Marilyn: Norma Jeane (7 page)

After just seven months of living outside an institution, Gladys asked the hospital to take her back. Norma Jeane was relieved. She was free now to begin a new life. This ghost from her childhood, a ghost whose fate she feared she would share, has outlived her by many years. First Marilyn, and then money left in Marilyn’s will, have supported Gladys in and out of institutions; she was never to live an independent life again.

In her notes for an autobiography, Marilyn recalled being told to say “Mama” to “a pretty woman who never smiled” and who visited her at the Bolenders’. “I’d seen her often before, but I hadn’t quite known who she was.

“When I said, ‘Hello mama,’ this time, she stared at me. She had never kissed me or held me in her arms or hardly spoken to me. I didn’t know anything about her then, but a few years later I learned a number of things.

“When I think of her now, my heart hurts twice as much as it used to when I was a little girl. It hurts me for both of us.”

In 1963, the year after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Dr. W. Hugh Missildine, a psychiatrist, published a book called
Your Inner Child of the Past.
It was an analysis of adult emotional problems based on his nine years as director of the Children’s Mental Health Center in Columbus, Ohio. Without the artificial language or gender-based theories of Freud, he simply wrote what he had concluded from observation.

He believed that the child we used to be lives on inside us. It is difficult for us to change that child’s patterns because they feel like “home.” Recognizing this compelling self of the past can help to keep us from repeating history. Otherwise, we may continue to treat ourselves—and others—as that child was once treated. At worst, such repetition is destructive. Even at best, we are following a pattern we did not choose for ourselves.

In identifying common excesses experienced by children, and so reported by them as adults, he used postwar studies on the damage caused by emotional neglect—damage that can occur even among the well-to-do without physical neglect. One chapter outlined the characteristics of an adult who is still controlled by the neglected child inside. Here is Missildine’s “Index of Suspicion” for such an adult. He could almost be speaking about and to Marilyn:

If you have difficulty in feeling close to others and in “belonging” to a group, drift in and out of relationships casually because people do not seem to mean much to you, if you feel you lack an identity of your own, suffer intensely from anxiety and loneliness and yet keep people at a distance, you should suspect neglect as the troublemaking pathogenic factor in your childhood. An additional clue suggesting neglect: prolonged separation from your parents, particularly your mother, by death, divorce, hospitalization or because of parental activities and interests.

Missildine described other common characteristics of such women, as well as men, though using the generic “he” of the day:

The childhood of persons who suffered from neglect usually reveals a father who somehow wasn’t a father and a mother who somehow wasn’t a mother. Thus, in adult life, the neglected “child of the past” maintains the security of this familiar emptiness… The relationships of persons who suffered from neglect in child hood resemble those of an actor to his audience. In childhood such a person may have discovered that he could win… momentary attention and love, through his achievements… In such circumstances a child learns to expect nothing but applause. More than momentary warmth and love do not exist… Closeness threatens the security of neglect on which his “child of the past” has been nourished. To such a person, closeness is frightening, binding and entrapping…

Superficially, the famous movie star with her numerous conquests and marriages, the world statesman and his lonely, melancholy wisdom, and the woman whose life consists of serving others do not seem to have been particularly neglected… Yet often they are deeply unhappy in their continuing self-neglect…

… It is not at all unusual for the individual who has suffered the loss of a parent for any reason… to create in his childhood fantasies a highly idealized parent. In his imagination this idealized and loving parent would correct all the difficulties he encounters, would appreciate his efforts, indulge him endlessly…

However, if continued into adolescence and adult life, the idealized fantasy parent may prevent formation of close relationships with members of the opposite sex… A girl who has lost her father may idealize him and reject men who might make excellent marriage partners because she feels they are lacking in the finer qualities of a gentleman and a scholar.

… Most individuals who suffered from neglect in childhood… actively seek social participation, sexual love and affection—“can’t get enough of it,” as one such girl declared. Once they have overcome an initial timidity, they may plunge into any relationship that seems to promise companionship, affection, closeness or excitement.

The lack of mothering in childhood tends to dominate the sexual activities… Such a person is interested in and wants tender, mothering love—not sexuality—and tends to convert the partner into a mothering figure…

The inability of the person who has suffered from neglect in childhood to contribute much emotionally to a relationship often causes its disintegration. Its maintenance is left to the other partner—and he tends to move off because he is tired of the burden…

Earlier in the work, Missildine noted:

Often the person whose childhood has been scarred by neglect becomes expert in exploiting others… He knows just how to stimulate interest and sympathy in himself. And he will demand love and affection, constant attention and emotional support… But this is a one-way street…

… Many such people, particularly women, are drawn into theatrical and movie work because, in this work and atmosphere, they can create a fantasy identity. Their inner feelings about themselves are so despairing that they do not feel they can pay attention to these feelings. As one such woman once put it: “When you’re a nobody, the only way to be somebody is to be somebody else.”

As you read and think about Marilyn, remember Norma Jeane.

I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.

—Marilyn Monroe

T
HAT FAMOUS DICTUM OF
Marilyn’s was quoted to Pete Martin, a journalist writing a book about her in the 1950s, by a man in the legal department of Twentieth Century-Fox. In advising her on a new contract she was bargaining for, he had suggested that she sign it in the existing tax year rather than waiting until the following one, thus saving herself money—and she refused.

Marilyn was obsessed with her career, with becoming a good actress as well as a famous movie star, but she cared very little about money and possessions. She wanted not power but love. Indeed, she sometimes acted against her own financial self-interest, and showed concern for business by forming her own production company only when she feared she was being exploited by Hollywood. To the end, her life-style and habits were fairly simple.

