Marilyn Monroe

by Michelle Morgan

  Whilst living at 1211 Hyperion Avenue, Gladys shocked everyone when, on 11 October 1924, she suddenly married Martin Edward Mortensen, a twenty-seven-year-old divorcee who worked as a meter man for the Los Angeles Gas and Electric Company. He was in love with his new wife, but it was not reciprocated; she complained to friends that he was ‘dull’ and it wasn’t long before she had fallen for Charles Stanley Gifford, a twenty-five-year-old divorcee and one of the bosses at Consolidated.

  ‘Gifford was a real likeable guy,’ remembered one friend; while another described him as ‘well-dressed, and always drove a pretty nice car’. He had a dark side, however, as witnessed by his first wife, Lilian, and detailed in divorce papers submitted by her shortly after they separated in 1923: Gifford ‘continuously pursued a course of abuse, threats and intimidation calculated to harass, annoy, hurt and worry the plaintiff’. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Lilian said she also experienced physical injury and accusations that she was being unfaithful to him, when actually she believed that he was undertaking affairs with women where he worked, as well as taking illegal drugs. Things had come to a head during June 1923, when Gifford verbally abused her before striking her so hard on the cheek that she was ‘knocked against the bed post’, sustaining severe bruising. The divorce papers also claim that a blood clot was formed under her cheek and urgent medical attention was required to remove it.

  Whether or not everything cited by Lilian was true will never be known, but certainly the marriage had been turbulent and by the time the divorce was finalized and Gladys Baker arrived in his life, Gifford was enjoying his new-found freedom and had no plans to settle down. Unfortunately for Gladys, she believed she could persuade him to change his mind, and on 26 May 1925, walked out on Martin Edward Mortensen.

  During the autumn of 1925, Gladys became pregnant. It has been said that there were various men who could have been the father, including a twenty-eight-year-old colleague called Raymond Guthrie. Friends at the studio claimed that Gladys had dated blue-eyed, brown-haired Guthrie for several months that year and that he could very well be the father. Raised by his aunt and uncle since a baby, Guthrie had also recently divorced and was certainly in a position to date Gladys, though all records indicate that she never considered him to be her baby’s father.

  The official ruling is that the father was unknown, though evidence suggests it was Gifford, and this was most certainly the belief of Gladys. For instance, family letters and memories show that both Gladys and Norma Jeane named him as the father on several occasions, and in August 1961, an article appeared in Cavalier magazine which said: ‘[Marilyn’s] father is very much alive and residing in Southern California. He was once connected with the movie business, although he no longer is today.’ This would certainly be a nod in Gifford’s direction, since by that time he was living south of Los Angeles, where he was running a dairy farm.

  Gladys broke the news of the pregnancy to Gifford during a New Year’s party at the family home, presumably that of his father, carpenter Frederick Gifford, who lived at 12024 Venice Boulevard. Later, as the pregnancy became obvious, it created quite a stir in the Gifford family; particularly with his sister Ethel, who lectured him intensely, demanding to know what he intended to do about the situation. The argument culminated with Ethel telling her brother, ‘Look, either marry the woman or do something.’ According to relatives, Gladys was not seen at their home any more.

  Shunned by the Gifford family, Gladys then tried to gain sympathy from her mother, who by this time was living on her own at 418 East Rhode Island Avenue, while Charles Grainger was now working overseas. Della acknowledged disgust that her daughter was once again pregnant with an illegitimate child, and then sailed off to South-East Asia on 20 March 1926 in order to visit her husband.

  When Gladys gave birth on 1 June 1926, she had hoped Gifford would accompany her to the hospital. She was greatly disappointed, however, as he purposely stayed away, refusing to have anything to do with her or the child. Gladys perhaps would not have been shocked by this had she known that in 1922, when his wife Lilian gave birth to their son Charles Stanley Jr, Gifford took her to the Lomashire Hospital, excused himself immediately and walked out of the building.

