Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (9 page)

In April, the assets of Gladys’s “Estate” were assessed:

Gladys Baker, as she was then known, had $60 cash in a bank account; $90 in unendorsed insurance checks (for loss of work due to illness); one table radio valued at $25, with a store balance due of $15; a debt of $250 on a 1933 Plymouth sedan Gladys had scarcely used; and $200 owed on the white piano.

On June 1, Norma Jeane’s ninth birthday, Grace McKee received full possession of everything owned by Gladys Baker—along with responsibility for its disposition. Within days, she drove the Plymouth back to its original owner (who canceled the debt); she sold the piano
for $235 (duly returning the profit to the Estate); and the house was repossessed by the mortgagee without penalty.

At the same time, Grace submitted items for reimbursement—sums to which she was entitled during her earlier care of Gladys and Norma Jeane: $24 for a fee to a nurse named Julia Bennett, for example; $25 to Emma Atchinson for custody of Norma Jeane; $49.30 in fees owed to the Santa Monica Rest Home; and a $43.16 clothing bill for items purchased for Norma Jeane. Able to negotiate her way through the thicket of many legal and social matters, Grace McKee was a formidable conjunction of fantasist and pragmatist.

But some things cannot be anticipated or readily adjudicated—a surprise romance among them. For the first time in several years, so far as can be determined, love overswept Grace’s life in the person of a man who forever altered her plans and Norma Jeane’s destiny.

Precisely how Grace McKee met Ervin Silliman Goddard that spring of 1935 is unknown; that there was a great mutual rush of passion is beyond dispute. Ten years younger than Grace, Goddard stood six feet five inches tall, was sometimes mistaken for film actor Randolph Scott, and was in fact handsome enough that he was engaged as Joel McCrea’s stand-in on several movies. (One of his daughters later spotted him as one of the soldiers alongside Laurel and Hardy in
Babes in Toyland
.) A divorced Texan with three children he did not see for long periods, Goddard was, as his daughter Eleanor later described him, “the ultimate Hail Fellow Well Met.” Charming and intelligent, he was an inveterate tinker and the son of a former surgeon, and so on both counts bore the nickname “Doc.” But his handsome geniality and his dream of movie stardom often led to periods of indolence, and indolence to prolonged appointments with cronies at local saloons. Not unexpectedly, he found Grace’s energy infectious, her passionate nature gratifying, her adoration and encouragement irresistible.

For her part, she was besotted by the flattery and ardent attention of a strong, young and comely man she described to everyone as a movie star. Side by side, Doc Goddard and Grace McKee were almost comical: she was a full foot shorter, thin and trim, and he was the proverbial brawny cowboy. Their own joviality forestalled laughter at them or snickering at her seniority, and friends enjoyed their sheer luxuriant enjoyment of one another’s company that spring and summer
of 1935. They were married in August, after a wild weekend frolic in Las Vegas, where Grace’s aunt was witness and hostess.

Returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds gathered one of Goddard’s daughters, Nona, who had come with him to California (she later became the actress Jody Lawrance), and the foursome took a small bungalow on Odessa Avenue in Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley just over the Hollywood hills. “Norma Jeane was a shy, introverted little girl,” Jody Lawrance said years later, adding that they were both “neurotic children [who] clammed up and were very sensitive toward our surroundings.” Lawrance remembered that the two girls assembled a makeshift tree house in a pepper tree, “and we crawled up there when we thought we’d get in trouble. That tree house was our escape.”
²

Modest would be too grand a word to describe the bungalow itself, which was essentially a shack. Both Doc and Grace were at this time employed only intermittently, and neither had savings. Goddard insisted that Norma Jeane’s was the unnecessary extra mouth to feed, and he prevailed on Grace to give the child up to the orphanage—for a short time, he promised, until his proverbial ship came in.

In light of her clear dedication to Norma Jeane’s welfare and the grand scheme for adopting and guiding her toward stardom, it could not have been easy for Grace to tell the child that she would have to move into the orphanage that September. For Norma Jeane, here was another relationship suddenly ruptured, another promise broken; she was once again an unwanted commodity. As she had been told by Ida Bolender, her own mother had “dropped her off,” and Norma Jeane learned for herself that she could be turned away when she was an inconvenience. In adulthood, her lack of close female friends owed much to these early experiences: she had had no primary experience on which to base any trust of a woman, no experience (after the remote, obsessive Ida Bolender) of womanly constancy. Once again, any semblance of a normal pattern of early socialization was subverted.

