PART ONE


The Early Years
1926-1945

There are no sweet memories of childhood, no misty tableaux of family, love, and hearth. Instead, there are desertion, madness, attempted murder, child rape. And in the middle, a strange, quiet, unwanted child whose first and most powerful lesson was that the less she said, the less trouble she’d get into.

Norma Jeane Baker was born on June 1, 1926. Her mother, a star-struck Hollywood film cutter, named her after a glamorous movie actress, Norma Talmadge. The last name was a convenience; Gladys Pearl Monroe had been deserted by her husband, John Newton Baker, three years before Norma Jeane’s birth, and her second husband, Edward Mortenson, left her when she told him about the pregnancy. Edward Mortenson may have been Norma Jeane’s father, but more likely it was Charles Stanley Gifford, a co-worker of Gladys’ at the RKO studios, a man she never married.

Gladys Baker’s parents and brother had all been mentally ill, and her bad luck with men and the strain of caring for Norma Jeane sent her over the brink. She suffered fits of hysteria and was committed to a mental institution in 1934. Eight-year-old Norma Jeane was treated as though she had no living parents.

From this point on, the child was shunted from one place to another. There were stays in an orphanage, with a guardian, and with eleven sets of foster parents, people who took her in only because the government, at the height of the Depression, paid them to do so. One family made her bathe in water six others had used first; another made her wash hundreds of dishes for five cents a month. “They had kids of their own,” she recalled, “and when Christmas came there was a big tree and all the kids in the house got presents but me. One of the other kids gave me an orange. I can remember that Christmas Day, eating that orange all by myself.”