by Lois Banner
Chapter 2
Trauma, 1933–1938
As an adult, Marilyn Monroe seemed obsessed with her childhood. She often told friends and reporters stories about it. In those stories the Bolenders were religious fanatics who beat her and most of her other foster families treated her as unwanted—although she never mentioned any by name, except for Grace and Ana, whom she always praised. She said the matrons in the orphanage (the Children’s Aid Society orphanage in Hollywood) required her to wash stacks of dishes, clean bathrooms, and scrub floors. Newspapers and magazines worldwide ran those stories. They became so well known that in 1955 Silver Screen reported, “Hillbillies who can’t tell you who’s president right now could probably recite the details of Marilyn’s life.”1
The tales contributed to making her an icon in her own day. She was the Little Orphan Annie who became a star, the Cinderella who, rising from poverty to fame, achieved a female version of the American Dream. No other film star endured a childhood so traumatic—not Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, or Lana Turner, all of whom had difficult childhoods. “The life story of almost any Hollywood star reads like a combination of Cinderella and Horatio Alger,” wrote a journalist. “But Marilyn has topped them all. Let one critic raise his voice in protest over her habitual tardiness or so-called rudeness and a protesting public looks beyond the present to Marilyn’s pathetic drudgery in the dreary place where she washed ‘a horrifying pile of soiled dishes for 5 cents a month.’ ”2
Were her stories accurate? Or were they part of an outsized legend she invented? My research suggests she sometimes exaggerated her childhood experiences but her tales were often true. The story of her childhood after Gladys broke down isn’t simple. In telling it, I will approach it chronologically, giving the surface story. I will then rework it, excavating the layers that lie underneath, probing the texts and counter-texts that, as so often in her life, defined it. I will evaluate the truth of Marilyn’s account. As I progress, keep in mind that once Gladys was committed to state mental hospitals Norma Jeane was especially vulnerable to disapproval. She was illegitimate in an age when it was stigmatized. She was a “charity case” at a time when many Americans regarded taking welfare as a disgrace. Relatives of hers had been diagnosed as mentally ill in an era that regarded such illness as inherited and almost inevitably degenerative.
One night after Gladys broke down in 1934, Norma Jeane, then eight years of age, stayed at Grace’s apartment. Lying in bed, she overheard Grace talking to her friends about her in the next room. They were advising Grace not to become Norma Jeane’s guardian because of her family “heritage.” They said her grandfather, grandmother, brother, and mother were “mental cases,” and she would become one, too. “I lay in bed shivering as I listened,” Marilyn remembered. “I didn’t know what a mental case was but I knew it wasn’t anything good.”3 Soon after that she learned about the diagnosis of Gladys’s brain as disintegrating. It was a horrible fate for an impressionable girl like Norma Jeane to contemplate. She would be afraid of going crazy for the rest of her life.
After Gladys collapsed, Grace left Norma Jeane living in the Arbol Drive house with the Atkinsons. It seemed the right thing to do, since Gladys might soon recover and return home. Norma Jeane’s school was nearby, and so were her friends. The Atkinsons were fond of Norma Jeane, and they seemed to take good care of her. Grace worked full-time and acted in plays; she never lost the love of acting that had brought her to Hollywood in the first place. Some of her time was freed up when her nieces moved away in 1934, but not enough for her to raise a child.4 The Atkinsons were Grace’s friends. She could visit Norma Jeane and see them, too. She lived on Lodi Drive in the center of Hollywood, ten minutes by car from Arbol Drive. As Gladys or she had for years, she took Norma Jeane to a movie and then to a restaurant on the weekends. She continued to tell her she would be another Jean Harlow.
Grace’s apartment was across the street from the Hollywood Studio Club, an inexpensive, chaperoned residence for aspiring actresses. In the 1920s influential Hollywood actresses and wives, fearing that Hollywood apartments were recruiting grounds for prostitutes, raised the money to build it. When Norma Jeane visited Grace, her mother’s friend told her about the stars who had lived in the Studio Club. Designed by architect Julia Morgan in the Mediterranean style of Los Angeles architecture, it had cachet. During her early years as a Hollywood actress, Marilyn sometimes lived at the Club.
