Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  In June 1933 Norma Jeane’s mother, currently working as a film cutter at both Columbia Pictures and RKO Studios, suddenly decided to reclaim her seven-year-old daughter from the Bolenders. For a brief period, they resided in a small rental apartment in North Hollywood, while Gladys put the finishing touches on a six-room bungalow she’d acquired on Arbol Drive, a short distance from the Hollywood Bowl. To help with the monthly mortgage payments, Gladys rented out one of the bungalow’s three bedrooms to an English couple, George and Maude Atkinson. Among the items she acquired for Norma Jeane was a white lacquered baby grand piano (and matching bench) that had once belonged to actor Fredric March. She also gave her daughter a set of Glenn Miller records and a windup portable Victrola. At the beginning of September, Gladys enrolled Norma Jeane in the Selma Street Elementary School. Determined to succeed in her new role as a doting parent, Gladys altered her work schedule so that she could take Norma Jeane to school in the morning and retrieve her in the afternoon. She used a small inheritance from her mother’s estate to hire a part-time housekeeper to help with chores and prepare meals. But by the end of 1933, Gladys had run out of cash and had to let the housekeeper go. It was the same year that Tilford Hogan, Gladys’s grandfather, committed suicide by hanging himself, some said, with a shower curtain.

  For all Gladys Baker’s noble intentions, her plan to create a home for her daughter soon went awry. As the months passed, her behavior grew increasingly erratic. She took a medical leave of absence from her job and began spending more and more time in bed. At night, Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, she could hear “the lady with red hair” weeping in the other room. Gladys no longer bothered to change her clothing. On the rare occasions she went out, she always wore the same baggy black dress. Her hair was matted. She had stopped bathing. For hours she would stand at the window of her bedroom, staring out, motionless. One night Norma Jeane lay next to her in bed, clasping her hand. Not knowing what to do or say, she told her mother she loved her. It was the night she realized Gladys wasn’t well and wasn’t going to get better.

  Returning home from school the next day, Norma Jeane found her mother in bed, her nightgown hiked up to her waist, her legs coated with a patchwork of urine and feces. A foul odor filled the room. Gladys addressed her as if in a trance.

  “I saw God this morning,” she said. “He’s a little old man, lives in a cabin in the woods. Seems like a nice guy. He’s a vegetarian. Grandpa Til and Mama Della were with him. Mama had flowers in her hair and seemed happy to see me. ‘It’s not so bad here,’ she said. ‘It really isn’t. You ought to stay for a while. You’d like it. And next time bring Norma Jeane. I want to see her again.’ ”

  “There’s something almost comical about the situation, but it isn’t difficult to imagine how frightening all this must have been for a young child,” remarked Rose Fromm. “It made her realize just how alone she was in the world. Nobody, not even Gladys, ever treated her like a real daughter. Nobody had ever held her. No one kissed her. Nobody.”

  In January 1934 Gladys Baker was carted off to a rest home in Santa Monica. From there she went to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital, where Norma Jeane was born, before being transferred to the Norwalk State Asylum, where Della had perished in 1927. At Norwalk, Gladys was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia—the same mental illness that had led to the deaths of her parents and grandfather. Marilyn Monroe feared, not without cause, that the dreaded disease would one day invade her own mind and destroy her life as surely as it had wrecked the lives of so many others in her family.

  The baby grand that her mother had bought for her—a token of what Gladys had hoped would be a prolonged period of familial bliss—was sold following Gladys’s institutionalization. Years later, Marilyn tracked down the piano, purchased it, and had it installed first in an apartment she leased in 1953 in Beverly Hills and then in her New York apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street, a sentimental reminder of the woman who had originally given it to her.

