Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  1. I have borrowed the title of my prologue, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Women,” from the title of James Agee’s famed book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about the working class during the Great Depression. The term “famous woman” connects Marilyn to the working class, applauds her success, and hints at the underside of her fame in “infamous” behavior, her accommodating sexual self.

  2. My description of the shoot is based on Lorie Karnath, Sam Shaw: A Personal Point of View (Osfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010), 8; Sam Shaw and Norman Rosten, Marilyn Monroe Among Friends (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 38–47; Bruno Bernard, Bernard of Hollywood’s Marilyn, ed. Susan Bernard (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); Earl Wilson, Hot Times: True Tales of Hollywood and Broadway (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1984), 79–91; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, clipping fragment, Starr—ASU; “Marilyn and Joe,” August 8, 1962, in The Seven Year Itch file, Billy Wilder—AMPAS: “The newspaper photographers and the fan magazines from everywhere were getting enough stills for years.”

  3. For pinups with the skirts of the models flying up, see Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel, The Great American Pin-Up (New York: Taschen, 1996).

  4. Natalie Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 124–51; Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Henry Brandon, “Sex, Theatre and the Intellectual,” in Brandon, ed., Conversations with Henry Brandon (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966), 196.

  5. George Barris, Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), 112–13.

  6. Shaun Considine, Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky (New York: Random House, 1994), 120.

  7. Earl Wilson, Show Business Laid Bare (New York: Putnam, 1974), 71; Susan Strasberg, Marilyn and Me: Sisters, Rivals, Friends (New York: Warner, 1992), 163.

  8. W. J. Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn (New York: Paragon, 1976), 112, 125.

  9. Bernard ed., Bernard of Hollywood’s Marilyn, 43.

  10. See, for example, “Marilyn, Too Soon for Love,” Movieland, April 1953; Jane Corwin, “Orphan in Ermine,” Photoplay, March 1954; Rita Garrison Malloy, “Marilyn, Oh, Marilyn,” Motion Picture, November 1954; “MM—Low-Brow to High-Brow,” National Police Gazette, October 1957; “Too Hot Not to Cool Down?” Movieland, December 1954. The only other Hollywood personality to become as famed for witticisms was the independent producer Sam Goldwyn, who was known for malapropisms called “Goldwynisms.”

  11. Interview with Sam Shaw, Runnin’ Wild, newsletter of All About Marilyn Fan Club, January 1993; David Zeitlin-Bevedit, interview with Jerry Wald, Zeitlin-Bevedit, AMPAS.

  12. On Lembourn’s visit to the United States, see Norman Norstrand, New York Times, June 3, 1979; on Lili St. Cyr, see Bruno Bernard, Requiem for Marilyn (Abbotsbrook, GB, 1986), 102–04, and Kelly DiNardo, Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique (New York: Back Stage, 2007). On Slatzer as a fabulist, see John Gilmore, Inside Marilyn Monroe: A Memoir (Los Angeles: Ferrine, 2007), 202–08. Slatzer initiated the fabulist tradition in 1974 with The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Pinnacle, 1974).

  13. In his Marilyn biography, Donald Spoto contended that Summers manufactured his interviews, Spoto, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). I can testify to the validity of those interviews because I have listened to them. Summers won a judgment against Spoto in a London court for misrepresentation. On the other hand, Spoto was the first author to challenge the validity of Slatzer and Carmen. See Donald H. Wolfe, The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe (1998; New York: Time Warner, 2002), 122–23.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. On Marilyn’s childhood, I have used Gilmore, Inside Marilyn Monroe; Michelle Morgan, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007); Spoto, Marilyn Monroe; Fred Lawrence Guiles, Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); and Guiles, Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Stein and Day, 1984). I have consulted J. Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Hachette, 2009); and Ted Schwartz, Marilyn Revealed: The Ambitious Life of an American Icon (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), although neither author uses footnotes, making it impossible to check their sources and evaluate their conclusions.

  I have also used Marilyn’s autobiography, published in 1974 as My Story; the many interviews she gave during her life; and the memoir of her half-sister, Berniece Baker Miracle (with Mona Rae Miracle), My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir (New York: Boulevard, 1994). I have drawn extensively from the primary materials collected by Roy Turner, which are in my possession.

  2. For family backgrounds, I have used Marilyn biographies; on Ana, I have used her death certificate, March 14, 1948, in RT. On Los Angeles, see Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1946), and the works of Kevin Starr, especially Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  3. Gladys misspelled Mortensen as Mortenson on Norma Jeane’s birth certificate. On Gifford’s background see Robert E. Brenneman, “New England in Hollywood, Part 3: The Possible Rhode Island Ancestry of Marilyn Monroe,” in New England Historical and Genealogical Society, Nexus, 3, no. 2 (1990): 64–67, in RT. On Marilyn’s father, see note 33, below.

