The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  During the summer of 1952, while Gladys worked at Homestead Lodge, her daughter was getting more attention and publicity than ever before. It was impossible to miss her on the cover of some magazine or on television in a news report, especially after her many movies and personal appearances, the calendar scandal, and her budding romance with Joe DiMaggio. Gladys would go to work and often be confronted by the image of her daughter in a newspaper or, especially, on the TV set in the “television room” where the guests of the home would while away the hours.

  Ever since Gladys started working at Homestead, she had been telling people she was Marilyn Monroe’s mother. According to two women who worked at the facility at that time, Gladys would insist, “I’m telling you that Marilyn Monroe is my kid. I don’t know why you don’t believe me.” In turn, she was inevitably told that she was being ridiculous because everyone knew that Marilyn’s mother was dead; Marilyn had said so publicly—repeatedly. From all available evidence, it seems that Marilyn and Grace—who together had the idea to proclaim Gladys dead in an effort to protect her from the media—had never told Gladys their PR strategy. She became defensive about it and believed her integrity was called into question when people at her job felt she was lying.

  Soon, according to one of two women on duty at that time at Homestead Lodge with Gladys, “She came in one day with photos of her and Marilyn Monroe—or at least a girl who looked like she could have been Marilyn Monroe except that she was young and had dark hair. ‘See, this is me and Marilyn Monroe,’ Gladys said, very proudly. ‘Do you believe me now?’ No one knew what to think. This was some big news, let me tell you. Yes, it had to be true, everyone decided. I mean, she had pictures. Gladys felt better, and everyone went about his or her business. However, we all looked at Gladys a little differently at that time. We certainly wondered how it came to pass that this woman, Marilyn Monroe’s mother, was working here at an old folks’ home. It seemed very odd… very sad.”

  Like ripples in a pond, the repercussions of Gladys’s revelation were sure to spread out far and wide from Homestead Lodge to… the world. It was just a matter of time before someone would tell someone else—who would then tell someone else—that Marilyn Monroe’s mother was alive and working in Eagle Rock, California. It’s not known who called Erskine Johnson with the tip, and Johnson would never reveal his source. While this backstage drama was going on, Fox renewed its contract with Marilyn. Now she would be receiving $750 a week. At about the same time Homestead Lodge was abuzz over Gladys’s revelations, Marilyn was in the hospital having her appendix removed. While she was still recovering, Johnson’s article about Gladys appeared in the Hollywood Reporter. The surprising news that Marilyn’s mother was alive traveled around the world at the speed of light. Fox was unhappy about it. Marilyn was told that her mother’s existence should have been kept a secret, and some of the executives blamed her for allowing the news to come out. Marilyn disagreed. “The cat’s out of the bag now,” she said. “The secret is no more.” Then, taking the matter into her hands quickly, the first thing she did was call Erskine Johnson from her hospital bed. She would repeat what had worked so well with Aline Mosby of United Press International when the nude calendar scandal broke. She gave Johnson an exclusive interview.

  “Unbeknownst to me as a child,” Marilyn said, “my mother spent many years as an invalid in a state hospital. I was raised in a series of foster homes arranged by a guardian through the County of Los Angeles and I spent more than a year in the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. I hadn’t known my mother intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her, I have contacted her. I am helping her now and want to continue to help her when she needs me.”

  Marilyn would later say of Gladys, “I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life, and I had in mine. I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works.”

  Because it seems that Gladys hadn’t been told Marilyn was keeping her existence a secret, it also would seem that Gladys wasn’t trying to hurt Marilyn in revealing her existence.

  As mentioned earlier, Erskine Johnson’s May 1952 story assumed that Gladys had just been released from Agnews State Hospital (whereas she had been released seven years prior); and because Marilyn never set anyone straight on this detail, the public has formed a lasting impression of Marilyn Monroe as a heartless person who had disowned her mother from the time Gladys had been committed to the mental hospital, right up through 1952. In all the years since 1952, the true date of Gladys’s release from the hospital still hasn’t become widely known. This biography sets the record straight: Marilyn’s PR decision to portray her mother as deceased had nothing to do with her being ashamed of Gladys. On the contrary, we now know that Marilyn throughout her life did everything she could to help her mother.

