Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (8 page)

“More hers than Gladys’s”—precisely because Gladys was now regarded as incompetent and ineffectual. One must presume, given the financial sacrifices Grace made on Norma Jeane’s behalf for so long, that the conscious motives animating Grace were benevolent; to be sure, she allowed the child more freedom than had the Bolenders, and provided more luxuries. But the freedom, pleasure and advantages Grace provided were not without benefit to Grace herself. “Grace
Goddard was nice enough—if she could benefit,” said Norma Jeane’s first husband, tempering his otherwise high praise for her generosity and sacrifice.

The woman Norma Jeane now had to please, to whom she owed her safety, her bed and board, did not merely enjoy working in a sector of the so-called dream factory—she supervised one of its most important departments. In Hollywood social life and in the celluloid stories she helped assemble for the public, Grace saw people in real life and characters in stories renamed and reinvented—just as she did for herself in her own capricious youth and whimsical bohemianism, in her airy unconcern for adding or subtracting a name here or losing a husband there.

If ever a girl was primed for Hollywood, it was Norma Jeane, watching Grace’s own hair color and hemlines alter. From her work, Grace knew how a woman’s appearance could be changed by makeup, lights, filters and shadows; how, with a quick snip of scissors, an unflattering image could be eliminated. She knew by profession what the studios successfully marketed, what “worked,” what the public wanted. The infinite varieties of cosmetic surgery, later one of Los Angeles’s most heavily advertised and lucrative professions, became perhaps the logical term of the movie world’s craving for an impossible ideal. It was, in other words, Grace McKee’s job to help perfect illusions. And with greater frequency and intensity during the next several years, Norma Jeane became the beneficiary of Grace’s experience. In taking on the child’s care and education, she had at last an opportunity to create the daughter nature had denied her.

In 1934, Olin G. Stanley was working as a temporary cutter with Grace in the Columbia Studios editing lab. As he recalled, cutters worked four hours on Saturdays, and for months Grace asked a friend to bring Norma Jeane to the lab an hour before noontime closing. “We workers were introduced to her, and every introduction was the same, over and over. Grace said, ‘Baby, I want you to meet Olin—Olin, isn’t she pretty?’ ”

Thus far, this was ordinary pride. But Grace went further: “Norma Jeane, turn around and show the nice man the big bow on the back of your dress. Now walk down that way and turn around. Good, now walk back here again . . . Oh, here comes Ella, Norma Jeane! You met Ella last month. Tell Ella again—she’s probably forgotten, but
you
haven’t forgotten! Tell Ella what you’re going to be when you’re all grown up. Say: ‘a movie star,’ baby! Tell her you’re going to be a movie star!’ This brainwashing continued every week for months and months.” Another worker confirmed Stanley’s recollections: “It was just a plain fact with Grace,” recalled Charlotte Engleburg. “Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star, and that was that.”

Toward this goal there could be only one model. “Grace was captivated by Jean Harlow,” said Norma Jeane, “and so Jean Harlow was my idol.”

1
. Contrary to popular belief, Gladys could hardly have bestowed the second name in honor of Jean Harlow, for Harlean Carpenter did not change her name until 1928.

2
. An important national study conducted during the 1920s suggested many parents who gave up their children “were themselves children emotionally . . . and manifested this in their disinterest in and hostility toward their own offspring as children who needed to be reared.”

3
. McPherson died of a barbiturate overdose in 1944 at the age of fifty-three.

4
. Other notably fantastic creations—some of them downtown, on Broadway—included the Warner Brothers, the El Capitan, the Vine Street, the Palace, the Los Angeles Theater, the United Artists Theater and the Mayan.

Chapter Three

J
UNE
1934–N
OVEMBER
1937

T
HE GIRL NAMED HARLEAN CARPENTER
, born to a genteel Kansas family in 1911, came to Hollywood with her divorced mother, a woman who had ambitions of movie stardom for herself. But the daughter fared better, took her mother’s name as her own, and as Jean Harlow worked as an unbilled extra in silent films and then more remarkably in comedy shorts with Laurel and Hardy. Her first major appearance was in
Hell’s Angels
in 1930. The bond between mother and daughter continued to be so strong that even during her three marriages “The Baby,” as everyone affectionately called Jean, frequently spent nights at her mother’s home.

