Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  In fact, Doc Goddard was not just a courtly Texas cowboy. He was also a “man’s man” who loved going to bars to drink liquor and swap stories with male buddies. He was such an enthusiastic bar man that he was often hours late for dinner. Aside from minor movie work and an occasional sale of one of his gadgets, he was unemployed until Adel Precision Parts, which made equipment for airplanes, hired him in 1938. Given the growth in the 1930s of the aircraft industry, located largely in Southern California, and the preparations by 1938 for a possible war with Germany, there was a shortage of skilled workers in the industry. Doc didn’t work for Adel before 1938, as some biographers have claimed, because Adel wasn’t founded until that year.23

  Doc was a “hale-fellow-well-met” kind of man, but his life in Texas before he moved to Hollywood had been filled with tragedy. He was the offspring of a prominent Austin family. His father had been dean of the medical school of the University of Texas in Austin, but he had committed suicide. Doc’s mother had broken down emotionally and had been committed to a mental institution. Doc had been a medical student, but he dropped out when he married his first wife in 1925. He was called “Doc” because he had attended medical school. After the birth of Bebe, Fritz, and Nona, Doc and his wife divorced in 1931.24

  The children lived in Texas, in the custody of their mother. According to Bebe, their mother was so mentally unstable that she placed them in foster homes, where they were mistreated. Nona made similar allegations. Bebe even contended that Marilyn derived her stories of bad treatment as a child from Bebe’s experiences in Texas.25 That may be partly true, but Marilyn had her own issues in foster homes. Deeply attached to Doc and Grace, Bebe didn’t want them accused of wrongdoing. She had her own reasons for challenging the truth of Marilyn’s stories about her childhood.

  Under the terms of his divorce Doc had visitation rights with the children. Yet he didn’t try to gain custody of them or to prevent his disturbed ex-wife from putting them in abusive foster homes. In fact, the divorce decree issued to Doc and his wife notes that Doc didn’t show up for the final hearing. But he could be charming. By late adolescence, Norma Jeane forgave him for whatever had happened between them, and she became close to him. In a 1942 letter to Grace she called him Daddy.26 In the early 1950s, when Grace managed Marilyn’s business matters, Doc helped her.

  The episode of sexual abuse raises another possibility. My evidence suggests that it occurred toward the end of 1933 and that it may have caused Gladys’s breakdown in January 1934. Some writers claim that Gladys was upset by the suicide of her grandfather Tilford Hogan the previous spring at the age of eighty-two, by the death of her son Jackie that fall, and by a strike in the film editing studio where she was working. But she had survived the death of her mother in 1928 and the disappearance of her brother, Marion, the next year. She had weathered strikes and crises in the film editing studios over the years. Buying the house in 1933 suggests that she felt better about herself. Renting most of it to the Atkinsons gave her a way to pay for it. In another indication of confidence, she bought a new car. Gladys seemed ready to handle potential problems—until the attack on her daughter occurred.

  Marilyn states in the Barris interview that when she told her foster mother about the attack, she slapped her across the face for having accused her “star boarder” of a crime. In other words, her foster mother thought Norma Jeane made up the charge of abuse. That belief rested on the assumption in this era that only lower-class men molested girls and that the girls involved provoked the abuse by arousing sexual desire in the men.27 A distinguished-looking man, whom everyone called “Mr.,” couldn’t have committed such an act. Norma Jeane had to be lying. Or she had invited the attack.

  In line with her practice in interviews of using pseudonyms for the actual individuals in her life situations, Marilyn referred to a foster mother, not her actual mother. George Atkinson was Gladys’s “star boarder,” since the rent the Atkinsons paid her covered most of the monthly mortgage payment on the Arbol Drive house. Once she broke down, Gladys didn’t live there again. In later years she was angry with her daughter for being a sexual icon. As she aged, Gladys turned against the free sexuality of her twenties. She wanted her daughter to be on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, not raunchy men’s magazines. It appears that she tended to connect her daughter to inappropriate sex.

