Marilyn: Norma Jeane (6 page)

In later years, when the famous Marilyn Monroe talked about her painful childhood, the Bolenders would protest that she had been well cared for, that they had treated her as they did their own adopted son who was close to her own age. The orphanage where she felt so deprived and abandoned would point out that children there were regarded as members of a big family, with no more regimentation or deprivation than any other family that size. Many of Marilyn Monroe’s biographers would accuse her of lying about her childhood suffering because she sometimes exaggerated facts: for instance, that she had been in “a dozen” foster homes, when the reality was a half dozen; or that her mother’s nervous breakdown had occurred when she was only five, as she had told Barris, instead of the reality, seven; or that she had hidden Gladys’s life in a mental institution by telling reporters for the first few years of her Hollywood starlet days that her mother was dead. Even Jim Dougherty, who had reason to know and believe Norma Jeane’s family abandonment, objected in his book,
The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe,
to the idea that Norma Jeane had been deprived. The Dougherty family had lived in a tent during the Depression, and his wife’s childhood in foster homes seemed to him better fed and better housed than his own had been.

But of all Marilyn’s stories of her early years, the account of rape by an elderly boarder when she was eight was most disbelieved. Guiles, the careful researcher, discounted the story because he could not find one of Norma Jeane’s foster families who also ran a boardinghouse. On the other hand, he did support through interviews the fact that Aunt Grace’s husband, Doc Goddard, once stumbled drunk into the teenage Norma Jeane’s bedroom, and terrified her by sitting on the bed and giving her what Guiles described as a “French kiss.” Though that episode took place several years later than Marilyn’s account of a rape, Guiles allows that she might have disguised her attacker if he was indeed married to the woman who was her legal guardian. Neither he nor other biographers pursued the possibility of the Englishman, though he and his wife could have been considered boarders in the white bungalow, and Norma Jeane was then an eight-year-old. In many cases, the tendency to disbelieve Marilyn’s story is reinforced by Jim Dougherty’s remembrance of his sixteen-year-old bride as a technical virgin, and thus someone who could not have been raped. Norman Mailer flatly asserts that her virginity as a bride makes the story of her childhood rape impossible. He seems unaware of the statistics that show many rapes, especially those of very young children, consist of oral and other sexual humiliations, not intercourse. Dougherty and Mailer especially seem to depend only on their own imaginations of what a rape should be.

In any case, childhood memories are prisms, not panes of glass. Details may loom large in the eyes of our smaller selves, while important events lie beyond our vision or understanding. Most of what Marilyn told Barris and other reporters differs in detail but is consistent in emotion. What impressed friends and lovers who actually listened to her—as opposed to biographers like Mailer and Guiles who never met her—was her emotional honesty. Facts may have been forgotten, or exaggerated to account for strong feelings, but Marilyn remained true to her memories of Norma Jeane’s emotional experience. From Arthur Miller and from friends, there comes a sense that, even when she tried to pretend an emotion—for instance, to be confident or gay when she did not feel it—some underlying honesty still gave her away. Whatever its facts, her memory of being sexually humiliated as a child, and then of being humiliated again by disbelief, seemed too full of pain to be artificial. Certainly, the stammering she attributed to that trauma was real.

One of her tragedies may have been growing up in a time when Freudian theory had convinced many people (perhaps Marilyn’s own later psychiatrists) that female children wanted and so fantasized rape by fathers or father figures. It was also a time when the Depression had focused American attention more on the physical suffering of children who lacked food and shelter than on the damage caused by emotional neglect. As a result, children’s sexual testimony largely was disbelieved, and sincere efforts to help children were focused on providing nutrition, safety, and shelter.

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself—all those turn out to be as important to a child’s development as all but the most basic food and shelter.

It was exactly these emotional basics that Norma Jeane lacked. And she was deprived of them in the earliest years of her life, when the resulting damage to a sense of self is most difficult to repair.