  Marilyn and Joe: Tumultuous Already?

  During the summer of 1952, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio began to date more regularly. He had a job at that time broadcasting for the Yankees on television, as well as at the games themselves. He wasn’t very confident in the role and, in truth, wasn’t very good at it. He simply didn’t have the personality for that kind of on-air position. Obviously, Marilyn—who turned twenty-six on June 1—could have helped him a great deal in his new endeavor, if only in terms of his presentation. But he didn’t want her help, and in fact wasn’t very nice about rejecting it. Marilyn was quickly learning that Joe felt she had a “place,” and that she should find it… and stay there.

  Indeed, red flags were being raised all over the terrain of Marilyn’s new relationship with DiMaggio. For instance, he was clearly jealous of the attention she generated from other men wherever she went. When she was at the stadium with him, of course she would be the subject of great fascination. She had always attracted men, but never like in the 1950s. By this time, she was in full-fledged Marilyn Monroe mode, meaning that the transformation from Norma Jeane had been total. The way she spoke—a honeyed voice so whispery and seductive. The way she moved her lips—a kiss always imminent. The way she moved her body—a striptease always a possibility, but never quite a reality. When she was in public in front of her adoring fans and the ever-present glare of the photographers’ flashes, she instantly became Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t even have to think about it anymore. The persona she had created was now such a part of her being it just… was. She was quickly becoming a rising sex symbol for an entire generation. It was only going to get worse for him (and for her!), not better, as her star continued in its ascent. Yet the heart wants what it wants, and the couple ventured forth anyway. Of course, Natasha Lytess had a strong opinion about it. “This man is the punishment of God in your life,” she told Marilyn, disguising neither her contempt for him nor her disapproval of their relationship.

  In July, Joe took her home to meet his family. Once there, she clearly saw why Joe wanted his wife to be domestic—women stayed home, raised children, cooked and cleaned, and it had always been that way in the DiMaggio family. Marilyn was not that kind of woman at all.

  At the end of the summer of 1952, Joe dropped a real bombshell: He thought it would be best if Marilyn abandoned her career. It only caused her great stress anyway, he argued, so why do it? It was becoming abundantly clear that this was a man who didn’t understand Marilyn. Her career—meaning fame—was her greatest passion. Acting was important to her and she did whatever she could to improve her skills. However, Marilyn Monroe wanted to be famous. In just a few months she would tell her stand-in on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “I want to be a star more than anything. It’s something precious.”

  “I didn’t want to give up my career,” Marilyn later recalled, “and that’s what Joe wanted me to do most of all. He wanted me to be the beautiful ex-actress, just like he was the great former ballplayer. We were to ride into some sunset together. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of journey yet. I wasn’t even thirty, for heaven’s sake.”

>   The physical attraction between Joe and Marilyn was intense, and it definitely contributed to their desire to be with each other. However, it was clear that they had very different values. The many differences between them can be boiled down to this: He was conservative. She was not. And neither was willing to compromise. Given these facts of their personalities, there seemed no way a romance between them was going be anything but tumultuous.

  Gladys’s Surprise Visit

  Though Gladys Baker had been saying for some time that she wanted to visit her daughter Berniece in Florida, Berniece and Marilyn were really not sure she was serious about it. When Marilyn offered to take care of her expenses for such a trip, all was quiet with Gladys.

  Then, true to form, Gladys—always one for a surprise appearance or disappearance—showed up in Florida without warning during the first week of September 1952. How she got the money for her trip (and by airline, no less, because Marilyn intended to send her by railway) remained a mystery. She definitely did not get the funds from Marilyn, though, because if she had, Marilyn would have warned Berniece about her impending arrival. Instead, Berniece’s daughter, Mona Rae, picked up the telephone one morning and it was Gladys on the other end telling her she was at the airport—and why wasn’t anyone there to pick her up? When Marilyn found out about it, she was frantic with worry. She couldn’t imagine how Gladys had made the trip. The mere fact that she was capable of such surprise maneuvers was something Marilyn found very troubling. “I don’t know how to keep an eye on her,” she said. “It’s becoming more than I can handle.”

