The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Della’s Terrible Fate

  Within just days of surrendering Norma Jeane to Ida and Albert Wayne Bolender, Gladys Baker began to feel remorse over the decision. “It occurred to her, I think, that maybe she could have done for this child what her mother had not done for her—love her, be there for her,” said one of her family members. The deal was that she would pay the Bolenders twenty-five dollars per week to raise Norma Jeane, which she did the entire time Norma Jeane was in their care. In the beginning, though, she gave them a few extra dollars a week so that she could stay with them on occasional weekends and at least be with her baby. That didn’t last long, though. “The truth was that Gladys had a problem watching Ida raise her child,” said Mary Thomas-Strong, whose mother was a close friend of Ida’s. “Ida could be strict and controlling. She felt she knew what was right. She was a professional mother, in a sense. She wanted to have her way with Norma Jeane and it was hard for Gladys to be on the sidelines. Therefore, she moved back to Hollywood determined to visit the baby every weekend. She was back and forth a lot.” In a 1930 census the Bolenders and Gladys were reported to live all in the same household.

  Adding to Gladys’s bewilderment at this time was the arrival of her mother, Della, who returned from India with malaria. Her “husband” Charles Grainger decided not to come back to the States with her, leaving most people to believe that their relationship was over. Della was delusional and sick with a fever for many weeks. It took a terrible toll on her.

  In summer of 1927, Della walked across the street from her home to the Bolenders’ with the intention of seeing Norma Jeane. She banged on the front door, but Ida didn’t want to let her into the house. It’s unknown why Ida took this position, but she may have felt that Della was out of control and a danger to the baby. Indeed, Della broke the door’s glass with her elbow and let herself in. The family history has it that she confronted Ida and said she believed that Norma Jeane was dead and that no one had told her or Gladys. Alarmed and not knowing how to handle the situation, Ida let Della see Norma Jeane sleeping in her crib. She went to get Della a glass of water and when she returned she found Della smothering the baby with a pillow. “Ida became almost hysterical,” said one friend of Gladys’s in the telling of the story. “She grabbed the child. Della said that the baby’s pillow had slipped and she was simply readjusting it. But Ida was very upset and demanded that Della leave the house.” Marilyn Monroe—and even the Bolenders—would tell variations of this story many times over the years.

  “Ida and Wayne called the police,” said Mary Thomas-Strong. “When they came, they found a very mixed-up Della babbling incoherently. With Norma Jeane crying in her bedroom, and Ida shouting accusations at Della, it was such a chaotic scene the police didn’t know what to do about it. So they escorted Della back to her house and left her there. What they should have done was taken her to a hospital.”

  For a long time, Della had been filled with an aching sadness. Now it was not only more acute but had also turned into abject anger directed at whoever happened to be in the room with her—and unfortunately, that was usually Gladys, who had recently moved in with her mother to care for her. After a battery of tests, it was determined that Della was suffering from a weakened heart, and probably heart disease as well. Of course, that diagnosis certainly did not account for her many years of unpredictable behavior, which had started back when she gave birth to her children. Once she began taking the prescribed medication, things went from bad to worse. Her swift decline reminded some family members of the sudden descent into madness that had been suffered by Della’s late husband, Otis. Gladys couldn’t help but fear the worst. The horrifying likelihood was that the same thing that had happened to her father was now afflicting her mother.

  A few nights after Gladys moved into the house with her, Della came rushing into her bedroom screaming that Charles Grainger had broken into the house and raped her. Gladys didn’t even have to check the property to verify that Grainger wasn’t on it—she just knew he wasn’t. However, there was no calming Della that night. A couple of days later, she started to complain that the local butcher had put shards of glass in her ground beef. Then, a week later, on August 1, Della took a turn for the worse, so much so that Gladys and Grace had to rush her back to the doctor. “He said there was no doubt about it, Della needed to be institutionalized,” said Mary Thomas-Strong. “Gladys couldn’t believe it. She wasn’t going to allow it. But then the strangest thing happened.”

