SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER MARILYN MONROE’S appendectomy, an event ensued that proved eerily similar, in a number of respects, to the recent “Golden Dreams” nude calendar affair.
Based on what Marilyn had told Twentieth Century–Fox about her childhood and upbringing, the studio’s publicity department had portrayed her in various press releases as a “disadvantaged orphan” whose formative years had been spent shuttling back and forth between a desolate Los Angeles orphanage and a collection of foster homes, some better than others. Investigating the actress’s past and present, a reporter discovered that Marilyn’s mother was still alive, suggesting that either the studio or Monroe (or both) had lied. “Just who is the real Marilyn Monroe?” the journalist asked in a widely distributed UPI (United Press International) article. It was a question Marilyn herself would pose many times in her life and to which there was no single or simple response.
In search of an answer, Marilyn had begun therapy in 1950 with Dr. Judd Marmor, a prominent West Coast psychiatrist (analyst), whose patient roster included an assortment of movie stars, studio executives, and Beverly Hills housewives. Discussing Marilyn, Dr. Marmor acknowledged seeing her only once or twice in 1950. “One of my patients was Shelley Winters, Marilyn’s friend and former roommate, and she sent her to see me. Another person who recommended that Marilyn begin therapy was director Elia Kazan, with whom Marilyn had an on-again, off-again three-year affair. The problem was that Marilyn lacked the funds at this point to commit to any long-term program. So we really didn’t get into anything. I think she’d seen one or two other therapists in Los Angeles, but, again, only for a session or two. It wasn’t until she moved to New York in 1955 that she began therapy in earnest.”
Marilyn had actually attempted a form of therapy prior to 1955. The doctor’s name was Rose Fromm, a German Jewish refugee who arrived in New York in 1937 and settled on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “In 1951,” said Dr. Fromm, “I spent six months in Los Angeles. I knew journalists Jim Bacon and Sidney Skolsky, and they introduced me to Marilyn Monroe. I’d known both columnists since 1948. I have to stress that I’d worked as a psychotherapist in Europe but not in the United States, and I made that perfectly clear to Marilyn. My doctorate in clinical psychology had been awarded abroad, and I had no interest in going through the process all over again, beyond what I needed in order to do psychiatric research in the US. In any event, Marilyn and I got along famously, and she visited my Los Angeles apartment at least a dozen times during 1951. I think at this point in time she actually preferred the kind of informal setting I provided, as opposed to the more traditional and regimented psychoanalytic sessions she underwent later in life. Basically, I think she just wanted to have somebody help her make sense of her troubled past and very turbulent childhood.”
The circumstances surrounding that “turbulent childhood” took shape well before June 1, 1926, the date of her birth in a charity ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe—she claimed to be related to James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States—came from a working-class family with a considerable history of emotional disturbance. Gladys’s maternal grandfather, Tilford Marion Hogan, committed suicide in 1933, and her mother and father both spent time in mental institutions. Gladys, red haired, fair skinned, and attractive, married businessman Jack Baker in 1917, when she was only fifteen. They had two children, Hermitt and Berniece, but Jack terminated the marriage after several years and took the children with him when he moved to Kentucky. Gladys never saw her son again. He contracted tuberculosis and died at age fifteen. Meanwhile, a succession of men followed Jack in Gladys’s bed, including an unemployed merchant named Edward Mortensen. Gladys and Mortensen were wed on October 11, 1924, and were divorced seven months later. Despite the irrefutable fact that Gladys and Mortensen never spoke again following their divorce, he is identified as Marilyn’s father on her birth certificate, a designation that is biologically not feasible considering the date of their last meeting. The same certificate listed Marilyn’s baptismal name as Norma Jeane Mortenson, a misspelling of Edward’s last name, which her mother later changed (though not legally) to Norma Jeane Baker.
At the time of Norma Jeane’s birth, her mother was employed as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood, where she’d worked since 1923. In the early fall of 1925, she had an affair with C. Stanley Gifford, a salesman in the same firm. Gladys became pregnant, and Gifford, unwilling to assume responsibility, cut off the relationship. He offered her money, which she proudly refused to accept. According to Dr. Fromm, Marilyn, or Norma Jeane, “never doubted the true identity of her birth father. Nor did Gladys Baker, for that matter. It was Stanley Gifford. Why Gladys wrote “Mortenson” on her daughter’s birth certificate is anybody’s guess. My guess is that she was in love with Gifford and felt terribly hurt that he’d abandoned her. And at least she and Mortensen had been married, which conferred the newborn infant with some vague sense of legitimacy.”