  The same could have been said for poor Berniece, because the next few weeks would prove to be very difficult. Gladys wasn’t exactly the ideal houseguest. The apartment in which Berniece and her husband, Paris, and daughter lived was very small, and now there was a fourth occupant. Not surprisingly, Gladys was demanding and difficult, argumentative and disruptive. She wouldn’t help with any household duties and spent her days complaining and making long-distance telephone calls. Berniece did everything she could to make Gladys happy, but nothing worked. Gladys’s emotional problems were complex. She needed to be managed very carefully, and Berniece simply didn’t have the skills necessary to do that. Ultimately, she was at a loss, especially when she got the bill for the first month of telephone calls—long-distance costs were unbelievably exorbitant back then and Paris was very unhappy about the charges. When Berniece asked Gladys about the phone calls, she became defensive and explained that she had simply forgotten to mention them. Confused, Berniece called Marilyn to ask if she thought Gladys was being forgetful or just plain inconsiderate. Marilyn decided it was probably a little bit of both.

  From an analytical viewpoint, Marilyn found the unhappy interaction between Gladys and Berniece interesting because for years she had wondered if it was just she who could not get along with Gladys. Maybe she should have tried harder, she often thought. Maybe she hadn’t been as patient as she should have been, or as understanding. However, when she learned of Berniece’s troubles with Gladys, she felt at least somewhat vindicated. From a practical viewpoint, what were they going to do about Gladys now? Marilyn had an idea: What if she paid for Gladys to move into an apartment near Berniece? Since Gladys did seem to like Florida, perhaps she could live there, Marilyn would take care of her expenses, and Berniece could keep an eye on her. The sisters agreed that this was a good idea and they felt certain that their mother would approve of it. However, when Berniece approached Gladys with the idea, she wasn’t happy about it at all. She became very angry because she felt that Berniece and Paris were just trying to get rid of her. Her feelings now hurt, she didn’t want to discuss it any further—and, moreover, it seemed as if she were not going to be ending her stay with Berniece anytime in the foreseeable future.

  While Gladys was with her, Berniece took the opportunity to ask her about Marilyn’s father. Gladys came out very bluntly with the information that Edward Mortenson was not Marilyn’s father. Did Marilyn know? Yes, Gladys said, she knew because Grace told her. (Here, she was probably referring to the time Grace visited her in the sanitarium and Gladys told her that Charles Gifford was Marilyn’s father.) Berniece wondered how Marilyn had reacted to the news. Gladys said she had no idea (which was true—she had been in the hospital when Grace gave Marilyn the news). As Berniece pressed on about the subject, Gladys became increasingly agitated. Finally, she snapped at her daughter, “Look, if you want to know all of the details, ask Marilyn.” Berniece dropped the subject.

  After almost two months of domestic turmoil, Berniece—feeling terrible about the entire situation—called Grace Goddard on October 30 to ask her advice. Grace sympathized with her. She had known Gladys for many years and she knew how difficult she was. She assured Berniece that Gladys didn’t mean any harm, that she was just sick and there had never been anything anyone could do about it. Grace had been using Christian Science as a tool in the healing of Gladys’s mind, but that didn’t seem to be working at all. Just two days earlier, she had sent Berniece a note telling her that Gladys “did not get a complete healing.” She wrote that she was afraid they were going to have to send her back to Agnews in San Jose, or maybe they should place her in the Rock Haven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, California. *

  In fact, Grace and Marilyn had recently visited Rock Haven, Grace wrote, and both agreed that it was “not terrible as such places go, about as good as they get, I suppose.” She wrote that Marilyn was so traumatized by the visit, however, she didn’t sleep well that night and “had to take some sleeping pills, which did not make me very happy.” Moreover, she indicated that if it Gladys were to end up at Rock Haven, “at least it will be easier for Norma Jeane and I to visit her, though I’m not sure how many such visits Norma Jeane could make. It’s a very upsetting place for her. However, a parent must be cared for and we are all doing the best we can for Gladys.”

