The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “If Gladys can’t raise that child,” Ida told her candidly, “I certainly don’t think you can, either.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” Della told her, “because I’m going to India, and I’m not coming back.”

  None of this made sense to Ida. She was twelve years younger than Della, but it was Della who must have seemed like the immature one to her. At the very least, she couldn’t imagine how this woman could leave the country when her child was in trouble. Moreover, she couldn’t fathom how any mother could ever have allowed her daughter to find herself in such a predicament. “You need to think about this,” Ida told Della. “You and I should discuss this further. We’re both mothers. We know what’s right.”

  In the days to come, Ida’s continuing attempts to alert Della to the seriousness of the task at hand would lead to an unexpected set of circumstances that would alter the lives of everyone involved. No doubt directly related to Ida’s finger-wagging, the day soon came when Della was able to convince Gladys that she should not be the primary caretaker of the baby she was carrying. First of all, it couldn’t be denied that she was a woman to whom the night called—and when it did, she answered with a resounding yes. Also, she too had certain other… problems. Indeed, someone was following Gladys as well. Maybe the same person who had been following Della? Mother and daughter understood each other’s fears because they shared them.

  Eventually, Della Monroe successfully convinced her daughter, Gladys Baker, that when she had her baby, she should “temporarily” place it in the care of the very religious and righteous woman who lived nearby—Ida Bolender.

  Marilyn’s Mother, Gladys

  From all outward appearances, Gladys Pearl Monroe had always seemed like such a happy youngster, surprising considering her tumultuous youth. She was born on May 27, 1900, to Otis and Della Monroe in Piedras Negras, Mexico—at the time called Porfirio Diaz, after Mexico’s president José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori. It was here that her father had found employment with the Pacific Electric Railway. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Los Angeles.

  Gladys’s mother, Della, always caused heads to turn as she sashayed down the street. However, she was apparently as tough as she was eye-catching. Early photographs taken of Gladys’s parents show a handsome, somewhat robust woman with a severe countenance—that would be Della—standing next to a gentleman who looks rather scared to death—Otis. If he ever thought he would be able to tell Della what to do, Otis soon found out it was not the case. Della was never one to acquiesce to anyone’s will. Therefore, the arguments between them started on their honeymoon and never ceased. In one of the family’s photographs Otis has a deep scar on his cheek, and there’s no telling how he got it. However, one thing is clear: He doesn’t have it in pictures taken before he married Della.

  Soon, Gladys and her brother, Marion Otis—born in 1905—became accustomed to a transient lifestyle as the Monroes moved in and out of nearly a dozen different rented apartments and houses in California between 1903 and 1909. Otis, who couldn’t keep a job, began to live a reckless and cavalier life. Not only was his drinking a growing problem, but he also started having sudden blackouts and frightening memory lapses.

  By 1908, when Otis was just forty-one, his health and emotional state had declined so rapidly it became clear that something was very wrong with him. He was temperamental and unpredictable, and his body seemed to always be in a tremulous state. His headaches would become so numbing and severe, he could barely stand. When not physically debilitated, he was filled with blind rage. On occasions when he would fly into fits of fury, Della would have no choice but to take their frightened children to a neighbor’s home and wait for the storm to pass. Doctors were at a complete loss to explain Otis’s mystifying behavior. “Otis has lost his mind, and I’m just going to have to come to terms with it,” Della wrote in a letter at this time.

  In 1909, Otis Monroe died of syphilis of the brain. He was just forty-three. “How will I explain this to my children?” Della asked the doctors at the hospital. Because the professionals were of no help to her, Della simply told Gladys, nine, and Marion, four, that their father had gone mad and died. In years to come, some family members would argue that he actually hadn’t died an insane man but rather had contracted syphilis, which then led to his death. Others would say that it was precisely because of the syphilis that he had gone insane. Back in the early 1900s, though, such distinctions were generally not made outside of the medical community. “He went nuts and then went to God,” is how Della described it, and she hoped that would be the end of it. However, this would most certainly not be the end of it. In fact, a fear of genetic madness would hold the Monroe descendants in its suffocating grip for decades to come—and it all started with Della’s declaration that Otis Monroe’s death was the direct result of insanity.

