2

The Overdose of 1,1,1-Trichloralethane

The stress of juggling a demanding career and being provider and nurturer became almost unbearable for the industrious Gladys. Her own mother was dead and there was virtually no one to help her raise Norma Jeane.

Mrs. Mortensen was accepted in the studio as a woman with an “illegitimate” daughter. Her coworkers liked her and respected her work, but outside the comfort and understanding of Hollywood’s liberal mores, it was a different story. Gladys was a social outcast—someone looked upon as a pitiful back-street girl, undeserving of respect.

The working environment for a film editor in the thirties was similar to a toxic waste dump. Open bottles of acetone used to treat the film were everywhere, sending poisonous vapors into the stale, unventilated air. Skin contact with the liquid acetone was even more dangerous. The small picture frames had to be glued with film cement that also produced toxic fumes. In addition, for as long as six months Gladys had to toil through double shifts in order to make frequent studio deadlines and monthly mortgage payments. The combination of long hours of hard labor and continued exposure to hazardous activants took its toll. Excruciating headaches became constant. But because she was so dedicated to both her profession and providing for her daughter, Gladys struggled on year after year, all the while suffering severe inner conflicts. Was the career she loved interfering too much with the care of her child? Could she be a good mother and still become a real success in her field?

Unfortunately, the career Gladys took so seriously was causing her physical, as well as psychological, damage. With the film industry still in its youth, little was known about the possible effects of the potent chemicals used in production. Science now shows unequivocally that the chemicals used at the time caused permanent brain damage. But working conditions then were grossly inadequate. The unions were virtually powerless, and the Depression and economic hardship endured by Americans made workers grateful to hold any job. The stock market had plunged to its lowest; debts and bread lines, starvation, deprivation, and poverty were everywhere. A producer or film company would never show concern for the possibility that the chemicals used in moviemaking could be dangerous to their employees’ health.

The workroom at Columbia Studios where Gladys cut film was isolated and cell-like. An area five feet by seven feet was hardly enough space for an editor to inhabit for eight to sixteen hours while attempting to concentrate on film splicing. The lighting was dim and the concrete walls were bare except for strips of film hanging to dry from clips attached to holders high above. Discarded strips of film lay in circles around the cutters’ feet. The glare of the lights was reflected on the celluloid as it passed through the viewer. Glue lay beside the cutter with acetone or cleaner close at hand. Although white cotton gloves were worn by the editors, it was not for their protection, but rather to protect the film itself from fingerprints. Accidental spills of acetone were unavoidably frequent, dangerously intensifying exposure, especially after long hours of work. During the winter months the fumes increased in density. The windowless cutting rooms completely lacked ventilation. The film editors’ comfort and safety were never considered.

In the midst of the Los Angeles rainy season, drafts and cold damp winds sent chills down Gladys’s spine. After several days of steady downpour and working overtime to warm the cutting room, the heater was barely pumping stale recycled air. Dense fumes collected over Gladys’s throbbing head, stealing precious oxygen. Between the sordid work conditions, the financial strain of making monthly mortgage payments to avoid losing her home, and the relentless demands of providing for her daughter’s needs, Gladys’s life was beginning to fall apart. She was obsessed with furnishing her daughter with the same stylish clothes that the Bolenders had provided; except Gladys couldn’t make her daughter’s clothes but had to buy them in department stores. Gladys also saw to it that Norma Jeane had spending money for movies and food. Money was always a worry. The headaches were getting worse, and depression was setting in. She was afraid she was losing her mind, as she believed had happened to her own mother, Della.

To understand Della Monroe’s demise, one need only examine the trials of her personal life. Her first husband, Gladys’s father, had died a slow, agonizing death that haunted her for years afterward. Eventually she had overcome her grief and fallen in love with a second husband, and he had run off with another woman. After that humiliation, she went on to marry a third man, who also left her for another woman. Della was an unhappy woman, her spirit broken and life shattered when she encountered the charismatic evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Della blamed herself; she wanted to be cleansed of her sins and Aimee claimed to be the savior and rescuer of lost souls. As virtually the only woman evangelist of her day and the self-appointed leader of the Pentecostal Church, she appealed to fundamentalist Christians appalled at the so-called loosening of morals in the country. Those who felt guilty of past sins and were committed to the self-righteous path that McPherson touted were mesmerized into joining her growing flock. Della was no exception. In her vulnerable, guilt-ridden state, she made McPherson’s Angelus Temple in Los Angeles her refuge.

Della’s idolatry of McPherson proved short-lived. In 1926 McPherson disappeared mysteriously. Rumors had it she was dead. Later police discovered she had engineered her own escape in order to run away with one of her married male parishioners. Exposed as a charlatan and adulterer, she eventually reemerged as a radio evangelist. However, McPherson never regained her former popularity. (On September 27, 1944, McPherson would “meet her maker” through an “accidental” overdose of barbiturates.)

