by Lois Banner
Contrary to Marilyn’s belief, orphans weren’t shunned by most Americans. But children can be cruel to one another, sometimes stigmatizing any sign of difference. When Norma Jeane reported that other children in her schools taunted her as an “orphan,” she was referring to children’s meanness, not to social realities. Had her schoolmates known that her mother was in a mental institution, the taunting would probably have been even worse. Thus Norma Jeane claimed that her mother and father were dead and that she was an orphan, rather than divulging the true state of affairs. It was also in line with her feelings about her situation, with both a mother and a father absent from her life.
The fictionalized orphan Horatio Alger, who sold newspapers on New York streets, was a central character in the mythology of the American Dream. He was a symbol of the pluck and resilience of young Americans in the face of difficult odds. During the Great Depression, abandoned children on the streets and in orphanages were emblematic of the nation’s suffering, of innocence threatened yet surviving. Orphan Annie, depicted in the hugely popular comic strip, became a national heroine. Child film star Shirley Temple, often motherless in her films, had a preternatural wisdom and an ability to solve problems that baffled adults.43
In September 1935, Grace placed Norma Jeane, then nine years old, in one of the best private orphanages in Los Angeles, the Children’s Aid Society orphanage (later renamed Hollygrove). It was located in the center of Hollywood, only a few blocks from Grace’s apartment on Lodi Drive. It had been founded in 1883 by a group of well-to-do Los Angeles women, following the example of many such groups of women throughout the nation. Located on a residential street close to RKO and Paramount, it housed about fifty children. It had an auditorium, a library, and—with five acres of land—playing fields, a swimming pool, and an organized sports program. Residents of the orphanage who lived there with Norma Jeane were unanimous in praising it. When Maurice Zolotow visited the orphanage in the late 1950s, he found it a model institution, with a large staff and a dorm mother for every ten children. The staff did the dishes and cleaned the bathrooms. The residents were required only to keep the dorms tidy and to set the tables for meals.44
According to orphanage records, Norma Jeane was docile and well mannered. Another resident who lived there at the same time remembered her as so generous that she gave other children anything of hers they wanted. There was a piano in the living room, and Norma Jeane sometimes played it. She had a well-coordinated, athletic body, and she was taller than most children her age. She became a star of the girls’ softball team. But she was also withdrawn and sometimes frightened. Tall and gawky, she often reminded her friend of a doe caught in the lights of an oncoming automobile. Individuals close to the adult Marilyn often used that metaphor to describe her.45
Grace visited most weekends, taking Norma Jeane to the movies and then to a restaurant, as she or Gladys had for years. On one occasion she took Norma Jeane to a beauty parlor and had her hair curled into smooth ringlets. She put makeup on her face, although wearing makeup was against orphanage rules. Several weeks before that another girl in the orphanage had been disciplined for doing so. But the matron was kind to Norma Jeane. When she returned to the orphanage with the makeup still on, the matron patted her head, washed her face, and told her not to do it again. The matron knew about her background and her relationship with the redoubtable Grace.
Yet the orphanage represented betrayal and abandonment to Norma Jeane. She had been in too many foster homes and had adjusted to too many families. “When I came to the orphanage,” she told George Barris, “it seemed that no one wanted me, not even my mother’s best friend.” She never forgot the evening Grace took her there. Her description of it never varied. When the car pulled up in front of the building and she saw the sign for the orphanage, she had an anxiety attack. “My heart began beating fast, then faster. I broke out in a cold sweat. I began to panic. I couldn’t catch my breath.”46 As the incident of sexual abuse had the previous year, it triggered her survival syndrome—a rush of adrenaline and stress hormones in her blood—that imprinted it on her brain.
Then Norma Jeane, usually well behaved, threw a tantrum. When Grace asked her to get out of the car, she clutched the door handle. The orphanage attendants had to pry her hands off the handle and half-carry her into the building. “I’m not an orphan! I’m not an orphan!” she cried. Her next memory was of being in a dining room where a lot of children were eating dinner. Startled and humiliated, she stopped crying—and began stuttering.47
The orphanage became a Dickensian horror in Norma Jeane’s memory. No matter how caring the orphanage staff was and how extensive the programs for the residents were, she didn’t like it. She knew she had a mother, even though she claimed that her mother was dead. She wanted to live in a family, not in an institution like the mental hospital in which her mother lived. She had visited her mother at Norwalk State. She had seen her bed in a ward, with attendants watching her. She saw people listless in hallways, muttering to themselves; she knew about straitjackets and continuous water baths. When children see their parents in hospitals, they often become frightened.
