The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The first few weeks without her son and daughter were a confusing period for Gladys Baker. After she contacted Jasper’s family and they convinced her that he had not returned to Kentucky, she set out on foot to find him and her two children. First she headed to San Diego, where he had once mentioned he might find work as a longshoreman. Thus began a four-month-long odyssey of hitchhiking, cheap motels, and the obligatory speakeasies that had become Gladys’s only social outlet. From the road, she wrote to a cousin, “I am doing what I can. I do not know if it is enough. I don’t know how I am getting by.” The trip was fruitless. Gladys seemed hardened by her pointless quest, and Della decided that she would never interrogate her daughter about her awful time searching. “It was as if her smile had died,” Della told one relative a number of years later. “She always seemed like a child to me before, but when she returned she was a woman. To tell you the truth, I had grown used to arguing with her. But she had no gumption left. She was just a very sad woman.”

  After Gladys returned to her mother’s home, she found a letter from her brother-in-law, Audrey, which had been delivered in her absence. Concerned for her emotional well-being, Audrey confessed in his letter that he’d been concealing vital information from her: His brother, Jasper, had actually been living with their mother for the past four months in Flat Lick, Kentucky—with the children. He suggested that Gladys move on with her life and not attempt to contact Jasper.

  Della later recalled watching tears run down Gladys’s face as she read Audrey’s letter. Although Della tried to lighten her daughter’s spirits, there was nothing she could do for her on that day. It was spent mostly in somber silence. That night, before bedtime, Della brought Gladys a large bowl of soup. The next morning, when she went in to awaken her daughter, the dish sat on the nightstand, untouched—and Gladys was gone.

  Gladys hitchhiked most of the way to Kentucky, riding the occasional bus when she grew tired of thumbing rides and being passed up. Her first stop was Louisville, where she decided to spend a day putting herself back together. She knew that the months spent traveling had not been kind and she wanted to at least appear well-rested when her children saw her for the first time.

  On the day she got to Flat Lick, her plan was to march up to her mother-in-law’s front door and demand that her children be handed over to her. They would all then return to Los Angeles and, hopefully, forget the events of recent months. Gladys’s intentions to wrench her children from their paternal grandmother’s arms did not go as she intended, however. Something had gotten in the way of her plan, something so simple—laughter.

  While standing across the street from her mother-in-law’s modest home, Gladys watched as Jackie and Berniece playfully chased each other. As the two giggled and ran around the yard, she couldn’t help but notice little Jackie’s pronounced limp. How well she remembered that injury. It had happened back in 1920, when Jackie was three. While driving from Los Angeles to visit Jasper’s mother at this very home, the couple began a fierce argument. Jackie had been sitting in the backseat, unattended. In a moment almost too terrible to imagine, the toddler tumbled out of their 1909 Ford Model T roadster, a doorless vehicle, while his parents were busy arguing. When they finally arrived in Kentucky with the injured child, Jasper’s family was of course horrified and wanted to know what in the world could have happened. Even though Jasper had been the one at the wheel, he told everyone that his negligent wife had been responsible for the accident because she’d not been properly minding their child. For her part, Gladys was already distraught because of what had occurred, and to now be solely blamed for it by Jasper was almost more than she could bear. She couldn’t fathom that the man she so loved had turned against her that way. Meanwhile, young Jackie had suffered a serious hip injury, from which he would never fully recover.

  Now the boy’s limp was a reminder of his terrible accident. Gladys watched her children for a bit, unnoticed. They seemed so happy in the large yard with a tire swing amid what appeared to be acres of woods surrounding the home. Gladys turned and walked away, unseen.

  However, she simply couldn’t leave Kentucky without her children. But how would she ever be able to retrieve them from the place they currently called home? She knew that her deficiency as a mother would be Jasper’s primary defense for having taken Jackie and Berniece. If she were going to get them back, she saw only two options. She could steal them—just as Jasper had done. Or she could prove that she was a new woman. If Jasper and his family saw her as someone capable of caring for her children, maybe they would willingly allow her to take them. So, for a time, Gladys would begin a new life in Louisville.