  Marilyn told George Barris that she began to stutter after she was sexually abused. She also informed him that stuttering is sex-linked, appearing more frequently in men than in women. She was correct. And when women stutter, a severe trauma has often caused it. Although Marilyn controlled her stuttering, she never overcame it. She especially reverted to it in moments of stress. When she told Adele Whiteley Fletcher of Photoplay about the sexual abuse inflicted on her, she began stuttering. It could be a problem for her when speaking her lines in films. Speech therapists today suggest that Marilyn’s soft voice and her facial mannerisms may have been strategies to disguise the stuttering.

  She told Maurice Zolotow that as a child she mostly stopped talking to adults because of her fear that she would stutter. The talkative, inquisitive Norma Jeane of Wayne Bolender’s experience became a “mouse” in front of adults. She didn’t talk in school because she feared that if a teacher called on her she would stutter in replying. “Naturally shy to begin with, my stuttering made me withdraw into myself altogether. I would start to say something and my lips would get fixed into an ‘O’ shape. A lost feeling would come over me, and I would stand there frozen for a long period of time.” It took many years for Marilyn to control the stuttering and to open herself up to others.28

  The sexual abuse inflicted on Norma Jeane shouldn’t seem surprising. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, the rate of sexual abuse of girls has remained constant at twenty percent. In other words, one in five girls is molested today, as in the past. The perpetrators are usually the male heads of the households in which the girls live, and they come from all social classes and ethnic groups. Like rape in general, sexual abuse of girls is not a crime perpetrated only by strangers or by violent lower-class men.

  The impact of sexual abuse on girls can be profound. The victim can experience the assault as a penetration of the self that causes shame, self-hatred, and guilt. In other words, abused girls may blame themselves for the crime committed against them. They may regard themselves and other women with contempt, and they may develop an aversion to sex. Or they may degrade themselves through prostitution or “sex addiction,” the drive for continual sex and the inability to resist seduction. They may develop an irresistible urge to expose their naked bodies and even their genitalia. They may become obsessed with being perfect or develop a sadomasochism in which they identify with powerful individuals and then try to destroy them. A low self-image can exist alongside megalomania. Such symptoms can appear immediately after the attack, later in life, or episodically.29 Many seem present in the adult Marilyn.

  Abused girls may develop what psychologists call “dissociation,” in which the self fragments and generates multiple identities. Thus Norma Jeane Baker produced Marilyn Monroe, her major alter ego, who was sexual and self-confident. Such dissociation can occur in the process of personality fragmentation, as the shy persona located in childhood remains present into adulthood, while a self-confident adult emerges, possessing knowledge initially triggered by the loss of innocence resulting from sexual assault. On the other hand, the personality fragmentation can be multiple, producing fully developed personas, which psychologists call alters. Or it can be partial. In that situation the boundaries between parts of the self aren’t rigid, and the personas produced are intermixed. By this definition, any personality can become a series of shifting entities.30 We all dissociate to a certain degree, while actors, creating characters out of their internal selves to play on stage, become expert in accessing their interior dimensions and bringing what is inside to the surface.

  Taking the point farther, some psychiatrists argue that mental d
isorders can exist between standard diagnostic categories, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder. Or “spectrum” conditions exist that draw from several categories. Some psychiatrists posit that each individual’s mental makeup is different and no one can be slotted into one category.31

  The original classifications devised by Emil Kraepelin in the 1890s still dominate definitions of emotional disorder today, although even Arthur Noyes, in his 1934 work, maintained that individual situations could combine categories or be located between them. Jim Dougherty’s portrayal of the fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane as more physically and emotionally mature than other girls her age, while still acting like a child—playing with dolls and young children—sounds like a description of dissociation. Marilyn herself described personality as shifting and her own as multifaceted. “I can be anything they want me to be,” she told Susan Strasberg. “If they expect me to be innocent, I’m innocent. There are lots of cards in my deck, so to speak.”32