Gladys Baker had turned twenty-four when she gave birth to Norma Jeane. Gladys’s mother, Della Monroe Granger, urged her to retain her full-time position at Consolidated and to place the infant with a foster family. Norma Jeane was turned over to Wayne and Ida Bolender, Christian Science adherents, who lived on East Rhode Island Street in Hawthorne, California, the same street as Della, an overzealous follower of the same religious ideology. Gladys paid the couple $5 a week to look after her daughter. “Aunt Ida,” as Norma Jeane knew her, served as her foster guardian and substitute mother. Although Ida objected to being called “Mommy” by the child, Wayne didn’t mind being referred to as “Daddy.” He thus became the first in a long line of elusive father figures that Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe would look to for protection and guidance in years to come.
“With the exception of Joe DiMaggio and perhaps one or two others, the pivotal truth is that few of these so-called father figures offered her anything even close to guidance,” said Dr. Fromm. “And the surrogate mothers even less so. There’s that horrific anecdote she related to me involving her grandmother, who frequently visited her at the Bolender house when she was a baby and sometimes took her across the street to her own home. The story has it that one day Della tried to smother the infant with a pillow because she wouldn’t stop crying. They committed the woman to Norwalk State Hospital, in Norwalk, LA County. It wasn’t her first stay in a mental institution. After several weeks at Norwalk, she suffered a manic seizure and died the following day.”
Even the most mundane of Norma Jeane’s childhood activities had a phantasmagoric edge to them. On weekends her mother sometimes took her on outings, mostly by trolley, to the beach at Santa Monica. But on those occasions Gladys seemed nervous and preoccupied, barely capable of relating to her daughter. Wayne and Ida Bolender took her to religious pageants and sent her to Sunday school, an experience, she told Dr. Fromm, that gave rise to a recurring childhood dream wherein she stands up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there are lying at her feet on the floor of the church, and she walks naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms. Another dream, also involving nudity, resulted from a visit she paid with the Bolenders to a country cemetery. In this dream she races naked around a cemetery at dawn trying to find a way out, getting lost, tripping over a headstone, then finally exiting the cemetery through high steel gates.
Norma Jeane attended kindergarten and then first grade with Lester, a boy her age who’d been adopted by the Bolenders. The two children were given private piano lessons at home, but Lester, as Marilyn Monroe recalled, constantly disrupted the lessons by throwing temper tantrums. She additionally remembered (how could she not?) that the Bolenders would discipline both youngsters by beating them with a belt, a practice that forever instilled in her a fear of violence. Her favorite “household member” turned out to be Charlie, a pet collie that accompanied her on treks through a clump of piney woods several blocks behind the house. One morning she awoke to find that Wayne Bolender had given the dog away the night before. No explanation for this action was ever provided. “Charlie simply disappeared,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “like so many others in my life.”
In June 1933 Norma Jeane’s mother, currently working as a film cutter at both Columbia Pictures and RKO Studios, suddenly decided to reclaim her seven-year-old daughter from the Bolenders. For a brief period, they resided in a small rental apartment in North Hollywood, while Gladys put the finishing touches on a six-room bungalow she’d acquired on Arbol Drive, a short distance from the Hollywood Bowl. To help with the monthly mortgage payments, Gladys rented out one of the bungalow’s three bedrooms to an English couple, George and Maude Atkinson. Among the items she acquired for Norma Jeane was a white lacquered baby grand piano (and matching bench) that had once belonged to actor Fredric March. She also gave her daughter a set of Glenn Miller records and a windup portable Victrola. At the beginning of September, Gladys enrolled Norma Jeane in the Selma Street Elementary School. Determined to succeed in her new role as a doting parent, Gladys altered her work schedule so that she could take Norma Jeane to school in the morning and retrieve her in the afternoon. She used a small inheritance from her mother’s estate to hire a part-time housekeeper to help with chores and prepare meals. But by the end of 1933, Gladys had run out of cash and had to let the housekeeper go. It was the same year that Tilford Hogan, Gladys’s grandfather, committed suicide by hanging himself, some said, with a shower curtain.
For all Gladys Baker’s noble intentions, her plan to create a home for her daughter soon went awry. As the months passed, her behavior grew increasingly erratic. She took a medical leave of absence from her job and began spending more and more time in bed. At night, Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, she could hear “the lady with red hair” weeping in the other room. Gladys no longer bothered to change her clothing. On the rare occasions she went out, she always wore the same baggy black dress. Her hair was matted. She had stopped bathing. For hours she would stand at the window of her bedroom, staring out, motionless. One night Norma Jeane lay next to her in bed, clasping her hand. Not knowing what to do or say, she told her mother she loved her. It was the night she realized Gladys wasn’t well and wasn’t going to get better.