Underneath her docility at the orphanage Norma Jeane had difficulty coping. “The world around me was kind of grim. I had to learn to pretend in order to block the grimness. The world seemed sort of closed to me. I felt on the outside of everything.” Retreating from reality, she wrote a postcard to herself and signed it with the names of fictitious parents. She made a feeble attempt to escape but was soon found and taken back. She began to respond to the instability in her life by closing down her emotions. “I had learned not to bother anyone by talking or crying. I also learned that the best way to keep out of trouble was by never complaining or asking for anything.” She cried herself to sleep at night.48
By the beginning of 1936 the orphanage staff was worried about her. She was anxious and withdrawn; she was stuttering; she came down with colds; she cried a lot. The orphanage didn’t have the resources to give her the in-depth care she needed. The matron told Grace that Norma Jeane needed to be placed with a family. Grace realized that she had to do something. On February 26, 1936, she petitioned the Los Angeles Superior Court to become Norma Jeane’s official guardian. Her petition was granted a month later. Grace made the last payment to the orphan home for Norma Jeane’s care on June 21 and her first payment to herself in October 1936. She took Norma Jeane to live with her sometime that summer.49 None of Doc’s children was living with them; Bebe, Fritz, and Nona didn’t move in with Doc and Grace until 1940.
In November 1937, a little over a year after the first payment of Norma Jeane’s stipend to herself, Grace moved Norma Jeane again, this time to the home of Olive Monroe, the wife of Marion Monroe, Gladys’s brother. Grace and Doc were living in the Hollywood Hills, while the MartinMonroes lived in North Hollywood, over the Cahuenga Pass, not that far from the Goddards. Ida Martin, Olive’s mother, owned the house they lived in. The situation in the Monroe family hadn’t improved since Gladys broke down in 1934 and Grace rejected them as caregivers for Norma Jeane. But Grace was at her wits’ end. Olive’s daughter, Ida Mae, was close to Norma Jeane in age, and the two girls might like being together. (Ida Mae told me that she found Grace controlling and mean. She didn’t like her.)
Once Norma Jeane moved into their house, she and Ida Mae played together, slept in the same bed, and became confidantes for a while. They attempted to make wine in a barrel by stamping on grapes, producing only a mess; they spent days planning a trip to San Francisco to find Ida Mae’s father, a trip they never took. In these adventures, they were preadolescent girls inventing fantasies together. But the Monroe-Martin family wasn’t functioning well. Olive and Ida were angry with Marion for deserting them, and they were also angry at the court rule that the children couldn’t go on relief stipends until ten years after his disappearance, when he could be officially declared dead. That year would be 1939. Grace was able to manipulate them into taking Norma Jeane, using the stipend
as her tool.50
With two adults and Olive’s three children—Ida Mae, Jack, and Olive—already living in Ida’s house, it was overcrowded. The sullen Norma Jeane was another burden—although they received her half-orphan stipend. Norma Jeane didn’t like living with them; they treated her as though she was unwanted. Ida Martin, who was in her seventies, told stories of having known Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok. Norma Jeane liked those stories, but she didn’t seem able to please either Ida or Olive. In later years, the experience in the Monroe home became a major example of mistreatment in her stories, although she never mentioned them by name.
Why did Grace suddenly place Norma Jeane in this situation? It seems that she felt she had little choice. Shortly before the sudden move, Doc returned home drunk one night and attempted to fondle Norma Jeane as she lay sleeping in her bed. Norma Jeane awakened, and she ran to Grace to tell her what had happened. Grace’s response was immediate: she moved Norma Jeane. She was committed to Doc; he and his family came first. Norma Jeane had to go. The MartinMonroes, who needed money, didn’t live far away. Grace could still oversee Norma Jeane. But by this point Norma Jeane had lived with five foster families: the Bolenders, Atkinsons, Giffens, Goddards, and now the MartinMonroes, with the orphanage between the two periods she lived with Grace and Doc Goddard.
