The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Indeed, during this time, Ida did telephone Norma Jeane. “Do you want to come back here and live with us, dear?” she asked, unable to keep the concern from her voice. “Because if that’s what you want, Daddy will come and get you. In fact, I think that would be best.” Norma Jeane said that she would have to ask her Aunt Grace for permission. (Norma Jeane knew that Grace wasn’t really her aunt, but she liked to call her so.) When she did, however, Grace became extremely upset and phoned Ida back immediately. “I asked you to speak to the girl just to tell her you still loved her,” Grace said angrily, according to the family’s history. “I certainly didn’t think you were going to try to take her from us again.” Again? Ida’s feelings were immediately hurt. “All I have ever wanted is for that child to feel that she was loved,” she told Grace. “How dare you speak to me like this! I love her too. I raised her for seven years! Have you forgotten?” Grace hung up on her. It would seem that, by this time, raw nerves were barely being controlled.

  By the middle of 1934, it was clear that something needed to be done for Gladys. Grace finally decided to take her to a neurologist, where Gladys spent a day undergoing a battery of tests. However, no doubt because mental care in the 1930s was so unsophisticated, there was no clear-cut diagnosis. It was simply decided that she was going insane and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Then one day Grace came home and found Gladys lying on the couch, having what appeared to be some sort of seizure. “She started kicking and yelling,” Grace later recalled. “She was lying on her back, staring up at the staircase and yelling, ‘Somebody’s coming down those steps to kill me.’ ”

  There are many conflicting accounts of what happened in the following minutes, some claiming that Gladys had brandished a knife in order to fight off her imagined “attackers.” Marilyn remembered the fallout of the event in her memoir. She and “the English couple” (the Atkinsons) were having breakfast when she heard someone fall down the stairs. It was her mother. Though she was told to stay in the kitchen, the little girl peeped out and managed to catch a glimpse of Gladys screaming, laughing, and acting in a completely irrational manner. With eyes alert and knowing—not even fearful—Norma Jeane seemed to realize that this moment would be a defining one where her mother was concerned. Indeed, Gladys Baker had suffered a severe psychotic break. Because it appeared that she was now a danger to herself and others, the police were called and it was quickly determined that she would be sent for psychiatric evaluation.

  Once she was at a hospital, a number of doctors came to the same conclusion. Gladys was diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic and would now have to be committed to the state mental institution, Norwalk Hospital, indefinitely. It seemed to have happened so fast—or had it? Truly, it had been coming for years. Schizophrenia is an often misunderstood brain disorder that affects over 1 percent of the country’s adult population. Each year more than one hundred thousand people are diagnosed with schizophrenia in the United States alone. One in four of them will attempt suicide at least once in their lifetime, and one in ten will succeed. Paranoid schizophrenia—a severe and disabling form of the condition—has frightening symptoms, which most commonly include sufferers hearing voices, thinking others can read their minds, and believing that plots are being developed to harm them. Often, schizophrenics have no signs of the disease until a certain period after adolescence, when a mental shift takes place. While this change in behavior occurs earlier in men (their late teens and early twenties), women sufferers can experience this dramatic shift later, usually in their twenties and thirties.

  It’s worth noting that this terrible diagnosis came with some sense of relief for Gladys, as well as for those who loved her. After years of worrying about a total mental collapse in the future, that fear was now relegated to the past. At thirty-two, Gladys Baker had spent much of her life battling the voices—and now, undoubtedly, the voices had won.

  Grace Is Norma Jeane’s Legal Guardian

  With Gladys in the sanitarium for an indeterminate period of time, the question, as always, remained: What to do about Norma Jeane?

  As an adult, Marilyn Monroe would recall having overheard a conversation between Grace McKee and friends as they tried to convince her not to take on the responsibility of raising the child. They said she was a “mental case.” Marilyn said that she lay in bed “shivering” because even though she didn’t know what a mental case was, she was sure it wasn’t good. Indeed, Grace’s friends talked about all of the people in Norma Jeane’s family who had mental problems and said they were sure the same fate would befall the little girl. Still, Grace decided that she would take care of her friend’s daughter, somehow. She soon filed the necessary papers and became her legal guardian.