In nine films released during the next two years (most notably
The Public Enemy
,
Platinum Blonde
and
Red Headed Woman
), Jean Harlow’s overt sexuality, her shockingly dyed and cinematically lighted platinum-colored hair and her shimmering screen image made her endlessly fascinating. The general critical consensus, however, maintained that she was merely a cheap, sassy twenty-year-old playing a succession of cheap, erotic roles. Longing for better parts in more serious films, in 1932 she signed a contract with MGM, where producer Louis B. Mayer carefully guided her star image and where she developed a natural flair for comedy. She was also, contrary to what the public was led to believe, a rather sweet young woman with a genuine longing to supplement her brief formal education and greatly—perhaps neurotically—attached
to her mother, known always as “Mama Jean.” Expressing the common sentiment of those who knew Jean Harlow, the actress Maureen O’Sullivan remarked that “there wasn’t anyone at MGM who didn’t love her, who wasn’t amused by her or didn’t think her an absolute darling.”

Playing opposite such stars as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow at twenty-two was, despite promises of more serious roles, still asked to show more cleavage and disport herself with more blatant sultriness than any star of her day. When Grace McKee took Norma Jeane to see Harlow in
Dinner at Eight, Bombshell
and
The Girl from Missouri
—all released between the summers of 1933 and 1934—the critical tide was turning in Harlow’s favor.

MGM continued to keep her in skintight white gowns emphasizing her startling blond-white hair. This presentation of frank eroticism corresponded with something in her own character; she rarely wore underclothes, and in restaurants and at press conferences was often seen (apparently distractedly) caressing and fondling herself. Like many stars of both sexes, she had no greater admirer than herself. Offscreen, Harlow’s life lacked anything like sustained happiness. Married three times by the age of twenty-four, she spent her short life in a constant search for her missing father, from whom she was always separated. But audiences adored her, and even the mysterious circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of her second husband (twenty-two years her senior) could not diminish public approval.

It is no exaggeration to say that during the Great Depression, Jean Harlow was America’s great apotheosis of daring but often comically exaggerated carnality. There were stars who sometimes tried to imitate her hair color or were given a similar studio buildup, but publicists and reporters insisted there would never be another like Harlow.
¹

But this Grace McKee stoutly denied: “There’s no reason you can’t grow up to be just like her, Norma Jeane. With the right hair color and a better nose . . .” For the child, then eight (and for those who overheard this oft-repeated refrain), Grace must have sounded a little
ridiculous, not to say intimidating. But she was the importunate and prophetic screen mother. As if incarnating a hoary cliché, both she and Mama Jean transmuted their own dashed hopes of stardom into energies on behalf of others, through whom they lived and who, they hoped, would succeed where they themselves had failed. In September 1934, Grace added to her own peroxide blond hair a lavender rinse and applied touches of makeup to Norma Jeane’s lips and cheeks. The race to stardom, insofar as it involved the child’s unofficial guardian, was beginning with an Olympic sprint.

That year passed for Norma Jean with the routines of grade school, regular moviegoing with Grace, and uneven visits from Gladys, who went with them at least three times to Sunday lunch at the Ambassador Hotel, a rare and glamorous treat. Quiet, sad and remote, Gladys picked at her food while Grace chattered gaily, proudly showing off a dress she had bought for Norma Jeane and the pink ribbons she had tied into the child’s curled hair. Such occasions must have been awkward for the mother, who could only have felt more incompetent than ever; and for the daughter, estranged again from a woman she had never really known.