Once she found her first brief but never-forgotten taste of unconditional love with her beloved Aunt Ana, Marilyn’s memory seems to have exaggerated the time that it lasted, as if this rare and bright light in her life had made the shadows around it disappear.

In fact, she was not taken directly to Aunt Ana’s house from the orphanage, as she told Barris. In late June 1937, when Aunt Grace made good on her promise of rescue, she took the eleven-year-old Norma Jeane to live with a husband and wife in Compton who ran a small business out of their home. Grace had married Doc Goddard, a divorced man ten years younger than she was, while Norma Jeane was in the orphanage. His three children were living with them, and Grace did not feel she could also take in Norma Jeane.

For a long summer, Norma Jeane helped her new “mother” in Compton load and deliver cartons to small stores throughout Los Angeles County. When she complained to her Aunt Grace that she was spending all her time riding in her new family’s battered car, Aunt Grace found her another home with a couple who made their meager living by keeping several other “county children.” There, an alcoholic husband presented another problem of instability. Grace was finally forced to take Norma Jeane into her own home, and into the bedroom of her stepdaughter, who was two years younger than Norma Jeane. She entered junior high a term behind her classmates. The irregularity of Norma Jeane’s life had caused her to fall back in school. In the seventh grade, but already tall and well developed, she became even more self-conscious.

But Norma Jeane was befriended by an aunt of Grace McKee Goddard’s. Her name was Ana Lower. Though she lived some distance away, Norma Jeane began spending every Sunday with this woman in her early sixties, accompanying her to Christian Science services, and eagerly drinking in her philosophy and affection. Though Ana Lower had never married or had children, she instinctively seemed to understand the support Norma Jeane needed, and to nurture the child inside this teenager who looked so deceptively mature.

In fact, Norma Jeane was a young girl who might not betray her presence in a room by so much as a cough, and so was called “Mouse” by the Goddards; yet in junior high school she found herself the object of fervent male attention. For all her “precocious curves,” as Marilyn later wrote, “I was as unsensual as a fossil. But I seemed to affect people quite otherwise.” Norma Jeane’s refuge was Aunt Ana’s house or the movies. At the Goddards’, she would close herself into her bedroom alone, and act out all the parts in any movie she had just seen. With the encouragement first of the orphanage matron, then of Aunt Grace, she also had begun experimenting with makeup that reminded her of the movies, but increased her oddly grown-up looks.

It was into this same bedroom that the drunken six-foot-two-inch Doc Goddard barged one evening, bestowing the “French kiss” for which Guiles reported he was sorry when sober. But this treatment from a man Norma Jeane had regarded as a substitute father and called Daddy was shocking enough to confide in Aunt Ana. Whatever the discussion with Grace and her husband, Aunt Ana then decided to take the fourteen-year-old into her own home.

Norma Jeane spent only a little more than a year living with Aunt Ana in the top half of a modest two-family house, but she had a loving, focused presence in her life for the first time. She was still a county child with public-support checks paying for her keep, her legal guardian was still Aunt Grace, and her own mother was still in a mental hospital, but Norma Jeane would remember this time as one of the happiest, and Aunt Ana as her most important influence, for the rest of her life.

This happy period was cut short when Doc Goddard was about to move his family to West Virginia, and Aunt Grace began to look for an alternative for Norma Jeane. Whether Grace’s motive was keeping her ten-years-younger husband from straying, protecting Norma Jeane, honoring her friend Gladys’s desire to have her daughter nearby, or all three, she never proposed taking the fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane with them. Whether Aunt Ana was persuaded by Grace’s arguments that Norma Jeane needed the protection of marriage, or by her own feeling of being too old to take over the responsibility of legal guardianship for a teenager, she didn’t stop Grace’s new plan. In later life, Marilyn never blamed Aunt Ana for arranging her teenage marriage—but she did blame Aunt Grace.

