The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  Faced with economic realities, Gladys rented the upstairs of the house to the Kinnells, a British couple who worked in motion pictures. Murray Kinnell was a character actor who had appeared with George Arliss in the Darryl F. Zanuck production of The House of Rothschild. Norma Jeane’s move to her mother’s house with its Hollywood milieu was a radical departure from the values instilled in her by the Bolenders. She remembered being shocked to see that her mother, Grace McKee, and the Kinnells smoked tobacco and imbibed alcohol.

  “Life became pretty casual and tumultuous, quite a change from the first family,” Marilyn recalled in later years. “They liked to dance and sing, they drank and played cards, and they had a lot of friends. Because of that religious upbringing I’d had, I was kind of shocked—I thought they were all going to hell. I spent hours praying for them.”

  The changes in her life were bewildering. She soon learned that not everyone was as devout as the Bolenders. “We’re churchgoers, not moviegoers,” Ida Bolender had said, but suddenly Norma Jeane was thrust into movieland. The conversation at the dinner table with the Kinnells was often about the movies, and when Norma Jeane wasn’t at school she was frequently given a dime to go to one of the opulent movie palaces on Hollywood Boulevard. “There I’d sit all day and sometimes way into the night—up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it.” Marilyn remembered. “I didn’t miss anything that happened.” She loved musicals and often sat through them two or three times, memorizing the songs, singing them to herself as she wandered home in the dark, late for supper.

  But the dream ended abruptly. Though Gladys seemed in better spirits after establishing the home for Norma Jeane, she still had bouts of anxiety and depression. Grace McKee’s attempts to help Gladys were of no avail. At times she refused to eat and couldn’t sleep, often wandering through the house at night weeping, muttering prayers, and studying her “science.” During the day she spent long hours at work to meet the mounting bills that had accumulated to pay for her dream house and its furnishings. Despite all her efforts, it became increasingly evident that the house was beyond her means. She had fallen behind in her payments and was ebbing into the darkness of despair when an incident occurred in December of 1934 that pushed her over the edge and into the abyss of madness.

  The only reliable source regarding the incident is Marilyn Monroe. In an interview with Ben Hecht in 1953, she stated very clearly that she was eight years old:

  I was almost nine, and I lived with a family that rented a room to a man named Kimmell. He was a stern-looking man, and everybody respected him and called him Mister Kimmell. I was passing his room when his door opened and he said quietly, “Please come in here, Norma.” I thought he wanted me to run an errand.

  “Where do you want me to go, Mr. Kimmell?” I asked.

  “No place,” he said and closed the door behind me. He smiled at me and turned the key in the lock.

  “Now you can’t get out,” he said, as if we were playing a game.

  I stood staring at him. I was frightened, but I didn’t dare yell…. When he put his arms around me I kicked and fought as hard as I could, but I didn’t make a sound. He was stronger than I was and wouldn’t let me go. He kept whispering to me to be a good girl.

  When he unlocked the door and let me out, I ran to tell my “Aunt” what Mr. Kimmell had done.

  “I want to tell you something,” I stammered, “about Mr. Kimmell. He…he…”

  My “Aunt” interrupted.

  “Don’t you dare say anything against Mr. Kimmell,” she said angrily. “Mr. Kimmell’s a fine man. He’s my star boarder!”

  Mr. Kimmell came out of his room and stood in the doorway smiling.

  “Shame on you!” my “Aunt” glared at me, “complaining about people!”

  “This is different,” I began. “This is something I have to tell…Mr. Kimmell…he…he…”

  I started stammering again and couldn’t finish. Mr. Kimmell came up to me and handed me a nickel.

  “Go buy yourself some ice cream,” he said.

  I threw the nickel in Mr. Kimmell’s face and ran out.

  I cried in bed that night and wanted to die. I thought, “If there’s nobody ever on my side that I can talk to I’ll start screaming.” But I didn’t scream.