  According to the family’s history, handed down a generation, on August 3 mother and daughter were having a silent and contemplative meal at the kitchen table. Perhaps Gladys was trying to sort through her emotions, maybe attempting to divine how she might proceed with her mother. Over the years, Della had become Gladys’s most loyal confidante. After all, mother and daughter shared the same kinds of mental problems, and often one would have to convince the other that the voices being “heard” were not real, that the people “watching” were imaginary. How could Gladys say goodbye to Della now? In her absence, who would be there for her? She had already lost her three children, and now her mother, this woman sitting across from her with an empty look in her eyes? Gladys couldn’t accept it, especially with the knowledge that when her father had been sent to a similar place, he never returned. His fate had rarely left her thoughts, especially during the last couple of weeks.

  Suddenly, in a moment of surprising lucidity, Della looked up from her plate and stared at her daughter with sad eyes. “You must let me go, Gladys,” she said earnestly. “It’s time for me to go. I want to go.” Mother and daughter looked intently at each other for a long, infinitely heartbreaking moment. Then, as the tears began to roll down Gladys’s face, Della went back to her meal.

  On August 4, 1927, Della Monroe was taken to the Norwalk State Hospital. Nineteen days later, on August 23, she died. She was buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Whittier, California, next to her first husband, Otis. She was just fifty-one.

  Living with the Bolenders

  By the time she was three, in 1929, Norma Jeane Mortensen was an extraordinarily pretty girl with honey blonde curls and baby blue eyes. Hers was a face that somehow seemed perfect, as if carved from pale, polished marble. It was difficult for anyone to just pass her by without taking notice. Interestingly, despite all of the confusion around her during these early years, she seemed remarkably well-adjusted to her life at the Bolenders’. She was not unhappy. “We treated her like our own child,” Ida Bolender said in 1966, “because we loved her.” However, in years to come, writers would paint a very bleak picture of this time in Marilyn’s life.

  “I guess there was an effort to sensationalize things,” says Nancy Jeffrey, the only surviving member of the foster Bolender siblings. “Because of the way things turned out for Norma Jeane, every one of her biographers over the years has wanted to make it sound like it was awful at our home, but I’m the only one of us still alive and I can tell you that it wasn’t. Norma Jeane was happy in our home. It was a loving family, just a happy home full of children. Mother was very industrious, too. She made all of our clothes for us. She loved us beyond words and she hung on to us. She didn’t want anything to happen to us. Whenever we left the house, I don’t care where we were going, she would say, ‘Stop just for a second,’ and she would then say a quick prayer for our safety.”

  Of course, a big part of the problem was that Marilyn constantly referred to her impoverished background when she became famous, and very often made the circumstances of her first seven years seem much worse than they were. Jeffrey says that when Ida was alive, she was “very upset” by the mischaracterizations of Norma Jeane’s time in the Bolender household.

  On Ida and Wayne Bolender’s two-acre agricultural property in Hawthorne, they raised chickens and goats and grew vegetables. “We grew up on fresh tomatoes, corn on the cob, watermelon, green beans, and squash,” recalls Nancy Jeffrey. “We also had trees that were full of plums, apples, and lemons. There was one huge
fig tree that Norma Jeane and Lester—our foster brother who was the only one Mother and Daddy actually adopted—loved to climb. They would drag blankets up there and make a fort for themselves. We also had chickens and rabbits, and Daddy even bought a goat because a couple of us were allergic to cow’s milk as little children. It wasn’t necessary to go to the store often, but on those occasions when we did go Daddy would drive us in his Model T Ford and we would wait in the car while Mother shopped. We played guessing games of the surrounding sights, sang favorite songs, or Daddy would tell us stories. Another childhood memory was that on rainy days we had to stay in the house, so we would make a fort under the dining room table, leaning the top of the chairs around it for rooms. Then we would cover it all with blankets. Mother even let us eat lunch under there at times. Norma Jeane loved that.”