Yet Grace did nothing to help Norma Jeane become an actress. Acting and singing lessons aren’t listed in Grace’s record of expenditures for her ward. Stage mothers were everywhere in Hollywood, pushing their children into films, as did the mothers of Shirley Temple, Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers, and Judy Garland. After years in the movie business Grace had connections, but she didn’t use them on Norma Jeane’s behalf, although she launched the acting career of Ervin (Doc) Goddard, whom she married in 1935. Grace’s fantasies about Norma Jeane becoming a film star were just that: fantasies.
Still, once Gladys broke down, Grace took over responsibility for both Gladys and Norma Jeane. She didn’t have to do this, but she didn’t want both of them committed to state institutions. No Monroe family members lived nearby, except for Olive Monroe, Marion Monroe’s wife, who was struggling to support three children after he disappeared in 1929 and left her penniless. She wasn’t a good candidate to be a foster mother. Given the difficulty with Ida Bolender, Grace didn’t want to return Norma Jeane to her, although Ida later claimed that she visited Norma Jeane and took her to see Gladys at Metropolitan. According to Lester Bolender, the Bolender house was so full of foster children by then that there wouldn’t have been room for Norma Jeane.5
In late 1934 Grace filed the papers for Gladys to be committed to Metropolitan. Its medical superintendent stated that Gladys wasn’t in good enough shape mentally or physically to appear in court then and for “an indefinite time to come.”6 In March 1935 Grace petitioned the court to appoint her Gladys’s legal guardian so that she could sell Gladys’s house and possessions and pay her expenses. The petition was granted, and she held the sale that spring. Ana Lower, Grace’s aunt, purchased the piano that Gladys had bought for Norma Jeane and kept it in her apartment, indicating that she knew the child and was fond of her. The piano, which remained there, became a symbol of past, present, and future for Norma Jeane. As a young adult and a Hollywood starlet living on her own Marilyn painted it white to resemble the white pianos often present in the art moderne sets of 1930s movies. Those pianos were a symbol of elegant sophistication.
Norma Jeane stayed with the Atkinsons until June 1935, when Grace sold the Arbol Drive house. They then moved to a house on Glencoe Way, in the Hollywood Hills close to Arbol Drive—not to England, as some biographers suggest. The 1935 Los Angeles census lists them at that address, but it doesn’t list Norma Jeane. George played in the Hollywood movies Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1936 and Raffles in 1939; and he and his wife attended Marilyn’s wedding in June 1942. Maude Atkinson’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times on March 9, 1944, notes that she had lived in Southern California for the previous twenty-five years.7
Once the Atkinsons left, Grace had to find a place for Norma Jeane. She still didn’t bring her ward to live with her; instead, she placed her with Harvey and Elsie Giffen, a well-to-do couple who lived near Arbol Drive and whose daughter was Norma Jeane’s best friend at school. Harvey Giffen was a sound engineer at RCA, and Elsie stayed at home to keep the house and raise their children. Now nine years of age, Norma Jeane was quiet and disciplined. Sensitive to others, always willing to help out, she seemed an ideal child. Whatever happened in the Bolender home, Ida had raised her well. She moved in with the Giffens, a loving family. When they offered to adopt her, Grace agreed to ask Gladys to allow them to do so.
Norma Jeane liked the Giffens. They had an aviary of tropical birds, including parakeets and other talking parrots. She was fascinated by the birds; she loved to feed them and talk with them. The Giffens were moving to New Orle
ans and wanted to take her along, but Gladys wouldn’t hear of it. Grace next approached Reginald Carroll and his wife to adopt Norma Jeane; he had been Gladys’s coworker and friend at Consolidated Film Industries, and he and his family lived in Los Angeles, so Norma Jeane would remain in the city. Gladys again refused to allow the adoption.8
When the Giffens left Los Angeles in July, Grace finally brought Norma Jeane to live with her. She told her she wouldn’t have to go to an orphanage, and the child was vastly relieved. She didn’t want to go to a place where she didn’t know any of the children. Some biographers contend that state law required Grace to put Norma Jeane in an orphanage while her situation was evaluated, but Grace, clever and manipulative, often got around such obstacles. Doc Goddard may now have entered the picture. He and Grace were discussing marriage, and he had children living in Texas with his ex-wife. There was a possibility they might come to live with him, and he didn’t want to take on Norma Jeane as well.