On such visits, Gladys was inevitably disconnected from the “real world” of family life to which her doctors wished her exposed. Nor could Gladys have felt more attuned to actuality when she met her daughter at the house on Arbol Drive. There the Atkinsons, still immured in their endless, unrealized fantasies, were packing for England and, they said, the certainty of success. Frightened of responsibility for Norma Jeane and doubtless guilty for failing her doctors, her daughter and her friend Grace, Gladys returned to the relative calm of the hospital. There, at least, was the comfort of a routine where she had no real chores and where maternal duties were nonexistent—and so Gladys could avoid any lingering guilt. The only reality was what she saw and heard; for her, Norma Jeane was a vague presence, lingering perhaps only like a phantom pain. “My mother,” Norma Jeane said later, “never really made any effort to be with me. I don’t think I existed for her.”

The house on Arbol Drive was put up for sale that autumn; this portion of the street soon vanished, and the land became part of the Hollywood Bowl complex. Grace, however, did not take the child to live with her,
and the reason for this was quite clear. She had decided to become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian, but the State of California required proof that the living natural parent or parents were incompetent and likely to remain so. In addition, the prospective adoptee was required to spend at least six months in a county orphanage while the guardianship was approved.

The first requirement was readily met after Grace obtained a formal statement from doctors that Gladys was insane. Grace then arranged her transfer from Los Angeles General to Norwalk State Hospital, where Della Monroe had expired. Gladys’s condition had stabilized and Los Angeles General’s staff said they could no longer accommodate her. “Her illnesses,” proclaimed the chief’s report, “have been characterized by (1) preoccupation with religion at times, and (2) at other times deep depression and agitation. This appears to be a chronic state.” Such an assertion perfectly demonstrates the impoverished state of both diagnosis and treatment of emotional illness in 1935. One might reasonably ask whether a longing for spiritual health, often the result of depression and agitation, was not in fact an appropriate response to much of what Gladys had known in her life.

Since the house on Arbol Drive was no longer the family home, there was no alternative but further institutionalization for Gladys. In addition, Norwalk had (at least by comparison with General) a better reputation in managing chronic cases of various mental illnesses. Quite apart from Gladys’s general apathy and loss of affect, county physicians at General were persuaded of the patient’s incompetence by Grace’s statement of Norma Jeane’s illegitimacy as well as her presentation of the family “history”—the now traditional but inaccurate account of mental illness afflicting Tilford, Otis and Della.

Thus in January 1935, Gladys was taken to Norwalk, where she remained one year before another transfer. “I was sorry she was sick,” Norma Jeane said later, “but we never had any kind of relationship. I didn’t see her very often.” Nor did Grace encounter difficulty fulfilling the second legal mandate. She learned there was a place available for Norma Jeane the following September at the Los Angeles Orphans Home, and until then she arranged for a family in West Los Angeles named Giffen to take in Norma Jeane. But before doing so, Grace cannily determined that the Giffens were already a houseful, with their
own and several other foster children: no, they could not keep Norma Jeane very long.

Because she was demonstrating such care for Norma Jeane and filing weekly reports with the appropriate authorities, Grace then repetitioned the court, asking the orphanage requirement to be waived so that Norma Jeane might live with her after a time with the Giffens. “You can imagine how happy I was when Grace told me I wouldn’t be sent away to live at some kind of school with children I didn’t know, and no family.”

And so, after two months with the Giffens, while the court investigated Grace McKee’s fitness as legal guardian, Norma Jeane was allowed to live temporarily with Grace’s mother, Emma Willette Atchinson. She had an apartment on Lodi Place, Hollywood, in a pleasant white stucco building with a Spanish tiled roof, a flowering courtyard and a gently splashing fountain. Norma Jeane moved there in early spring 1935.

That same month, Grace swung into action—not only expediting the cause of her guardianship, but also asking the court to appoint her the sole control over affairs of Gladys P. Baker. Grace rightly saw that Gladys’s financial affairs must be kept regular to avoid seizure by the surprise appearance of someone claiming to be Norma Jeane’s father, or by the tax authorities. She also knew that proper investments and sales of any cash or real property needed a careful eye, and that she could, on Norma Jeane’s behalf, draw on these monies for the girl’s support. Accordingly, on March 25, Grace swore an affidavit that Gladys needed a court-appointed guardian and that, despite the interim orphanage requirement, she was the proper candidate.