  Nine years after relating the incident to Ben Hecht, Marilyn Monroe told the same story to photojournalist George Barris, who photographed her for Cosmopolitan just weeks before she died. Again she stated that she was eight years old and referred to Mr. Kimmell as the “star boarder.” But instead of saying she ran to her “aunt,” Marilyn said, “I ran to my foster mother and told her what he did to me. She looked at me shocked…then slapped me across the mouth and shouted at me, “I don’t believe you! Don’t you dare say such things about that nice man!”

  I was so hurt, I began to stammer. She didn’t believe me! I cried that night in bed all night, I just wanted to die…. This was the first time I can remember stammering…. Once afterward when I was in the orphanage, I started to stutter out of the clear blue….”

  In both recollections Norma Jeane was only eight years old when the molestation incident occurred; therefore it was before June 1935, and before she entered the orphanage. The only boarder she lived with prior to the age of ten, prior to the orphanage, and prior to the onset of stuttering, was at her mother’s house. Clearly the “Aunt” and the “foster mother” was Gladys; and Mr. Kimmell, the molester, was Murray Kinnell, the British actor who stayed upstairs at the house on Arbol Drive.

  Kimmell is scarcely a disguise for Kinnell, but in referring to her mother as her “aunt” or “foster mother” Marilyn was protecting Gladys. The loss of her star boarder would have meant the inevitable loss of the house, and the end of her desperate dream. That her mother hadn’t defended her, however, was beyond Norma Jeane’s comprehension, and the incident explains to a degree the estrangement Norma Jeane would always feel toward her mother: “If there’s nobody ever on my side that I can talk to, I’ll start screaming.” Though in time Norma Jeane tried to understand and mend the relationship, it was never to be the same. Having failed to protect Norma Jeane, just as she had failed Jackie, Gladys lost the hope of her daughter’s love and respect, the only hope remaining to her. In doing so, she lost everything.

  Custodial records indicate that it was during the Christmas season of 1934, shortly after the incident with Mr. Kinnell, that Gladys was taken away to a mental institution.

  Grace McKee described Gladys’s breakdown to Berniece in 1942: “When Gladys bought her own place, she brought in an English family to share the house. They stayed until she found out they were treating Norma Jeane unkindly and we got rid of them. The happy days didn’t last long. In a few months Gladys had her nervous breakdown. It seemed like a lot of things happened all at once to put pressure on her. Overwork…the trouble with the English couple. One day she was lying on the couch and she—there were steps in the living room leading upstairs—she started kicking and yelling, staring up at the staircase, and yelling ‘Somebody’s coming down those steps to kill me!’”

  Marilyn told Ben Hecht she was having breakfast when

  Suddenly there was a terrible noise on the stairway outside the kitchen. It was the most frightening noise I’d ever heard. Bangs and thuds kept on as if they would never stop. “Something’s falling down the stairs,” I said. The English woman held me from going to see. Her husband went out and after a time came back into the kitchen.

  “I’ve sent for the police and the ambulance,” he said.

  I asked if it was my mother.

  “Yes,” he said, “but you can’t see her.”

  I stayed in the kitchen and heard people come and try to take my mother away. Nobody wanted me to see her. The Englishman said, “Just stay in the kitchen like a good girl. She’s all right. Nothing serious.” But I went out and looked in the hall. My mother was on her feet. She was screaming and laughing. They took her away to the Norwal
k Mental Hospital…. It was where my mother’s father and my grandmother had been taken when they started screaming and laughing.”

  Gladys was institutionalized at the Norwalk State Hospital for the insane in December 1934, scarcely three months after purchasing her dream house. On January 15, 1935, she was declared legally incompetent. Grace McKee became guardian of the estate and took custody of Norma Jeane. The dream house was sold along with the furnishings to settle Gladys’s debts. The piano was sold to Grace’s aunt, Ana Lower.

  “All the furniture disappeared. The white table, the chairs, the beds and white curtains melted away, and the grand piano, too. The English couple disappeared also,” Marilyn recalled. “Aunt Grace had lost her job at the studio and had to scrape for a living. Although she had no money she continued to look after me…. When she ran out of money and had only a half dollar left for a week’s food, we lived on stale bread and milk. You could buy a sackful of old bread at the Helms Bakery for twenty-five cents. Aunt Grace and I would stand in line for hours waiting to fill our sack. When I looked up at her she would grin at me and say, ‘Don’t worry, Norma Jeane, you’re going to be a beautiful girl when you grow up. I can feel it in my bones…’ She was the first person who ever patted my head or touched my cheek. I can still feel how thrilled I felt when her kind hand touched me.”

