Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (11 page)

This news of her mother’s condition Norma Jeane seemed to receive as virtually an announcement of Gladys’s death. Grace tried to soften the occasion with gifts (the details and sums for which were preserved by Grace’s family): a sunsuit for the beach, a new hat, and three new pairs of shoes. By that summer, to the consternation of Ida Martin and her grandchildren, Norma Jeane, poorest of the cousins, had no less than ten pairs, all of them supplied by Grace (and charged to Gladys’s dwindling account).

The second episode involved a violation that was even more traumatic than Doc Goddard’s crude and abusive advance. Not long before Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday in June 1938, a cousin forced her into some kind of violent sexual contact. According to her close friends Norman Rosten and Eleanor Goddard, among others, she was “sexually assaulted” (although her first husband claimed she was a virgin at the time of their wedding). The importunate cousin was thirteen-year-old Jack, of whose later life nothing is known; by his twenties he seems
to have imitated his father’s disappearing act. This incident reinforced her sense that she was desired as an object, but she was left feeling abused; she was, after all, only eleven years old. As Ida Mae recalled, Norma Jeane bathed obsessively for days after.

As if on cue in her role as fairy godmother, Grace returned to celebrate Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday. After spending eleven dollars and seventy-four cents for Norma Jeane’s new dress and the then outrageous sum of six dollars for a hair treatment, Grace meticulously prepared the girl’s makeup and whisked her off for a professional photographic session. This was, she explained, the first step toward fame—toward growing up to become the new Jean Harlow. She also gave Norma Jeane a scrapbook in which to paste the photos.

But Grace’s constant fussing over Norma Jeane’s appearance, her obsession with the girl’s future and even the gifts were more endured than enthusiastically received by Norma Jeane—who had (especially after her experiences with Doc and Jack) good reason to regard herself as a mere object for someone’s pleasure. But she was legally subject to Grace’s decisions about where she would live, and she was as well dependent on Grace’s subsidies.

Another decision by Grace was soon announced. At summer’s end, she decided Norma Jeane should quit the Martin household and return to Los Angeles—not only to have her ward closer and thus keep an alert eye on her adolescent development and forthcoming career, but also to enroll her in a junior high school of which she approved. Norma Jeane would not, however, be returning to the Goddard household. Instead, she was to board with Grace’s aunt.

Edith Ana Atchinson Lower, always called Ana, was sister to Grace’s father. Born January 17, 1880, she was fifty-eight years old when Norma Jeane came to live with her. During the 1920s, she and her husband, Edmund H. (“Will”) Lower, had acquired a number of modest bungalows and cottages in various parts of Los Angeles County. They were then divorced about 1933, and so while Ana was by no means a rich divorcée, her settlement provided some rental income. (Will Lower died in 1935.) But Ana’s circumstances were imperiled during the depression, when a number of her lessees simply abandoned their residences.

By 1938, the Goddards were living virtually rent-free in one of Ana’s houses on Odessa Street in Van Nuys, while Ana lived in a two-family duplex she owned at 11348 Nebraska Avenue, West Los Angeles, whose ground floor she rented out. She would have the income of thirty dollars a month from the State of California for boarding Norma Jeane Baker. (After the unhappy business of the Mortensen telephone calls, Grace everywhere registered Norma Jeane under Gladys’s first married name, which Gladys herself had used most frequently.)

“Aunt Ana,” as Norma Jeane called her, was a plump, white-haired, grandmotherly soul. She was also a very devout Christian Scientist, having advanced to the level of healing practitioner.

“She was very religious,” recalled Eleanor Goddard,

but not at all a fanatic. In fact she was very sensible, compassionate and accepting of others. She looked severe and stern and had an imposing carriage, but she was putty inside, not the dominating matron she was often made out to be.

Ana was generous and outgoing; her good works and devotion to her religion took her to the Lincoln Heights jail once weekly, where she spent time reading the Bible to inmates.

Alone in the life of Norma Jeane, Ana Lower warranted undiluted loving praise.