  Knowing that Gifford was to play no part in the child’s upbringing, Gladys reluctantly decided to get on with her life. She named the child after the little girl she had looked after whilst in Kentucky and, for the sake of respectability, also gave the surname of her former husband, hence naming her Norma Jeane Mortenson (she added an ‘e’ to Norma Jean and changed Mortensen to Mortenson on the birth certificate). Shortly afterwards she changed her mind and declared that both she and her daughter would be known by the surname of her first husband, Baker.

  Shortly after the little girl’s birth, perhaps feeling mild curiosity or a pang of guilt for the way he had treated her in the past, Gifford asked Gladys if he could see the child. His plea fell on deaf ears, however, and she refused point-blank to let him have anything to do with her. ‘He felt the mother had been unfair,’ remembered Gifford’s minister, Dr Liden. ‘She had cut him off and didn’t allow him to see the child.’

  On leaving hospital, Gladys took Norma Jeane to her apartment at 5454 Wilshire Boulevard, but it was only a matter of days before she made a trip to East Rhode Island Avenue to deposit her child at number 459, the home of the Bolender family.

  Ida and Wayne Bolender lived across the road from Gladys’ mother Della, on a two-acre plot of land in Hawthorne; an agricultural area dominated by lots of space, dairies and farms. A postman for many years, Wayne and his wife had applied to become foster-parents just before the Depression and for the next thirty-five years continued happily opening their home to any child who needed their help.

  Contrary to popular belief, Gladys did not immediately abandon her child with the Bolenders; instead, she moved in with the family and left Norma Jeane in their care while she commuted to and from her job in Hollywood. ‘Mrs Baker was with me,’ Ida later told Cavalier. ‘She stayed in Hollywood when working nights as a negative cutter and stayed with me while working days.’ However, the long journey and the responsibility of single-motherhood soon became too much for Gladys, and she ultimately took the decision to return to her old life.

  Leaving her baby behind, Gladys moved in with her friend and colleague, Grace McKee, and the two shared a space at the Rayfield Apartments at 237 Bimini Place. Going from the quiet seclusion of the Bolender home to this colourful apartment block must have been something of a thrill for Gladys. But in spite of now living the life of a single girl once again, she didn’t give up on her daughter and always paid $25 a month to the Bolenders for her care. She also often stayed at the weekend, involving herself with family life, and later showed up on the 1930s census as a ‘boarder’ in the Bolender home. Norma Jeane ‘was never neglected and always nicely dressed,’ said Mrs Bolender. ‘Her mother paid her board all the time.’

  On 15 August 1926, Della sailed from Hong Kong and arrived in San Francisco on 8 September. On her return to East Rhode Island Avenue, she was introduced to her granddaughter for the first time, though she never developed much of a bond with the child, seeing her as more of a sin than a joy. Sick with malaria and often delusional, she made her feelings quite clear just months later when she was caught trying to smother the child with a pillow. She was immediately banned from the Bolender home, but Della still tried to gain access to Norma Jeane, as Ida Bolender later recalled: ‘She did come over one day for no reason I know of. She just broke in the glass of our front door and I believe we called the police.’

  For Della, this sequence of events was the beginning of the end and she soon found herself admitted to the Norwalk Mental Hospital, suffering from manic depressive psychosis. She was never to leave the hospital, and when she passed away, Della Monroe Grainger contributed to the legacy of mental illness that had begun with the death of her husband.

  After the turmoil of recent days, the Bolender family tried their bes
t to continue life in a normal way for their foster-children, Norma Jeane and a baby boy called Lester. Born on 23 August 1926 whilst his parents, Pearl and Carl Flugel, were living in a tent, Lester had come to the Bolender home after the Flugels decided they were too young to care for him. Married for just over a week before the birth of their son, the couple handed the baby to Ida Bolender and returned to their home state of Washington, where they later had four more sons, Milton, Gerald, Robert and William. The couple kept their first son a secret from their family, and it wasn’t until Pearl’s death in 1988 that they discovered a 1927 letter from Mrs Bolender, describing Lester’s life in California. The now elderly Lester travelled to meet his long-lost family but unfortunately, even at this late stage, one of the brothers refused to believe they were related and apparently never accepted Lester as his brother.

