Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (6 page)

That the Bolenders were not prodigal with entertainments or compliments is entirely consistent with the austere and highly charged religious character of their lives. Perhaps the primary advantage of faith, they believed, was the certainty of their moral posture, and it was
morality which assured salvation. They were members of a branch of the United Pentecostal Church much influenced by the famous Los Angeles Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, a revival community founded on Azusa Street in 1906. Like many people with good intentions but a restrictive and potentially dangerous literal-mindedness, adherents to this kind of religion often equate true religion with unquestioning obedience to a certain code of right conduct; a sense of mystery (much less a mystical sense) is not even mentioned. For children especially, everything was to be made clear and immutable, and people of any age who questioned or complained were pitied, ignored or held in quiet contempt. This is not to imply, however, that there is any evidence that the Bolenders were other than attentive, caring foster parents. “They were terribly strict,” Norma Jeane said years later. “They didn’t mean any harm—it was their religion. They brought me up harshly.”

For over a century, Roman Catholic, mainstream Protestant and then Jewish communities had flourished in Los Angeles. But in the 1920s and 1930s, flamboyant evangelical sects proliferated along with the aromatic eucalyptus and acrid auto fumes. Unconventional, sometimes hysterical attempts at faith healing; bizarre costumes; midnight-to-dawn meetings where sinners were asked to “testify”; services that resembled movie-set extravaganzas—all these were typical of local religious life. This is not remarkable in a place where the entertainment industry depended on the mechanisms of fanfare and promotion; the fringe churches, too, engaged advertising and public-relations counselors.

The best example of this colorful spirit during Norma Jeane’s childhood was the notorious Aimee Semple McPherson, greatly admired by the Bolenders, who took Norma Jeane and their other young charges to hear the famous evangelist. A Pentecostal minister born in 1890, Sister Aimee began her preaching career with itinerant evangelism, radio sermons and healing services at seventeen; eventually she found her greatest welcome in Los Angeles. There, after terminating two marriages but attracting many followers, she established her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, whose Angelus Temple was built by her devotees in 1927 at the staggering cost of one and a half million dollars. Her congregations nationwide, augmented and united
by radio broadcasting, numbered in the tens of thousands.

McPherson was quite a character. Usually present was her mother, sunnily addressed as “Ma Kennedy,” who led the applause for her daughter’s highly theatrical revival services—rites ideally suited to Hollywood. To preach a sermon on God’s law, she wore a police uniform; to address the topic of decency, her outfit was a Victorian coverall. Lights, music and mirrors were routinely used for the right effects. The saxophone, for example, was played by a young man named Anthony Quinn, later a movie star. Dynamic and attractive, McPherson was much loved by her faithful, even after the collapse of her third marriage, the filing of at least fifty lawsuits against her and widespread scandals involving (separately) sex and money. (She had an affair with Charles Chaplin.) For all that, the impression made by the exuberant blond Sister Aimee, who used the tools of the acting trade to arouse her congregants, was unforgettable for those who saw her.
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At home, the Bolenders continued the ideals set before everyone at church. Dancing, smoking and card-playing were considered works of the demon, and neatness, order and discipline were marks of virtue; childhood sloppiness, back talk or poor manners were sinful. Routines for mealtimes, chores and playtime were meticulously observed; household regulations were dutifully observed and deviation from them was to be avoided at all cost. Ida’s face often bore an expression of exasperated disappointment over some minor childish foible: “It was hard to please them. Somehow I was always falling short, although I can’t remember being especially bad.” Standards were high for winning approval from Norma Jeane’s first mother figure, while Albert Bolender remained mostly a quiet backer of his wife’s domestic management, his silence severer than any open threat of punishment.

As a natural part of maturing, of establishing independence, of testing and claiming one’s own personality, every child finds a way of rebellion. For Norma Jeane, rigorous discipline at home firmly forestalled mischief, tantrums and rank disobedience. She could, she always
insisted, only withdraw to an inner world for her escape. In this regard, there was so much emphasis on propriety that a peculiar type of recurring childhood dream was perhaps inevitable:

I dreamed that I was standing up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church, and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone.