  It was decided, though, that Norma Jeane would continue to live, at least for the time being, with the Atkinsons. Therefore, for the rest of 1934, she stayed with them in the Arbol Drive home. After just becoming accustomed to having her mother around, now she had to readjust to living without her. For weeks, she would ask where Gladys was and when she was going to return. Even though she’d had that terrible exchange with her mother where her mother wished her dead, Norma Jeane felt that they’d gotten closer in recent months. She was finally happy. Now it seemed as if it were all over, and she wanted to know why. As always, Grace was very patient with her. “Your mommy is gone, sweetheart,” she told her, “and she’s not going to be back for a long time. But I’m here for you now.”

  Following the union strike at Consolidated Studios, Grace was working at Columbia Pictures in the movie company’s film library. Because she worked on the periphery of show business, she knew a great many people in the movie business and often discussed with them the current crop of movie stars and their careers at Columbia. Columbia Pictures, though, was considered a “poverty row” operation, not the huge film company it would become in later years.

  In the early 1930s, Columbia was a fledgling company that laid claim to the most popular comedy trio of the day, the Three Stooges, who would display their screwball slapstick comedy in 190 short films between 1934 and 1957. The studio’s primary focus was low-budget comedies, westerns, Saturday afternoon serials, and any story that could be shot in a week and in theaters in another week. Speed and economy were its strong suits, and Columbia was the best studio in Hollywood for that kind of fare. Grace was inspired by her surroundings and began to wonder if perhaps she could become involved in the movie business in some way other than as a film cutter.

  As Grace came to know Norma Jeane better, she began to believe that the young girl had some potential in show business, maybe as an actress. Not only was she very pretty, but there was something more complex about her. Her eyes were large and intelligent. She was interesting to look at, to watch. She had unusual charisma for such a young child. Of course, it is easy to make such a retrospective judgment about the girl who would one day become Marilyn Monroe, but it was really true just the same. Grace told everyone she knew that she had a strong feeling about the child and that, as she put it, “there might be something there.” Today it would be said that what Grace perceived in Norma Jeane was the “X” factor—a quality that can’t be described but that somehow conveys stardom.

  “My mother told me that Grace would dress her up in the prettiest little outfits and bring her to work,” recalls Dia Nanouris, whose mom was an assistant film editor at Columbia. “She doted on her and seemed to love her very much, as if she was her own daughter. In fact, most people did think they were mother and daughter.

  “Grace was a big fan of Jean Harlow’s and my mom thought it was Jean Harlow’s career that Grace had in mind for Norma Jeane. One thing was sure, Grace had made up her mind that Norma Jeane would be in show business, and from what was known about Grace, once she had her mind made up about something, it usually happened. She took Norma Jeane to see several Jean Harlow films back then and talked a lot about Harlow to the little girl.”

  Arriving in Hollywood during the decli
ning years of the silent era, Jean Harlow (née Harlean Carpenter) traveled the usual starlet route, appearing in Hal Roach shorts and bit parts in forgettable films, before her career took off like a rocket thanks to the legendary Howard Hughes, who cast her in the principal female role in his 1930 World War I aviation epic, Hell’s Angels, an international blockbuster. She would appear in five films the following year for five different studios, including The Public Enemy, a groundbreaking gangster film that established James Cagney as a superstar and Warner Bros. as the premier studio for the gangster genre. This was also the year—1931—that Columbia Pictures’ top director, Frank Capra, cast her in a film, Platinum Blonde, whose title provided her with a lifelong identification.

