Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (10 page)

There was another outlet for her longing and her fantasy. To her first husband and to many friends, she later said that she often

went up to the roof [of the Home] to look at the water tower at the RKO Studios a few blocks away, where my mother had once worked. Sometimes that made me cry, because I felt so lonely. But it also became my dream and my fantasy—to work where movies were made. When I told this to Grace, she almost danced for joy.

The child’s bleakness and daydreams are easy to understand. The Home cared diligently for its young charges, but in the custodial manner of institutions and enforced communities. There was necessarily an atmosphere of impersonal affection that strictly discouraged particular friendships between children and mentors, to avoid unhealthy dependence as well as the erotic attachments inevitable in close quarters when adults are placed
in loco parentis
. As a result, there is often found in institutionalized children a paradoxical indifference to the welfare of others. Each child is, after all, but one of dozens, and because the staff strives to act without favoritism, there is a kind of emotional insipidity. However dedicated the supervisors, orphanages are not usually happy places. Everyone implicitly understands the artificiality of the milieu, and children know very quickly that there has been something woefully incomplete about their lives.

There was one notable exception to the general impersonality. Mrs. Dewey saw Norma Jeane returning from a Saturday outing with Grace. Primped and fluffed, with new ribbons in her curled hair and makeup freshly applied, the girl approached the building. Later she remembered:

I suddenly stopped. I knew we weren’t allowed to wear makeup [at the orphanage], and I forgot until that minute that I was wearing the makeup Grace had put on my face that day. I didn’t know whether to go in or just run away. Another girl had been given some kind of punishment or de-merit . . . for wearing lipstick, which the teachers thought was pretty trashy.

But Mrs. Dewey surprised Norma Jeane. “You have very lovely skin,” she said, “and you don’t want to have a shiny face, but sometimes you hide it with a little too much rouge.” And with that she toned down Grace’s handiwork without embarrassing Norma Jeane.

Grace kept her promise to bring Norma Jeane home. Her final papers for guardianship were filed on February 26, 1936, and (with the slowness typical of bureaucracies) the petition was finally granted in the spring of 1937. She left the Los Angeles Orphans Home and arrived at the Goddard bungalow in Van Nuys on June 7, 1937—a week after her eleventh birthday. Just as she was climbing into Grace’s car that evening, radio bulletins announced the death of Jean Harlow, who died suddenly of uremic poisoning at twenty-six. Louis B. Mayer, Harlow’s boss at MGM, summarized the consensus of those who knew her and those who simply admired her: “This girl, whom so many millions adored, was one of the loveliest, sweetest persons I have known in thirty years of the theatrical business.” As one reporter wrote, “She added little that was new to comedy, but she intensified in her person several comical ideas of her day: the gold-digger type, the under-educated, utilitarian, quick-tongued, slightly unaware females then in vogue among cartoonists, magazine writers, jokesters.” Grace was torn, according to Marilyn years later, between grief at the death of this beautiful young woman and her conviction that this made Norma Jeane’s future all the more certain.

Norma Jean’s residence with the Goddards was brief—because of a singularly unpleasant and even traumatic event for the young Norma Jeane. According to her first husband, James Dougherty, Doc Goddard was very drunk one night. He grabbed the girl and, fumbling and fondling her crudely, tried to force himself on her. She managed, however, to disengage herself from his embrace and dashed off, shaking and crying. Especially for so vulnerable and fatherless a girl, this incident was alarming and repellent, and she repeatedly described it throughout her life. Norma Jeane’s initial experience of physical contact with a man dissociated sex from the context of affection: what may have at first seemed like a gesture of tenderness turned ugly and abusive.

At once, Norma Jean complained to her “Aunt Grace,” who must have thought her husband’s drunken advance portended more serious trouble. “I can’t trust anything or anyone,” Grace muttered. And so,
in November 1937, Grace shipped the girl away again—this time to board with relatives. “At first I was waking up in the mornings at the Goddards’ and thinking I was still at the orphanage,” Norma Jeane told friends eighteen years later. “Then, before I could get used to them, I was with another aunt and uncle, waking up and thinking I was still at the Goddards.” She concluded the reminiscence poignantly: “It was all very confusing.”