  The house itself, at 459 East Rhode Island Street, * was small and cramped, a ramshackle-looking structure in the middle of what must have seemed to little children to be… nowhere. During the seven years Norma Jeane would live there, quite a few children came and went, but there were five foster children who were there most, if not all, of the time: the aforementioned Lester, plus Mumsy, Alvina, Noel, and Nancy. “Around the time of the Depression, a lot of parents simply didn’t have the resources to care for their own children,” recalls Nancy Jeffrey, “so they would drop them off in foster homes until they were ready to take proper care of them. It was a common thing.” From all accounts, Norma Jeane got along well with all of her foster siblings, especially with Lester, who was two months younger.

  Wayne Bolender was an amiable and openhearted fellow who was pleasant to everyone and had always eagerly embraced the idea of raising foster children. He was wiry, with light gray eyes behind thick tortoiseshell glasses, and the most prominent feature on his face was his very large nose. He had a jolly air about him. Sturdy and dependable, as a mail carrier for the United States Postal Service he would work the same route for thirty-five years (48th Street and Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles). “He loved being with the kids,” says one source who knew the Bolenders, “and the kids loved him. He was devoutly Baptist, like Ida. He had a little printing press in the house and he would make prayer cards for the church with it.”

  Though they shared many of the same ideals, Wayne and Ida didn’t have much of a relationship. He and Ida rarely spoke and when they did it was usually Ida chastising him for some perceived transgression or insisting he do something he obviously did not want to do. He was clearly intimidated by her and, some thought, maybe even afraid of her. Indeed, she ran her household with the stringent rules and regulations of an Old World orphanage, taking her responsibility to the foster children quite seriously.

  Much has been made over the years of Ida and Wayne’s fanatical religious leanings. It’s been written that they were zealots about their Protestant faith. “First of all, we were Baptists,” says Nancy Jeffrey. “Though I think along the way Mother did belong to a United Pentecostal Church. We went to Sunday school on Sunday mornings and then Wednesday night services. I don’t think that was too much. Mother sometimes did the cooking for big church dinners—there would be a big dinner at the church for the congregation—or sometimes many of them would come to our home. I’m not sure how it evolved that my parents were religious fanatics. Maybe it was just part of the myth that was created around Norma Jeane when she became Marilyn Monroe. Mother taught us to love the Lord and, by extension, to love each other. It was really the only foundation Norma Jeane ever had, and I think it did her a lot of good in her life. I know that was Mother’s intention.”

  Supposedly, at least according to the stories written about the adult Marilyn Monroe, she was forced to memorize the following prayer when she was about four—and she would be quizzed often to make sure she remembered it: “I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink or sell or give alcoholic liquor while I live; from all tobaccos I’ll abstain and never take God’s name in vain.” Her foster sister Nancy Jeffrey scoffs at the notion. “I never heard that prayer in my entire life. I’m not sure that there’s anything wrong with it, anyway, even if Mother had made us say it. But she never did.”

  Another story has it that going to the movies was out of the question because there was no telling what Norma Jeane would be exposed to in the theater. In fact, Marilyn once recalled Ida having told her, “If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies, do you know what would happen? You’d burn along with all the bad people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers.” Years later, Marilyn would say, “I don’t think it’s right to use God to frighten a child like that. I just think that was an awful thing for her to do to a child.”

  Again, Nancy Jeffrey disagrees with that piece of history. “The truth is that we were only not allowed to go to the movies on Sundays. However, we really didn’t go to movies that much anyway. We were little kids. How many movies were we going to see between the ages of one and seven? I just don’t think Mother would have frightened Norma Jeane like that. She may have said something like, ‘We are churchgoers not moviegoers.’ That sounds like her. But the rest of it, burning with bad people? That doesn’t sound like Mother to me.”