Returning home from school the next day, Norma Jeane found her mother in bed, her nightgown hiked up to her waist, her legs coated with a patchwork of urine and feces. A foul odor filled the room. Gladys addressed her as if in a trance.
“I saw God this morning,” she said. “He’s a little old man, lives in a cabin in the woods. Seems like a nice guy. He’s a vegetarian. Grandpa Til and Mama Della were with him. Mama had flowers in her hair and seemed happy to see me. ‘It’s not so bad here,’ she said. ‘It really isn’t. You ought to stay for a while. You’d like it. And next time bring Norma Jeane. I want to see her again.’ ”
“There’s something almost comical about the situation, but it isn’t difficult to imagine how frightening all this must have been for a young child,” remarked Rose Fromm. “It made her realize just how alone she was in the world. Nobody, not even Gladys, ever treated her like a real daughter. Nobody had ever held her. No one kissed her. Nobody.”
In January 1934 Gladys Baker was carted off to a rest home in Santa Monica. From there she went to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital, where Norma Jeane was born, before being transferred to the Norwalk State Asylum, where Della had perished in 1927. At Norwalk, Gladys was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia—the same mental illness that had led to the deaths of her parents and grandfather. Marilyn Monroe feared, not without cause, that the dreaded disease would one day invade her own mind and destroy her life as surely as it had wrecked the lives of so many others in her family.
The baby grand that her mother had bought for her—a token of what Gladys had hoped would be a prolonged period of familial bliss—was sold following Gladys’s institutionalization. Years later, Marilyn tracked down the piano, purchased it, and had it installed first in an apartment she leased in 1953 in Beverly Hills and then in her New York apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street, a sentimental reminder of the woman who had originally given it to her.
Another item in the Arbol Drive house that didn’t go unnoticed by Norma Jeane was a small framed photograph of a man with dark hair, even features, and a mustache, which had been mounted on the wall over Gladys’s dresser. “When I asked her who he was,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “she said, ‘He’s just an old friend.’ I later learned it was a picture of my father, Charles Stanley Gifford. He resembled Clark Gable. One day I came across an eight-by-ten-inch photo of Mr. Gable in a memorabilia shop and bought it. I’d look at it now and then and say, ‘That’s my father—that’s him!’ ”
So that she could complete the year without having to switch schools, it was decided Norma Jeane would continue living with the Atkinsons at the same address. Gladys’s boarders undertook the task of looking after the child, which they did for several months until a death in the family forced the Atkinsons to return to England. Once again Norma Jeane found herself in transition, going from one foster home to another until finally she was taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Giffen, former friends of Gladys Baker. Harvey, a sound engineer with the Radio Corporation of America, gave her tennis and sketching lessons. The living arrangement appeared to suit everyone until Harvey’s employer reassigned him to a new position in Mississippi. Preparing to leave, the Giffens offered to adopt Norma Jeane and take her along. The prospect of staying with a family she had quickly grown to like appealed to the child, but Gladys, presently undergoing electroshock therapy, wouldn’t allow it.
The Arbol Drive bungalow was repossessed and put up for sale, and, in a sense, so too was Norma Jeane. Grace McKee, a film librarian at Columbia Pictures when Gladys Baker worked there, had become friendly with both Gladys and her daughter. Not that Gladys and Grace had always gotten along. Allegedly, Gladys once accused Grace of trying to poison her. In retaliation for this imagined misdeed, Gladys attacked Grace with a butcher knife. The police were called, and Gladys was led away in handcuffs.
Nevertheless, insofar as she had no children of her own, Grace McKee volunteered to become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian. Because she wasn’t married at the time and because the guardianship papers hadn’t yet been processed, she decided to place the child with the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society (now Hollygrove), at 815 North El Centro Avenue in Los Angeles, not far from the same RKO Studios where Gladys Baker had previously worked. Norma Jeane entered the orphanage in September 1935 and remained until the end of June 1937, a total of twenty-one months. She was assigned bed number 27 (of sixty-five beds) and told that her mandatory chores included scrubbing the latrine and waiting on tables in the dining hall. She called the facility “the child factory” and later claimed that being there had been the worst experience she’d ever had to endure.
“They taught her how to swim at a nearby public swimming facility,” said Dr. Rose Fromm, “and that’s the extent of it.” The child’s only respite from the dreariness of the institution came when she attended day school during the week and on occasional Saturdays when Grace McKee would take her out for the afternoon, typically to Hollywood Boulevard for a matinee at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. Afterward, they’d have ice cream cones and watch the caged monkeys in front of the theater.