1
. Harlow’s image was attempted by or forced on stars as various as Marion Davies, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Betty Grable, Constance Bennett, Lyda Roberti, Alice Faye and Joan Blondell.

2
. Jody Lawrance assumed minor roles in six films between 1951 and 1962. She took her life soon after finishing the last.

Chapter Four

N
OVEMBER
1937–J
UNE
1942

F
ROM NOVEMBER
1937
TO AUGUST
1938, Norma Jeane lived with cousins and a great-aunt in Compton, about twenty-five miles southeast of the San Fernando Valley but still in Los Angeles County. But instead of a pleasant new home, more challenges and trauma awaited.

First of all, there was in the house a general ambience of suspicion, constant whispers of something sinister and tragic about the family’s history. It was a milieu that could have sprung straight from the pages of a story by Edgar Allan Poe or Henry James—aptly described as Gothic were it not for the prevailing Southern California sunshine. And the aroma of dread that hung in the rooms had nothing to do with Gladys or her daughter.

The woman to whom Grace made irregular payments for Norma Jeane’s care was a divorcée named Ida Martin, who received sometimes five dollars a month, at other times ten or fifteen, often nothing. She was the mother of Olive Brunings, who had married Gladys’s younger brother Marion in 1924. Olive and Marion Monroe, so far as the family knew, lived for five years in the Central California town of Salinas, where he worked as a mechanic, and there they had three children: Jack, born in 1925; Ida Mae, in 1927; and Olive, in 1929. On the afternoon of November 20, 1929—when the youngest was nine months old—Marion Monroe left the house, telling his wife he was
going to buy a newspaper and would return before dinner. He was never seen or heard from again.

The Bureau of Missing Persons failed to locate him, and local police could not trace his itinerary that afternoon. The California Department of Motor Vehicles was no help, nor were police in four neighboring states. Marion had not contacted anyone in his family, including Gladys, to whom the news was relayed the next day. His most recent employer, Joe Zerboni (owner of the Union Storage and Transfer Company), was equally surprised and had no idea of Monroe’s whereabouts, destination or fate. Ida Martin, Marion’s mother-in-law, engaged the prestigious Shayer Detective Service of Los Angeles; after three years they had not a single clue.

In 1934, Olive (“destitute and in need of State aid,” as her petition read) began legal proceedings to have her husband declared legally dead, so that her three children could be registered as half-orphans and thus eligible for public welfare funds. (Laws providing aid for single parents later changed, but this was Olive’s only recourse for financial aid at that time.) Still, the state required ten years of a spouse’s absence before a declaration of presumed death could be issued, and with it the concomitant financial benefits for the surviving family. Olive and her three children had no relief from a situation of grinding poverty until 1939.

When Norma Jeane arrived in Compton at the end of 1937, she met her three cousins for the first time, since Ida Martin was also caring for her three grandchildren while Olive worked with migrant farmers. The children were close in age—little Olive was then eight, Ida Mae ten, Jack twelve and Norma Jeane eleven. Years later, Ida Mae recalled one statement that Norma Jeane repeated: “I remember she said over and over again that she was never going to marry. She said said she was going to be a school teacher and have lots of dogs.”

Here again was a parentless household, with children trying to structure life after a father’s mysterious disappearance, of familial instability, of abandoned and displaced children. Just as in the lives of men linked to Della, Gladys and Grace, there was the impression that men were both necessary and capricious—untrustworthy, volatile, unknowable, unpredictable and still achingly missed. Life was imperfect with and without them.

And here was still another surrogate mother for Norma Jeane to
know and to please. Ida Martin seems to have been an attentive provider, but she had no answer for Norma Jeane when she asked about her Uncle Marion’s absence and the distance of Aunt Olive from the family. “Once we decided to run away from home,” Ida Mae added. “We had the idea we’d go to San Francisco to look for my dad, because someone had once said they had seen him there. But we didn’t leave the house.” She remembered, too, that there was an odd and frightening lady who lived across the street—a demented woman named Dorothy Enright who sat on her porch, endlessly rocking in an old rattan chair. “Her family kept her occupied with piles of movie magazines to pore over, and we got the hand-me-downs.”