The surreal scene was described and appropriately embellished in adulthood, and whether or not it actually haunted the pre-adolescent Norma Jeane is perhaps unimportant. More to the point, the dream represents what she later wanted the public to think of her childhood fantasies: that she had a kind of prophetic sense of who she would be and what effect she would have on others. She would be a woman to surprise and shock with a natural, guilt-free display of her body; she would also take care not to offend, and in some way this would be connected to her being (as she desired) accepted—even adored—with people lying at her feet. Dream or no, this became the reality.

The Bolenders would have been horrified to hear such a dream: the bathtub was the only situation of licit nakedness. And because cleanliness was not only next to godliness but virtually a sign of it, the Bolenders’ sole extravagance was the hot water lavishly poured for the children’s baths. In a household obsessed with the taint of sin, Norma Jeane was encouraged to soak and scrub. But she never felt that she emerged quite clean enough to please her foster parents. “You could have done better,” Ida or Albert said quietly as they brushed her hair and set out a clean dress. The religious injunctions of church echoed at home:
perfection
was the ideal to be ever kept before the growing child. Anything less—and of course everything is—deserves implicit belittling; and therefore nothing is more dangerous than praise, which can lead to complacency, idleness or spiritual torpor. She recalled that in her childhood she never felt quite ready, quite clean enough, acceptable, presentable for the Bolenders. “You can always do better.” It was a short route from a soiled blouse to eternal damnation.

She certainly could have done better than to be bored and distracted at a religious pageant into which she was corralled at Easter 1932. With fifty other black-robed youngsters arranged in the form of
a living cross, she made her first public theatrical appearance at a sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl:

We all had on white tunics under the black robes and at a given signal we were supposed to throw off the robes, changing the cross from black to white. But I got so interested in looking at the people, the orchestra, the hills and the stars in the sky that I forgot to watch the conductor for the signal. And there I was—the only black mark on a white cross. The family I was living with never forgave me.

“I’ve got to get rid of that quiet little girl,” Norma Jeane overheard Ida Bolender say to her husband that night. “She makes me nervous.”

In 1932, the domestic atmosphere of discipline and achievement were reinforced in the new demands of school life. “Go down two blocks, turn left and keep going till you see the school,” Ida Bolender said one morning in early September, and with two older neighboring children to accompany her, Norma Jeane set off for first-grade class at the Washington Street School in Hawthorne, then located at the corner of El Segundo Boulevard and Washington Street (just south of the area that included Los Angeles International Airport). Classroom discipline was simply a variant on home for Norma Jeane, but in the schoolyard, she remembered, “I loved playing games, and everything seemed like it was pretending. Like all kids, we used to act out little dramas, exaggerate stories. But I loved to make things up—more than the others, I think—maybe because life with my foster parents was always so predictable.” On most days, Tippy followed her to school and waited outside for the return journey.

Another “pretend game” that year seems to have been inspired by a recurring motif on a radio detective serial the Bolenders allowed. A few times that year, Norma Jeane slipped off to school with Albert’s flashlight, prowling the route and (despite broad daylight) shining the lamp on the license plate of every auto and carefully jotting it down. Thus did she practice writing her numbers in early 1933.

And then, with the suddenness of the earthquake that rocked Southern California that March, life changed for Norma Jeane just after her seventh birthday. An angry neighbor, annoyed at Tippy’s barking, grabbed
a shotgun and killed the dog, causing the child a spasm of grief. The Bolenders summoned Gladys, who arrived in late June, transported by her friend Grace McKee, who was by this time more than ever Gladys’s closest confidante, sometimes her emotional support, often her counselor, always the arbiter of difficult decisions and the adjudicator of Gladys’s personal and financial dilemmas. Then almost forty, single and childless after several marriages, generous, bohemian with an almost manic pertness, Grace was to become the most important influence in Norma Jeane’s life. For the present, however, Gladys was at the center of things.