  After Otis passed away, Della—just thirty-three years old—was on her own with two small children. She was attractive and usually fun to be around, but she could also be unpredictably volatile and, if in one of her moods of despair, even morose. In March 1912, when she was thirty-five, she married a railway switchman supervisor named Lyle Arthur Graves, six years her junior. That union was over quickly. After the divorce, Della began to date an assortment of characters, some respectable but most unsavory, who came and went from her life swiftly, most not before spending at least one amorous night with her. In fact, it was at this time, after the end of her second marriage, that Della developed a looser sense of morality and didn’t seem particularly concerned as to how it might adversely affect or otherwise influence her two children, Gladys, who was now twelve, and Marion, seven.

  By the time she was a teenager, Gladys Monroe wore her chestnut brown hair—though it sometimes appeared more reddish—in soft waves and long curls that cascaded luxuriously down her back. She was a real looker, with Wedgwood blue eyes, a full mouth, a dazzling set of white teeth, and skin that glowed with vitality. Enviably thin and petite, as an adult she would grow to only five feet tall. However, an oversized personality and captivating quality made her well-liked at school and the life of any party.

  When Gladys was about sixteen, her mother banished Marion, eleven, from the household. Because he was constantly in trouble at school and obstreperous at home, Della didn’t know what to do with him. Disciplining him didn’t seem to work. Stubborn and willful, he tried her patience. Therefore, one morning she collected all of his toys and tossed them into a pillowcase. Then, as Marion cried softly in the backseat and Gladys sat quietly staring straight ahead in the front passenger seat, Della drove to San Diego. There she left the boy in the care of a cousin, and that was the last anyone ever heard of Marion.

  At about this same time, in 1916, Gladys met a young businessman named John Newton Baker, known primarily as Jasper. He’d just moved to Los Angeles from Kentucky after serving in the military. Jasper was tall and lanky with a lean, angular face and straight dark hair that he parted with great purpose to one side. Seeming genuinely interested in Gladys from the start, he not only wanted to hear about her many problems at home but also assist her in coming up with reasonable solutions. Twelve years her senior, he had more experience than her and seemed eager to insulate her from her troubled life and maybe even protect her from future heartache. Therefore, when he asked for her hand in marriage, she eagerly agreed. Della not only accepted the coupling of her young daughter with Jasper, she wholeheartedly encouraged it.

  Sixteen-year-old Gladys Monroe took John Newton Baker as her husband on May 17, 1917. They had two children, Robert Kermit—nicknamed Jack—and Berniece, before their marriage began to crumble. It turned out that Jasper was an alcoholic with a violent temper. He beat Gladys, making her young life a misery, often striking her about the head and twice giving her concussions. When she finally divorced him, Jasper took both of their children and moved to Kentucky because he’d decided she’d been an unfit mother. Gladys didn’t have any say in the matter, and she certainly didn’t have
the money for an attorney.

  In 1924 Gladys, who was twenty-four, took a second husband, Martin Edward Mortenson—known as Edward. The twenty-seven-year-old son of Norwegian immigrants, Mortenson was not classically handsome in the strictest sense of the word, but he was nonetheless a good-looking man with a broad brow, high cheekbones, and a full, wide smile. Tall and solid, he seemed like a stable and amiable fellow who only wanted to please and take care of his new wife. It was impossible for him to do so, though, because by the time she was in her mid-twenties it was clear that something was terribly wrong with Gladys. Like her mother, she began experiencing mood swings and crying jags. With the marriage all but over after just four months, Edward Mortenson filed for divorce.

  Once she felt free of her matrimonial bonds, though she was not yet divorced, Gladys Baker mirrored her mother’s behavior and became notoriously promiscuous. Taking many lovers, she developed a terrible reputation at her job at Consolidated Studios, where she worked as a film editor or “cutter.” Soon she began an affair with a man named Charles Stanley Gifford, a sales manager at the company.

