Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (5 page)

Chapter Two

J
UNE
1926–J
UNE
1934

I
N
1917, beautiful, doe-eyed Norma Talmadge, then twenty, married the thirty-eight-year-old independent producer Joseph M. Schenck, who founded a corporation named for his wife and molded her career with astonishing success. By 1926, when the couple separated, Norma Talmadge had appeared in more than sixty films, most of them a series of somewhat damp melodramas with titles like
Smilin’ Through
and
Secrets
, over which the star’s luminous, expressive beauty somehow triumphed. For a film lab worker like Gladys, who coveted glamour and routinely saw images of Talmadge everywhere, the name was more than an imitation: “Norma” expressed a kind of totemic longing, a benediction on her daughter’s future. Double names for girls were popular at the time, and Gladys found “Jeane” a suitable addition.
¹

Within two weeks of the child’s birth, Gladys gave Norma Jeane over to a foster family sixteen miles away. The reasons for this are not difficult to fathom.

In the Roaring Twenties, moral and aesthetic standards were challenged
in deed as well as discourse—not only in America, but round the world. After the horror of the Great War, there were extraordinary explosions of creativity as well as bolder (and sometimes dangerous) amusements everywhere. Along with New York, Berlin and Paris seemed simultaneously to inaugurate the “Jazz Age,” and life for a time seemed a cycle of uninhibited fun, excitement and experimentation. Europeans heartily imported the works of Americans like Hemingway, Dreiser, Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton—but not the dark, imprecatory religious sentiments so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

The United States, however, was caught in the conflict between the new moral turmoil and the old Puritan repressions. In the 1920s, there were higher hemlines seen and more coarse language heard in public than ever before; there was widespread use of drugs as recreational gear (especially cocaine and heroin); and plays and movies routinely dealt with the dark underside of life. Contrariwise, by that peculiarity known as Prohibition, alcohol was then illegal. As the voices of moral vigilance became more strident, the country’s penchant for the bogus remedy of extreme moralism (as distinct from authentic morality) led to the emergence of thumpingly righteous fundamentalist religions—in California as in the South.

Other factors encouraged Gladys to place the baby with a “decent” family: she could not quit her job, there was no one to care for Norma Jeane while she worked, and her restless, nomadic life (like her mother’s, as she may have apprehended) was unsuitable for mothering.

And there were less tangible, more elusive, perhaps unconscious (but nonetheless potent) reasons to deliver Norma Jeane to the care of others. Gladys had seen her father’s deterioration and death, which (she had been wrongly told) were due to madness—a condition poorly differentiated but, it was then believed, invariably inherited. Disappointed, like Della, in marriage, Gladys had also found herself incapable of effective mothering. Hostile toward Della on account of the past and Della’s recent abandonment of her during the latter part of her pregnancy, Gladys may have been, in a way, a classic type of parent who resents an offspring of the same sex.
²
In addition, she was plainly terrified
by the physical responsibilities of caring for an infant. Further seasoned by sharing her friend Grace McKee’s dedication to an unfettered life of gaiety (as if it were a vocation), Gladys had developed the habit of an essentially selfish life.

She was, then, ill prepared to be a diligent, effective and constant mother, and she knew it. Of this Gladys’s own mother, Della, was similarly convinced, for as soon as she returned from her exotic South Seas adventure—when her granddaughter was a week old—she urged Gladys to place Norma Jeane in the care of a sober, devout couple named Bolender; they also lived on Rhode Island Street, the address of Della’s bungalow in Hawthorne. (The street name was changed several times as Hawthorne and adjacent El Segundo became business extensions of the Los Angeles International Airport.) “I was probably a mistake,” Norma Jeane told a friend years later. “My mother didn’t want me. I probably got in her way, and I must have been a disgrace to her.”

Like many families of that time, the Bolenders supplemented their income by caring for foster children, a responsibility for which they were paid twenty or twenty-five dollars a month either by the natural parents or by the State of California.