That she often ignored her own security was more than just the neglected Norma Jeane recreating a feeling of “home” by treating herself as she had been treated. It was also part of her emotional connection to ordinary people like those of her childhood—working-class families who were struggling through the Depression, people for whom poverty was no shame and the chance to work hard was a gift.

Even as a penniless starlet, invited as decoration to Hollywood parties where men risked thousands on a casual card game, she didn’t want to become one of the rich. “When I saw them hand hundred- and even thousand-dollar bills to each other,” she wrote, “I felt something bitter in my heart. I remembered how much twenty-five cents and even nickels meant to the people I had known, how happy ten dollars would have made them, how a hundred dollars would have changed their whole lives. I remembered my Aunt Grace and me waiting in line at the Holmes Bakery to buy a sackful of bread… And I remembered how she had gone with one of her lenses missing from her glasses for three months because she couldn’t afford the fifty cents to buy its replacement. I remembered all the sounds and smells of poverty, the fright in people’s eyes when they lost jobs, and the way they skimped and drudged in order to get through the week.”

From those people, Norma Jeane had learned to work hard. Habits gained while doing chores in the orphanage and foster homes or watching the job struggles of her mother and her Aunt Grace were reinforced by her own need for approval. They helped her keep an immaculate apartment as a teenage bride and win an E for excellence when she worked spraying fuselages at a defense plant. She was also remembered by photographers as the rare model who asked for criticism and wanted to learn every aspect of composing a good photograph.

From them, she also learned the importance of dreams in lives whose realities were hard. As Norma Jeane, imagination and fantasy had been her only refuge. “I loved playing pretend games,” Marilyn said of her fascination with acting, “and I led all the other children into making up play games, and taking different parts. And I’d listen to ‘The Lone Ranger’ and get terribly excited. Not at the horses and the chases and the guns but… the
drama.
The wondering of how it would be for each person in that situation… There are techniques to be learned, and it’s hard work. But it still seems sort of like play to me, and something you want terribly to do.”

When she herself became rich, it couldn’t change the lives of ordinary people, and only made her feel estranged from them. It couldn’t even change her own sense of being an outsider among the well-to-do, where her lack of education and social skills made her feel personally out of place. But, as an actress, she could offer everyday moviegoers the hope and dreams that had built a fantasy escape for Norma Jeane. “Even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say ‘Hi,’” Marilyn explained of her obsession with work, “I’ve always felt that the people ought to get their money’s worth, and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.” Response from working people seemed to mean as much to Marilyn as praise from movie critics, or coveted invitations to the same Beverly Hills parties she once had decorated as an interchangeable starlet. When street crowds yelled their approval at premieres, she seemed to forget her terror of appearing in public. When truck drivers called a friendly greeting in the street, or children asked for her autograph, or old people stopped to say she made them proud, she was delighted and touched. She considered-herself one of them—and they seemed to sense that. Indeed, this populist support was one of the few things that could buoy up her shaky self-confidence. In Korea, where she went to entertain the troops, she was honestly amazed and moved to find an audience of thirteen thousand G.I.’s waiting in the freezing cold. When the crowd called for her over and over again, she insisted on braving the chill in a strapless dress and open sandals so she wouldn’t disappoint them. “It was the first time,” she explained later, “that I ever felt I had an effect on people.”

Given her obsession with public stardom, the poverty of her early days in Hollywood, and her use of sex as a friendly reward to men whom she trusted to understand or help her, many biographers have been skeptical of her protestations that she was never “kept,” or her angry and fearful response to being sexually “used.” As she had told George Barris, shortly before her death, “If there’s only one thing in my life I was to be proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.” In those last months when she was out of work and had even less sense of self than usual, she raged and wept at the idea that men might be using her “only as a plaything.”

“Maybe it was the nickel Mr. Kimmel once gave me…,” she wrote, using a name that referred to the old man she said had sexually attacked her as an eight-year-old, “but men who tried to buy me with money made me sick. There were plenty of them. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up… I didn’t take their money, and they couldn’t get by my front door, but I kept riding in their limousines and sitting beside them in swanky places. There was always a chance a job and not another wolf might spot you.”

There is not only her testimony, but the financial facts of her life to support the belief that she refused gifts of clothes and expensive apartments from the various men who wanted to “keep” her. Most of her pre-stardom days in Hollywood were spent cleaning by hand and re-wearing the same two or three dresses, eating meals at drugstore counters when she had little money, and living on peanut butter and raw hamburger in her room to keep up her energy when she had even less. Her small income as a starlet-in-training went for acting lessons in her drive for self-improvement. When she got broke enough in those early modeling and acting days, she seems to have exchanged sex for small sums of money from men she didn’t have to see again. Lena Pepitone, a maid who worked for her in New York, says Marilyn told her of trading sex for fifteen dollars in pocket money from a man she met in a bar when Jim Dougherty was away at sea, and that there were a few other such incidents after that. Acting teacher Lee Strasberg also told an interviewer that Marilyn said she had worked as a call girl at conventions, and that she felt damaged by the experience. No independent evidence has come to light to support these stories: Marilyn may have been dramatizing the deprivation of her background, as she sometimes did, as if to justify her real feelings of being deprived.

And, as Patricia Newcomb, her friend and press assistant, has explained, “Marilyn Monroe never told anybody everything.”

But even if the most sordid of these stories were true, they seem to parallel the famous calendar incident. After refusing other nude modeling jobs, Marilyn finally agreed to pose for the nude calendar for only fifty dollars because it was the exact sum she needed to retrieve her old car. Even though waiting until she was desperate went against her own financial self-interest, she seems to have resisted pridefully, and then given in only when she thought there was no other way out.