  Another item in the Arbol Drive house that didn’t go unnoticed by Norma Jeane was a small framed photograph of a man with dark hair, even features, and a mustache, which had been mounted on the wall over Gladys’s dresser. “When I asked her who he was,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “she said, ‘He’s just an old friend.’ I later learned it was a picture of my father, Charles Stanley Gifford. He resembled Clark Gable. One day I came across an eight-by-ten-inch photo of Mr. Gable in a memorabilia shop and bought it. I’d look at it now and then and say, ‘That’s my father—that’s him!’ ”

  So that she could complete the year without having to switch schools, it was decided Norma Jeane would continue living with the Atkinsons at the same address. Gladys’s boarders undertook the task of looking after the child, which they did for several months until a death in the family forced the Atkinsons to return to England. Once again Norma Jeane found herself in transition, going from one foster home to another until finally she was taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Giffen, former friends of Gladys Baker. Harvey, a sound engineer with the Radio Corporation of America, gave her tennis and sketching lessons. The living arrangement appeared to suit everyone until Harvey’s employer reassigned him to a new position in Mississippi. Preparing to leave, the Giffens offered to adopt Norma Jeane and take her along. The prospect of staying with a family she had quickly grown to like appealed to the child, but Gladys, presently undergoing electroshock therapy, wouldn’t allow it.

  The Arbol Drive bungalow was repossessed and put up for sale, and, in a sense, so too was Norma Jeane. Grace McKee, a film librarian at Columbia Pictures when Gladys Baker worked there, had become friendly with both Gladys and her daughter. Not that Gladys and Grace had always gotten along. Allegedly, Gladys once accused Grace of trying to poison her. In retaliation for this imagined misdeed, Gladys attacked Grace with a butcher knife. The police were called, and Gladys was led away in handcuffs.

  Nevertheless, insofar as she had no children of her own, Grace McKee volunteered to become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian. Because she wasn’t married at the time and because the guardianship papers hadn’t yet been processed, she decided to place the child with the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society (now Hollygrove), at 815 North El Centro Avenue in Los Angeles, not far from the same RKO Studios where Gladys Baker had previously worked. Norma Jeane entered the orphanage in September 1935 and remained until the end of June 1937, a total of twenty-one months. She was assigned bed number 27 (of sixty-five beds) and told that her mandatory chores included scrubbing the latrine and waiting on tables in the dining hall. She called the facility “the child factory” and later claimed that being there had been the worst experience she’d ever had to endure.

  “They taught her how to swim at a nearby public swimming facility,” said Dr. Rose Fromm, “and that’s the extent of it.” The child’s only respite from the dreariness of the institution came when she attended day school during the week and on occasional Saturdays when Grace McKee would take her out for the afternoon, typically to Hollywood Boulevard for a matinee at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. Afterward, they’d have ice cream cones and watch the caged monkeys in front of the theater.

  The girls at the orphanage were required to wear a prisonlike uniform consisting of a formless skirt and faded gray blouse. Whenever one of them celebrated a birthday, the orphanage provided a birthday cake. After the birthday celebrant blew out the candles, the cake would be taken away only to reappear on the occasion of the next girl’s birthday party. In other words, they didn’t get to eat the cake; they only got to look at it. What made this cruel exercise seem even more extreme was the ordinariness of the food they did get to eat: oatmeal for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, and broiled chicken for dinner. The menu rarely varied. To escape the orphanage’s stultifying atmosphere, Norma Jeane would often retreat to a deck on the roof of the building and peruse Hollywood fan magazines that Grace would bring her whenever she visited.

 
Marilyn recalled for Dr. Fromm the process whereby couples hoping to adopt an orphan would drop by the administration offices to browse through a catalogue containing photographs and descriptions of the girls. When they came across a photo that interested them, the child would be delivered to the office for a personal meeting. If all went well, the prospective adoptee would spend a trial week or two with her new family. As often as not, the child would be rejected by the couple and returned to the orphanage. Because Norma Jeane had already been “spoken for” by Grace McKee, she was ineligible for general adoption and therefore spared the indignity of what she called “the dog pound” experience. “It’s bad enough to live in a dog pound,” she told Rose Fromm, “but it’s ten times worse to be thrown back in.”

  • • •

  On the tenth of August, 1935, Grace McKee married Ervin “Doc” Goddard, a failed actor then working as a technician in a precision instruments company. Ten years younger than Grace, Goddard had three children from an earlier marriage. He also had a drinking problem, and as Marilyn assessed it, “was drunk more often than he wasn’t.” Doc’s alcoholism notwithstanding, Norma Jeane felt a burden had been lifted when she moved out of the “child factory” and in with the Goddards, who had set up some semblance of a household at 6707 Odessa Avenue in Van Nuys, California. She felt comfortable enough with Grace and looked forward to the prospect of becoming the newest member of a close-knit family.