She changed my whole life. She was the first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her [long since lost] and I showed it to somebody and they cried. . . . It was called “I Love Her.” She was the only one who loved and understood me. . . . She never hurt me, not once. She couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love.

Yet Ana Lower was, howsoever kindly, the latest in an ongoing variety of mother figures. She could enfold Norma Jeane in a blanket of loving commitment and take her for the daughter she never had. But there was no way to alter the fact that she was also another woman whose attitude toward men and marriage was undeniably tinted (like
Gladys, Grace and Ida Martin) by her own divorce. “Talk about marriage and sex was certainly never on the agenda,” Marilyn Monroe said frankly years later.

There were, then, oddly ambivalent circumstances at this time, for Ana’s broken marriage, her appearance of refined widowhood and the fact that she was the oldest of Norma Jeane’s custodians denied the girl an effective female confidante. And this set of particulars was doubtless made more complex by Ana’s earnest Christian Science faith and its impact on Norma Jeane—a sincere example, to be sure, but one set before the girl with considerable zeal. That August of 1938, Norma Jeane found herself at local Christian Science services, twice on Sunday and once during the week.

Ana Lower gently but somewhat simplistically guided Norma Jeane to see that only what was in the mind was real, and the mind could be uplifted. But the girl had already long sought refuge from insecurity in unreal movie images, a program of transformation into Jean Harlow enjoined by Grace and a cultivation of her own fantasy life. Ana’s brand of religion, in other words, complemented by a Victorian-Puritan sensibility and her seniority (with its implicit image, to youngsters, of sexlessness), was not altogether appropriate given Norma Jeane’s past experience and her present adolescent needs.

In 1938, there were in America about 270,000 members in about two thousand congregations of Christian Science.
³
Founded in 1879 in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy, the religion is a system of therapeutic metaphysics. The vast majority of its adherents have always been middle-aged and elderly American women from the middle and upper classes, although the denomination is found in all countries with large Protestant populations. Central to its doctrine is a variation of subjective idealism: matter is unreal, there is only God (or Mind). The goal of Mrs. Eddy’s teachings (codified in
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
, 1891) is to bring the unreal material body into a condition of perfect harmony with our real spiritual condition: made in the Divine likeness, we are geared for spiritual perfection.

In a kind of intense Gnosticism linked to traditional American transcendentalism (which originated and flourished in Mrs. Eddy’s home territory, New England), there is an optimistic attitude toward the perceived world, which may ever be brought closer to its fulfillment by effort as well as by spiritual healing. (It should be stressed, however, that Christian Scientists have never been encouraged to withdraw from the world: responsibility in public and social life was exemplified by its foundation and long maintenance of one of America’s great journals, the
Christian Science Monitor
, a newspaper commanding worldwide respect.)

The godly human being, for this denomination, constantly strives for a spiritual condition in which the counterfeit flesh and the mortal, fallible mind can be overcome. Taken in its purest form, Christian Science denies the reality of the senses, although allowance is made for a human level at which improvement is sought and achieved by right thinking. We do not sin, suffer or die: we are victims of unhealthy delusions. Linked to this doctrine is that of “malicious animal magnetism,” evil thought that
appears
real and powerful only because people wrongly assert its actuality. Advanced Scientists—especially the accredited, elite cadre of teachers known as practitioners trained to read, pray and invoke therapeutic healing—learn how to counter the impact of this “animal magnetism.”

Furthermore, the disharmony of sin, sickness and death may be overcome by right prayerful thinking and a dutiful attentiveness to Mrs. Eddy’s commentaries on the Scriptures. Instead of drugs and medicines, spiritual truth must be affirmed, error denied and the distinction made between absolute being and the frail mortal life. The symbol of Christian Science is thus immediately compelling: a cross (without the figure of the dead or dying Christ) surrounded by a crown. Glory overwhelms suffering, which has no real relation to humanity.

Because by a complicated and intriguing paradox Christian Science does not share American fundamentalism’s contempt for the world and the flesh, recreation and entertainment are not forbidden, nor is the religion hostile to education (medical studies excepted). Because she chose not to seek any other employment, Ana Lower was eligible to be
one of the Church’s official practitioners, and in this capacity she was permitted to take fee-paying clients.