  When Grace McKee lost her job at Columbia she had moved in with her mother, Emma Atchinson, who kept an apartment on Lodi Place just off Hollywood Boulevard, and Norma Jeane stayed with Grace at the Atchinson apartment. “I could hear her friends arguing in her room at night when I lay in bed pretending to be asleep,” Marilyn remembered. “They advised her against adopting me because I was certain to become more and more of a responsibility as I grew older. This was on account of my ‘heritage,’ they said. They talked about my mother and her father and brother and grandmother being mental cases and said I would certainly follow in their footsteps. I lay in bed shivering as I listened. I didn’t know what a mental case was, but I knew it wasn’t anything good….”

  It was difficult for Grace to look after Norma Jeane, not only because of her financial situation but because she had fallen in love with “Doc” Goddard, a tall Texan who had also traveled to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. Goddard and Grace were married in Las Vegas on August 17, 1935, and Norma Jeane hoped she would be able to live with them, but it proved to be impractical. “Doc and Aunt Grace were very poor,” Marilyn was to recall, “so they couldn’t care for me, and I think she felt that her responsibility was to her new husband.”

  On the afternoon of September 13, 1935, when Norma Jeane saw “Aunt Grace” packing up her few belongings into a box, she knew she was going away again. Aunt Grace didn’t tell her where she was going, but Aunt Grace had been crying all morning, and Norma Jeane had a sense of foreboding. Getting into the car, they silently drove to Vine Street and turned east on Santa Monica Boulevard until they finally came to El Centro Avenue and headed south. Grace stopped the car in front of a stately three-story colonial brick building at 815 North El Centro. A flagpole stood in the midst of the sweeping lawn surrounding the walkway to the front door.

  “This is where you will live now,” Grace said, “I hope you’ll be happy here. I’ll come and see you as often as I can. They’ll take good care of you—better than I can at home. But I expect soon we’ll get a house and then you will come and live with me again.”

  “Yes, Aunt Gr-Grace,” Norma Jeane dutifully said, taking the box of her belongings and walking with Grace up to the front door. As they rang the bell and waited, Norma Jeane read the words of a bronze plaque beside the entry. It clearly stated, “Los Angeles Orphans’ Home.”

  “Orphan!” she exclaimed. “Bu…But I’m no orphan! I have a mother! I’m not going in there!” she screamed.

  Her body stiffened as the matron opened the door. “I’m not an orphan! My mother’s not d-dead! There’s been some mistake!” she shouted hysterically as she was dragged inside. It was near dinnertime and the wards of the orphanage were in the dining hall having their supper. “There were about a hundred of them eating,” Marilyn remembered. Hearing her screams as she was forcibly ushered into the dining hall, they silently turned to stare at her, and Norma Jeane suddenly became quiet in the paralyzing comprehension that she had become one of them.

  Throughout her school years Norma Jeane was registered under the last name of Baker, and Norma Jeane Baker was registered as the three thousand four hundred and sixty-third child to be admitted to the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. Ten years later number 3,463 would become Marilyn Monroe.

  18

  The Mouse

  You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child, because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

  —Marilyn Monroe

  Norma Jeane slept in a dormitory she shared with twenty-six other girls. After dark she often sat in the window and looked out at the city lights. Not far from the orphanage she could see the giant neon sign on top of the stages of a nearby film studio. “At night, when the other girls were sleeping, I’d sit up in the window and cry because I’d look over and see the studio sign above the roofs in the distance,” Marilyn later recalled. “It was where my mother had worked as a cutter.”