The girls at the orphanage were required to wear a prisonlike uniform consisting of a formless skirt and faded gray blouse. Whenever one of them celebrated a birthday, the orphanage provided a birthday cake. After the birthday celebrant blew out the candles, the cake would be taken away only to reappear on the occasion of the next girl’s birthday party. In other words, they didn’t get to eat the cake; they only got to look at it. What made this cruel exercise seem even more extreme was the ordinariness of the food they did get to eat: oatmeal for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, and broiled chicken for dinner. The menu rarely varied. To escape the orphanage’s stultifying atmosphere, Norma Jeane would often retreat to a deck on the roof of the building and peruse Hollywood fan magazines that Grace would bring her whenever she visited.
Marilyn recalled for Dr. Fromm the process whereby couples hoping to adopt an orphan would drop by the administration offices to browse through a catalogue containing photographs and descriptions of the girls. When they came across a photo that interested them, the child would be delivered to the office for a personal meeting. If all went well, the prospective adoptee would spend a trial week or two with her new family. As often as not, the child would be rejected by the couple and returned to the orphanage. Because Norma Jeane had already been “spoken for” by Grace McKee, she was ineligible for general adoption and therefore spared the indignity of what she called “the dog pound” experience. “It’s bad enough to live in a dog pound,” she told Rose Fromm, “but it’s ten times worse to be thrown back in.”
• • •
On the tenth of August, 1935, Grace McKee married Ervin “Doc” Goddard, a failed actor then working as a technician in a precision instruments company. Ten years younger than Grace, Goddard had three children from an earlier marriage. He also had a drinking problem, and as Marilyn assessed it, “was drunk more often than he wasn’t.” Doc’s alcoholism notwithstanding, Norma Jeane felt a burden had been lifted when she moved out of the “child factory” and in with the Goddards, who had set up some semblance of a household at 6707 Odessa Avenue in Van Nuys, California. She felt comfortable enough with Grace and looked forward to the prospect of becoming the newest member of a close-knit family.
But if one burden had been lifted, another would soon take its place. “Daddy Doc”—Norma Jeane’s nickname for Grace’s husband—complained that the eleven-year-old daughter of his wife’s “insane friend” represented nothing more than “another unnecessary mouth to feed.” Grace subsequently applied for and received a fairly substantial court-mandated monthly foster family stipend to cover the cost of Norma Jeane’s room and board. Doc Goddard withdrew his objection.
Eleanor “Bebe” Goddard, one of Doc’s three children, described her foster sister as “kind and fun-loving—she had a good sense of humor and liked to laugh.” Eighteen months younger than Norma Jeane, Bebe freely admitted that her father spent his evenings hanging out in the taverns and bistros of Van Nuys, and that Grace too had become a heavy drinker. “Aunt Grace considered herself my substitute mother,” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm, “but I never recognized her as such. When it came to Doc, Grace was overly indulgent. She let him get away with murder.”
It wasn’t murder, but it was serious enough. In late 1937, following a usual nightly stopover at a local watering hole, Doc Goddard stumbled home, barged into Norma Jeane’s bedroom, and proceeded to abuse her sexually. Although he didn’t rape her, he evidently molested her. Norma Jeane said nothing at the time, but Grace Goddard must have sensed something because she arranged for the child to move in with Ida Martin, Norma Jeane’s great aunt. A strict, evangelical Christian, Ida had a house in Compton, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. To help cover expenses, Grace Goddard paid Ida Martin $30.
Doc Goddard wasn’t the only sexual predator Marilyn Monroe encountered while growing up. An elderly male boarder had accosted her during her stay with the Bolenders and had given her a nickel in exchange for her silence. Although she reported the incident to Mrs. Bolender, the woman refused to believe Norma Jeane, insisting the boarder was “a nice gentleman” who “wouldn’t harm a flea”—if Norma Jeane repeated her lie, she would have to be punished. And then there was her teenaged cousin, Jack, the son of Gladys Baker’s brother, who also apparently took liberties with the child. But the Doc Goddard affair was the most upsetting, because Norma Jeane had come to regard him as something of a father figure. Whatever faith and trust she had invested in their relationship had been abruptly and permanently destroyed.