On September 13, 1935, Grace packed Norma Jeane’s clothes and delivered her to the Los Angeles Orphans Home, at 815 North El Centro,
Hollywood, where she was registered as the 3,463rd child in its twenty-five-year history. The place was nothing like a flophouse; on the contrary, it was an attractive and spacious red brick colonial mansion. Nevertheless, it was an institution for orphans.

The Home could accommodate fifty or sixty children, not all of whom were actually without parents: in the 1920s, fully a third of the residents were runaways or street urchins forsaken by the poor or immigrant workers incapable (or unwilling) to provide for unwanted offspring. In the 1930s, many poverty-stricken parents could apply for a child’s short-term lodging. These, like Norma Jeane, were classified as “temporary guests or students.” Her residency lasted until June 26, 1937 (just after her eleventh birthday), by which time Doc Goddard’s ship was still unberthed. “Doc had a lot of trouble during the Depression,” as Norma Jeane’s first husband later recalled. “This was unfortunate, because he really had a great mind and seemed to me able to do just about anything.”

At the Home, boys and girls were housed in separate wings, four, five or six in each neat, tidy room. From 1952, Marilyn Monroe’s statements to the press about the orphanage became more and more fantastic. By 1960, she said (among other embroideries) that she “slept in a room with twenty-seven beds,” and she added distressing tales of orphanage trauma: dreary accommodations, cold-water baths, rigid discipline and endless menial tasks such as toilet-scrubbing and washing hundreds of plates after meals. In fact, there was a team of adult employees to cook and clean at the Home, but, to encourage a sense of responsibility, the children were paid five or ten cents a week for less arduous, minor chores suited to the age and strength of each.

According to Eleanor Goddard, Norma Jeane was inspired by the accounts of the really dreadful and abused situations Eleanor herself had known in Texas, when at an early age her parents divorced and she was pitchforked from stranger to stranger and house to house, many of which situations were in fact miserable. But Norma Jeane’s time on El Centro was quite decent, and because the Home was nonsectarian, the supervisors, while encouraging children to attend church on Sundays, imposed no religious obligations.

Norma Jeane’s file noted that she was in 1935 “a normal, healthy girl who eats and sleeps well, seems content and uncomplaining and also says she likes her classes.” Formal education was not offered at the
Home, but at the Vine Street Elementary School, a five-minute stroll away. Of her two years at Vine Street, in grades four and five, no records remain.

On Saturdays during these two years, Grace frequently appeared and took Norma Jeane for a day’s outing, which usually meant lunch and a movie—especially if there were an early evening premiere, when they both applauded the stars and joined the throngs in the cries of adoration typical of the time. Among the pictures Norma Jeane especially remembered was
Mutiny on the Bounty
, with Clark Gable; he reminded her of the dark-haired, mustached man whose photo had hung at Arbol Drive. Gable, she said repeatedly, was “the man I thought of as my father.” Grace often replied that she was still trying to “fix things up so you can come back with me where you belong,” by which, no doubt, she meant the Goddards’ legal guardianship.

On such days, Norma Jeane was often taken to Grauman’s Chinese, where she remembered “trying to fit my feet into the footprints—but my school shoes were too big for the stars’ slim, high-heeled ones. Then I measured my hands with theirs, but mine seemed too small—it was all very discouraging!”

But with Grace as tutor, Norma Jeane’s dejection could not last long. The girl was routinely taken to a beauty parlor, Grace standing by anxiously as curlers, irons and brushes attempted the proleptic glamorization of Norma Jeane. She was sometimes hauled into the ladies’ lavatory at a tearoom or movie theater and shown the proper application techniques of face powder and lip rouge; eyeliner and a delicate cologne completed a spectacle passersby could only have regarded as the slightly bizarre, premature display of a pre-adolescent. “Grace was something of a wizard with cosmetics,” according to Eleanor Goddard, “and she loved to sweep down on us with all kinds of advice about makeup.”