  4. Otis Monroe Death Record. 245–355, California State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, in RT.

  5. Lawrence O. Christensen and Gary R. Kremer, A History of Missouri, 4: 1875–1919 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1997). My thanks to Stephen Aron, Professor of History, UCLA, for advising me on Missouri culture in this period.

  6. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  7. Otis Monroe’s death certificate lists Indiana as his birthplace. But the spaces for the names of his mother and father contain the word “unknown,” suggesting that Della didn’t have this information.

  8. Documents in RT indicate home ownership. On the LA rail system, including time tables, important to understanding the geography of Marilyn’s childhood, see Spencer Crump, Ride the Big Red Cars: The Pacific Electric Story (Glendale, Calif.: Trans-Anglo Books, 1983).

  9. Susan Steinman Salter, “Toward Community Mental Health: A History of State Policy in California, 1939–1969,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978, 5. Venereal disease was epidemic in these decades, with no effective cure until penicillin was introduced in 1944. See Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  10. Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, 87.

  11. Della Monroe Graves vs. Lyle A. Graves, Divorce Action, January 17, 1914, Superior Court, State of California, County of Los Angeles, in RT. See J. Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1997); and Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); LB, interview with Patricia Traviss, July 24, 2008. On Della and Gladys, I follow Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, 12–17, 86–89.

  12. Tom Moran and Tom Sewell, Fantasy by the Sea: A Visual History of American Venice (Culver City, Calif.: Peace Press, 1980); Jeffrey Stanton, Venice of America, 1905–1930: A History (Venice, Calif.: ARS, 1980). In the late 1920s, developers filled in most of the canals to build houses and commercial buildings.

  13. Elizabeth R. Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167–68.

  14. Barris, Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words, 5. Applications for passports filed with the U.S. State Department, Passport Division, by Charles Grainger in 1924 and Della Monroe in 1925, in RT. Della filed for divorce in 1926, but the action was nullified by her death two years later.

  15. Lester Bolender, “Brother Lifts Lid on Past,” newspaper clipping, courtesy of Stacy Eubank; MZ, interview with Emmeline Snively, in Zolotow—UT; Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 186.

  16. David Nelson to Inez Melson, August 14, 1962, in possession of AS. When I examined the file cabinets and their contents in 2006, the letter wasn’t there. By then, some material in the file cabinets had been sold or given away. See Lois Banner and Mark Anderson, MM—Personal (New York: Harry Abrams, 2011).

  17. Gilmore, Inside Marilyn Monroe, 35; Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, 22. Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 2000), 61; Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in the Post-Victorian Era (New York: Basic, 1988), 92.

  18. Marriage License, Gladys Monroe and Jasper Newton Baker, in RT. On Gladys and Jasper’s marriage, see Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, 12–15.

  19. In 1920 Della and Charles bought a second lot in Hawthorne, although they defaulted on the mortage in 1926 and forfeited it. See documents on second lot, in RT. See also Walt Dixon and Jerry Roberts, Hawthorne (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005).

  20. Divorce Petition, Baker vs. Baker: Superior Court of Los Angeles County, no. 8–8426, in RT.

  21. When Gladys was in Kentucky, a friend in Los Angeles wrote her that Gifford was lonely for her. See “Coming Attractions,” in Runnin’ Wild, April 1994; Monroe, My Story, 19.

  22. Matthew Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

  23. Monroe, My Story, 32; Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

  24. See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Made Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

  25. Rupert Hughes, Souls for Sale (1922; New York: Garland, 1978), 168–69. Hughes was the uncle of Howard Hughes, aviation mogul and owner of RKO.

  26. Ibid., 168–69, 184.

  27. John Gilmore, interview with Ernest Neilson, in Gilmore, Inside Marilyn Monroe, 55.

  28. Ibid., 38.

  29. Anthony Summers, “How Marilyn Monroe Rejected Her Secret Dad in His Dying Days,” Star, December 1, 1987. On Mortensen as Marilyn’s father, see Ann Salisbury, “Marilyn Monroe’s Father Dies with His Secret,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, February 12, 1981, in RT.

  30. Divorce Petition, Gifford vs. Gifford, no. D-2488, Superior Court, State of California, in RT.

  31. Divorce Petition, Mortensen vs. Baker, no. 053720, Superior Court, State of California, in RT.

  32. In her 1960 interview with Georges Belmont, editor of Marie Claire, Marilyn denied that Mortensen was her father. See Belmont, “Interview with Marilyn Monroe,” in Marilyn Monroe and the Camera (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 13. In a 1962 interview with photographer George Barris, Marilyn stated that Stanley Gifford was her father. See Barris, Marilyn: Her Life, 5. Arthur Miller, Timebends (1987; New York: Penguin, 1995), 371, 419, thought that Gladys actually wasn’t sure. Miller detested Gladys, although he never met her.

  33. In the Belmont interview (see note 32), 14, Marilyn stated that her mother was upset and confused after her birth and thus she filled out the birth certificate incorrectly.