After moving in with Ida Martin, Norma Jeane entered the sixth grade at the Lankersham School in North Los Angeles. A schoolmate, Roxanne Smith, with whom she became friendly, lived within walking distance of the school. Before long, Norma Jeane began spending a day or two each week with the Smiths, sharing Roxanne’s bedroom. Despite the best efforts of the dozens of biographers who have written about Marilyn Monroe over the years, the relationship that developed between Norma Jeane and Roxanne has never come to light. Though she herself never mentioned it in her memoir (or anywhere else), that it made an impression on young Marilyn is evidenced by the detailed description she provided Dr. Rose Fromm, replete with recalled snippets of actual conversation.
Roxanne, like Norma Jeane, was pretty and well developed for her age. Roxanne’s favorite pastime, as Marilyn remembered it, entailed “staring at herself in the mirror.” That she was attracted to Norma Jeane became evident by virtue of the effusive compliments she lavished upon her. Roxanne’s bedroom contained twin beds, but one night that winter she said to Norma Jeane, “It’s cold. Can I just climb into bed with you for a minute?” Without waiting for an answer, she slid into Norma Jeane’s bed. “It’s freezing,” she said, hugging Norma Jeane tenderly. Norma Jeane pulled away.
“I’m just trying to warm myself,” Roxanne remarked.
Not certain what her schoolmate wanted of her, Norma Jeane twisted herself so that her back faced the girl. Roxanne persevered. “Do you want a back rub?” she asked. She began massaging Norma Jeane’s shoulders in soft, soothing movements. She continued in silence, her fingers inching their way down Norma Jeane’s back, and up under her pajama top, then down again until they reached the upper part of her backside.
“Why are you doing this to me, Roxanne?” Norma Jeane asked.
“Relax,” whispered the girl, “just relax.”
Norma Jeane moved away until she reached the edge of the bed and could go no farther. Without breaking her rhythm, Roxanne followed and snuggled even closer.
It became clear to Norma Jeane that Roxanne, a year older and far more experienced, had overcome the objections of other visiting girlfriends. Norma Jeane was no match for her seducer. Yet she was determined to make one final effort. She turned around and faced her bedmate. “I want you to go back to your side of the room,” she insisted in as officious a tone as she could muster.
“I guess my voice had no conviction,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “because she not only didn’t budge, she proceeded to unbutton my pajama top and her own as well. She then rolled me onto my back and out of my bottoms. She began to kiss me and didn’t stop until I began to cry.” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm she couldn’t recall exactly how she felt about the experience, only that she never returned to Roxanne Smith’s home and in addition cut off all further contact with her in school.
“If anything,” said Marilyn, “I probably felt betrayed.”
In the fall of 1938, Norma Jeane went to live with (Edith) Ana Lower, Grace McKee Goddard’s fifty-eight-year-old aunt, at her two-family Nebraska Avenue home in Sawtelle, at the time a lower-middle-class section of Los Angeles. A divorcee, “Aunt Ana,” more than anybody else, became Norma Jeane’s true surrogate mother. “She was the first person in the world I ever really loved, and who in turn loved me,” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm. “She was a wonderful human being. She never hurt me, not once. She was very spiritual, always consulting Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, the Christian Science handbook, constantly reading me excerpts from it and, like the Bolenders, forever dragging me to church. But it didn’t bother me. Aunt Ana was all light and kindness. I used to tell her all my little dreams and fantasies about wanting to become an actress. ‘You’re going to be a star, Norma Jeane,’ she’d say. She wasn’t rich. She rented out the bottom floor of her house to make money. And though she didn’t have much, she paid for my voice, dance, and piano lessons. Nobody else ever cared what became of me. She did. The sad thing is she died in March 1948, before I began to make a name for myself, so she never knew whether she was right or wrong about my future. But had she lived, she would’ve been thrilled for me.”
Living with Ana had only one drawback: she refused to install a telephone in her home. She maintained that people would call at all hours, and she didn’t want to be disturbed. This made it difficult for Norma Jeane to have friends over for playdates. Yet Ana’s essential goodness and her openness afforded Norma Jeane a sense of security she hadn’t felt before. It was Ana who revealed the identity of the man in the photograph Norma Jeane had seen in her mother’s bedroom, telling her all she knew about C. Stanley Gifford. It was also Aunt Ana who informed her that Gladys Baker, her mother, had recently attempted to escape from the mental hospital at Norwalk and as a result had been transferred to the more secure Agnew State Asylum in San Francisco.
On June 1, 1939, Norma Jeane’s thirteenth birthday, she accompanied Ana Lower and Grace Goddard to San Francisco for a visit with her mother. Recalling the encounter for Dr. Fromm, Marilyn said, “She looked as though she’d been lobotomized. She wasn’t there. I mean she was there physically but not mentally. She didn’t speak, just sat on the bed, looking frightened and lost.”
