Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  In early 1927, Della suddenly fell ill with a weak heart and became susceptible to frequent respiratory infections. She now depended on Gladys, who moved in with her mother despite the long daily trolley-car ride to work. By late spring, Della was in wretched health. Her breathing became severely impaired by degenerative heart disease, and this caused her to suffer acute depressions. Medication provided only occasional relief and, as with many cardiopulmonary patients, the intervals were often characterized by pleasant imaginations, reveries and even periods of frank euphoria. Della could be withdrawn and tearful when Gladys departed for work, but then in the evening she might find her mother cheerfully preparing dinner. It would have been natural, in such circumstances, for Gladys to recall the unpredictable behavior of her father years earlier. There is some evidence in the family files that Della suffered a stroke in the late spring of 1927—an event that could also have caused unpredictable shifts of mood and temper.

  At the end of July, Della was convinced death was near, and an array of guilty memories alternated with hallucinations: her parents, Tilford and Jennie Hogan, were reconciled, she told Gladys, and they were coming to rescue her, to take her home. The next morning, Della claimed that Charles Grainger (long since out of her life) had crept into her bed the night before and had made violent love to her. Not long after, she struggled from her home, walked over to the Bolenders’ to see her granddaughter, and banged on the door. Angered when she saw that no one came to admit her, Della broke the door’s glass with her elbow—“for no reason I know of,” Ida said, adding, “we called the police.”

  On August 4, 1927, Della was carted away to the Norwalk State Hospital, suffering from acute myocarditis, a general term for inflammation of the heart and surrounding tissues. After nineteen days of agonizing distress, she died on August 23, at the age of fifty-one. The death certificate gives the cause as simply myocarditis, adding a “contributory manic depressive psychosis.” This latter term was imprecise especially in those days, and one subjoined only because Gladys stressed to the physicians at Norwalk that her mother’s moods and tempers had alternated unpredictably in recent weeks.

  The fact is that little was done for Della’s grave heart condition. She had seen doctors only three or four times and often forgot the hours and doses of her medication. Thus, when the ward supervisor signed papers a day after her death, Gladys’s report on her mother’s mental state made the addition of “psychosis” understandable but really baseless. But among the documents of Della’s case during confinement, there is no psychological profile, nor is there record of an attending neurologist. Della Monroe (thus her name appeared in hospital records) died of heart disease, which caused impaired mentation due to insufficient oxygenation of the brain. As in the case of her husband Otis Monroe, there is no evidence that she was also a psychiatric case. But for Gladys, the myth of family madness deepened: after Della’s death she was distressed and for several weeks failed to report for work. Shutting herself in her mother’s bungalow, she pored over Della’s few possessions; finally, she emerged and decided to sell the place. Bracing herself for a return to work, Gladys then moved back to Hollywood, obtaining work at two movie studios, weekdays and Saturdays.

  Although there were quite different reasons to pity much in her life, the truth is that (contrary to later publicity reports) Norma Jeane’s years with the Bolenders were essentially secure, she lacked for no material necessities, and there is no evidence that she was abused or mistreated. But she was the only child to remain so long: more than a dozen other children arrived, grew and departed, or returned to their families.

  “Despite all the inventions of later years,” according to Norma Jeane’s first husband, “she never had known grinding poverty, never had gone shoeless, never, to the best of my knowledge, had to skip a meal.” He felt that as her career improved she “desperately wanted some colorful family tale of want and scarcity . . . [while] the truth is that she was raised in a small but comfortable bungalow with every modern convenience, if not splendid luxury.” The Bolenders even owned a scarred old upright piano, used mostly for hymn-singing by Ida’s church cronies. There were also toys and books, and a small room to accommodate a child’s parent for an overnight visit.