And so, on June 13, 1926, Norma Jeane Mortensen (her name variously noted on official forms as Mortensen, Mortenson or Baker) was delivered to Albert and Ida Bolender. He was a postman, and she devoted herself to mothering (she had one son), foster-parenting, housekeeping and local Protestant parish life of the Low Church type. Among the many dramatic presentations of Norma Jeane’s life was the account of her being shuttled to over a dozen foster homes before she was ten. Like so many other tales of her childhood, however, this bit of manufactured autobiography conveniently fed the legend of a miserable, Dickensian childhood—a theme beloved of Hollywood publicists and sentimentally cherished by many people. But Norma Jeane’s earliest years were actually rather geographically stable, for she resided seven years in the Bolenders’ modest four-room bungalow.

One unhappy event occurred during Norma Jeane’s early years—something she could have hardly recalled from the age of one, but about which she learned from the Bolenders, Gladys and Grace.

In early 1927, Della suddenly fell ill with a weak heart and became susceptible to frequent respiratory infections. She now depended on Gladys, who moved in with her mother despite the long daily trolley-car ride to work. By late spring, Della was in wretched health. Her breathing became severely impaired by degenerative heart disease, and this caused her to suffer acute depressions. Medication provided only occasional relief and, as with many cardiopulmonary patients, the intervals were often characterized by pleasant imaginations, reveries and even periods of frank euphoria. Della could be withdrawn and tearful when Gladys departed for work, but then in the evening she might find her mother cheerfully preparing dinner. It would have been natural, in such circumstances, for Gladys to recall the unpredictable behavior of her father years earlier. There is some evidence in the family files that Della suffered a stroke in the late spring of 1927—an event that could also have caused unpredictable shifts of mood and temper.

At the end of July, Della was convinced death was near, and an array of guilty memories alternated with hallucinations: her parents, Tilford and Jennie Hogan, were reconciled, she told Gladys, and they were coming to rescue her, to take her home. The next morning, Della claimed that Charles Grainger (long since out of her life) had crept into her bed the night before and had made violent love to her. Not long after, she struggled from her home, walked over to the Bolenders’ to see her granddaughter, and banged on the door. Angered when she saw that no one came to admit her, Della broke the door’s glass with her elbow—“for no reason I know of,” Ida said, adding, “we called the police.”

On August 4, 1927, Della was carted away to the Norwalk State Hospital, suffering from acute myocarditis, a general term for inflammation of the heart and surrounding tissues. After nineteen days of agonizing distress, she died on August 23, at the age of fifty-one. The death certificate gives the cause as simply myocarditis, adding a “contributory manic depressive psychosis.” This latter term was imprecise especially in those days, and one subjoined only because Gladys stressed to the physicians at Norwalk that her mother’s moods and tempers had alternated unpredictably in recent weeks.

The fact is that little was done for Della’s grave heart condition. She had seen doctors only three or four times and often forgot the hours and doses of her medication. Thus, when the ward supervisor signed papers a day after her death, Gladys’s report on her mother’s mental state made the addition of “psychosis” understandable but really baseless. But among the documents of Della’s case during confinement, there is no psychological profile, nor is there record of an attending neurologist. Della Monroe (thus her name appeared in hospital records) died of heart disease, which caused impaired mentation due to insufficient oxygenation of the brain. As in the case of her husband Otis Monroe, there is no evidence that she was also a psychiatric case. But for Gladys, the myth of family madness deepened: after Della’s death she was distressed and for several weeks failed to report for work. Shutting herself in her mother’s bungalow, she pored over Della’s few possessions; finally, she emerged and decided to sell the place. Bracing herself for a return to work, Gladys then moved back to Hollywood, obtaining work at two movie studios, weekdays and Saturdays.

Although there were quite different reasons to pity much in her life, the truth is that (contrary to later publicity reports) Norma Jeane’s years with the Bolenders were essentially secure, she lacked for no material necessities, and there is no evidence that she was abused or mistreated. But she was the only child to remain so long: more than a dozen other children arrived, grew and departed, or returned to their families.

“Despite all the inventions of later years,” according to Norma Jeane’s first husband, “she never had known grinding poverty, never had gone shoeless, never, to the best of my knowledge, had to skip a meal.” He felt that as her career improved she “desperately wanted some colorful family tale of want and scarcity . . . [while] the truth is that she was raised in a small but comfortable bungalow with every modern convenience, if not splendid luxury.” The Bolenders even owned a scarred old upright piano, used mostly for hymn-singing by Ida’s church cronies. There were also toys and books, and a small room to accommodate a child’s parent for an overnight visit.