  But Marilyn wasn’t always able to control her personas. Her first acting coach, Natasha Lytess, with whom she lived on and off, described her insecurities as making her seem as though she was “under water,” a “moon walker,” oblivious to her surroundings, not part of the real world. “She was accustomed to hiding everything,” Natasha stated. “She had learned this behavior from her childhood.” Many of her directors spoke of her as moving into her own world to create a role; friends described the “strange nobody’s-home look she could get into her eyes.”33

  Some experts on abuse find that a frightening episode can be embedded in the brain, producing long-term trauma, akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. A sudden attack can trigger the human “self-preservation” response. High levels of adrenaline and other stress hormones circulate through the blood, imprinting the experience in the brain. It may be replayed over and over, as the individual tries to blunt the horror through familiarity. This process may partly explain Marilyn’s adult fixation with her childhood, her replaying of episodes from that childhood so often.

  Recent research on trauma and memory suggests that she wouldn’t retain a precise memory of a trauma that happened before the age of six because the memory region of the brain isn’t mature at that age. By the age of eight, however, that region is more developed, able to record more accurate memories. Thus she didn’t have a precise memory of the episode of sexual repression connected to Ida Bolender, but she remembered the sexual abuse visited on her by “Mr. Kimmel” when she was eight. In a diary fragment she wrote in 1955 she stated that she had accessed a memory of Aunt Ida punishing her for touching her genitals.34

  According to experts on sexual abuse, abused girls may have nightmares about witches and demons. For much of her life Marilyn saw such figures in her dreams and daydreams. In 1952, on a visit to New York, Sam Shaw took her to an exhibition of Goya’s drawings of figures in the Napoleonic Wars in Spain at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shaw remembered, “When she saw Goya’s black horrors of war and violence, witches on a broomstick flying through the night, she grabbed my arm and said, ‘I know the man [Goya] very well; I had those dreams since I was a kid.” She told Ralph Roberts, her personal masseur from 1958 until her death, that the demonic figures in her nightmares looked like the illustrations in Rossell Hope Robbins’s 1959 Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, which contains seventeenth-century drawings of witches and demons.35

  Marilyn told New York Post entertainment columnist and friend Earl Wilson that she thought her chronic insomnia was caused by her dread of her nightmares. Wilson remembered her describing them as “horrendous dreams … of guilt. Frightening ghosts accusing her of the wrongs she’d done.” Susan Strasberg wrote that the figures in Marilyn’s dreams resembled figures from the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch—demons, orgies, the underworld. In a diary fragment written in 1956, when she was in London with Arthur Miller making The Prince and the Showgirl, she writes about lying in bed, unable to sleep. “On the screen of pitch blackness reappears the shape of monsters, my most steadfast companions.”36

  Some psychologists conclude that the “demons” in these dreams represent the attacker. They may also represent death, which can be threatening or alluring, promising a return to the preconscious state in the mother’s womb. Marilyn told Ralph Greenson, her last psychiatrist, that the calm haze produced by the drugs she took—barbiturates like Seconal and Nembutal—made her feel “womby and tomby,” a reference to a mother’s womb and to a tomb holding a dead body.37

  Marilyn’s dreams of witches and demons suggest that the episode of abuse was traumatic and that she connected it to Christian beliefs about the devil and dark angels. Arthur Miller thought that she had a Puritan sense of sin. Louella Parsons, who was close to her, described her concept of “sin” as like that of the revivalist preachers of her childhood: hard and unrelenting. According to Earl Wilson, Marilyn’s rape as a child left her with a stammer and the belief that all men wanted to bed her. Maurice Zolotow wrote, “She was obsessed by her guilt. She had committed the unpardonable sin. If she died she would go to hell. The terrors of her childhood return in twisted shapes, and as long as possible she resists sleep by reading or talking.”38 Her insomnia worsened as she grew older, and she took ever more pills to go to sleep.

