in case. You can’t be too prepared. With a baby on the way. Of course, nothing’s gonna happen to the Gemini!” Norma Jeane hadn’t known how to reply to this suggestion. Insure herself? The prospect frightened her, for it indicated so clearly that one day she must die.
But not “Marilyn.” She was on film and in photos. Everywhere.
Suddenly Gladys opened her eyes wide, trying to bring them into focus. Norma Jeane had the uneasy feeling that her reaction wasn’t to Norma Jeane’s words. Excitedly she said, “What year is this? What time did we travel to?”
Norma Jeane said soothingly, “Mother, it’s May 1953. This is Norma Jeane, here to take care of you.”
Gladys squinted suspiciously at her. “But your hair is so white.”
Gladys shut her eyes. Kneading Gladys’s limp fingers, Norma Jeane tried to think how to tell her mother the good news without upsetting her. A baby. Already almost six weeks old. Aren’t you happy for me? Somehow it seemed to her that Gladys already knew. That was why Gladys was so elusive, determined to escape into sleep.
Norma Jeane said tentatively, “When you h-had me, Mother, you weren’t married I guess? You didn’t have a man supporting you. Yet you had a baby. That was so brave, Mother! Another girl would have—well, you know. Gotten rid of it. Of me.” Norma Jeane laughed a startled squeaking laugh. “Then I wouldn’t be here, at all. There wouldn’t be any ‘Marilyn.’ And she’s getting so famous now, fan letters! telegrams! flowers from strangers! It’s so . . . strange.”
Gladys refused to open her eyes. Her face was softening like melting wax. Saliva glinted at one corner of her mouth. Norma Jeane spoke without knowing what she said. With a part of her mind she seemed to know how implausible it was, preposterous, her plan to have a baby. A baby, and no husband? If only she’d married Mr. Shinn. If only V had loved her a little more, he might have married her. It would be the end of her career. Absolutely the end of her career. Even if, in haste, she married one of the Gemini, the scandal would destroy her. Marilyn Monroe, newly famous, a balloon inflated by the media, would be gleefully destroyed by the media.
“But you were brave. You did the right thing. You had your baby. You had . . . me.”
But Gladys’s eyes were closed. Her bloodless lips hung slack. She’d slipped into sleep as if into a dark mysterious water where Norma Jeane couldn’t follow. Though she heard the lapping of waves close beside the bed.
From the Lakewood Home, Norma Jeane made a single telephone call to a number in Hollywood. The phone rang and rang at the other end. “Help me, please! I need help so badly.”
Norma Jeane would have liked to leave the Lakewood Home immediately, for she’d been crying and the skin around her eyes felt raw and reddened. She was Nell, disoriented and panicky but compelled by the presence of others to behave as if normal. Yet the director insisted upon speaking with her in private. He was a middle-aged man with an oyster-round face, magnified-looking eyeglasses with chunky black plastic frames. By the excitement in his voice Norma Jeane understood that he was seeing not her, the daughter of the mental patient Gladys Mortensen, but a film actress. Maybe a “blond sexpot film actress.” Would he dare to ask for her autograph? At such a time? She’d scream profanities at him if he did. She’d burst into tears. She couldn’t bear it!
Dr. Bender was discussing Gladys Mortensen. How well, “generally,” Gladys Mortensen had been doing since entering Lakewood. Yet how, sometimes, like many patients in her condition, she “lapsed”—“relapsed”—and behaved in unexpected and dangerous ways. Paranoid schizophrenia, Dr. Bender explained, with the air of a kindly, solicitous recording device, is a mystery illness. “Always, it has reminded me of multiple sclerosis. As mystery illnesses no one truly understands. A syndrome of symptoms.” Some theorists believe that paranoid schizophrenia can be explained by the patient’s interaction, or thwarted interaction, with her environment and with other people; some theorists, Freudians, believe it can be explained by the patient’s childhood; some theorists believe it has a purely organic biochemical origin. Norma Jeane nodded to show she was listening. She smiled. Even at such a time, exhausted and depressed and the baby in her womb aching, beginning to recall the numerous appointments she’d missed that day at The Studio, totally forgotten, hadn’t called to postpone or explain, she knew she must smile. Smiles were expected of all women and especially of her.
Norma Jeane said sadly, “I don’t ask any longer when my mother will be discharged. I guess she never will be. Just so long as she’s safe and h-happy, I guess that’s the most we can expect?”
Gravely Dr. Bender replied, “At Lakewood, we never give up on a patient. Never! But, yes—we are realists too.”