  Yet she was clearly scarred by the psychological and emotional stress of her uncertain identity and by not knowing when her mother might suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish. When she did visit Norma Jeane, Gladys took her for outings or picnics. Mother and daughter rode the Pacific Electric trolley cars to Sunset Beach; alternately, they made several connections and traveled south to tour the glass factories in Torrance; or, year-round, they would simply ride and ride from one shoreline resort to another, stopping at Redondo, Manhattan and Hermosa for lunch or ice cream. Among Norma Jeane’s earliest memories was Venice’s own St. Mark’s Plaza, on the corner of Windward and Ocean Front Walk, where (then as decades later) residents and tourists shopped and gaily dressed crowds crossed to and from the beach. Gladys once bought a striped parasol her daughter kept for years, and at the plaza Norma Jeane loved to watch the mimes, jugglers and fire-eaters. Frequently, mother and daughter rode the Venice Miniature Railway down Windward and then walked along the inland lagoons, where Gladys pointed out the weekend rendezvous of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, of Harold Lloyd, of William S. Hart. But such happy Saturdays were increasingly rare, for Gladys visited less and less often. “Her mother paid her board all the time,” Ida recalled, adding that Norma Jeane “was never neglected and always nicely dressed.” But Gladys became for the most part an irregular, shadowy visitor at the edge of Norma Jeane’s life.

  Just when other children had those to call mother and father, therefore, Norma Jeane was hurtled into confusion. “One morning I called [Ida] ‘Mother,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me that—I’m not your mother. Call me ‘Aunt Ida.’ Then I pointed to her husband, and I said, ‘But he’s my Daddy!’ and she just said, ‘No.’ ” Later, “she discussed her father more than anyone in her past,” according to a close friend. “She remembered her mother, although without much feeling. But she missed a father terribly, although she was smart enough to be wary of anyone she took for a surrogate father.”

  Ida Bolender was correct to speak truthfully about the situation; her manner and tone, however, seem to have lacked the kind of comforting explanation that would have prevented the child’s bewilderment and the conviction that she was in some way markedly different from other children. At two and three, Norma Jeane could not have understood the sporadic arrivals and departures of the woman she was told to call mother. “She didn’t come very much,” she said later. “She was just the woman with the red hair.” Gladys, whose visits meant good times, made guest appearances, but the major players of Norma Jeane’s early life were the Bolenders, and in matters of conduct, religion and morality they yielded center stage to none.

  “To go to a movie was a sin,” Norma Jeane remembered of one Bolender doctrine. “If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies,” Ida warned, “do you know what would happen? You’d burn along with all the bad people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers.” The sharp disjunction between Gladys’s attitudes and those of the Bolenders must have caused Norma Jeane considerable confusion about proper conduct and standards of right and wrong.

  Confusion or no, photographs from these first several years show Norma Jeane a winsome child with ash-blond hair, an engaging smile and bright blue-green eyes. But she always recalled that in the Bolender household “no one ever called me pretty.” The plainspoken, decent, humorless Ida did not believe in flattery; prettiness might even be dangerous. She and her family lived within bustling, modern Los Angeles County, but Ida and Albert could have been the models for Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Norma Jeane’s closest playmate was a stray dog she brought home and named Tippy. The Bolenders allowed her to keep the puppy so long as she cared for it, and Norma Jeane was usually seen followed two paces behind by the worshipful Tippy.


  The family had, in fact, no inclination for mere worldly amusements; they placed primary emphasis on morality and religious responsibilities. The church they all attended (literally shaken to its foundations by the 1933 earthquake) was the focus of Bolender life—and therefore, by extension, the lives of the children committed to their care. “We took her to Sunday school with us,” Ida said. “I had not only Norma Jeane and my own son, but other children, too, with me.” This pious little platoon marched off to the pews not only on Sunday but also for prayer and instruction one afternoon and one evening during each week, as Marilyn recalled. “Every night I was told to pray that I would not wake up in hell. I had to say: ‘I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell or give alcohol while I live. From all tobacco I’ll abstain and never take God’s name in vain.’ . . . I always felt insecure.”