  Grace McKee’s prediction about Norma Jeane’s film future was perhaps more prescient than even she could have imagined. Saratoga, Jean Harlow’s last film, though incomplete, costarred Clark Gable, and with an irony that’s hard to ignore, Marilyn’s last film completed was The Misfits, also starring Gable. (Some Monroe biographers list as her final film Something’s Got to Give, but the picture was never finished and never released to theaters.) *

  “There was something a little unusual about Grace’s intense interest in Jean Harlow,” recalled Dia Nanouris. “My mom said that every time she brought the girl to work it was like an audition. She would have her prance about and pose or pout. ‘Show them how pretty you are, Norma,’ she would say. ‘Just like Jean Harlow! Or show them how you smile. Just like Jean Harlow. Show them.’ My mom thought it was strange. After all, Norma Jeane was just eight. The girl was wearing a little bit of makeup, she had her hair curled, and Grace was talking about having her nose ‘fixed’! Grace gave her an enormous wide-brimmed hat to shield her little face from the sun. ‘Doesn’t it look stylish?’ she would ask. But Grace was always a little eccentric. If you look at pictures of her back then, she had peroxided blonde hair, wore a lot of makeup—but wore it well. She wasn’t trashy. She was very theatrical. When I see those pictures today in family scrapbooks, I can’t help but think, yes, this is where Marilyn Monroe got it from.”

  Marilyn Monroe summed it up best herself: “Aunt Grace would say things to me like no one else would ever talk to me.… She would sit me down and tell me things and hold my hands. I felt as whole as a loaf of bread nobody’s eaten.”

  Norma Jeane’s Troubling Visit with Gladys

  Late in 1934, it was decided that Gladys Baker would be able to obtain leave from the sanitarium on occasional weekends. Because her medication seemed to be working, her doctors thought it might be beneficial if she were able to travel in the outside world, just as long as her time away from the facility was supervised by a responsible person. Grace, of course, was eager for her friend to regain some sense of normalcy in her life and said she would be more than happy to be accountable for her during these intermittent sojourns. However, as it would happen, these weekends with Gladys—once every month or so—which began in September, were to be quite difficult. Gladys, though better than she was when first institutionalized, was still not well.

  On one such weekend in late November 1934, Grace took Gladys and Norma Jeane to the Ambassador Hotel for what she hoped would be a lovely lunch in elegant surroundings. The Ambassador, a grand, sprawling hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, was quite the “in” place at this time, its Coconut Grove nightclub a destination point for an evening on the town for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. In fact, because the sixth annual Academy Awards presentation had taken place in its Fiesta Room eight months earlier, Grace was certain that a luncheon at such an auspicious place would be a special treat for all of them. Moreover, Grace was proud of the physical transformation that had taken place in her little charge over the last year, and she wanted Gladys to see it for herself.

  Norma Jeane now wore her long blonde hair in dangling curls. Of course, she had those cornflower blue eyes, and now even a touch of red brushed across her pouting lips. Somehow, she seemed much more precocious than the last time Gladys saw her. Actually, some in Grace’s circle found the makeover a tad disconcerting. It was as if Norma Jeane were far more mature than her eight years, perhaps even being forced into adulthood—not that her childhood had been, thus far, one to cherish. However, Grace had a specific image of how she wanted the youngster to appear and comport herself in public, and she’d spent many hours tutoring her in order that she would rise to those standards. For instance, she’d taught her to curtsy, to be polite, to look people in the eyes when speaking to them, and also to speak clearly and enunciate every syllable. It was as if Grace were running a charm school with only one pupil.

  According to a later recollection, when Gladys laid eyes on this new version of her daughter, she didn’t seem interested one way or the other. “I think we could have eaten in the coffee shop downstairs and that would have been a lot better than this,” she told Grace, ignoring Norma Jeane from the outset. She seemed angry. In fact, the severity of her expression did not change during the entire meal. “I shouldn’t be in that place,” she kept insisting, speaking of the sanitarium, “and I want out.”

  Obedient and very quiet, Norma Jeane just picked at her food while Grace struggled to engage Gladys in conversation.

