You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child, because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.
—Marilyn Monroe
Norma Jeane slept in a dormitory she shared with twenty-six other girls. After dark she often sat in the window and looked out at the city lights. Not far from the orphanage she could see the giant neon sign on top of the stages of a nearby film studio. “At night, when the other girls were sleeping, I’d sit up in the window and cry because I’d look over and see the studio sign above the roofs in the distance,” Marilyn later recalled. “It was where my mother had worked as a cutter.”
The studio had been named by Joseph P. Kennedy, who entered the motion-picture business in the year Norma Jeane was born. In 1926 Joe Kennedy was a multimillionaire whose bootlegging operations provided a lucrative income and the foundation for his successful stock market manipulations. In 1928 Kennedy had merged the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) vaudeville circuit to form a motion-picture studio. It was named Radio-Keith-Orpheum and a monumental reproduction of the studio trademark was erected on top of one of the Hollywood soundstages on the corner of Melrose and Gower—only blocks from the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. The large plaster globe with an enormous radio tower on top was brightly illuminated at night, and flashing neon bolts of electricity emanated from the giant letters RKO.
By 1929 Joe Kennedy had made over five million dollars in his Hollywood ventures, and had established a reputation in the film capital as a shrewd man of numerous business affairs. He was also known for his numerous affairs with budding starlets plucked from the gardens of Hollywood beauties. Stories soon spread of his romances with Marion Davies, Betty Compton, and Gloria Swanson.
Young Jack Kennedy was also “brought up differently from the average American child.” Looking back on his childhood, Jack said that he was raised in an atmosphere of “institutionalized living.” Surrounded by servants and nannies, the Kennedy children saw little of their mother or father. Joe was frequently busy with his various affairs—always, it seemed, en route to London, or Paris, or Hollywood. When Joe was in London in 1928, Rose wrote him, “I am praying that I shall see you soon. Do pray too, and go to church, as it is very important in my life that you do just that.” But Joe was in London with Gloria Swanson and had little time for prayer. Joe’s priorities were money and women. In Gloria Swanson he found both. One of Hollywood’s top stars, Swanson was beautiful, sophisticated, wealthy—and titled. Her husband was the dashing Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye.
In the summer of 1927 Joe Kennedy had acquired the Hyannisport summer house on the east coast of Cape Cod that would one day be expanded into the Kennedy compound. Neighbors recalled the extraordinary event that took place in the summer of 1929 when Gloria Swanson arrived at Hyannis: “Miss Swanson and her party landed in the harbor near the breakwater not far from Kennedy’s summer house, in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. Hyannisport residents gaped from the beach as Miss Swanson—petite, chic, flawlessly coiffed and a member of the aristocracy since her marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye—deplaned.”
It was a bizarre situation. Swanson found it incredible that Rose Kennedy pretended to know nothing of the affair. Swanson wondered, “Was she a fool, I asked myself with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”
The Kennedy children referred to the Hollywood film star as “Aunt Gloria.” Aunt Gloria even left her autograph on the wall of the children’s playhouse, and Jack wrote her a thank-you note for gifts received. According to children of the Kennedy’s neighbors, Joe Kennedy took “Aunt Gloria” sailing in the family sailboat named after Mrs. Kennedy, the “Rose Elizabeth.” He and Swanson were interrupted in their nautical lovemaking by young Jack, who had stowed away aboard the Rose Elizabeth. When he peeked up from below deck and was surprised to find his father on board “Aunt Gloria,” the horrified and bewildered boy panicked and jumped overboard. Joe Kennedy dove in after him and hauled him back to the boat.
What occurred that summer afternoon in 1929, when Jack was twelve years old, was undoubtedly a traumatic event for this young Catholic boy. But Gloria Swanson was only one of the parade of attractive young women who visited the Kennedy compound. Neighbor Nancy Coleman recalled that Rose Kennedy would be driving out to the airport in her Rolls-Royce for one of her frequent trips abroad, and almost simultaneously Joe Kennedy would be driving into the driveway with a girlfriend. Young Jack and the other sons soon learned that promiscuity was an inherent masculine right.
“My own special interest in clothes developed during this period,” Rose Kennedy later explained. “Not just from this episode, but from the general circumstances of which it was an especially vivid part…. Obviously, I couldn’t compete in natural beauty, but I could make the most of what I had by keeping my figure trim, my complexion good, my grooming perfect, and by always wearing clothes that were interesting and becoming.”
During the next few years Rose Kennedy would accomplish this by making at least seventeen trips to Europe in which she would haunt the Paris fashion houses, seeking out the latest styles and shopping for particularly interesting diamond jewelry. Rose confided to a neighbor that she made her husband pay for his infidelity. “I made him give me everything I wanted—clothes, jewels, everything!”
Jack Kennedy was particularly sensitive regarding his mother’s long absences from home. He confided to a friend that he used to cry each time Rose packed her bags for one of her extended trips abroad, and he protested, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone.” He later angrily exclaimed to one of his school chums, “My mother was either at some Paris fashion house, or else on her knees in some church. She was never there when we really needed her…. My mother never really held me and hugged me. Never! Never!”