  Whether or not she went to the movies—and of course she wasn’t going without an adult anyway—it sometimes seemed that there wasn’t much Norma Jeane could ever do to please Ida. No matter how hard she tried, she could never measure up to the Bolender matriarch’s standards of cleanliness or behavior. “Poor Norma Jeane always seemed to be in some kind of trouble,” said Mary Thomas-Strong. “She loved to play in dirt, like a lot of kids. Ida would be unhappy about that. Ida would dress her in pretty clothes and Norma Jeane would go and play and come back thirty minutes later, dirty again. It drove Ida crazy. She wanted Norma Jeane to toe the line. She was strict, at times.”

  Yes, Ida Bolender could be difficult—there seems to be no argument there from any quarter. She was tough and resilient, an indomitable woman. “But I believe to this day that she was one of the major stabilizing influences in Norma Jeane’s young life, and truly the first powerful woman she’d been exposed to,” says her foster daughter Nancy Jeffrey. Maybe Ida sensed there might be a shortage of stable and decisive adults in Norma Jeane’s world, and she was determined to be one of them—no matter what her foster daughter or anyone else thought of her. “I was hard on her for her own good,” she once explained to Jeffrey. Then, with great positiveness, she added, “But I know I raised her the right way. I know it in my heart.”

  Many of Ida Bolender’s best character traits were impressed upon Norma Jeane Mortensen during her seven years at the Bolender home. Because she was born to a mother who was in emotional disarray, perhaps it served the young girl well to be molded by a foster mother who was firm and controlled. Indeed, it was Ida’s strength and determination that Norma Jeane would one day need to draw upon in order to make it in show business. However, Gladys’s traits of extreme vulnerability and emotional instability were also an undeniable part of Norma Jeane’s biology. For instance, she would be well equipped to handle rejection in her professional life, just as Ida would have in her place. However, to handle it in her personal life would prove to be very difficult—just as it would have been for Gladys.

  “All she ever wanted for Norma Jeane was for her to be strong, like she was,” said Nancy Jeffrey of her foster mother. “She always knew that [Norma Jeane] would have a very difficult life. She could see that her family background was not going to be helpful to her and, in fact, could possibly be the downfall of her. So she wasn’t going to coddle her. She would say, ‘The girl will face stronger foes than me, I can tell you that much. She has to be able to stand on her own. For all I know, she may hate me now, but she will be strong. She will have a good life.’ ”

  A Frightening Encounter with Gladys

  By the fall of 1929, with Della Monroe dead for two years, Gladys had become accustomed to not having anyone in her life upon whom she could totally depend. She hadn’t been able to make any of her ro
mantic relationships last, and her children had either been taken from her or given away by her. Her job at Consolidated Studios offered her little opportunity to build friendships. In fact, as a film cutter, her role was menial. She was told where and how to cut and splice together pieces of film so they could be viewed as a whole. The irony of that vocation most likely never occurred to Gladys, but it could be considered an interesting metaphor representing the major challenge of her mental state: putting the pieces of her life together. It’s true, she had made a good friend in Grace McKee. However, since Della’s death, Grace hadn’t been able to reach Gladys. It was as if something in Gladys had been switched off and she simply didn’t care that much about connecting with other people. Perhaps it was because Gladys was simply not able to quiet the increasingly loud voices in her head. After all, only her mother had possessed the key to settling her back into a more reasonable thought process. On her own, she lacked the ability to view her circumstances from a distance. Without that perspective, each moment became about exactly what was happening right then and there. Goals were impossible to set, consequences impossible to calculate. She was in a mental tailspin, and everyone in her life knew it but didn’t know what to do about it.

  While her moment-to-moment experiences may have been torturous, Gladys was still able to complete tasks. For instance, she could show up for work on time, go grocery shopping, and remember to water the plants. Therefore, if someone’s life could be judged solely by her daily agenda, Gladys Baker would have appeared quite unspectacular. Yet it was how she experienced and reacted to the string of events that made her different.