  But back in 1926, when both Lester and Norma Jeane were just babies, they were nicknamed ‘the twins’ and raised as brother and sister. ‘They have great times together,’ wrote Mrs Bolender. ‘Lots of people think them twins. I dress them alike at times and they do look cunning . . .’

  Eventually the Bolender family made a decision to officially adopt Lester, and asked Gladys if they could adopt Norma Jeane too. Gladys, having already lost two children, was appalled at the Bolenders’ plans and turned them down flat. However, they were not the only ones interested in the child as, according to several reports, Charles Stanley Gifford also had plans to raise her. By this time he was living on his own at 832 N. Alta Vista Boulevard, and had learned that Norma Jeane had been placed in a foster home. He contacted Gladys to tell her he intended to raise the little girl himself, but was sent away with nothing more than a scolding from his ex-lover, who had developed a deep loathing for him since her troubled pregnancy.

  How Gifford thought he could possibly raise the child on his own is a mystery. He was not listed as her father on the birth certificate, and divorce records from his first wife Lilian show that he had been verbally abusive and distant from his other children, calling them derogatory names on many occasions.

  But even if his temper was not an issue, there was no way Gladys was going to let the man she claimed to detest raise her child. Instead, she continued to visit her daughter at the weekends, though as Norma Jeane grew, the stopovers became more and more confusing for the child. One day when she referred to Ida Bolender as ‘Mama’, she was immediately put in her place. ‘The woman with the red hair is your mother,’ explained Ida, though this did not end the confusion. ‘But [Wayne] is my daddy,’ exclaimed Norma Jeane. ‘No,’ replied Ida. After that, the child became afraid to call anyone mummy or daddy, as not even Gladys referred to her as a daughter.

  As for her father, Gladys told Norma Jeane that he had been killed in a car crash either before she was born or when she was a young baby – the story differing according to Gladys’ mood at the time. Her story was cruel but contained a kernel of truth, as in 1929 she was told that the man she had named as Norma Jeane’s father – Martin Edward Mortensen – had been killed in a car crash. Unknown to Gladys, it later transpired that it was a completely different person who had died, and her ex-husband was actually alive and well and living in California. For his part, Mortensen added to the confusion by years later claiming to friends that he was Norma Jeane’s real father, but this is extremely unlikely – and certainly not the belief of Marilyn or her mother.

  At irregular intervals, the young child would travel to her mother’s home in Hollywood, and stare quietly at a photo of Charles Stanley Gifford, which hung on the wall despite Gladys’ claims of hatred towards him. Gifford bore a striking resemblance to Clark Gable and, from that moment on, Norma Jeane always thought of the actor as something of a surrogate father. Unfortunately, looking at the photo was the only thing Norma Jeane enjoyed about her visits to her mother, who was so uptight that she would often chastise her for turning the pages of a book ‘too loudly’. As a result the child spent most of her time hiding in the closet, waiting to be taken back to the Bolenders’ house.

  Gifford, meanwhile, was living just miles away at 3014 Chesapeake Avenue, in a house that he jointly owned with none other than Raymond Guthrie, the laboratory technician whom Gladys had dated in 1925. How the two men ended up buying a home together is a mystery, and we can only imagine the interesting conversations that could have occurred within those four walls. The two shared the house for several years before Guthrie moved on, but Gifford was to stay there throughout Norma Jeane’s childhood and well into her first marriage. It is not known if he ever tried once more to gain access to his daughter, but if he did, Gladys kept very quiet about it and never discussed it with Norma Jeane.

  There has been a great deal of talk as to the kind of upbringing provided by the Bolender family, with various stories concocted by the film studio and Marilyn herself to present her tale as something of a Cinderella story. These stories may have provided a good deal of public sympathy for the star, but according to her foster-sister, Nancy Bolender, they gave her parents nothing but heartache: ‘Mother and Daddy always felt bad about the things written about Marilyn Monroe’s young life that said she was brought up in poor homes and not loved or taken care of.’

  In later years, Ida Bolender became very upset about the way Norma Jeane’s life was misrepresented, and told reporters, ‘We treated her like our own child because we loved her.’