“Is it inherited?”
“Excuse me?”
“My mother’s illness? Are you born with it, in your blood?”
“In your blood?” Dr. Bender repeated these words as if he’d never heard anything quite like them before. Evasively he said, “There has been noticed, in some families, a certain tendency, yes, but in others absolutely not.”
Norma Jeane said hopefully, “My f-father was a very normal man. In all ways. I don’t know him, except from photos. I’ve only heard of him. He d-died in Spain, in 1936. I mean, he was killed. In the war.”
As Norma Jeane rose to leave, Dr. Bender did ask her for an autograph, with apologies, quickly explaining that he wasn’t the kind of person who did such things, but would Norma Jeane mind terribly?—“It’s for my thirteen-year-old Sasha. She wants to be a movie star, she thinks, too!”
Norma Jeane felt her mouth smile graciously, as it had been trained. Though she could feel a migraine beginning. Since becoming pregnant, and no menstrual periods, she’d been spared blinding headaches as she’d been spared
paralyzing cramps, but now she felt a migraine coming on and wondered in panic how she would transport herself and Baby back home. Yet graciously she signed the cover of Photoplay in the airy sweeping script The Studio had devised for “Marilyn.” (Her own signature, “Norma Jeane Baker,” was a tiny backhand.) The Photoplay cover portrayed Marilyn as Rose, voluptuous, sexy, her head tilted back, eyes narrowed and dreamy, and lips provocatively pursed. Her swelling breasts nearly spilled out of an electric-blue silk halter dress Norma Jeane could have sworn she’d never worn. In fact, she’d forgotten this cover. She’d forgotten the photo shoot. Maybe it had never happened?
Yet there, Photoplay for April 1953, was proof.
To My Baby
In you,
the world is born anew.
Before you—
there was none.
THE MAGI
They were Hedda Hopper, P. Pukham (“Hollywood After Dark”), G. Belcher, Max-the-Man Mercer, Dorothy Kilgallen, H. Salop, “Keyhole,” Skid Skolsky (who dredged for hot Hollywood gossip from his perch on the mezzanine at Schwab’s Drugstore), Gloria Grahame, V. Venell, “Buck” Holster, Smilin Jack, Lex Aise, Cramme, Pease, Coker, Crudloe, Gagge, Gargoie, Scudd, Sly Goldblatt, Pett, Trott, Leviticus, *BUZZ YARD*, M. Mudd, Wall Reese, Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, and HOLLYWOOD ROVING EYE among others. Their columns of excited newsprint appeared in L.A. Times, L.A. Beacon, L.A. Confidential, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Hollywood Tatler, Hollywood Confidential, Hollywood Diary, Photoplay, PhotoLife, Screen World, Screen Romance, Screen Secrets, Modern Screen, Screenland, Screen Album, Movie Stories, Movieland, New York Post, Filmland Tell-All, Scoop!, and other publications. They were syndicated by the United Press and the American Press. It was their tireless task to spread the word. To shake the sheets and fan the flames. They ran ahead, loosing skeins of gasoline in the underbrush, to hasten the rush of the flames. They blazoned, they heralded, they beat the drums. They blew bugles, trumpets, and tubas from the ramparts. They rang the bells, and they sounded the alarms. Together and individually, in a chorus and in arias, they proclaimed, acclaimed, broadcast, and forecast. They ballyhooed. They disclosed, and they exposed. They praised, dispraised, promulgated, and disseminated. They were volcanoes of words. They were tidal waves of words. They pitched, they advanced, they plugged, and they slugged. They spotlighted. They limelighted. They hawked. They puffed, blurbed, fanfared, hoopla’d, ventilated, and hyperventilated. They predicted, and they contradicted. The “meteoric” rise of, the “tragic” descent of. They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars. Ceaselessly they scoured the night sky. They were there at the birth of the star and they were there at the death. They rhapsodized the flesh and they picked at the bones. Greedily they licked the beautiful skin and greedily they sucked the delicious marrow. In boldface in the fifties proclaiming MARILYN MONROE MARILYN MONROE MARILYN MONROE. Photoplay Gold Medal Best New Star 1953. Playboy Sweetheart of the Month November 1953. Screen World Miss Blond Bombshell 1953. In glossy magazines Life, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire. In posters with a crippled child in a wheelchair gazing up at her erect blond beauty: REMEMBER TO GIVE GENEROUSLY TO THE MARCH OF DIMES. MARILYN MONROE.
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