  But if one burden had been lifted, another would soon take its place. “Daddy Doc”—Norma Jeane’s nickname for Grace’s husband—complained that the eleven-year-old daughter of his wife’s “insane friend” represented nothing more than “another unnecessary mouth to feed.” Grace subsequently applied for and received a fairly substantial court-mandated monthly foster family stipend to cover the cost of Norma Jeane’s room and board. Doc Goddard withdrew his objection.

  Eleanor “Bebe” Goddard, one of Doc’s three children, described her foster sister as “kind and fun-loving—she had a good sense of humor and liked to laugh.” Eighteen months younger than Norma Jeane, Bebe freely admitted that her father spent his evenings hanging out in the taverns and bistros of Van Nuys, and that Grace too had become a heavy drinker. “Aunt Grace considered herself my substitute mother,” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm, “but I never recognized her as such. When it came to Doc, Grace was overly indulgent. She let him get away with murder.”

  It wasn’t murder, but it was serious enough. In late 1937, following a usual nightly stopover at a local watering hole, Doc Goddard stumbled home, barged into Norma Jeane’s bedroom, and proceeded to abuse her sexually. Although he didn’t rape her, he evidently molested her. Norma Jeane said nothing at the time, but Grace Goddard must have sensed something because she arranged for the child to move in with Ida Martin, Norma Jeane’s great aunt. A strict, evangelical Christian, Ida had a house in Compton, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. To help cover expenses, Grace Goddard paid Ida Martin $30.

  Doc Goddard wasn’t the only sexual predator Marilyn Monroe encountered while growing up. An elderly male boarder had accosted her during her stay with the Bolenders and had given her a nickel in exchange for her silence. Although she reported the incident to Mrs. Bolender, the woman refused to believe Norma Jeane, insisting the boarder was “a nice gentleman” who “wouldn’t harm a flea”—if Norma Jeane repeated her lie, she would have to be punished. And then there was her teenaged cousin, Jack, the son of Gladys Baker’s brother, who also apparently took liberties with the child. But the Doc Goddard affair was the most upsetting, because Norma Jeane had come to regard him as something of a father figure. Whatever faith and trust she had invested in their relationship had been abruptly and permanently destroyed.

  After moving in with Ida Martin, Norma Jeane entered the sixth grade at the Lankersham School in North Los Angeles. A schoolmate, Roxanne Smith, with whom she became friendly, lived within walking distance of the school. Before long, Norma Jeane began spending a day or two each week with the Smiths, sharing Roxanne’s bedroom. Despite the best efforts of the dozens of biographers who have written about Marilyn Monroe over the years, the relationship that developed between Norma Jeane and Roxanne has never come to light. Though she herself never mentioned it in her memoir (or anywhere else), that it made an impression on young Marilyn is evidenced by the detailed description she provided Dr. Rose Fromm, replete with recalled snippets of actual conversation.

  Roxanne, like Norma Jeane, was pretty and well developed for her age. Roxanne’s favorite pastime, as Marilyn remembered it, entailed “staring at herself in the mirror.” That she was attracted to Norma Jeane became evident by virtue of the effusive compliments she lavished upon her. Roxanne’s bedroom contained twin beds, but one night that winter she said to Norma Jeane, “It’s cold. Can I just climb into bed with you for a minute?” Without waiting for an answer, she slid into Norma Jeane’s bed. “It’s freezing,” she said, hugging Norma Jeane tenderly. Norma Jeane pulled away.

  “I’m just trying to warm myself,” Roxanne remarked.

  Not certain what her schoolmate wanted of her, Norma Jeane twisted herself so that her back faced the girl. Roxanne persevered. “Do you want a back rub?” she asked. She began massaging Norma Jeane’s shoulders in soft, soothing movements. She continued in silence, her fingers inching their way down Norma Jeane’s back, and up under her pajama top, then down again until they reached the upper part of her backside.