Later, Norma Jeane’s feelings of this period were complicated:

The world around me then was kind of grim. I had to learn to pretend in order to—I don’t know—block the grimness. The whole world seemed sort of closed to me. . . . [I felt] on the outside of everything, and all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend-game.

One of her more imaginative games was based on a movie-magazine story that showed a picture of winemaking, “and so she had the idea we would make wine,” Ida Mae recalled. “We had a big old, discarded bathtub in the back yard, and we gathered grapes and piled them into the tub, then stomped on them with our bare feet. This went on for three or four days, but we ended up only with a rotten smell in the backyard, and no wine!”

In the spring of 1938, Olive Monroe visited Ida Martin and together they told her children that thenceforth they had to consider their father dead, not just absent—only in this way could they have enough money to remain a family. This idea was at once picked up by Norma Jeane, for she told her schoolteacher that she was living with relatives because her parents had been killed in an accident (as indeed, for her, they might as well have been). Her instructor, a benign woman named Parker, was moved to tears and for the remainder of the sixth grade Norma Jeane was the object of special attention and concern. The student’s quietly dramatized account was remarkably effective.

Some of Norma Jeane’s other inspirations were more psychologically complex. In 1937, Grace had taken her twice to see Errol Flynn
and the Mauch twins in the movie
The Prince and the Pauper
, and in early summer 1938 she saw it again with her cousins. The jaunty Flynn was a dashing leading man, but the identical boys were forever after fascinating to Norma Jeane:

Later, I thought it [the identical twins] was a little eerie, actually, but then I was very excited by seeing the two look-alikes, one a prince pretending to be a beggar-boy and the other an urchin pretending to be a prince.
¹

Flynn reminded Norma Jeane of Clark Gable (“I told Jack and Ida Mae that Gable was my real father, but they just laughed”), but the movie perhaps made its deepest impression on her because of the exchange-of-roles fantasy. A waif only pretends to be so: he is actually a prince, and after considerable effort he is recognized as heir to the throne of Henry VIII.

Norma Jeane had already been transformed from a kind of weekday orphanage Cinderella into a Saturday-afternoon princess by the determined Grace McKee Goddard. Grace had primed her for stardom and said she would one day inherit the mantle of movie queen Jean Harlow. Norma Jeane then discovered that inventions about her family and her background both sweetened her own memories and occasionally made her lovable to others. No wonder the doubles of
The Prince and the Pauper
, with the neat replacement of a fantasy by a real royalty, long haunted her. She had only to meet the heroic father figure (a Clark Gable or an Errol Flynn) to set the matter right: the waif would be raised to the legitimate regal position.

The need for fantasy may well have been underscored in light of two events that year. First, Grace visited in March and quietly told Norma Jeane that, after Gladys had tried to escape from the hospital at Norwalk, she had been transferred to a more secure environment—the state asylum at Agnew, near San Francisco.

The attempted breakout had a concrete and tragically ironic cause. Gladys had been terribly upset and disoriented after receiving telephone calls from her last husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, who she believed had died in a motorcycle accident in Ohio eight years earlier. In fact, Mortensen was alive and well in California, but there had been a midwesterner with the same name and a similar background whose death had been mistakenly reported to her by relatives as that of her husband.

Still solicitous for Gladys’s welfare and willing to provide for some of her needs, Mortensen had tracked her to the hospital at Norwalk and put through several calls. Alternately confused and almost hysterical with relief that someone had remembered and was reaching out to her, Gladys tried to leave the Norwalk grounds to find her ex-husband. But the staff had been told Mortensen had died in 1929, and so Gladys’s report of the telephone calls and her subsequent escape attempt were regarded as grave schizophrenic delusions requiring the more sophisticated treatment available at Agnew. This was forthwith decreed, and Gladys and Martin had no further contact.
²