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"HOW I WISHED I HAD A DAD”
MY MOTHER, GLADYS, WAS BORN IN MEXICO (of American parents) in 1900. The family later moved back to the Los Angeles area, where they had originally lived. Gladys had two children by her then husband, Jack Baker. Those children were kidnapped by her husband and taken to live with him in Kentucky. Gladys then married Edward Mortenson. [As I said], I was the love child of an affair she had with a divorced salesman (they both worked at the same film lab) named C. Stanley Gifford. I was that love child named Norma Jeane. My father would have nothing to do with me or my mother, and so I was baptized when I was six months old as Norma Jeane Baker by Sister Aimee Semple McPherson at the Four Square Gospel Church in Hawthorne, California.
As long as I can remember, I've always loved people. When I was a small child, my fondest memories were being around my mother and her friends. It made me feel like we were one big happy family.
Whenever Mom or her friends bought me an ice cream cone, we'd go for a walk or to the movies. I was in heaven when we went to church; I looked forward to this, even if it wasn't every week. The singing and services always excited me. I was sort of in a trance. There I was, dressed in my best clothes. Then, about noon, it was back home, where we always had a chicken lunch with our family—Mom and her friends. Then off we would go for a stroll, looking in the fancy store windows at things we couldn't afford to buy: We were dreamers.
What made me sad was seeing other kids with their moms and dads strolling around holding hands. Oh, how I wished I had a dad, too. I know Mom loved me and tried to make my days happy ones, but most days she seemed sad and lonely. I'm sure it was because there was no man in her life. No man to love her and me. No husband, no daddy. When I thought about this, it made me sad, too. I had no daddy to hug, to talk to or play with, just to love.
Mom really tried her best. She worked at the Consolidated Film Industries lab as a cutter of the negative film. It was long hours, low pay, at a boring and tedious eye-
GEORGE BARRIS: I remember Marilyn talking about the sadness her mother knew during all those years, how even her mother's lover, the man who fathered Marilyn, rejected Gladys and their love child, how painful for Marilyn it had been when she found him and tried to become his friend. Imagine her pain when he told her never to bother him.
Later on, her biggest enemy was Mari- lyn Monroe. Her true self was little Norma Jeane. Often she couldn't believe that little girl had become a world-famous star. Her new life was like a dream to her, and her greatest fear was that one day she would wake up and discover it was all make- believe, a rags-to-riches-back-to-rags life.
straining job. And making ends meet was just too much for her. Since she was at her job most of the time, she had to pay others to look after me. Sometimes I would get to see her only early in the morning or at night. It was enough for any mom to have a nervous breakdown. All I can remember was her being in and out of hospitals.
But I never blamed her for my having to live in other homes. If only there was a daddy there to love and care for me.
My mother was working long hours at the film lab just to make ends meet. She became very tired and nervous; life had become difficult for her. She had to be sent to the hospital for a rest when I was only five years old. That's what caused her to have a nervous breakdown. That's what caused me to spend my childhood in and out of foster homes.
Let me lean closer to you and slowly and softly tell you what happened to a sad, lonely little girl. I was living in the home of my mother's best friend. Then she remarries. All of a sudden her house became too small, and someone had to go. Guess who that someone had to be?
One day she packed my clothes in my suitcase, and off we went in her car. She drove and drove for a long time without saying where she was taking me. She never said a word when I asked her. She just kept driving, looking straight ahead.
I realized why she had kept secret for so long that her mother was alive but in a mental hospital and why she told no one about the nude calendar picture for which she posed when she was young and broke. Neither was a matter of shame for her, but she was afraid that revealing the truth might damage or even end her fabulous career. However, her religious upbringing with Aunt Ana, a churchgoing Christian Scien- tist, had taught her that truth would over- come anything. That is why Marilyn Monroe eventually told all. The truth saved her pride, and her career. Her fans loved her more than ever for her honesty.
We finally arrived at a three-story red-brick building. She made me carry my small suitcase as we walked up the stairs to the main entrance of the building. I noticed a sign in huge letters. Emptiness came over me; my heart began beating fast, then faster. I broke out in a cold sweat. I began to panic. I cried. I couldn't catch my breath. The sign said Los ANGELES ORPHANS HOME. Please don't let me stay here. I'm not an orphan—my mother's not dead. I'm not an orphan. It's just that she's sick in the hospital and can't take care of me. Please don't make me stay here. I cried and protested as hard as I could; I can still remember, she had to drag me inside. I was only nine years old then, but something like this I'll never forget. My heart was broken.
This woman who put me in this orphanage was my mother's best girlfriend. They worked together at the same film lab. She had promised my mother to always take care of me. Her name was Grace Goddard. She was my aunt Grace. I learned sometime later that the day Aunt Grace took me to the orphanage she cried all morning. She did make a promise to me that as soon as she was able to she would take me out of that place. Aunt Grace came to visit me often, but when a little girl feels lonely and that nobody cares or wants her, it's just something that she can never forget as long as she lives. The promises she made to me to someday take me out of that place seemed then like only promises. I really didn't believe her.
As nice as they tried to be to me at the orphanage, it never made up for the hurt that had been done by Aunt Grace. I wanted more than anything in the world to be loved. Love to me then and now means being wanted. The world around me just crumbled. It seemed nobody wanted me, not even my mother's best friend. I was nine when I entered the orphanage and eleven when Aunt Grace finally took me out.
You know, it certainly is strange the way things work out. If Aunt Grace had not remarried, what road in life would I have taken instead? There might not have been the life in an orphanage where I was mostly miserable, living like an inmate in an institution where everyone told you, do this, do that, or you will lose your privileges of being paid to wash and dry dishes after meals, or playing with the others, or, most of all, seeing a movie.
So, instead of hating Aunt Grace for the rest of my life, I began to realize that what she did to me then hurt her so much, she felt guilty every time she would see me. Of course, I forgave her.
[When she took me out of the orphanage,] Aunt Grace did not bring me back to live with her. She took me to Van Nuys, a very poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I was to live there with her aunt [Edith Ana Atchison Lower], a sixty- two-year-old spinster. Her home was a rundown bungalow, and the people in the neighborhood were mostly poor and on relief.
But VII never forget my living there with Miss Ana Lower. She became my aunt Ana. This woman became the greatest influence in my life.
The love I have today for the simple and beautiful things in life are because of her teachings, bless her. She was one of the few persons that I really loved with such a deep love that I could only have for someone so good, so kind, and so full of love for me.
One of the many reasons I loved her so much was her philosophy, her understanding of what really mattered in life. You know, like the time when I was going to Emerson Junior High and one of the girls in my class made fun of a dress I was wearing. I don't know why kids do things like that. It really hurts so. Well, I ran home crying as though my heart would break.
My loving aunt Ana was so comforting. She just held me in her arms and rocked me to and fro like a baby and said, “It doesn't make any difference if other children make fun of you, dear—it's what you really are that counts. Just keep being yourself, honey. That's all that really matters.” She was quite a person. She didn't believe in sickness, disease, or death. She didn't believe in a person being a failure, either. She did believe the mind could achieve anything it wished to achieve.