In 1935, two Harlow films opened in Hollywood—
China Seas
and
Libeled Lady
—and Grace reiterated her conviction that Norma was going to follow Jean Harlow, a vision in sparkling black-and-white pictures: platinum hair, a shimmering white wardrobe whenever possible, white decor and props. After seeing several Harlow pictures in 1935 and 1936, Grace dyed her own hair blond, went into a period when she was seen only in white, bought only white clothes for Norma Jeane and briefly considered dying the girl’s hair platinum but wisely reneged:
the Home would not have admired such a change in a ten-year-old. As the
New York Times
reported, it was due to Harlow that platinum blondes “made their appearance everywhere, among actresses, dancers, show girls and blues singers . . . in the subways, in the streets and in the audiences at theatres.”

“Time after time, Grace touched a spot on my nose,” Norma Jeane said years later. “ ‘You’re perfect except for this little bump, sweetheart,’ she’d say. ‘But one day you’ll be perfect—like Jean Harlow.’ But I knew that no matter what, I would never be perfect—as anyone else, let alone myself.” Looking at the girl, Grace imagined a young Harlow and said so to Norma Jeane (who later told this to friends so often it became an obsession). Both had blue-green eyes and a slightly receding chin (that “could also stand fixing,” Grace said); the hair color would be altered in due course. Such early preparation and exhortation to become an imitation of a major movie star would naturally appeal to a child with a confused identity, a lack of normal home life and a pattern of needing to please so many mother figures. She was, in other words, primed to be the ultimate, manufactured facsimile of a culture’s fantasies.

There was also something of a stir in the gossip columns on June 1, 1936—Norma Jeane’s tenth birthday—when the blond star announced that after almost a decade of acting under her mother’s maiden name, she was at last formally changing her own to Jean Harlow. She would thenceforth no longer, after three marriages, be legally Harlean Carpenter McGrew Bern Rosson. About the same time, it was widely touted that Harlow was one of the celebrity volunteers campaigning vigorously for the reelection of President Franklin Roosevelt—a political involvement that much impressed Grace.

Saturdays with Grace were welcome breaks from school and communal living. But in a way it would have been surprising if Norma Jeane did not deem her “Aunt Grace” a variation of Gladys—a fantastic creature who arrived at her own convenience, one to whom she might gradually be unimportant, even negligible. Norma Jeane had, after all, been displaced by the arrival of Doc and one of his daughters.

In addition, Grace was not entirely reliable or predictable in her visits, although her account books (carefully preserved) reveal her regular
payments to the Home and her purchase of clothes for the girl. (In 1936, for example, Grace paid the full fee to the Home, fifteen dollars monthly.) She spent almost the same amount on clothes, makeup and “expenses for minor.” Norma Jeane must have feared that Grace, like Gladys, might be taken away without warning. And so she seemed to be, when Grace failed to come to the Home after five consecutive Saturdays in late 1936. That season, the girl broke into sobs of despair at the slightest provocation. If she was “almost perfect,” she may have reasoned, why was she abandoned? One of the administrators, a good-natured soul named Mrs. Dewey, reminded her that most of the children never had any visitors, but that was very cold comfort indeed. Years later, her third husband felt that “she was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents . . . or had spent time in orphanages.”

By early 1937, Norma Jeane’s mood darkened. “I was never used to being happy during those years,” she told a reporter later. Indeed, a supervisor that year noted that she occasionally seemed “anxious and withdrawn . . . and at such times she stutters slightly. Norma Jean [
sic
] is also susceptible to a lot of coughs and colds. . . . If she is not treated with much reassurance and patience at such times, she appears frightened. I recommend her to be put with a good family.”

Typically, Norma Jeane’s yearning for solace evoked a vivid fantasy life. “I sometimes told the other orphans I had real wonderful parents who were away on a long trip and would come for me any time, and once I wrote a postcard to myself and signed it from Mother and Daddy. Of course nobody believed it. But I didn’t care. I wanted to think it was true. And maybe if I thought it was true it would come true.”

Inventing idealized fantasy-parents may sometimes have briefly eased the loneliness; later (even when she admitted the truth) she found relations with women difficult to negotiate. Just as she found contradictory the injunctions set by Ida and Grace, just as they gently reminded her that she could always “do better” and “be perfect,” so no one could match the expectations aroused by her lost parents. In addition to a pitiable cycle of search and inevitable disappointment, she sometimes chose unsuitable partners for friendship, romance or marriage—perhaps
in the unacknowledged belief that in repeating the unhappiness of the past she might at last reverse its effects.