  The studio had been named by Joseph P. Kennedy, who entered the motion-picture business in the year Norma Jeane was born. In 1926 Joe Kennedy was a multimillionaire whose bootlegging operations provided a lucrative income and the foundation for his successful stock market manipulations. In 1928 Kennedy had merged the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) vaudeville circuit to form a motion-picture studio. It was named Radio-Keith-Orpheum and a monumental reproduction of the studio trademark was erected on top of one of the Hollywood soundstages on the corner of Melrose and Gower—only blocks from the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. The large plaster globe with an enormous radio tower on top was brightly illuminated at night, and flashing neon bolts of electricity emanated from the giant letters RKO.

  By 1929 Joe Kennedy had made over five million dollars in his Hollywood ventures, and had established a reputation in the film capital as a shrewd man of numerous business affairs. He was also known for his numerous affairs with budding starlets plucked from the gardens of Hollywood beauties. Stories soon spread of his romances with Marion Davies, Betty Compton, and Gloria Swanson.

  Young Jack Kennedy was also “brought up differently from the average American child.” Looking back on his childhood, Jack said that he was raised in an atmosphere of “institutionalized living.” Surrounded by servants and nannies, the Kennedy children saw little of their mother or father. Joe was frequently busy with his various affairs—always, it seemed, en route to London, or Paris, or Hollywood. When Joe was in London in 1928, Rose wrote him, “I am praying that I shall see you soon. Do pray too, and go to church, as it is very important in my life that you do just that.” But Joe was in London with Gloria Swanson and had little time for prayer. Joe’s priorities were money and women. In Gloria Swanson he found both. One of Hollywood’s top stars, Swanson was beautiful, sophisticated, wealthy—and titled. Her husband was the dashing Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye.

  In the summer of 1927 Joe Kennedy had acquired the Hyannisport summer house on the east coast of Cape Cod that would one day be expanded into the Kennedy compound. Neighbors recalled the extraordinary event that took place in the summer of 1929 when Gloria Swanson arrived at Hyannis: “Miss Swanson and her party landed in the harbor near the breakwater not far from Kennedy’s summer house, in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. Hyannisport residents gaped from the beach as Miss Swanson—petite, chic, flawlessly coiffed and a member of the aristocracy since her marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye—deplaned.”

  It was a bizarre situation. Swanson found it incredible that Rose Kennedy pretended to know nothing of the affair. Swanson wondered, “Was she a fool, I asked myself with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a bett
er actress than I was?”

  The Kennedy children referred to the Hollywood film star as “Aunt Gloria.” Aunt Gloria even left her autograph on the wall of the children’s playhouse, and Jack wrote her a thank-you note for gifts received. According to children of the Kennedy’s neighbors, Joe Kennedy took “Aunt Gloria” sailing in the family sailboat named after Mrs. Kennedy, the “Rose Elizabeth.” He and Swanson were interrupted in their nautical lovemaking by young Jack, who had stowed away aboard the Rose Elizabeth. When he peeked up from below deck and was surprised to find his father on board “Aunt Gloria,” the horrified and bewildered boy panicked and jumped overboard. Joe Kennedy dove in after him and hauled him back to the boat.

  What occurred that summer afternoon in 1929, when Jack was twelve years old, was undoubtedly a traumatic event for this young Catholic boy. But Gloria Swanson was only one of the parade of attractive young women who visited the Kennedy compound. Neighbor Nancy Coleman recalled that Rose Kennedy would be driving out to the airport in her Rolls-Royce for one of her frequent trips abroad, and almost simultaneously Joe Kennedy would be driving into the driveway with a girlfriend. Young Jack and the other sons soon learned that promiscuity was an inherent masculine right.

  “My own special interest in clothes developed during this period,” Rose Kennedy later explained. “Not just from this episode, but from the general circumstances of which it was an especially vivid part…. Obviously, I couldn’t compete in natural beauty, but I could make the most of what I had by keeping my figure trim, my complexion good, my grooming perfect, and by always wearing clothes that were interesting and becoming.”

  During the next few years Rose Kennedy would accomplish this by making at least seventeen trips to Europe in which she would haunt the Paris fashion houses, seeking out the latest styles and shopping for particularly interesting diamond jewelry. Rose confided to a neighbor that she made her husband pay for his infidelity. “I made him give me everything I wanted—clothes, jewels, everything!”