Tall and handsome, a courtly “cowboy” from Texas, Doc had come to Hollywood hoping for a career as a film actor. He landed bit parts in the movies and became the standin for Joel McCrea, who played tough-guy roles in cowboy films and crime dramas. Doc was ten years younger than Grace and more than a foot taller, but they joked about their differences in age and height. He worked as a part-time inventor, making electrical gadgets in his garage workshop, but he didn’t make much money, either from acting or from his inventions, and his children in Texas were still young. In 1935 Eleanor (Bebe) was nine, Fritz seven, and Josephine (Nona) five.
Grace didn’t mind Doc’s shaky finances. Now in her mid-thirties, she was too old for the Hollywood party scene, and she welcomed marriage to the dashing, handsome Doc. Grace considered her new family her primary responsibility, with Norma Jeane second. It’s unclear what financial responsibility Doc had to his ex-wife and children, but he probably sent them something. Grace married Doc in Las Vegas in early August 1935. Ana Lower was at the ceremony, but Norma Jeane wasn’t there. A month later, in September 1935, Grace placed her in an orphanage. The way was clear for Doc’s children to move in with them, although they didn’t do so until 1940. Rather, they remained in Texas.
There is a backstory to the events I have related. It involves Marilyn’s claim that she was sexually abused when she was eight years old. She made the claim in interviews with screenwriter Ben Hecht in 1953 and 1954 for an autobiography of her he was to ghostwrite.9 She also told her tale of childhood sexual abuse to Maurice Zolotow for his 1960 biography of her. Then in 1962, several months before her death, she amplified the story in interviews with photographer George Barris. Barris’s interviews were supposed to be published in Cosmopolitan, but when Marilyn died the magazine canceled the story. Barris then sold it to newspapers worldwide, and it was widely published. Barris’s interviews were thus available to Marilyn’s biographers soon after she died, although biographers have mostly overlooked them. When I spoke with Barris in 2010 he told me that, with the exception of Gloria Steinem, who wrote a brief biography of Marilyn to accompany his photos of her, previous Marilyn biographers hadn’t contacted him. Thus Marilyn’s most detailed account of the episode of sexual abuse has been largely disregarded.10
She was eight years old when it happened, she said. She was living with a family that rented a room to a man named Mr. Kimmel. He was elderly, stern and formal, and everybody respected him. One evening he asked her to come into his room, and when she did, he locked the door behind her. He put his arms around her. She kicked and struggled to no avail. He did what he wanted, telling her to be a good girl. (In the Barris interview she stated that the abuse involved fondling.) When he let her out of the room, he handed her a nickel and told her to buy herself an ice cream. She threw the nickel in his face. Then she ran to tell her “aunt” what had happened, but her aunt wouldn’t listen. (Marilyn called all her foster mothers “aunt.”) “Shame on you,” her aunt said, “Mr. Kimmel’s my star boarder.” Norma Jeane went back to her room. Throwing herself on her bed, she cried all night.11
In her interview with Georges Belmont of Paris Match, Marilyn explained that the real name of her attacker wasn’t Kimmel, and that she always changed the names of the individuals in her childhood stories to conceal their identities. If she was eight when the attack occurred, she was living with the Atkinsons, since she lived with them in the Arbol Drive house for nearly two years, from October 1933 to the spring of 1935, when Grace sold the house. She may have lived with them earlier, from the time Gladys brought her to Hollywood in June 1933. Marilyn made that claim in her interview with Belmont.12
Most male biographers of Marilyn dismiss the sex-abuse story as a fabrication because Jim Dougherty, her first husband, stated that she was a virgin when he married her. Thus, they conclude, she couldn’t have been sexually abused as a child. They don’t seem to know that experts on child sex abuse agree that the act usually involves fondling, not intercourse. The perpetrators, not wanting to leave evidence, don’t bruise the victim or penetrate the hymen. Even today, the conviction of an adult for abusing a child is based mainly on the testimony of the child, since physical evidence usually doesn’t exist and perpetrators rarely admit guilt. Without total vaginal penetration, Norma Jeane would have been a virgin when she married Jim.13
In the 1962 Barris interview, Marilyn described the fondling. “He put his hand under my dress. He touched me in places no one had ever before.” And she stated that the “foster mother” who refused to believe her about the abuse slapped her across her face. Marilyn told her cousin Ida Mae Monroe that she felt dirty after the attack and took baths for days after it happened to feel clean. Such repeated attempts to feel clean through showers or baths are typical behavior for a rape victim.14
The name Mr. Kimmel, which she used for her attacker in My Story, has led some Marilyn biographers to identify English actor Murray Kinnell as the abuser. There is, however, no proof for this charge—except that George Atkinson and Kinnell knew each other. Both worked with the renowned British actor George Arliss, who had control over his films and cast many of the same actors in supporting roles in them. Kinnell was often one of these actors, while Atkinson was Arliss’s regular standin. Kinnell was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild, and he lived on Beverly Glen Boulevard in Westwood, not far from the Fox Studios, where Arliss made his films. Westwood and Culver City are both distant from the Hollywood Bowl and the Arbol Drive house.15
It’s possible that the abuser was a boarder in Gladys’s house, which had four bedrooms. Norma Jeane occupied one, her mother another, and the English family the third. Thus an extra room remained to rent out.16 If Kinnell is eliminated, the abuser might have been George Atkinson or Doc Goddard, the two older men close to Norma Jeane during this period of her life. Circumstantial evidence could suggest either of them. In his autobiography, George Arliss described his standin (namely, Atkinson) in negative terms.