  Within weeks, she had altered her appearance dramatically, wearing simpler, more matronly attire. She also began to go without makeup, something she hadn’t done for many years. Her toned-down appearance may have helped her land the precise position she sought. She was hired as a nanny for a well-off couple, Margaret and John “Jack” Cohen, on the outskirts of town. This job would not simply be a way for her to survive financially, it would afford her the opportunity to become the kind of woman she hoped her ex-husband would approve of, a woman worthy of being called a mother.

  The Cohens were a happily married couple, and their daughter, Norma Jeane, was a well-behaved three-year-old child. The new Gladys was, in this family’s mind, the ideal caretaker, treating their daughter as if she were her own. However, Gladys’s only goal was to one day regain custody of her own children.

  Months later, when she believed her transformation had been completed, she knocked on the Bakers’ front door. Her mother-inlaw answered, with only a few awkward words spoken through the crack in the door. When her ex-husband appeared, he asked Gladys to come into the house. As she entered, she saw a wide-eyed little girl standing by the kitchen. However, before Gladys even had a chance to say hello, the youngster’s grandmother grabbed the girl and disappeared with her into another room.

  Gladys’s meeting with Jasper was strained, her attempts to present herself as an improved woman falling on deaf ears. Jasper was firm in his position that she would not get the children back, no matter what she said or did to convince him that she had changed. She asked if she could at least visit them. Jasper said she could see Berniece, but not little Jackie. After months of being in agonizing pain, the boy was now in a hospital and there was no telling how long he would have to remain there. Jasper reminded Gladys that her neglect was primarily to blame for the child’s desperate condition. Devastated, Gladys then spent a short time with Berniece before her ex-mother-in-law asked her to leave.

  Now, back in the home of the perfect family with the perfect child, things felt different to her. She no longer saw the Cohens as role models. In fact, their very existence seemed to mock her inability to change, to truly alter the woman she had once been and become someone new, someone respectable. “Each idyllic day with that family was another dagger in Gladys’s broken heart,” says a cousin of hers interviewed for this book. “She couldn’t help but mourn the loss of what once was, what could have been.”

  While Gladys did her best to appear as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred during her weekend away—supposedly with her aunt—her sinking mood made that impossible. As had happened so many times in her past, she slipped into the dark place that was by now all too familiar to her. The progress she had made, the many joyful scenarios she had imagined, the hope she once had—all of it was gone. The “new” Gladys Baker was dying a slow death.

  The First Norma Jeane

  It’s been written in countless Marilyn Monroe biographies that Gladys Baker’s baby, Norma Jeane, was named after the actress Jean Harlow. However, this can’t be true, since Jean Harlow’s real name was Harlean Carpenter and wasn’t changed until 1928, two years after Gladys gave birth. Other accounts have it that the child was named after another actress, Norma Shearer. Still others insist it was Norma Talmadge. None of this is true. In the 1960s, Gladys explained the derivation to Rose Anne Cooper, a young n
urse’s aide at the Rock Haven Sanitarium.

  After her failed attempt to regain custody of Jackie and Berniece, Gladys returned to the Cohen household. The Cohens’ three-year-old daughter whom Gladys had been helping to raise for the last year was named… Norma Jeane. It would be with this little girl that Gladys would finally achieve what had been expected of her with her own children. Each and every day of the year she was with her, Gladys made it her priority to see to it that the tot was nourished, entertained—loved. However, after Gladys’s return from Flat Lick without her own children, things began to shift. In the simplest terms, her mind had begun to fail her. She was just twenty-three.