  In My Story Marilyn connected the assault to Christianity when she described a revival meeting her “aunt” forced her to attend after the attack. In her memory Mr. Kimmel was present at the meeting. When the revival preacher called on sinners to go to the altar and repent, Norma Jeane rushed up to tell the preacher about the episode of sexual abuse, which she called her “sin.” But the other “sinners” around the altar wailed so loudly that they drowned her out. Then she saw Mr. Kimmel standing among the “non-sinners.” He wasn’t repenting for what he had done. He was praying for God to forgive the sins of others.

  I interpret this story as a reflection on sin and guilt. The abuser blended into the congregation, while the victim was blocked from repentance and absolution. Her “aunt” made Norma Jeane attend the revival meeting, which suggests that the aunt considered her responsible for the attack. Yet Marilyn’s recollection that she threw the nickel her abuser gave her in his face is important. It shows toughness under her fractured self, a place where she preserved a sense of self-worth. It is connected to the human “self-care system,” an evolutionary mechanism designed for the survival of the species. The self can be sadistic, like the id in Freud’s theory, but it can also be supportive. As humans we are capable of “mothering” ourselves.39

  Fantasy is basic to the self-care system, where the ability to create a cocoon of dreams can nurture the individual, blunting a traumatic past and projecting a positive future. Marilyn often created fantasy worlds in which dissociation was curative. She moved through her childhood as the princess being wooed by the prince, the famous actress beloved by the world, the adored daughter of a father who looked like Clark Gable and was protective and caring. She often daydreamed about colors—red and crimson, gold and green—the colors of kings and queens in the fantasy world of children’s fairy stories. In her bedroom she acted out all the parts in the movies she saw, creating another fantasy world for herself.

  When she lived in the orphanage she could see the flashing sign on the RKO building, a radio tower atop a globe of the world, from her bedroom window. That sign, which was the studio’s trademark, promoted RKO as a communicator of information to the world. Her mother had worked at RKO. Watching the sign, Norma Jeane thought of the smelly dark lab where Gladys cut and pasted films. Smell is the most primitive of the senses; remembering a smell brings into the mind a vivid snapshot of episodes connected to the smell. Norma Jeane rejected her negative image of the cutting lab by an act of will. Having done that, she saw the sign as the beacon to a promised land, a Hollywood inhabited, she said, by stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. They were powerful women, called by film historians “fast-talking dames,” similar to the perfect ladies of Glad
ys’s imagination.40

  Marilyn had a fantasy, she said, about wearing a hoop skirt and being naked in a church, walking over the bodies of the congregation as they lay on their backs and looked up at her with open eyes. That fantasy, with its sexual overtones, is another powerful dream of conquering the world. It seems the product of the Norma Jeane who threw the nickel back at her abuser and then cried all night when her foster mother wouldn’t believe her. It also seems related to later episodes of exposing her genitals in public, another strategy to deal with the abuse by enacting it on a grand scale.

  According to Arthur Miller, she regarded her body as possessed by men and as something that she had to bestow on them when they wanted it. She told screenwriter Nunnally Johnson that she gave sex to men as a “thank you” for favors. “I sometimes felt I was hooked on sex,” she told W. J. Weatherby, “the way an alcoholic is hooked on liquor or a junkie on dope.”41 Despite her ladylike demeanor, what is now called sex addiction became an issue for her, although, as I will presently discuss, her belief in “free love” doctrines placed it in an acceptable context in her mind.

  Norma Jeane’s placement in so many foster homes and in an orphanage may have been excessive, but it wasn’t necessarily exceptional among people with limited means in the 1930s, when unemployment was high and public welfare was limited. Most children in orphanages nationwide, like Norma Jeane, were “half orphans,” with a father absent from their home and a mother without means. Their impoverished families intended to retrieve them when their financial situation improved. Most of the children in Marilyn’s orphanage were half orphans.42