Her mother helped Norma Jeane bury her pet. She then paid the Bolenders their last month’s fee, packed her daughter’s clothes and swept her off to a small apartment she had leased for the summer at 6012 Afton Place, Hollywood, near the studios where she and Grace worked as free-lance cutters. Thus Norma Jeane’s time in the sleepy fringe-village of Hawthorne had firmly ended, and with it the vigilant moralism to which the child had been subjected. At the same time, Gladys’s decision to reverse the pattern of her life and to take on the care of her daughter seemed almost a desperate act, one of foreign or imposed conscience.

However, on June 13—as part of President Roosevelt’s assault on the Great Depression—the Home Owner Loan Corporation had been instituted, and low-cost mortgages were now available to hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Gladys, as a single parent, easily qualified. At once she negotiated the purchase of a house into which she and her daughter moved that autumn. Life was changing very rapidly indeed, as Norma Jeane found when, during that summer, Gladys and Grace acted as her tour guides for Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.

A decade earlier, the city had a half-million people; now there were almost three times that number. This increase created an enormous suburban sprawl, with the emergence of various communities linked by the Pacific Electric streetcars; these traveled as far northeast as Pasadena and southwest as far as Long Beach for only twenty cents; out to the village of Lankershim (later North Hollywood) for fifteen cents; and out to Zelzah (Canoga Park) for a dime. Trolleys clanged along Hollywood and Santa Monica boulevards—two of the major east-west arteries—while travelers along Sunset Boulevard rode elegant double-decker buses.

The various sections of Los Angeles were characterized by the development of different industries and technology. Airplane factories were busy near the shore, opening up Los Angeles to a world from which it had been much isolated with deserts on the eastern and the ocean on the western frontiers. Wells were operating round the clock in the hills south of Hollywood, and the port of Los Angeles was the country’s largest oil terminal.

Ten miles inland was the epicenter of the motion picture industry, flourishing as never before with talkies, attracting technicians as well as hopeful actors from all over the world. Film companies owned more than two million dollars’ worth of real estate, studio space and equipment, while two hundred miles of new streets were being blocked out and paved with routes toward the studios. Los Angeles and Hollywood were, in the collective mind of the world, synonymous.

For all its business enterprises and efficient movie storytelling, there was little high culture—a fact at least partly due to the influx of migrant laborers to Los Angeles. From Iowa, Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas there came, in the words of one contemporary historian, “a people well stereotyped in American folklore—mainly derived from Low Church Protestant stock, puritan and materialistic to start with.” And from Central America came another kind of migrant worker: Hispanic Catholic, often with strong Indian roots—in other words, not European-American and, therefore, so far as the sturdy midwesterner judged, not American at all. With depression breadlines and Beverly Hills mansions, immigrant poor and movie-star rich, Los Angeles was evolving into an odd confusion of realms, a hedonistic hick town where the traditional American frontier values of hard work and land cultivation clashed with the allure of the fast buck, fame and a good life under perpetual sunshine.

Late in August, Gladys and Norma Jeane moved into their house at 6812 Arbol Drive, a furnished six-room, three-bedroom house not far from the Hollywood Bowl. The item that settled Gladys’s mind on this particular residence was a Franklin baby-grand piano, painted white. It could have come straight from a scene that had passed through her fingers at the lab—
Flying Down to Rio
with Fred Astaire (on which she
had worked at RKO that year), or Busby Berkeley’s
Gold Diggers of 1933
. For Gladys, as for most moviegoers, a white piano was an omen of better times.

The house was negotiated and a $5,000 loan obtained from the Mortgage Guarantee Company of California—the note, interestingly, issued to “Gladys Baker, a married woman.” To facilitate the required payments, Gladys at once leased out the entire house to a married couple; she then rented back a bedroom for herself and her daughter, sharing the living room, bath and kitchen with the other family. In Gladys and Norma Jeane’s bedroom hung one small framed photograph—of Charles Gifford. From this fact sprang a subsequent false certitude, among several writers, of Norma Jeane’s parentage, but all the child knew (or her mother admitted) was Gladys’s residual affection for an old beau.