  Stanley Gifford was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1898. When he was twenty-seven, he moved to Los Angeles after an unsuccessful marriage during which he had fathered two children. He found employment at Consolidated, as foreman of the day shift. When Gladys met him, she fell hard. A good-looking man with a thin mustache, dark eyes, and wavy jet black hair, he was both elegant and distinctive. Debonair and personable, he was a real lady-killer. He had a quick wit, a wonderful sense of humor, and, as someone who came from a family with a little money, he also enjoyed the occasional game of polo. His family had made a fortune in the shipbuilding business and Gifford was well-off enough to be able to afford two houses in Los Angeles during the Depression, a bleak period when most people were fortunate to even have one.

  “He had a decent job,” says his son, Charles Stanley Gifford, who today is eighty-six years old. “He had a good life. Along with polo, he enjoyed hunting and fishing. I was born in 1922, and he and my mother divorced in 1926. Still, he was a wonderful father to both me and my sister. I knew the only three women that he seriously dated over the years. He married two of them, my mother and then his second wife, Mary. Gladys was not one of the three women. The other one was a Catholic woman, a very nice lady he decided not to marry for his own personal reasons—not Gladys. I don’t believe he was ever serious about Gladys, or he would have told me about it at one time or another over the years. He said he knew her, they dated casually, but that was it. The truth is that Gladys was a very attractive woman and she dated many people back then.”

  In late 1925, Gladys learned that she was pregnant. But who was the father? It’s been published repeatedly over the years that Gladys didn’t have a clue, that she wasn’t keeping score of her lovers, she was just enjoying them. That’s not the case, though. In fact, she always insisted that Stanley Gifford was the father of her child, and she never wavered from that belief. Biographers and other historians over the years have simply not wanted to believe her, citing her mental instability and promiscuity as reasons for doubt. However, it seems unfair to conclude that just because Gladys had serious problems, her identification of her daughter’s paternity should be completely dismissed, especially since she was so consistent about it over the years.

  In 1925, when Gladys told Stanley Gifford he was the father of her child, he refused to accept responsibility, claiming that he knew she’d been with other men. The more she insisted, the angrier he got, until finally he stormed off. She would see him a few more times, but he simply never believed her. She knew she would have to raise the child on her own, and was prepared to do so—or at least that’s what she thought at the time.

  In the 1940s, as we will later see, Gladys would continue to insist that Gifford was the baby’s father. Then, in the 1960s, she would again confirm what she had been saying all along about him. In fact, in 1962, right after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Gladys discussed the actress’s paternity with Rose Anne Cooper, a young nurse’s aide at the Rock Haven Sanitarium in La Crescenta. Cooper was just twenty at the time she worked there. Gladys was sixty-two. “She was very clear,” recalls Cooper. “She said that she’d been intimate with a number of men, and she talked about her past, openly saying that when she was young she was, as she put it, ‘very wild.’ However, she said that the only kind of intimacy that could have resulted in a pregnancy was what she had shared with the man she called ‘Stan Gifford.’ She said she had always been bothered by the fact that no one seemed to want to believe her, but that it was the truth. She said that even her own mother didn’t believe her. ‘Everyone thought I was lying,’ she said, ‘or that I just didn’t know. I knew. I always knew.’ ”

  Norma Jeane Is Born

  On the morning of June 1, 1926, Della Monroe’s daughter, Gladys Baker, gave birth to a child in the charity ward of the Los Angeles General Hospital (known today as the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center at 1200 North State Street). A collection had been taken up from concerned coworkers at Consolidated in order to tide Gladys over until she could return to work, and also for any medical expenses that would not be covered by charity. As she lay in the recovery room, bone tired from hours of labor, there was of course no expectant father pacing in a waiting room hoping for news about his child’s arrival. Even her own mother was nowhere in sight since she’d taken off for India the previous December.