  That the Bolenders were not prodigal with entertainments or compliments is entirely consistent with the austere and highly charged religious character of their lives. Perhaps the primary advantage of faith, they believed, was the certainty of their moral posture, and it was morality which assured salvation. They were members of a branch of the United Pentecostal Church much influenced by the famous Los Angeles Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, a revival community founded on Azusa Street in 1906. Like many people with good intentions but a restrictive and potentially dangerous literal-mindedness, adherents to this kind of religion often equate true religion with unquestioning obedience to a certain code of right conduct; a sense of mystery (much less a mystical sense) is not even mentioned. For children especially, everything was to be made clear and immutable, and people of any age who questioned or complained were pitied, ignored or held in quiet contempt. This is not to imply, however, that there is any evidence that the Bolenders were other than attentive, caring foster parents. “They were terribly strict,” Norma Jeane said years later. “They didn’t mean any harm—it was their religion. They brought me up harshly.”

  For over a century, Roman Catholic, mainstream Protestant and then Jewish communities had flourished in Los Angeles. But in the 1920s and 1930s, flamboyant evangelical sects proliferated along with the aromatic eucalyptus and acrid auto fumes. Unconventional, sometimes hysterical attempts at faith healing; bizarre costumes; midnight-to-dawn meetings where sinners were asked to “testify”; services that resembled movie-set extravaganzas—all these were typical of local religious life. This is not remarkable in a place where the entertainment industry depended on the mechanisms of fanfare and promotion; the fringe churches, too, engaged advertising and public-relations counselors.

  The best example of this colorful spirit during Norma Jeane’s childhood was the notorious Aimee Semple McPherson, greatly admired by the Bolenders, who took Norma Jeane and their other young charges to hear the famous evangelist. A Pentecostal minister born in 1890, Sister Aimee began her preaching career with itinerant evangelism, radio sermons and healing services at seventeen; eventually she found her greatest welcome in Los Angeles. There, after terminating two marriages but attracting many followers, she established her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, whose Angelus Temple was built by her devotees in 1927 at the staggering cost of one and a half million dollars. Her congregations nationwide, augmented and united by radio broadcasting, numbered in the tens of thousands.

  McPherson was quite a character. Usually present was her mother, sunnily addressed as “Ma Kennedy,” who led the applause for her daughter’s highly theatrical revival services—rites ideally suited to Hollywood. To preach a sermon on God’s law, she wore a police uniform; to address the topic of decency, her outfit was a Victorian coverall. Lights, music and mirrors were routinely used for the right effects. The saxophone, for example, was played by a young man named Anthony Quinn, later a movie star. Dynamic and attractive, McPherson was much loved by her faithful, even after the collapse of her third marriage, the filing of at least fifty lawsuits against her and widespread scandals involving (separately) sex and money. (She had an affair with Charles Chaplin.) For all that, the impression made by the exuberant blond Sister Aimee, who used the tools of the acting trade to arouse her congregants, was unforgettable for those who saw her.3

  At home, the Bolenders continued the ideals set before everyone at church. Dancing, smoking and card-playing were considered works of the demon, and neatness, order and discipline were marks of virtue; childhood sloppiness, back talk or poor manners were sinful. Routines for mealtimes, chores and playtime were meticulously observed; household regulations were dutifully observed and deviation from them was to be avoided at all cost. Ida’s face often bore an expression of exasperated disappointment over some minor childish foible: “It was hard to please them. Somehow I was always falling short, although I can’t remember being especially bad.” Standards were high for winning approval from Norma Jeane’s first mother figure, while Albert Bolender remained mostly a quiet backer of his wife’s domestic management, his silence severer than any open threat of punishment.

  As a natural part of maturing, of establishing independence, of testing and claiming one’s own personality, every child finds a way of rebellion. For Norma Jeane, rigorous discipline at home firmly forestalled mischief, tantrums and rank disobedience. She could, she always insisted, only withdraw to an inner world for her escape. In this regard, there was so much emphasis on propriety that a peculiar type of recurring childhood dream was perhaps inevitable:

  I dreamed that I was standing up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church, and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone.