On the train ride back to Los Angeles, Norma Jeane learned from Ana that she had an older half sister named Berniece, who had similarly just learned of Norma Jeane’s existence and had reached out to her by way of a written note. Although Berniece and Norma Jeane didn’t meet until 1944 (after Berniece had married and become a mother), by the fall of 1939, they were in touch with each other via telephone and letter. Norma Jeane informed her half sister that she’d enrolled at Emerson Junior High School, where her favorite subjects became English literature and Spanish. Her least favorite: cooking. She enjoyed athletics, especially track and field. She’d joined the staff of the school newspaper and had developed an interest in acting. She looked forward to performing in school plays and thought that one day she might want to be in the movies. All in all, she sounded like a typical, happy-go-lucky teenager without a care in the world rather than a fatherless child whose schizophrenic mother was locked away in an insane asylum and whose foster father had sexually molested her.
Indeed, Norma Jeane was quickly blossoming into an early iteration of the famed actress and personality she would eventually become. Leaner and sporting darker curls than the later Monroe, she exuded a youthful beauty that, if not yet wondrous, was certainly noticeable. Boys her age (and older) had begun to pursue her. “She could be a bit shy and withdrawn at times, but for the most part, she absolutely glowed,” said a friend named Susan Ryder. “She was not only pretty but very bright. You could see it in her eyes. She also had great skin; the clearest, pinkest skin I’ve ever seen. It was silky and flawless. Then in the ninth grade, she began spilling out of her clothes. Not fat, just curves. She wore makeup and sweaters that were a size too small, accentuating her bustline. She couldn’t walk down the street without having some jerk in a passing car come to a screeching halt and start yelling and whistling at her out the window.”
Barbara Anthony, another playmate from this period, considered Norma Jeane “quite alluring and sensitive but thin-skinned and somewhat secretive. She didn’t talk much about her personal life. She did well in school. She was witty, but, as I say, she could be very thin-skinned. If you said something that rubbed her the wrong way, she’d let you know it.”
In 1940 Ana Lower suffered a mild heart attack, and Norma Jeane went back to the Odessa Avenue home of the Goddards. Given Doc Goddard’s sexual proclivities, the arrangement was far from ideal, but under the circumstances, it remained the most practical alternative. By that fall, Norma Jeane had entered the tenth grade at Van Nuys High School and had met James Edward Dougherty, the son of Edward and Ethel Dougherty, neighbors of the Goddards. At age twenty, Jim Dougherty, truly “the boy next door,” cut a manly figure. He had blue eyes, light brown hair, and a muscular physique. A graduate of Van Nuys High, he had been student body president as well as a football star and member of the Maskers Drama Club. In addition, he owned his own car, a blue Ford coupe. Although he’d been offered a partial college scholarship, he had opted for a job at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, in Burbank, augmenting his income by working at a funeral home embalming corpses. When Lockheed offered to increase his salary, he quit the funeral home job.
At the time that Norma Jeane met him, Dougherty was dating three other girls, among them Doris Ingram, who’d been crowned Miss Santa Barbara. He nevertheless began driving his neighbors Bebe Goddard and Norma Jeane Baker to school every morning and hanging out with them on weekends. Each girl had a crush on Jimmy. In December 1941 Grace Goddard asked Dougherty to take Norma Jeane to a Christmas dance at Lockheed. There she was introduced to the future actor Robert Mitchum, then one of Jim’s coworkers. By the end of January 1942, Jim and Norma Jeane were going steady. A month later, Grace informed Norma Jeane that she and Doc, along with his children, would be moving to Huntington, West Virginia, where Doc had procured a lucrative position with an electronics firm. She also told her it would be best if Norma Jeane remained in California, especially now that she and Jim Dougherty were involved.
Looking back, Marilyn would tell Rose Fromm that once again she felt as though she’d been deserted. “It came as a blow,” she said. “Not that I necessarily wanted to go with them—rather, that I wasn’t given a choice. When I thought about it, I remembered that though Daddy Doc never touched me again, he used to give me suggestive looks. Grace probably surmised it was only a matter of time before he tried something. Maybe she was jealous, or perhaps she just didn’t want to chance it.”