Della’s faith in life was crumbling. Too many devastating disappointments and betrayals undoubtedly caused her downfall. On August 4, 1927, she was admitted to Norwalk State Mental Hospital. Nineteen days later she was dead. The hospital records allege that she passed away from coronary heart failure brought on by a “manic seizure.” Considering that before the last nineteen days of her life there had never been any indication of mental instability and no history of heart disease in this fifty-one-year-old woman, it seems highly unlikely that she would so suddenly develop manic-depression and suffer a heart attack.

Treatment of the mentally ill during the twenties was barbaric, with such practices as bloodletting (letting the insanity flow out through the blood) and “scare” therapy where patients were believed to have sense shocked into them. Physical and emotional abuse in state mental hospitals was commonplace in 1927. Moreover, Norwalk Hospital in particular had been cited for its misdiagnosis and abuse of patients. What really happened to Della during the last nineteen days of her life will remain a mystery.

As Gladys left for work on a brisk cool morning in January 1935 for another double-shift day at Columbia Studios, she was thinking of her mother’s tragic life and death. The piercing pain of another headache was already throbbing and suddenly Gladys looked at her own pitiful life. A woman with an illegitimate child, she blamed herself for everything—her failed marriages, separating from her first two children, the death of her son, the failure to keep her lover around long enough to help care for their daughter. Being unable to spend enough time with Norma Jeane nagged at her, too. Before Gladys could redirect her thoughts and report to the office, she found herself growing dizzy as her headache intensified. She became delirious and fell to the sidewalk. The poisons of guilt and the chemicals she had been exposed to for nearly a decade were finally catching up to her. The woman who knew personal tragedies and how difficult keeping the faith was, had collapsed under the stress and strain and now began to cry uncontrollably. The English couple who lived in her house swiftly called an ambulance. Because Gladys showed no physical trauma and was reported by the couple to have been depressed for some time, and was still crying and disoriented, the ambulance took her to Norwalk Hospital, the same place her mother had spent her last nineteen days on earth.

After school Norma Jeane was met by the English couple, who explained what had happened to her mother that day. Once again separation and instability rocked Norma’s world, just as she was getting used to living with her real mother for the first time—what would happen to her? Would they send her back to the Bolenders? Or would she stay with the English family in her mother’s house? She became fearful when she wondered what might happen to her mother. Would she die because of her illness? Was it her hard work and sacrifice for Norma Jeane’s care that made her ill? Was she the cause of all her mother’s problems? Norma Jeane would never resolve her guilt for “causing” her mother’s misfortune. A singular theme of personal tragedy, self-guilt, and blame characterized three generations of mothers and daughters. As her dreams of togetherness instantly evaporated, Norma Jeane remembered her imaginary father warning her to be a good girl and not to cry and upset her mother any more. She paid attention and didn’t cry.

The Norwalk staff listened to Gladys’s ravings of discontent and diagnosed her as a woman with severe depression. The State Lunacy Commission that ran Norwalk Hospital began in 1916 with a 105-bed facility. As is true today, once a patient is diagnosed with mental illness, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of the stigma. Few are rediagnosed. The State Lunacy Board’s policy was simple: once branded a lunatic, always a lunatic.

Unfortunately, in the 1930s, chloral hydrate and barbiturates were popular in the treatment of both mania and depression. Various physical treatments for the mentally ill were hysterectomy, castration, and removal of various “thought to be infected” organs. Hydrotherapy required patients to stand in a cold shower for long periods of time. The various shock therapies prospered as well, such as spinning patients around on a horizontal wheel.

Gladys was told by psychiatrists that her mental illness was inherited from her mother and that her breakdown was assumed to be like her mother’s. The misconceptions of insanity and depression in particular were applied in Gladys’s treatment with the use of chloral hydrate, a sedative, and phenobarbitol, a barbiturate. Gladys’s system was already full of toxins from chronic inhalation and exposure to a number of hazardous substances. Carbon tetrachloride and 1,1,1-trichloralethane, chemicals Gladys worked with daily, are now known to be poisonous. Concentrations of 1,000-1,700 parts per million, which Gladys was breathing each day, cause headaches, disequilibrium, depression, and even coma. A low-oxygen condition called cerebral hypoxia can result from long periods of exposure. To compound the depression caused by chemical exposure, Gladys was prescribed more depressants, which had the synergistic effect of causing irreversible pathological damage, thus ensuring that Gladys would be permanently institutionalized. Like her mother before her, she was a victim of the mental-health system. Norma Jeane would soon suffer the consequences.