But when Norma Jeane began seventh grade at Emerson Junior High School on Selby Avenue, between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards in West Los Angeles, Aunt Ana’s creed was at once challenged. That very September, the girl began to menstruate, and every monthly period for much of her life was a grueling time during which she rarely found relief from severe cramps. In 1938 there were no readily obtainable medicines to counter the effects of what was for Norma Jeane very real agony (and it is unlikely that Ana would have made them available in any case). Friends from this and later times of Norma Jeane’s life recall that each month she writhed on the floor, sobbing in pain. So began a lifelong history of gynecological problems, including chronic endometriosis. She had, then, another conflict, but neither the spiritual nor intellectual sophistication with which to cope: if there was no real body and if God was All Goodness and Mind, why this torture? Why was her own body playing her false? Aunt Ana comforted her, prayed with her, embraced her, “but nothing did any good. I just had to wait it out.”

At Emerson there were five hundred students in the seventh grade, and like those in the eighth and ninth they came from all parts of the western sector of Los Angeles. Some were chauffeured down from the gated mansions in the enclave known as Bel-Air, above Sunset Boulevard. Others were from the middle-class flatlands of West Los Angeles. And some—Norma Jeane among them—were within walking distance, from a poorer district known as Sawtelle.

A section of the so-called Western Front of the city, Sawtelle was bounded by four boulevards: Sepulveda on the east, Bundy on the west, Wilshire on the north and Pico on the south. The area was a jumble of populations—Japanese immigrants; longtime California pioneers from the East and Midwest; recent Dust Bowl “Okies” who had sought work and refuge in sunny California during the depression; Hispanics and Mexican-Indians; and older Los Angeles residents like Ana Lower.

“Los Angeles was a very divided, class-conscious society,” according to Norma Jeane’s classmate Gladys Phillips (later Wilson),
“and this was unfortunately true of school life, too. All the students were immediately, unofficially classified according to where they lived. And Sawtelle was simply not the place to be from.” Indeed, Angeleños smiled and thought of beer halls when Sawtelle was mentioned, for there were many such gathering places for the working classes; the neighborhood seemed synonymous with illiterate or semiliterate poor. Ana Lower was neither illiterate, out of work nor on the dole, yet from her first day at school Norma Jeane Baker was marked by most of her classmates as (thus Gladys Phillips) “from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Norma Jeane’s courses, those designed for seventh-grade girls not enrolled in the college prep track, were not overwhelmingly impressive from an academic standpoint, and her achievements were neither remarkably good nor bad:

AUTUMN 1938

Social Living (history, civics, geography): C
Physical education (gym class): B
Science: C
Office practice: A
Journalism: B

SPRING 1939

Life Sciences (elementary biology): C
English: B
Bookkeeping: B
Physical education: C

“She was very much an average student,” recalled Mabel Ella Campbell, who taught the Life Sciences class. “But she looked as though she wasn’t well cared for. Her clothes separated her a little bit from the rest of the girls. In 1938 she wasn’t well developed. Norma Jeane was a nice child, but not at all outgoing, not vibrant.”

Marilyn elaborated twenty years later:

I was very quiet, and some of the other kids used to call me The Mouse. The first year at Emerson, all I had was the two light blue dress-suits from the orphanage. Aunt Ana let them out because I’d grown a little, but they didn’t fit right. I wore tennis shoes a lot, because you could get them for ninety-eight cents—and Mexican sandals. They were even cheaper. I sure didn’t make any best-dressed list. You could say I wasn’t very popular.

Reserved in her new environment, embarrassed about wearing the same uniform every day, and with no experience of socialization outside the confines of the orphanage, Norma Jeane found friendships difficult. “She was neat but plain, as I remember,” recalled Ron Underwood, another classmate. “She was also somewhat shy and withdrawn, and apparently had few friends.” Marian Losman (later Zaich) remembered that “she always seemed to be alone.” Gladys Phillips agreed: “She really wasn’t close to anyone at all.” Norma Jeane’s isolation was intensified by the fact that Ana Lower had no telephone.