  Unfortunately, this affection didn’t protect them from the constant rumours that have circulated ever since and while Norma Jeane’s early years were not exactly the best, life with the Bolender family was not one of hardship and destitution. ‘Life was safe, secure and comfortable,’ remembered Nancy, ‘with plenty of playmates. [The Bolenders] truly loved us and protected us and nurtured us with all of their hearts.’

  The family did have strict values and religious beliefs, and certainly no idle time was allowed. ‘Idle hands are from the devil,’ was something Lester Bolender frequently told his foster-siblings. However, while Ida was very schedule-oriented and was never known to laugh, she did have her reasons. A childhood bout of scarlet fever had left her with hearing loss in one ear, and later she had to use hearing aids and learn to lip-read in order to communicate with friends and family.

  Life had been hard for Ida and looking after a team of children in the 1920s was no picnic, but her mother lived next door and she often helped out. The children always had clothes made for them by Ida herself, and most of the food was grown on their land: there was an abundant supply of apples, tomatoes, corn, watermelon, and string beans, and the only items they had to buy from the store were flour, butter, sugar and coffee. On such occasions the family would pile into Wayne Bolender’s Model T and travel into town, where Ida would do her shopping and the children stayed in the car with Wayne, playing guessing games, singing songs and telling stories.

  On some occasions Norma Jeane even took great joy in sitting on her foster-father’s lap, while pretending to drive the car. Wayne loved little Norma Jeane as one of his own, considering her his baby, and the child spent a lot of time with him, sitting on a stool while he shaved and asking questions such as, ‘Who is God?’, ‘Where does he live?’ and ‘How many people live in the world?’

  For Norma Jeane, there were many happy times with the Bolender family, and she would often find herself spending days at nearby Redondo beach, or climbing the apple tree outside her bedroom window, with Lester in tow. The two would drag blankets up to the branches in order to make a fort, while in the yard, the chickens, rabbits and goat would go about their business, oblivious to the antics above.

  Norma Jeane was also the proud owner of a small dog called Tippy, which she spent many hours playing with, and there were afternoons spent playing hopscotch on the sidewalk with Nancy. While going to the cinema was frowned upon (although Marilyn later claimed that she snuck into a movie theatre once or twice), Norma Jeane was still allowed to listen to the radio – her favourite shows being The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger. ‘I us
ed to get terribly excited,’ she said about listening to The Lone Ranger. ‘Not at the horses and the chases and the guns, but the drama. The wondering how it would be for each person in that situation.’

  On a creative level, there was always music in the house, as Ida loved listening to symphonies on the radio and the family would often sing when they got home from church. Norma Jeane even learnt to play the piano that sat proudly in the Bolender home, and she carried this passion throughout her life, always having a piano in her own home as an adult.

  The religious beliefs of the Bolender family were also passed on to the child and, according to Nancy Bolender, she was taught about God and told that he was utterly trustworthy and bigger than any situation she could face in her lifetime. It is this aspect of her life with the Bolender family that has been blown out of all proportion over the years, with stories emerging of the family being so consumed with religion that they had no time for the children, and continually criticized Norma Jeane for doing what they considered to be sinful acts. However, this is certainly not how Nancy remembers her parents: ‘I never heard them criticize or talk badly about anyone. They accepted people for who they were and loved them unconditionally.’

  On 14 September 1931 it was time for both Norma Jeane and Lester to start school. Foster-sister Nancy remembered watching ‘the twins’ skip to the Washington Street School, followed by Tippy, Norma Jeane’s beloved dog. The children continued their schooling there until the Los Angeles earthquake struck on 10 March 1933, when they were relocated to the 5th Street School (now the Ramona School). Years later, music teacher Evelyn Gawthrop remembered Norma Jeane as a timid child who nevertheless got on well with the other children.

  However, being timid did not prevent Norma Jeane from realizing that making up stories was a good way of gaining sympathy and attention for herself. She began telling tales about the Bolenders to her school teacher and on one occasion even went so far as to fabricate a story that she had seen little Nancy being pushed against an oven by her foster-parents. In later years – in the privacy of her notebooks – she admitted this was done only as a way of gaining attention from the trusting teacher, and that the incidents she described had never happened at all.