  When Gladys’s problem became apparent to the Cohens, they were alarmed, and with good reason. Here’s the story, as passed down in the Cohen family:

  One evening after a dinner date, Mr. and Mrs. Cohen found their child alone in the nursery. She was hysterical and the sheets were soiled, suggesting that she’d been left unattended for quite some time. When they finally found Gladys, she was crouched on the floor behind a grand piano, her knees pulled in to her chest. Her eyes were closed as she spoke quietly to herself. She was visibly upset, tears streaming down her cheeks. After a moment, she looked at Mrs. Cohen and said, “Are they gone?”

  “Is who gone, Gladys?” replied the missus.

  “The men.”

  Gladys then explained that she had seen a group of men sneaking about the house for the previous few days, but she didn’t want to worry her employers.

  At first the couple were deeply concerned for their own safety. However, as Gladys continued to describe her experiences, they began to have a new concern: their nanny’s sanity.

  Gladys told of odd happenings that were beyond reason. She said she went to retrieve something from a cabinet under the kitchen counter and found there was a man lying inside it. Another man had walked into an upstairs bathroom, she said, and when she finally got the nerve to follow him in there, he was nowhere to be found.

  The Cohens had a problem on their hands—a problem that needed to be dealt with quickly.

  Gladys Baker lasted a few more days—though never alone with the child—before her employers made her termination official. At that time Gladys was weaving in and out of lucidity, appearing at one moment to be just fine, and the next claiming that she heard a voice. Indeed, there were many voices—but the voices were never really there.

  Gladys’s dismissal was a civilized procedure, with the Cohens claiming they no longer needed a nanny.

  But what about little Norma Jeane? The child had been the only constant for Gladys while she was in Kentucky during this very difficult time, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her. For a time, as she later told Rose Anne Cooper, she considered taking Norma Jeane back to Los Angeles with her to start a new life. However, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had experienced the misery of losing her own children and said she couldn’t inflict that kind of pain on Margaret Cohen.

  After packing her things the night before she was to depart the household, Gladys recalled that she sat in her room alone. Her minimal belongings now stuffed into a tattered satchel, she crept down the dark hallway and quietly let herself into the nursery. She sat on Norma Jeane’s bed and stroked the child’s hair. She then kissed her on the forehead before tucking her back in. After gathering the rest of her things in the dark of night, Gladys Baker then disappeared from the Cohen family’s life.

  Jim’s Ultimatum

  But we only have two rooms here,” Jim told Norma Jeane when he was told that Gladys would be staying with them. “Where are we going to put her?”

  “Um…”

  Jim took a quick look around the house. Something didn’t seem quite right. There were no flowers in the vase on the table, and he knew Norma Jeane loved keeping them there to add color to the small surroundings. There were no magazines on the coffee table, and he knew she liked their guests to have something to thumb through while she fetched coffee for them. In fact, the place looked as if no one was really living there. As he scanned the room, his eye caught a framed photograph of Norma Jeane on the wall, one that he recognized as having been taken by André de Dienes. Of course, this did not make him happy. When he walked over to a closet to hang up his coat, he opened the door to a surprise. There, hanging on a rod, were just a couple of dresses. On the floor, a few pairs of shoes. Obviously, Norma Jeane and Gladys were not living in that house. “What is going on here?” he asked, now very upset.

  With Gladys sitting on the bed observing everything, Jim felt that he couldn’t express himself openly, so he and Norma Jeane stepped outside to talk. She explained that she and Gladys had actually been living at Aunt Ana’s. She’d had a series of modeling jobs and couldn’t leave Gladys alone, and so therefore it was more sensible for them to be living with Ana. “I just didn’t think you’d understand, Jimmie,” she concluded. Then she started crying, buckling under the pressure of the moment. Jim had had enough. In fact, he did not understand. She had specifically told him she was going to move back into their own home.

  “That’s it,” he told her. “That’s it, Norma Jeane. You have to choose. Me or your career. Your marriage or your career.” And there it was: the ultimatum she had hoped would not be forthcoming, the one he was probably a fool to issue. She didn’t say a word. She just stared at him as he walked away.