  “Let’s please mail Mother a train ticket to come back to Los Angeles,” Marilyn finally suggested. She then telephoned Gladys and said that she wanted her to return to California. Of course, Gladys stood her ground. She wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, she told Marilyn to concentrate on her “moving picture career” and to leave her alone. She said she was tired of being told what to do, that she had her own agenda and was going to live her life exactly as she pleased. Then she slammed down the phone. The next day, Marilyn paid for a train ticket and mailed it to her mother in Florida.

  Niagara

  Marilyn’s 1953 films, three carefully constructed, big-budget, high-profile properties in gorgeous, eye-popping Technicolor—Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire— would define the Monroe screen persona and secure her place in the firmament of Hollywood for the next decade, always billed above the title and more often than not in the top spot. The films would also propel Marilyn to the number five spot in Quigley’s Top Ten list of the year’s box-office stars. “The time when I sort of began to think I was famous, I was driving somebody to the airport,” she would recall in 1962, “and as I came back there was this movie house and I saw my name in lights. I pulled the car up at a distance down the street—it was too much to take in up close, you know? And I said, ‘God, somebody’s made a mistake!’ But there it was, in lights.… And I sat there and said, ‘So, that’s the way it looks’… it was all very strange to me.”

  Charles Casillo, an author and Marilyn Monroe historian, best summed up Marilyn’s appeal this way: “Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. Marilyn Monroe was sexy. Marilyn Monroe was delicious… always delicious. Everyone knew that. She wasn’t just a sex symbol. She was the sex symbol. But it was a certain kind of sex appeal, initiated, developed and perfected by her. Her appeal was childlike, innocent, tempting, glowing—bursting forth and available like a dish of fresh strawberries arranged in cream.… The creation of Marilyn Monroe had made an unwanted girl of the streets the most desired, written about, analyzed, gossiped about, wondered about and longed for woman of her era.”

 
For the first of these landmark movies, Niagara, the studio lavished the film with an impressive team of Oscar-honored artisans and craftsmen, with veteran Fox director Henry Hathaway, who had just directed Monroe the previous year in O. Henry’s Full House.

  Joseph Cotten played Loomis, a mentally damaged Korean War vet who, with his wife, Rose (Monroe), makes a trip to Niagara Falls in an attempt to repair their broken marriage. In Rose’s mind, the marriage is beyond repair and she uses the trip to continue an adulterous affair with her lover, Patrick, who agrees to murder George. The plot to kill George backfires when he hurls Patrick into the falls to his death. Rose escapes and begins a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with George, played out against the awesome beauty and deafening power of the falls. George’s pursuit of Rose moves furtively in and out of Niagara’s watery veil. We teeter between horror and relief as George corners the beautiful Rose in the belltower and chokes the life out of her.

  Since the beginning of her film career, Marilyn had striven to win the approval and respect of those in her profession. She studied her craft and worked with coaches from day one. She had the adoration of millions of fans yet somehow felt her beauty got in the way of her being recognized as a serious actress. There is evidence that some movie critics felt the same way. But occasionally there would be favorable comments about her acting chops, and her films would also get a thumbs-up. Even Pauline Kael, the feared film critic of the New Yorker, would praise her with faint damns, as she did when writing about Niagara. “This isn’t a good movie,” she wrote, “but it’s compellingly tawdry and nasty… the only movie that explores the mean, unsavory potential of Marilyn Monroe’s cuddly, infantile perversity.” Of the same movie, a critic at the New York Times wrote, “Seen from any angle, the Falls and Miss Monroe leave little to be desired.”