Yet Norma Jeane’s saga didn’t end once she moved in with the MartinMonroes. In March 1938 the Los Angeles River overflowed its banks, severely damaging many houses in North Hollywood, including the MartinMonroe home. (The river wasn’t yet encased in concrete, as it is today, to prevent flooding.) All family members had to be relocated after the flood. Grace moved Norma Jeane on a temporary basis to the home of her friends Ruth and Alan Mills, who also lived in the San Fernando Valley, so that she could continue attending her North Hollywood school.51
When the school year ended, Grace moved her to another temporary location—the home of her brother, Bryan Atchinson, and his wife, Lottie, in the industrial city of Compton, on the east side of downtown Los Angeles, far from Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Norma Jeane hadn’t liked living with the MartinMonroe family, and she didn’t like living with the Atchinsons. Lottie drove around Los Angeles County delivering the furniture polish her husband made to hardware stores, and she took Norma Jeane along with her, even though the child didn’t want to go. Norma Jeane had motion sickness, but Lottie didn’t pay any attention to her nausea. Norma Jeane’s stay with Bryan and Lottie lasted from late June to September 1938. As she began junior high, she moved to the home of Ana Lower, Grace’s aunt, where she lived on and off for the next four years.52
By the time she went to live with Ana Lower, Norma Jeane had lived with seven foster families: the Bolenders, the Atkinsons, the Giffens, Grace and Doc, the MartinMonroes, the Millses, and the Atchinsons. Ana Lower would constitute an eighth foster mother. There was also the family of Reginald Carroll, Gladys’s coworker at Consolidated, who had wanted to adopt Norma Jean. Moreover, she stayed with several families for short periods of time between more permanent arrangements. These included the families of Sam and Enid Knebelkamp, Grace’s sister and brother-in-law, and Doris and Chester Howell, friends of Ana’s. Both the Knebelkamps and the Howells lived in Westwood, not far from Ana. Both seemed like foster parents to Norma Jeane. She called Enid and Doris “Aunt,” as though they were foster mothers.
In her early teenage years Norma Jeane often babysat the Howells’ twin daughters, Loralee and Doralee. She went on excursions with the Howells, and she stayed overnight at their house, which was large, befitting Chef Howell’s position as a lawyer. Marilyn documentaries sometimes contain home-movie footage of her as a young teenager frolicking on the beach with several younger children: that footage is of a Howell family outing. Actor Howard Keel—then Harry Keel—was the son of the Howells’ housekeeper. He met Norma Jeane when she was thirteen years old and dated her when she was living with the Howells. It was his impression that she was staying there between foster homes.53
The total number of foster homes in which Norma Jeane lived now stands at eleven. Marilyn often cited that number in interviews.54 But she never revealed that all her foster parents were either relatives or friends of Grace Goddard—in fact, in her interviews she rarely mentions the names of any foster parents. Rather, she implies that they were anonymous families to which the county welfare board assigned her. Marilyn didn’t want the real families bothered by the press, and she wanted her childhood story to be as dramatic as possible. In fact, she knew every foster family she lived with before she moved in with them. The county welfare board allowed Grace to find foster families for Norma Jeane, and she turned to her network of kin and friends to do so.
Possessing a strong survival drive, children often avoid displeasing parents or adults on whom they depend. Thus some children aren’t honest about their feelings—or they repress them. Moving from foster home to foster home, having to adjust to new situations and family dynamics so many times, was hard on Norma Jeane. Changing schools when she moved was also difficult, as she entered new classrooms, dealt with new teachers, and had to make new friends. Grace tried to keep her in the same school when she moved her, but it wasn’t always possible. Moving schools increased her fears of abandonment and catastrophic destruction. She never lost those fears.
But the moving also made her shrewd and manipulative. In describing Marilyn to a reporter, Nona Goddard drew on her own experience of having lived in foster homes. “Once you’ve been in a couple, you’ve had it. You become cagey, cynical, and you know how to get the most out of people.” Louella Parsons wrote that Marilyn’s youth “had taught her to be self-contained, self-assertive, and always self-protective, but it had brought with it a brashness that was too often taken for hardness.” “When you’re an orphan,” Marilyn told Susan Strasberg, “you kind of have to learn how to get what you need to survive.”55 The adult Marilyn was a mix of people, and one of them was the manipulative child from the foster homes.