  It should be remembered that during this period, there was a tremendous judgment on single mothers. No doubt Gladys could feel the condemnation directed toward her from the nurses at General Hospital. The paperwork she was required to fill out upon admittance did little to quiet any uneasiness she felt because of her situation. For instance, one of the first questions asked on the form was the father’s name. Gladys wrote that a man named Edward Mortenson was the baby’s father, even though she had been separated from him for some time. She also misspelled his name as “Mortensen.” That she and the father didn’t share a last name was controversial enough, but it was the response to the next question that was sure to start tongues wagging: father’s residence. Examining the paperwork from that day as filled out by Gladys, the word “unknown” appears to be scrawled in a bolder, more deliberate handwriting. Indeed, filling out this paperwork had to have been difficult for her. She provided her address, which was no problem. Then, in answering the question of how many children she’d previously given birth to, her reply was “three”—odd, since she hadn’t yet had the third. The next question—“Number of children of this mother now living”—was either answered incorrectly or dishonestly, depending on her understanding of it. She said that only “one” of those three was still living. Of course, she had borne two other children, who were presently being raised by her ex-husband, Jasper. Yes, Gladys did have a colorful past. Maybe she’d been deliberately dishonest in order to garner sympathy from an attending nurse. Perhaps she thought that if her first two children had passed away, she could be forgiven for having this third child out of wedlock. Whatever her reasoning, the questions put to her and the way she responded certainly suggest that the day was difficult her. Years later she told a friend, “I keep dreaming of that [hospital]. Everything seemed bright, too bright, and the nurses all seemed like nuns to me, mean awful nuns.”

  As is the case with many women, Gladys had a major emotional spiral immediately after the birth. Postpartum depression may have been a factor. It certainly appeared to many people in the family that her mother, Della, suffered from it as well—and maybe never got past it. Whatever the case, Gladys seemed disoriented and troubled for many days after giving birth. When the nurse brought the baby into the recovery room, the tiny child was placed on her mother’s chest. “She just held her, with her eyes closed,” Della later wrote to a family member when speaking of that moment, even though she wasn’t present for it. “I feel awful. I know she can’t keep [the baby]. She is not well. She needs to get her mind right first.”

/>   Gladys would have two weeks with her baby girl before she would have to do what she had agreed to do: Before her mother had left town, Gladys had agreed to hand over the infant to a stranger, Ida Bolender. During those two weeks, something dreadful occurred, making it clear that the arrangement made between Della and Ida was necessary. A friend and coworker of Gladys’s at Consolidated Studios named Grace McKee came by the house to take care of the baby for an afternoon while Gladys went grocery shopping. (Grace would play a very important role in the lives of Gladys and Norma Jeane in years to come.) When Gladys returned, she went into a manic state for reasons unknown and began to accuse Grace of poisoning the child. One thing led to another, and somehow Grace ended up on the receiving end of a kitchen knife, stabbed by Gladys. Though Grace’s wound was superficial, it was clear that Gladys could be a danger to her baby. After that violent episode, which panicked and bewildered everyone, it was an easy decision to turn Norma Jeane over to Ida.

  The emotionally charged transfer happened on June 13, 1926—that was the sad day Gladys Baker showed up on Ida Bolender’s doorstep with a two-week-old infant. After a long and difficult farewell, she walked out the front door of Ida’s house without the child named Norma Jeane Mortensen. * Norma Jeane was a help less infant who had entered this world without any form of welcome. There was no freshly furnished nursery awaiting her, no tiny wardrobe, and in fact no one on earth whose future plans included her. She spent the first few days of her life simply being sustained, not nurtured. She was a burden, one that needed to be unloaded. No one can know for certain, but it very well may have been at a tender age that she began to sense that something wasn’t quite right in her world—that there wasn’t sufficient attention being paid her. Indeed, she would spend much of the rest of her life trying to change those circumstances—but to do so, she would need to one day become… Marilyn Monroe.