After suggesting the marriage to the Dougherty family, with whom the twenty-year-old Jim was still living—and after a few dates between Jim and Norma Jeane—Aunt Grace instructed the teenager to explain her illegitimacy to Jim in case this still shameful status was a bar to the marriage. It was not; but later, Marilyn said this was the first time she had been sure that her father and mother were not married, or known that the name Mortensen on her own birth certificate belonged to her mother’s second husband.

Before leaving for West Virginia, Aunt Grace arranged to have the wedding performed in the home of friends. The winding staircase in their front hall would make the ceremony “just like in the movies,” she assured Norma Jeane. With both this guardian and her mother absent, and no known father in sight, it was Ana Lower who gave her “niece” away. Marilyn had exaggerated when she recalled “six mothers weeping” at her wedding, but the Bolenders did come for the occasion. It was the last time Norma Jeane would ever see them. The marriage ceremony was conducted by a minister of the Christian Church who had taught Jim to hunt and shoot when he was a boy.

Having been born “Mortensen,” and gone to school as “Baker,” she was now “Norma Jeane Dougherty.” Later she would revert on occasion to “Baker,” the name of her mother’s first husband; and she also used “Jean Norman,” at the suggestion of her modeling agency. Later still, as a starlet, she would choose “Monroe” for its alliteration with the studio-chosen first name of “Marilyn.” Ironically, she became famous with the family name of both her maternal grandmother and her mother, whose shared fate of desertion by men and depression would be continued to the third generation.

In early 1946, Gladys called Grace Goddard, who had returned with her husband to California, to say that she would like to try living outside an institution again. It was decided that mother and daughter could live together in the downstairs apartment of Ana Lower’s house—Jim Dougherty was away at sea. The nineteen-year-old Norma Jeane was making her living as a model in the absence of her husband, and trying to become a starlet.

They slept in the same bed, and Gladys tried to make herself useful to her daughter by looking after the small apartment, answering the phone, and taking messages of modeling assignments and studio casting calls. Once, she even got painstakingly dressed in a white dress, white shoes, and a new picture hat to make a surprise call on Emmeline Snively, whose modeling agency she believed had rescued her daughter. After fervently discussing Norma Jeane’s career with the astonished Miss Snively, Gladys shook her hand and said, “I only came so I could thank you personally for what you’ve been doing for Norma Jeane. You’ve given her a whole new life.”

But that was probably one of Gladys’s few outings on her own. It was hard for the long-institutionalized Gladys to be alone. Norma Jeane was gone from the apartment most of the day. When she decided to move out of the apartment and into the Studio Club, a rooming house for starlets, Gladys’s only company was the elderly Aunt Ana who lived upstairs. Gradually, she even stopped going upstairs.

And it must have been hard for Norma Jeane, too. There was the pressure on her starlet’s small salary of helping to support her mother, and the occasional shopping sprees that Gladys’s mood swings produced. Before her mother’s arrival her small earnings had barely paid for her own food and professional expenses, and Dougherty had angrily cut off her allotment as soon as she wrote him about a divorce. There were also fearful memories. “I kept hearing the terrible noise on the stairs and my mother screaming and laughing as they led her out of the home she had tried to build for me,” Marilyn later said. Each time she came home to that apartment, she must have worried about what she would find.

However, when Norma Jeane moved into the Studio Club, Gladys seemed to accept this as necessary to her daughter’s career. Dougherty had met his mother-in-law for the first time earlier that year when he was on leave. In August he saw her again when he met Norma Jeane at the apartment instead of the Studio Club to discuss signing the divorce papers. If the dissolution of this marriage had not been already inevitable on personal grounds, Gladys seemed to approve it as a work necessity. Miss Snively had made clear that movie studios did not want to hire a starlet who was married and might waste their investment by getting pregnant.

Norma Jeane sometimes stopped by to see her mother between studio appointments, and was alarmed that Gladys was withdrawing more and more into one of her refuges: an obsession with religion.