  The surreal scene was described and appropriately embellished in adulthood, and whether or not it actually haunted the pre-adolescent Norma Jeane is perhaps unimportant. More to the point, the dream represents what she later wanted the public to think of her childhood fantasies: that she had a kind of prophetic sense of who she would be and what effect she would have on others. She would be a woman to surprise and shock with a natural, guilt-free display of her body; she would also take care not to offend, and in some way this would be connected to her being (as she desired) accepted—even adored—with people lying at her feet. Dream or no, this became the reality.

  The Bolenders would have been horrified to hear such a dream: the bathtub was the only situation of licit nakedness. And because cleanliness was not only next to godliness but virtually a sign of it, the Bolenders’ sole extravagance was the hot water lavishly poured for the children’s baths. In a household obsessed with the taint of sin, Norma Jeane was encouraged to soak and scrub. But she never felt that she emerged quite clean enough to please her foster parents. “You could have done better,” Ida or Albert said quietly as they brushed her hair and set out a clean dress. The religious injunctions of church echoed at home: perfection was the ideal to be ever kept before the growing child. Anything less—and of course everything is—deserves implicit belittling; and therefore nothing is more dangerous than praise, which can lead to complacency, idleness or spiritual torpor. She recalled that in her childhood she never felt quite ready, quite clean enough, acceptable, presentable for the Bolenders. “You can always do better.” It was a short route from a soiled blouse to eternal damnation.

  She certainly could have done better than to be bored and distracted at a religious pageant into which she was corralled at Easter 1932. With fifty other black-robed youngsters arranged in the form of a living cross, she made her first public theatrical appearance at a sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl:

  We all had on white tunics under the black robes and at a given signal we were supposed to throw off the robes, changing the cross from black to white. But I got so interested in looking at the people, the orchestra, the hills and the stars in the sky that I forgot to watch the conductor for the signal. And there I was—the only black mark on a white cross. The family I was living with never forgave me.

  “I’ve got to get ri
d of that quiet little girl,” Norma Jeane overheard Ida Bolender say to her husband that night. “She makes me nervous.”

  In 1932, the domestic atmosphere of discipline and achievement were reinforced in the new demands of school life. “Go down two blocks, turn left and keep going till you see the school,” Ida Bolender said one morning in early September, and with two older neighboring children to accompany her, Norma Jeane set off for first-grade class at the Washington Street School in Hawthorne, then located at the corner of El Segundo Boulevard and Washington Street (just south of the area that included Los Angeles International Airport). Classroom discipline was simply a variant on home for Norma Jeane, but in the schoolyard, she remembered, “I loved playing games, and everything seemed like it was pretending. Like all kids, we used to act out little dramas, exaggerate stories. But I loved to make things up—more than the others, I think—maybe because life with my foster parents was always so predictable.” On most days, Tippy followed her to school and waited outside for the return journey.

  Another “pretend game” that year seems to have been inspired by a recurring motif on a radio detective serial the Bolenders allowed. A few times that year, Norma Jeane slipped off to school with Albert’s flashlight, prowling the route and (despite broad daylight) shining the lamp on the license plate of every auto and carefully jotting it down. Thus did she practice writing her numbers in early 1933.

  And then, with the suddenness of the earthquake that rocked Southern California that March, life changed for Norma Jeane just after her seventh birthday. An angry neighbor, annoyed at Tippy’s barking, grabbed a shotgun and killed the dog, causing the child a spasm of grief. The Bolenders summoned Gladys, who arrived in late June, transported by her friend Grace McKee, who was by this time more than ever Gladys’s closest confidante, sometimes her emotional support, often her counselor, always the arbiter of difficult decisions and the adjudicator of Gladys’s personal and financial dilemmas. Then almost forty, single and childless after several marriages, generous, bohemian with an almost manic pertness, Grace was to become the most important influence in Norma Jeane’s life. For the present, however, Gladys was at the center of things.