Having returned to Ana Lower’s Nebraska Avenue home, Norma Jeane withdrew from Van Nuys High School and enrolled at University High. She continued to see Jim Dougherty. What she didn’t know was that Grace Goddard, no doubt feeling guilty over having left Norma Jeane behind (and so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage), had conspired with Jim’s mother to have him propose to her. After they became engaged, Norma Jeane dropped out of University High, and in early June, she and Jim signed a one-year lease on a small cottage in Sherman Oaks. Ana Lower made Norma Jeane’s white embroidered wedding gown. The service in the Los Angeles home of friends of Grace Goddard took place on the evening of June 19, 1942, and was led by Reverend Benjamin Lingenfelder of the Christian Science Church. Aunt Ana walked the sixteen-year-old bride to the makeshift altar, where Jim Dougherty, in a rented white tuxedo, took over. Ana Lower paid for a wedding reception for thirty-five guests at an Italian-themed nightclub and restaurant called Florentine Gardens. The Bolenders attended, but Doc and Grace Goddard were conspicuously absent.
In March 1953, long after they were divorced, Jim Dougherty wrote an article for Photoplay magazine entitled “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” which began: “Our marriage was good . . . It’s seldom a man gets a bride like Marilyn . . . I wonder if she’s forgotten how much in love we really were.”
She evidently had forgotten, because she’d previously told Dr. Fromm that her marriage to Dougherty had been “a sham, a coupling of convenience.” On the surface, at the point she married him, she seemed at least moderately content. They didn’t go on a honeymoon, but the young couple went on weekend fishing expeditions to Sherwood Lake in Ventura County, California. They took ski lessons together and attended college football games. They saw movies at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where Norma Jeane had gone as a child. They prepared picnic luncheons and frolicked on the beach at Malibu. And when they weren’t making love at home, they would have sex in the backseat of his car on the side streets and back roads up and down the San Fernando Valley.
Their sexual relationship proved to be less than satisfying for Norma Jeane. “For all the girls he’d supposedly had,” she informed Fromm, “he [Dougherty] didn’t seem to know very much. He didn’t believe in foreplay. It was slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. I knew even less than he did, so I thought it was mostly my fault. He’d fall asleep afterward, leaving me awake, frustrated, and angry. I began to suspect he might still be seeing Doris Ingram, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to complain. I wrote to Aunt Grace in West Virginia, by then a seasoned alcoholic, extolling the virtues of marriage. I sweetened my letters out of loyalty to Grace and in an effort to please her, which is more than she’d done for me.”
The Norma Jeane that Dougherty wed was still an unformed person. She had a beautiful face and figure. She was a mature sixteen-year-old in certain respects but a little girl in others. She’d had no childhood as such. In a way, there were two Norma Jeanes: One was the little girl whose dolls and stuffed animals were propped up on top of her chest of drawers “so they can see what’s going on.” The other Norma Jeane was a person of unpredictable moods. In her published memoir, Marilyn portrayed herself at this stage as being “divided” into two people: “One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody, the other was someone whose name I didn’t know.” In his Photoplay piece, Jim Dougherty depicted his former wife as possessing two distinct and very different personalities, which made her “a bit scary at times.” He blamed her lack of cohesion on her “impossible” childhood. “Now and again,” he wrote, “you’d catch glimpses of someone who had been unloved for too long, unwanted for too many years.”
Whatever chance the marriage might have had of surviving ended when Jim, about to be drafted into the army, joined the Maritime Services and went away to a merchant marine training base, finally winding up on Catalina Island, just off the Southern California coast. Norma Jeane, feeling a sense of abandonment, moved in with her mother-in-law and occasionally visited Catalina to be with her husband, but the visits terminated after she began working at the Radioplane Company in Burbank as a parachute inspector and paint sprayer. It was here, at the height of World War II, that she was “discovered” by US Army photographer David Conover, who’d been assigned by his commanding officer (Ronald Reagan, the future US president) to shoot pictures of women working to aid the war effort. Eventually penning a book titled Finding Marilyn: A Remembrance, Conover detailed first seeing her at Radioplane and asking if he could photograph her in a tight sweater rather than her work overalls. She obliged, and the die, as the saying goes, was cast. The photo appeared on the cover of Yank. Other pictures of Norma Jeane ran in Stars and Stripes, the US troop newspaper, which named her “Miss Cheesecake.” She was voted “the present all GIs would like to find in their Christmas stocking.” Conover’s book goes on to document his short-lived but memorable affair with the photogenic model. Norma Jeane, having moved out of her mother-in-law’s house and back in with Ana Lower, is depicted by Conover as having “a great body and enormous passion.”