Rose Kennedy’s retreat from her husband and her family was resented perhaps more by Jack than the other children, and he was to tell his friend Mary Gimbel, “My mother is a nothing!” He grew up with a hostile attitude toward marriage and family. Women were viewed as no more than sex objects. His experience of family life involved “institutionalized living—children in a cell block.”
Though the childhoods of Jack Kennedy and Norma Jeane were quite different, the sense of parental isolation and emotional denial was to a certain extent a shared experience.
“In the orphanage I began to stutter,” Marilyn recalled. “My mother and the idea of being an orphan—maybe that’s the reason. Anyway, I stuttered. Later on in my teens at Van Nuys High School, they elected me secretary of the English class, and every time I had to read the minutes I’d say, ‘Minutes of the last m-m-m-meeting.’ It was terrible. That went on for years, I guess, until I was fifteen.”
She attributed the cause of her speech disorder to “my mother and the idea of being an orphan—maybe that’s the reason.” However, the chronology of events indicates that the stuttering was related to the molestation incident.
The stammering problem never went away entirely. In 1960 Marilyn Monroe stated, “Sometimes it even happens to me today if I’m very nervous or excited. Once when I had a small part in a movie, in a scene where I was supposed to go up the stairs, I forgot what was happening and the assistant director came and yelled at me, and I was so confused that when I got into the scene I stuttered. Then the director himself came over to me and said, ‘You don’t stutter.’ And I said ‘Tha-Tha-That’s what you th-thi…think!’ It was painful, and it still is if I speak very fast or have to make a speech…terrible.”
The children from the orphanage attended the Vine Street Elementary School several blocks away and walked there in a group. Norma Jeane found it difficult to make friends at Vine Street because the children from the orphanage were considered homeless. “They’re from the place for homeless hooligans,” it was whispered, and the orphans were never invited to visit and play at the homes of the more fortunate students. In her unhappiness at the orphanage, Norma Jeane made plans for escape. She tried to run away with another girl from the dormitory, but they got only as far as the front lawn before being discovered.
On a homeless child’s birthday, the orphanage followed a prescribed ritual. A large, elaborate birthday cake would be wheeled into the dining hall on a tea cart while all the orphans dutifully sang “Happy Birthday” to the celebrant. The birthday child would then blow out the candles. However, the jubilation would often be as wooden as the cake, which had plaster frosting and was carved out of pine. The wooden cake had a triangular divot allowing for one slice of genuine cake, which was ceremoniously served to the orphaned celebrant. Much to the salivary disappointment of the novices, the wooden cake would then be wheeled into a closet where it remained until the next birthday festivities.
Whenever Grace Goddard visited the orphanage, Norma Jeane complained bitterly about her confinement in the hope that “Aunt Grace” would come to her rescue. In the months that followed, her guardian became Norma Jeane’s “saving Grace.” Grace would often take her away from the orphanage on the weekends for visits to the small Hollywood home she shared with “Doc.”
On these special outings Grace permitted Norma Jeane to try her lipstick, and Grace would put her straight light-brown hair in curlers. Sometimes she’d be taken to a beauty parlor on Hollywood Boulevard to have her hair done. Guardianship records indicate that Grace bought dresses and shoes for Norma Jeane with the meager proceeds from the sale of Gladys’s few possessions.
In time Norma Jeane was told the truth regarding her mother’s mental illness and that Gladys was confined in Norwalk. Gladys was allowed to leave the asylum and lunch with Norma Jeane and Grace, but on these rare occasions Gladys remained withdrawn and uncommunicative, scarcely acknowledging her daughter’s presence.
“Grace loved and adored Norma Jeane,” a friend and coworker at the studios, Leila Fields, recalled, “If it weren’t for Grace there would be no Marilyn Monroe. She raved about Norma Jeane like she was her own. Grace said Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star. She had this feeling—a conviction. ‘Don’t worry, Norma Jeane, you’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big—an important woman, a movie star!’”
Grace Goddard’s compassion for Norma Jeane was entangled with her own frustrations. She had come to Hollywood to be a movie star like Mary Pickford, but ended up being an itinerant assembler of the movie stars’ celluloid images. Unable to have children of her own, Grace became a foster “stage mother” and focused the transference of her frustrations on Norma Jeane. In photos taken by Grace during this period, Norma Jeane is seen in Mary Pickford curls and makeup—a lost dream from an earlier generation. By the 1930s, Mary Pickford, the innocent child with the beautiful curls and the petulant pout, was fading into puffy oblivion. She had been supplanted by the overt sexuality of the vamps and the “it” girls. The shimmering platinum-blond sensuality of Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels, Public Enemy, and Red Dust had electrified audiences and catapulted Harlow into instant stardom. Harlow soon became Grace’s new idol. She dyed her own hair blond and began divining a young Harlow in Norma Jeane. “There’s no reason why you can’t grow up to be just like her,” Grace would say.