The standin for the elderly star is a pathetic figure. More often than not he is an old actor who has played everything, but has “never had his chance.” And now he is nothing—a shadow. And yet he feels within himself a certain sense of importance. He is dressed like the star; he believes that he looks like the star; almost unconsciously he takes on the walk, the mannerisms of the star; he poses like him before the cameraman, and he sees himself as a star.17
In Arliss’s description Atkinson is a poseur, a shadow man lacking a sense of self, but with an inflated ego that compels him to assume Arliss’s identity, cloaking himself in the star’s fame. In My Story Marilyn described the English couple as jolly and carefree, former vaudevillians who taught her to dance the hula, play cards, and juggle oranges. As Arliss’s standin, however, Atkinson must have resembled him. Both men were in their sixties. Bette Davis, who played in Arliss films, described Arliss as looking like a combination English gentlemen and uninhibited satyr. “His small dark eyes held an ancient sadness, his taut triangular mouth seemed always to be repressing an irrepressible mirth.”18
He often played English statesmen, representing the Depression taste for calm heroism and puckish independence in the face of disaster.
In her interview with Maurice Zolotow, Marilyn called the abuser “Mr. K.” She described him as a stern old man who wore dark suits and a gold watch in his vest pocket, with a gold chain across his vest. That’s what George Arliss wore. She states that “Mr. K.” was always called “Mr.,” an honorific always bestowed upon the dignified George Arliss. Playing the role of a British gentleman in real life as in his films, Arliss always wore a monocle. We can assume that Atkinson, who copied Arliss’s dress and behavior, also dressed this way.19
Marilyn told Jean Negulesco, a Hollywood director and friend, that an elderly actor had raped her when she was eight. She told Photoplay editor Adele Whiteley Fletcher that she had difficulty calling studio executives on their bad treatment of her because they reminded her of her abuser. Grace Goddard stated that she took Norma Jeane away from the Atkinsons because she found that they were not treating her well. In 1959 at a party in New York, Marilyn spent the evening discussing the attack with the husband of Peggy Fleury, a fellow student at the Actors Studio. Marilyn said she felt lucky that the experience hadn’t made her psychotic, as it did many victims of such attacks.20
Could Doc Goddard have been the abuser? When Norma Jeane lived with Doc and Grace in 1937, he tried to fondle her. He admitted he had done so to Marilyn biographer Fred Guiles. Jim Dougherty, who respected Doc, knew about it. It may have been the one-time advance of someone who was drunk and out of control; it may have had precedents.21
Interviews and newspaper articles I’ve found provide new information about Doc. A Los Angeles Times article of August 19, 1935, announced that Doc and Grace had eloped to Las Vegas the previous week. It stated that he had come to Los Angeles in 1933, not 1935, the year cited by previous Marilyn biographers. If the Times is correct, he was in Hollywood when the first sexual assault on Norma Jeane occurred and Gladys broke down. That same year Grace introduced him to Al Rangell, who directed westerns, and Rangell cast him in a bit part.22 Doc continued to land small roles, eventually becoming the standin for Joel McCrea.