In May 1976 Jim Dougherty was quoted in People magazine as claiming, “If I hadn’t gone into the merchant marine during World War II and been shipped off to the Pacific, Norma Jeane would still be Mrs. Dougherty today.” Had she survived long enough to read Dougherty’s comment, Marilyn Monroe would probably have deemed it an overblown case of wishful thinking. By the time he returned from the Pacific, his wife had undergone a dramatic change.
She had left her job at Radioplane and gone full-time into modeling, having been signed by Emmeline Snively of the Blue Book Modeling Agency. As a popular pinup and cover model (her image appeared in more than a hundred magazines), she started to meet other photographers, agents, would-be agents, film producers, publicists, advertising executives—in short, an entire crew of Hollywood types, all of them quite different from the people she’d known as Mrs. Jim Dougherty. She had colored her hair a golden blond. The limited contours of domesticity had given way to an exhilarating and expansive new world.
As for Norma Jeane’s mother, she had been released from the San Francisco mental hospital and, as of May 1945, was living in a small room on the top floor of a rundown hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. In December André de Dienes, a fashion photographer with whom Norma Jeane had started a romance, drove her to Portland for a reunion with Gladys, the first time she’d seen her mother since 1939.
“We had little to say to each other,” Marilyn would inform Dr. Fromm, recounting the Portland visit. “She looked much older than I remembered her. She emanated no warmth. I tried to maintain a cheerful façade. I unpacked a few presents I’d brought for her—a silk scarf, a bottle of perfume, and a box of chocolates—and placed them on top of a coffee table. She wouldn’t go near them, just stared at them. Then, without a word, she lowered her head and buried her face in her hands and seemed to forget all about me. I saw myself to the door and left.”
• • •
With her modeling career in full bloom, Norma Jeane was earning enough to rent the bottom floor of Ana Lower’s house on Nebraska Avenue. In early 1946 she received a letter from her mother asking if she could come to Los Angeles and stay with her. Against her better judgment—and in spite of the disappointment of her Portland visit—Norma Jeane agreed. Their second attempt at living together as mother and daughter turned out no better than the first. Within months, Gladys Baker reentered the psychiatric ward at Norwalk State Asylum, the same institution from which she had once tried to escape. From there she would in time be sent to the Rockhaven Sanitarium, a virtual country club for the incurably insane, in Verdugo, California, where she remained until 1967, five years after Marilyn’s death. Throughout Gladys Baker’s lengthy internment at Rockhaven, it was Marilyn who footed the bills.
In 1946 Norma Jeane became involved with Tommy Zahn, a lifeguard and aspiring actor who later described her to a reporter as “tremendously fit, very robust . . . so healthy.” Photographs of her taken at this time support Zahn’s portrayal. That same summer she hired an attorney, established residency in Las Vegas, and instituted divorce proceedings against Jim Dougherty. The divorce decree was granted on July 5, 1946, in Clark County, Nevada.
Her newfound freedom marked the beginning of an extremely active sexual phase during which Marilyn took numerous lovers ranging in age and experience from a young college student named Bill Pursel to over-the-hill Borscht Belt comedian George Jessel. “Talk about being promiscuous,” she told Dr. Rose Fromm, “I can’t remember the names of three-quarters of the men I slept with at that time.” A name she did recall belonged to Charlie Chaplin Jr., son of the legendary comic, with whom she had an affair in 1947. According to Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the affair ended when Charlie Jr. caught Marilyn in bed with his brother Sydney. The latter romance ended when she underwent one of several early abortions.
In subsequent years, Jim Dougherty, having remarried and become a patrolman with the Los Angeles Police Department, would tell a journalist: “I never knew Marilyn Monroe. I knew Norma Jeane Baker, but Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker were two different people.”
By 1952, the year she met Joe DiMaggio, Norma Jeane Baker had grown into the iconic role of Marilyn Monroe both in name and in terms of her career, which, while not yet at its height, was well on its way. Having overcome the “Golden Dreams” nude calendar scandal, she now defended herself against a charge by the press that she’d fabricated her family history, having presented herself to Twentieth Century–Fox and to the public at large as an orphan, when, if truth be told, her mother was still very much alive.
As she’d done in the nude calendar controversy, Marilyn took matters into her own hands, releasing a statement admitting that Gladys Baker was incapacitated, a patient in a mental institution, and that she’d fibbed only to protect her mother from the glare of public scrutiny. She said that although she’d lived with her mother for a brief period as a child, she barely knew her. Nor had she ever met her father. Her childhood, she added, had largely been spent in an orphanage and in the homes of a number of foster families. If the press felt she had misled anyone, she wished to apologize and hoped to be forgiven. She was forgiven.
As Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “Let’s give Marilyn Monroe the benefit of the doubt.”