Marilyn recalled, “Time after time Grace touched a spot on my nose and said, ‘You’re perfect except for this little bump, sweetheart, but with the right hair and a better nose one day you’ll be perfect—like Jean Harlow. And so Jean Harlow became my idol, too.”
On the weekends Grace frequently took Norma Jeane to lunch and a movie show at the Grauman’s Chinese, where Norma Jeane remembered “trying to fit my feet into the footprints—but my school shoes were too big for the stars’ slim high-heeled ones.” In 1935 she saw China Seas with Clark Gable and Harlow. Gable reminded her of the man with the mustache and the jaunty smile in the photo of Stan Gifford her mother had kept on the wall. When Gladys had been taken away, Gifford’s photo was packed in a trunk by Grace, and it would be many years before Norma Jeane would see it once again. But in her dreams Gable became “the man I thought was my father.”
It was during her confinement at the Orphans’ Home that a sleep disorder had its onset. The affliction was to haunt her the rest of her life. Marilyn Monroe suffered from “night terrors.” While insomnia is characterized by a restless wakefulness that prevents sleep, night terrors are characterized by the victim’s sudden arousal from deep sleep by the “fight or flight” syndrome—the rush of adrenaline that accompanies panic and fear. In extreme cases the victim wakes in a cold sweat—screaming, trembling, and in mortal terror.
At the orphanage Norma Jeane would suddenly wake up at night screaming and shivering in the darkness. Anxieties and a sense of isolation may have been momentarily forgotten in merciful play, sports, and the duties of the day, but when she lay sleeping in the dark of the dormitory, her heart would race, her pulse quicken, her mind and body surge with adrenaline as the suppressed memory of her mad mother, her “heritage,” and the sudden severance of relationships engulfed her. Orphans often vanished from their beds after dark, when the “night people” came and took them away before dawn.
Norma Jeane’s world brightened when Grace McKee appeared one weekend and held out the hope of rescue. She indicated that one day she might be able to provide a home for her. Doc Goddard had three children from a previous marriage, and Grace was faced with her own practical considerations. However, the directress of the orphanage felt that Norma Jeane needed to be placed in a family situation, and it was arranged for Norma Jeane to be temporarily placed in a foster home until a more permanent arrangement could be made.
“Suddenly, I wasn’t in the orphanage anymore,” Marilyn remembered.
I was placed with a family who were given five dollars a week for keeping me. I was placed with nine different families before I was able to quit being a legal orphan. I remember one where I stayed for just three or four weeks. I remember them because the woman delivered furniture polish made by her husband. Every morning we’d load up the backseat of her car with the bottles and she’d take me along. We’d bump along the roads and the car smelled like polish, and I’d get so carsick. I can still hear the awful sound of the car starting and her yelling, “Norma Jeane! Get in the car! Let’s go!”
After that I only lived in the orphanage off and on. The families with whom I lived had one thing in common—a need for five dollars. I was also an asset to have in the house. I was strong and healthy and able to do almost as much work as a grown-up. And I had learned not to bother anyone by talking or crying. I learned also that the best way to keep out of trouble was by never complaining or asking for anything. Most of the families had children of their own, and I knew they always came first. They wore the colored dresses and owned whatever toys there were. My own costume never varied. It consisted of a faded blue skirt and white waist. I had two of each, but since they were exactly alike everyone thought I wore the same outfit all the time.
Every second week the Home sent a woman inspector out to see how its orphans were getting along in the world. She never asked me any questions, but would pick up my foot and look at the bottom of my shoes. If my shoe bottoms weren’t worn through, I was reported in a thriving condition. I never minded coming “last” in these families except on Saturday nights when everybody took a bath. Water cost money, and changing the water in the tub was an unheard of extravagance. The whole family used the same tub of water. And I was always the last one in. One family with whom I lived was so poor that I was often scolded for flushing the toilet at night. “That uses up five gallons of water,” my new “uncle” would say, “and five gallons each time can run into money.”
I was always very quiet, at least in front of the adults. They used to call me “the mouse.” I didn’t say very much except to other children, and I had a lot of imagination. The other kids liked to play with me because I could think of things. I’d say, “Now we’re going to play murder…or divorce,” and they’d say, “How do you think of things like that?” No matter how careful I was, there were always troubles. Some of my troubles were my own fault. I did hit someone occasionally, I’d pull her hair, and knock her down…and I was often accused of stealing things—a necklace, a comb, a ring, or a nickel. I never stole anything. When the troubles came I had only one way to meet them—by staying silent. Aunt Grace would ask me when she came to visit how things were. I would tell her always they were fine because I didn’t like to see her eyes turn unhappy. In a way they were not troubles at all because I was used to them. When I look back on those days I remember, in fact, that they were full of all sorts of fun and excitement. I played games in the sun and ran races. I also had daydreams, not only about my father’s photograph but about many other things. I daydreamed chiefly about beauty. I dreamed of myself becoming so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed. And I dreamed of colors—scarlet, gold, green and white. I dreamed of myself walking proudly in beautiful clothes and being admired by everyone and overhearing words of praise.