  “Why are you doing this to me, Roxanne?” Norma Jeane asked.

  “Relax,” whispered the girl, “just relax.”

  Norma Jeane moved away until she reached the edge of the bed and could go no farther. Without breaking her rhythm, Roxanne followed and snuggled even closer.

  It became clear to Norma Jeane that Roxanne, a year older and far more experienced, had overcome the objections of other visiting girlfriends. Norma Jeane was no match for her seducer. Yet she was determined to make one final effort. She turned around and faced her bedmate. “I want you to go back to your side of the room,” she insisted in as officious a tone as she could muster.

  “I guess my voice had no conviction,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “because she not only didn’t budge, she proceeded to unbutton my pajama top and her own as well. She then rolled me onto my back and out of my bottoms. She began to kiss me and didn’t stop until I began to cry.” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm she couldn’t recall exactly how she felt about the experience, only that she never returned to Roxanne Smith’s home and in addition cut off all further contact with her in school.

  “If anything,” said Marilyn, “I probably felt betrayed.”

  In the fall of 1938, Norma Jeane went to live with (Edith) Ana Lower, Grace McKee Goddard’s fifty-eight-year-old aunt, at her two-family Nebraska Avenue home in Sawtelle, at the time a lower-middle-class section of Los Angeles. A divorcee, “Aunt Ana,” more than anybody else, became Norma Jeane’s true surrogate mother. “She was the first person in the world I ever really loved, and who in turn loved me,” Marilyn told Dr. Fromm. “She was a wonderful human being. She never hurt me, not once. She was very spiritual, always consulting Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, the Christian Science handbook, constantly reading me excerpts from it and, like the Bolenders, forever dragging me to church. But it didn’t bother me. Aunt Ana was all light and kindness. I used to tell her all my little dreams and fantasies about wanting to become an actress. ‘You’re going to be a star, Norma Jeane,’ she’d say. She wasn’t rich. She rented out the bottom floor of her house to make money. And though she didn’t have much, she paid for my voice, dance, and piano lessons. Nobody else ever cared what became of me. She did. The sad thing is she died in March 1948, before I began to make a name for myself, so she never knew whether she was right or wrong about my future. But had she lived, she would’ve been thrilled for me.”

  Living with Ana had only one drawback: she refused to install a telephone in her home. She maintained that people would call at all hours, and she didn’t want to be
disturbed. This made it difficult for Norma Jeane to have friends over for playdates. Yet Ana’s essential goodness and her openness afforded Norma Jeane a sense of security she hadn’t felt before. It was Ana who revealed the identity of the man in the photograph Norma Jeane had seen in her mother’s bedroom, telling her all she knew about C. Stanley Gifford. It was also Aunt Ana who informed her that Gladys Baker, her mother, had recently attempted to escape from the mental hospital at Norwalk and as a result had been transferred to the more secure Agnew State Asylum in San Francisco.

  On June 1, 1939, Norma Jeane’s thirteenth birthday, she accompanied Ana Lower and Grace Goddard to San Francisco for a visit with her mother. Recalling the encounter for Dr. Fromm, Marilyn said, “She looked as though she’d been lobotomized. She wasn’t there. I mean she was there physically but not mentally. She didn’t speak, just sat on the bed, looking frightened and lost.”

  On the train ride back to Los Angeles, Norma Jeane learned from Ana that she had an older half sister named Berniece, who had similarly just learned of Norma Jeane’s existence and had reached out to her by way of a written note. Although Berniece and Norma Jeane didn’t meet until 1944 (after Berniece had married and become a mother), by the fall of 1939, they were in touch with each other via telephone and letter. Norma Jeane informed her half sister that she’d enrolled at Emerson Junior High School, where her favorite subjects became English literature and Spanish. Her least favorite: cooking. She enjoyed athletics, especially track and field. She’d joined the staff of the school newspaper and had developed an interest in acting. She looked forward to performing in school plays and thought that one day she might want to be in the movies. All in all, she sounded like a typical, happy-go-lucky teenager without a care in the world rather than a fatherless child whose schizophrenic mother was locked away in an insane asylum and whose foster father had sexually molested her.