Throughout her childhood, Norma Jeane refused to criticize Grace. She knew that she was a “charity case” and the daughter of a “paranoid schizophrenic,” and she considered herself lucky that Grace paid attention to her. Besides, Grace was fun. Norma Jeane was cheered up experiencing her optimism, bubbling energy, friendliness to everyone, and contagious laugh. Grace lived a complex life, filled with dreams and schemes, and Norma Jeane easily got caught up in them. According to Bebe Goddard, Grace was nonjudgmental. You could tell her anything, Bebe said, and she would be sympathetic. She was affectionate and jokey, with a smile on her face and a kind word for everyone. In My Story Marilyn called Grace her “best friend.”56
Marilyn claimed that if Doc hadn’t appeared in Grace’s life, Grace wouldn’t have placed her in the orphanage and the later foster homes. Grace, out of work, couldn’t afford to support Doc, herself, and Norma Jeane plus whatever child-support payments Doc made. Yet that claim is questionable. In 1935, the Los Angeles Times reported that Grace was the film librarian at Columbia. The 1936 Los Angeles City Directory listed her as still holding that position. The 1937 directory listed only her address, with no notation about employment.57 Grace’s income was stable in 1935 and 1936, but she lost her job in 1937. She then had to scramble to make ends meet. Marilyn’s stories of standing in bread lines with Grace and having to skimp on food and clothing happened in 1937, not earlier.
In Ben Hecht’s notes from his interviews with Marilyn for her proposed autobiography, she states that she accepted Grace’s explanation for her actions: because of her stepchildren she could do more for Norma Jeane. Besides, without Grace’s intervention she might have been placed in a dreadful public orphanage, worse than the private one Grace found for her. “I always knew she loved me,” Marilyn told Hecht. “I could trust anything she’d say. I called her up whenever I was depressed. She was my confidante.”58 When Hecht wrote down these comments, Grace had died only several months prior. A grieving Marilyn may have overstated her reliability.
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br /> On Grace’s 1953 death certificate, the official cause of death is suicide. Indeed, she took an overdose of Nembutal because she had terminal liver cancer. Her years of heavy drinking as a flapper and her marriage to a man who drank caught up with her. Marilyn paid for Grace’s burial in the Westwood Memorial Cemetery and Mortuary where Marilyn and other Goddard family members are buried. In unpublished comments to Hecht, Marilyn described in loving detail Grace’s appearance as her dead body lay in a coffin in the mortuary viewing room. It was dark in the room, with light coming only from candles placed around the coffin. The flowers that Marilyn had sent were there, in the purples, oranges, and browns that were Grace’s favorite colors. At first the corpse frightened Marilyn and she couldn’t look at it, but she remembered how Grace had loved her and that gave her courage. Reaching down, she adjusted the white scarf around Grace’s neck and fluffed up her hair, caressing her skin.
It’s quite a testimony to a woman who was a puppet master pulling the strings that moved the child Norma Jeane all over Los Angeles, living in eleven foster homes and an orphanage. Grace was kind and loving, but she was also controlling, as she had been throughout her relationships with Gladys and Norma Jeane, determining their lives, deciding what to do with them. Until she reached the heights of Hollywood stardom, Norma Jeane/Marilyn didn’t like to criticize anyone, and Grace was the closest version to a mother she had in much of her childhood. Yet Jim Dougherty, like Ida Mae Monroe, didn’t like Grace. He thought she never did anything that wasn’t in her own best interests.
Families are never simple. They can enter new phases, welcoming new people into their circle—and they can just as easily fall apart. A family chronicler can discover new material that revises existing narratives. Like many individuals in Norma Jeane’s life, Grace’s sister Enid Knebelkamp, whom Norma Jeane and Grace often visited, suffered from bouts of depression. She feared dying in childbirth, as a sister of hers had, and she continually talked about it, imprinting her own death narrative in Norma Jeane’s memory. She converted to Catholicism. In a family drawn to Christian Science, that action amounted to a declaration of independence.59 In contrast to Enid, her husband, Sam, was a trickster who told jokes all the time. Norma Jeane loved his jokes, the way he could bring joy into dark situations.