Yet she was clearly scarred by the psychological and emotional stress of her uncertain identity and by not knowing when her mother might suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish. When she did visit
Norma Jeane, Gladys took her for outings or picnics. Mother and daughter rode the Pacific Electric trolley cars to Sunset Beach; alternately, they made several connections and traveled south to tour the glass factories in Torrance; or, year-round, they would simply ride and ride from one shoreline resort to another, stopping at Redondo, Manhattan and Hermosa for lunch or ice cream. Among Norma Jeane’s earliest memories was Venice’s own St. Mark’s Plaza, on the corner of Windward and Ocean Front Walk, where (then as decades later) residents and tourists shopped and gaily dressed crowds crossed to and from the beach. Gladys once bought a striped parasol her daughter kept for years, and at the plaza Norma Jeane loved to watch the mimes, jugglers and fire-eaters. Frequently, mother and daughter rode the Venice Miniature Railway down Windward and then walked along the inland lagoons, where Gladys pointed out the weekend rendezvous of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, of Harold Lloyd, of William S. Hart. But such happy Saturdays were increasingly rare, for Gladys visited less and less often. “Her mother paid her board all the time,” Ida recalled, adding that Norma Jeane “was never neglected and always nicely dressed.” But Gladys became for the most part an irregular, shadowy visitor at the edge of Norma Jeane’s life.

Just when other children had those to call mother and father, therefore, Norma Jeane was hurtled into confusion. “One morning I called [Ida] ‘Mother,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me that—I’m not your mother. Call me ‘Aunt Ida.’ Then I pointed to her husband, and I said, ‘But he’s my Daddy!’ and she just said, ‘No.’ ” Later, “she discussed her father more than anyone in her past,” according to a close friend. “She remembered her mother, although without much feeling. But she missed a father terribly, although she was smart enough to be wary of anyone she took for a surrogate father.”

Ida Bolender was correct to speak truthfully about the situation; her manner and tone, however, seem to have lacked the kind of comforting explanation that would have prevented the child’s bewilderment and the conviction that she was in some way markedly different from other children. At two and three, Norma Jeane could not have understood the sporadic arrivals and departures of the woman she was told to call mother. “She didn’t come very much,” she said later. “She was just the woman with the red hair.” Gladys, whose visits meant good times, made guest appearances, but the major players of Norma
Jeane’s early life were the Bolenders, and in matters of conduct, religion and morality they yielded center stage to none.

“To go to a movie was a sin,” Norma Jeane remembered of one Bolender doctrine. “If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies,” Ida warned, “do you know what would happen? You’d burn along with all the bad people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers.” The sharp disjunction between Gladys’s attitudes and those of the Bolenders must have caused Norma Jeane considerable confusion about proper conduct and standards of right and wrong.

Confusion or no, photographs from these first several years show Norma Jeane a winsome child with ash-blond hair, an engaging smile and bright blue-green eyes. But she always recalled that in the Bolender household “no one ever called me pretty.” The plainspoken, decent, humorless Ida did not believe in flattery; prettiness might even be dangerous. She and her family lived within bustling, modern Los Angeles County, but Ida and Albert could have been the models for Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
. Norma Jeane’s closest playmate was a stray dog she brought home and named Tippy. The Bolenders allowed her to keep the puppy so long as she cared for it, and Norma Jeane was usually seen followed two paces behind by the worshipful Tippy.

The family had, in fact, no inclination for mere worldly amusements; they placed primary emphasis on morality and religious responsibilities. The church they all attended (literally shaken to its foundations by the 1933 earthquake) was the focus of Bolender life—and therefore, by extension, the lives of the children committed to their care. “We took her to Sunday school with us,” Ida said. “I had not only Norma Jeane and my own son, but other children, too, with me.” This pious little platoon marched off to the pews not only on Sunday but also for prayer and instruction one afternoon and one evening during each week, as Marilyn recalled. “Every night I was told to pray that I would not wake up in hell. I had to say: ‘I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell or give alcohol while I live. From all tobacco I’ll abstain and never take God’s name in vain.’ . . . I always felt insecure.”