  Final Confrontation

  Jim Dougherty was in service in Shanghai at the end of May 1946 when he received the “Dear John” letter. He later said it had come directly from Norma Jeane personally, but actually it was much more impersonal than that: It was written by her lawyer, C. Norma Cornwall, who informed him that she had filed for divorce in Las Vegas. As it happened, Norma Jeane had made up her mind that she wanted the marriage to be ended. She wasn’t sure how to proceed, but she knew of one woman who was always able to think of a solution to any problem: “Aunt” Grace. Of course, Grace had encouraged Norma Jeane into a marriage of convenience, and her plan had worked in that Norma Jeane was spared the misery of another orphanage. Now she was twenty and ready to be free. Grace knew that the quickest way to obtain a divorce was to file in Las Vegas and then live there for the six months it would take for residency to be established and the paperwork to be filed. Conveniently, Grace had an aunt there. So Norma Jeane was off to Las Vegas in early May to begin the process.

  The first thing Jim Dougherty did when he got the letter announcing Norma Jeane’s intention was to cut off the stipend that wives of military men received at that time from the government. He was angry. In his view, Norma Jeane had gotten what she wanted and now she was done with him. Certainly he knew what she had gotten out of the deal; he just wasn’t sure how he had benefited from it. In his view, he could have been single for the last few years and enjoying the benefits of being a bachelor in the military. One thing was certain: He wasn’t going to make it easy for his wife to get out of the marriage. He was determined not to sign the papers until he was able to meet with her. He later admitted that he secretly felt he could change her mind if they had sex. Many years later he still wouldn’t admit that the marriage wasn’t perfect. In fact, he began to insist that the reason Norma Jeane filed for divorce was because she was trying to get a movie contract at MGM and was told they’d never sign her if she was married. Why? Because she might get pregnant and the studio’s investment would then be lost. Of course, this wasn’t the case at all. He also said that Norma Jeane later proposed that she “just be my girlfriend” and not his wife in order to placate the studio. Again, not true. In fact, there was never a deal on the table with MGM. Yes, movie studio honchos at the time preferred their new actresses to be single, but this had nothing to do with Norma Jeane’s decision. She was unhappy with him and wanted out of the marriage.

  When he returned to the States in June, Jim planned to drive to Las Vegas to meet with Norma Jeane. Much to his surprise, though, she was not in Nevada. She was in Los Angeles at Aunt Ana’s, where she’d been
staying. When she answered the door of her apartment in Ana’s duplex, the first thing Jim noticed was Gladys sitting on the bed in the one large room. She looked nervous, as if she thought there might be some sort of confrontation. Norma Jeane apologized for not being able to talk to him at that moment and asked if they could meet at another time. Jim left wondering why she hadn’t apologized for wanting to divorce him. “I was losing most of my determination to hang onto her,” he recalled. “She was no longer the anxious-to-please young woman I married. She was calculating, something she had never been before. She made sure that Gladys would be living there when I made my last appearance—that her mother would have my place in the only bed in that apartment. What she would do with Gladys—a woman who was only capable of looking on passively and putting her trust in God—I couldn’t guess.”

  Jim and Norma Jeane met several times over the next few days to try to sort out their problems. At one point, Jim went directly to Ana to appeal to her. He hoped she would talk some “sense” into Norma Jeane. However, he was surprised to learn that she fully supported Norma Jeane’s goals. She had always been Norma Jeane’s great ally. He said later that Ana seemed “awestruck by the very notion that Norma Jeane might be a movie star.” More likely, she was just very enthusiastic about Norma Jeane following her dream. Jim’s appeal to Ana, though, does demonstrate how desperate he was to find a way to save his marriage—but for what reason? “He truly did not want to sign the divorce papers,” says his friend Martin Evans, “but it had gone beyond love. It was now a matter of ego.