  34. Summers, “How Marilyn Monroe Rejected Her Secret Dad.”

  35. MZ, interview with Earl Theisen, in Zolotow—UT.

  36. Rose, A Mother’s Job, 167–68.

  37. Ezra Goodman, The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), 225. Goodman interviewed the Bolenders at length, as did Fred Guiles. No recent Marilyn biographer refers to this material. My analysis of the Bolenders also draws from my interview with Nancy Bolender Jeffrey, December 1, 2005, and letters she sent me.

  38. Marilyn Monroe, “I Was an Orphan,” Modern Screen, February 1951; Richard Merryman, “Fame May Go By,” Life, August 3, 1962; Margaret Parton, “A Revealing Last Interview with Marilyn Monroe,” Look, February 19, 1979.

  39. Barris, Marilyn: Her Life, 3; Merryman, “Fame May Go By.”

  40. LB, interview with Nancy Bolender Jeffrey, December 4, 2005; talk by Nancy Bolender, recorded in “Some Like It Hot,” German Marilyn Monroe fan club newsletter, December 2001; Nancy Bolender to LB, March 28, 2007.

  41. On Dwight Moody, see God’s Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  42. G. Ted Martinez, The Rise, Decline, and Renewal of a Mega Church: A Case Study of the Church of the Open Door (Los Angeles: Biola University, 1997); William Edmondson, “Fundamentalist Sects of Los Angeles 1900–1930,” Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1980.

  43. Philip Goff, “Fighting Like the Devil in the City of Angels: The Rise of Fundamentalist Charles E. Fuller,” in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitten and William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 220–51; George Mardsen, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Gregory Singleton, Religion in the City of Angels (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1978). R. A. Torrey, Revival Addresses (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903).

  44. LB, interview with Nancy Bolender Jeffrey, December 4, 2005.

  45. Miller, Timebends, 371.

  46. Ibid.

  47. On the history of masturbation, see Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003).

  48. Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, ed. Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 57, 101. The editors mistakenly identify Ida Martin as the “Ida” of these fragments.

  49. Nancy Bolender Jeffrey to LB, March 28, 2007.

  50. In the petition filed with the court on November 20, 1929, to declare Otis Monroe dead after he disappeared, as well as in the 1930 census, Gladys listed the Bolenders’ address as her address. The claim that Gladys never visited Norma Jeane began when Donald Spoto misread an interview with Olin Stanley, a coworker with Gladys and Grace, in RT, as stating that Grace took Norma Jeane to the editing studio and dressed her like Shirley Temple, although Stanley states that Gladys, not Grace, did this.

  51. Maurice Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, rev. ed. (1960; New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 17–18.

  52. I have consulted general practitioner King Reilly M.D. and heart specialist Robert Siegel M.D. on myocarditis and heart disease as linked to manicdepressive syndrome.

  53. Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, 53.

  54. Barris, Marilyn: Her Life, 12.

  55. Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1929.

  56. Lisa Wilson, “The Truth About Me,” American Weekly, November 16, 1952. In the Belmont interview, Marilyn stated that she lived with the English family after Gladys took her to Hollywood. Los Angeles city directories listing the Atkinsons do not include Nellie as living with them.

  57. Gilmore, Inside Marilyn Monroe, 49.

  58. On Grauman’s theaters, see Charles Beardsley, Hollywood’s Master Showman: The Legendary Sid Grauman (New York: Cornwall, 1983).

  59. Jim Dougherty, To Norma Jeane with Love, Jimmie, as told to L. C. Savage (Chesterfield, Mo.: Beach House, 2000), 30.

  60. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 46.

  61. On Whitley Heights, see Gaelyn Whitley Keith, The Father of Hollywood: The True Story (Los Angeles: BookSurge, 2006). For a view of the location of Gladys’s house before the city tore it down for a parking lot, see Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1956.

  62. Arthur P. Noyes, Modern Clinical Psychiatry (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1934). Noyes’s bo
ok was in its eighth edition in 1973. My discussion of the categories of mental illness draws especially from Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), and Elizabeth F. Howell, The Dissociative Mind (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 2005).

  63. LB, interview with Patricia Traviss, February 27, 2010.

  64. Gail A. Hornstein, Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meaning of Madness (New York: Rodale/Macmillan, 2009).

  65. Joel Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Braslow focuses on the California state mental hospitals. See also Salter, “Toward Community Mental Health.”

  66. Grace Goddard to Mrs. Van Hyming, August 15, 1935, Stacy Eubank Collection.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Roger Newland, “The Lies They Tell About Marilyn,” Silver Screen, June 1955.

  2. A number of Hollywood stars were sexually abused as children, including Joan Crawford, Esther Williams, and Rita Hayworth, although they didn’t reveal it publicly as Marilyn did. See Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell, Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 2002); Esther Williams, The Million Dollar Mermaid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); and Barbara Leaming, If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth (New York: Viking, 1989). See also “Marilyn Monroe’s Secret Weapon,” Movieland, February 1957.