  In truth, Gladys was too self-involved at this point in her sickness to care about Norma Jeane or anyone else. So immersed was she in her mental illness and in her desire to obtain her freedom, it didn’t matter to her that her daughter was sitting before her. This kind of scene would be repeated for many years to come, whenever Norma Jeane would have an occasional weekend with her mother. “I just don’t think she even liked me very much, let alone loved me,” is how the adult Marilyn would recall it. Of course, there were myriad reasons for Gladys’s emotional disconnect from her daughter, so many that it had become impossible for others—like Grace—to even begin to understand the complex machinations of Gladys’s mind.

  At one point during the troubling meal, Grace said to Norma Jeane, “Tell your mother what you want to be when you grow up.” Norma Jeane, perhaps hoping to impress her mother with her exciting goal, turned to Gladys with eager brightness and said, “I want to be a movie star.” In response, Gladys just looked at her daughter with eyes cold as steel. Then she went back to her meal without saying a word.

  Norma Jeane in an Orphanage

  The next chapter in young Norma Jeane’s life has always been confusing to Marilyn Monroe historians. In the fall of 1935, Grace McKee decided to take nine-year-old Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home Society at 815 North El Centro Avenue in Hollywood. * The question has always been why Grace, who not only had strong maternal instincts toward Norma Jeane but also a goal of stardom in mind for her, would suddenly put her in an orphanage. Some Marilyn Monroe historians have theorized that the Atkinsons had become abusive to Marilyn, though she never suggested as much in any of her interviews. However, Grace McKee did tell Berniece many years later that she learned they had not been treating Norma Jeane well and dismissed them. That may have been true, but the Atkinsons also felt they had film opportunities in London and decided to return to their homeland.

  At this same time, Grace became the legal custodian of all of Gladys’s affairs and, as such, took on the complicated responsibility of caring for all the loose ends her friend had left behind before being institutionalized. One of her first decisions was to sell Gladys’s home in order to pay off her debts, mostly medical expenses. Next on her agenda was the possibility of adopting Norma Jeane. It was just a seed of an idea, but it was something she would discuss openly with her friends (most of whom seemed to be against it). Grace already thought of the girl as her own and she knew that Gladys would not oppose the idea. For her part, there was no one else Norma Jeane would have wanted to be with at this time, other than perhaps her Aunt Ida. She loved her “Aunt Grace” and felt that she could do no wrong.

  By this time, Grace had married and divorced a third husband and was on her fourth. That she was barren had become an issue in
all three of her earlier marriages. In fact, it was specifically responsible for the demise of at least one of them and caused tension in the other two. In her fourth marriage, she found a man who came with a ready-made family. Her new husband was Ervin Silliman Goddard—known as Doc. Ten years her junior, he was divorced and had custody of his three children, aged nine, seven, and five. An amateur inventor by trade—thus the nickname—his profession wasn’t exactly a lucrative one. Grace felt that she had to make this marriage work. In her forties, she viewed it as her last hope for true happiness. As strong-minded and self-sufficient as she was, she still wanted to have a romantic partner in life. “I just don’t want to end up old and alone,” she had said. She also felt that little Norma Jeane would be a perfect addition to her new family. However, there was to be a big stumbling block in her way.

  Because Norma Jeane had grown so attached to Grace, it became difficult for her to watch her guardian alter her focus and direct some of it not only to a man but, more troubling, to his daughter, Nona, the only one of his three children who was living with him at this time. There’s little doubt that it called to mind Norma Jeane’s growing abandonment issues. She had lost so much in her nine years, and now it must have felt like she might lose Grace as well. Doubtless in reaction to these disconcerting feelings, Norma Jeane suddenly became obstreperous. She started having surprising temper tantrums and alarming emotional outbursts. She also began making impossible demands of Grace, crying whenever she couldn’t be with her. Sometimes she and Nona got along beautifully, but often they did not. Grace found herself being harsh and exacting where Norma Jeane was concerned, and that wasn’t like her at all.