The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (13 page)

M
arilyn Monroe's first childhood memory was of being suffocated by her mad grandmother, Della. “I remember waking up from my nap fighting for my life. Something was pressed against my face. It could have been a pillow. I fought with all my strength,” she recalled many years later.

Della Monroe Grainger had a history of mental illness, and her first husband, Otis Elmer Monroe, died in a mental institution in 1909. When Della married oil field worker Charles Grainger in 1923, they lived in a bungalow on Rhode Island Avenue in Hawthorne, a suburb of Los Angeles. Grainger soon learned of Della's mercurial moods and was often the object of her irrational rages. Their stormy relationship ended when Grainger arranged to be transferred across the globe to the safety of the oil fields in the wilds of Borneo.

Thrown into despair by her abandonment, Della turned to religion for solace, and joined Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's Church of the Foursquare Gospel, where Sister Aimee would seemingly rise into the air and glow with glory at the end of her illuminating sermons—thanks to the miraculous effects installed by the Otto K. Olesen Illuminating Company of Hollywood. But no amount of illumination could brighten the darkness
descending on Della. A manic-depressive psychosis was enveloping her mind.

In December 1925, Della's daughter by Otis Monroe, Gladys, took the Pacific Electric Red Car from Hollywood to Hawthorne to make an uncommon visit to her mother. Informing Della that she was pregnant, and that the father of the child didn't want to marry her, Gladys hoped to stay with her mother until the baby was born. But Della was planning on sailing to Borneo, hoping for a reconciliation with Charles Grainger. A solution was found in Della's suggestion that Gladys stay with Wayne and Ida Bolender, neighbors who lived across the street from Della on Rhode Island Avenue.

The Bolenders were devout Christian fundamentalists who took care of children for a fee. It was arranged for Gladys to stay at their home until the baby was born, and to remain for a few weeks after the birth. Fellow workers at the film laboratory in Hollywood where Gladys was employed chipped in to help pay for the baby's delivery. Norma Jeane was born on June 1, 1926, and baptized by Aimee Semple McPherson several weeks later. In July, Gladys returned to her work at Consolidated Film Laboratories and moved back to her Hollywood apartment. An illegitimate baby was a problem for a single young woman working in Hollywood during the twenties, and Norma Jeane remained with the Bolenders, who were paid five dollars a week.

“I'll come every Saturday and stay over whenever I can, if that's all right,” Gladys told them. According to Wayne Bolender, “Gladys would come to visit nearly every Saturday around noon. Sometimes she would spend the night, but she usually had a date on Saturday night or a party to go to and would return to Hollywood after a visit of several hours.”

Della's attempt at a reconciliation with Charles Grainger proved to be financially and emotionally draining, and when Della returned from Borneo alone in October 1926, she began drinking heavily. Moving back to her residence across the street from the Bolenders, she soon became fascinated by her grandchild, Norma Jeane, and offered to take care of her. However, Gladys decided that it was best for the baby to stay on with the Bolenders, and it was made clear to Della that Norma Jeane had been placed in their care. Della resented the Bolenders' control over her grandchild, and her frequent visits to see the baby often ended in arguments.

Noting that Della was frequently inebriated and acting strangely, Ida Bolender became concerned when Della began taking Norma Jeane across the street for long periods of time, and it was during the summer of 1927
that the “incident” occurred. Della had taken Norma Jeane for the afternoon and attempted to smother the baby. There was only one tiny, silent witness, and she recalled it from the vague recesses of early traumatic memory.

Sensing that Norma Jeane was frightened by something that had occurred during her stay at Della Grainger's house, the Bolenders began discouraging Della's visits. And in August 1927, Della descended into the snake pit of madness. Wayne Bolender recalled seeing her head up the walk toward the house in a blind rage. She was yelling incoherently, demanding to see her grandchild. He quickly shut the front door and locked it. Hearing the commotion, Ida entered the living room from the kitchen and watched Della through the window. Della was screaming and pounding on the door like a madwoman. Terrified, Ida yelled, “Call the police, Wayne. Hurry!” Before the police arrived Della tried to break down the door. Smashing through a panel with her fist, she injured her hand and blood spurted from the wound. When the police arrived, they subdued Della and forcibly took her away. Wayne vividly recalled his last image of Della as they dragged her off, her head thrown back, screaming to the heavens as she beseeched God's help.

Help soon arrived in the guise of death.

Della Grainger died nineteen days after the incident at the Bolenders' house. Her heart failed during a manic seizure at the Norwalk Hospital for the insane, the same hospital where Norma Jeane's grandfather, Otis Monroe, had died in 1909. Della's death certificate lists “myocarditis” as the cause of death and cites a manic-depressive psychosis as the contributing factor.

On August 25, 1927, Della Grainger was buried in an unmarked grave next to Otis Monroe at Rose Dale Cemetery in central Los Angeles.

A
t times the Bolenders boarded as many as five children. One of the children was a boy named Lester. Two months younger than Norma Jeane, he was later adopted by the Bolenders. At fourteen months, Norma Jeane would often mimic Lester, who began calling Ida Bolender “Mama.” But Gladys didn't want her baby to refer to Ida as “Mama,” and Ida would scold Norma Jeane and say, “I'm not Mama. I'm Aunt Ida—
Aunt Ida!
” Hurt and bewildered that she couldn't call Ida “Mama” as Lester did, Norma Jeane tried to understand, and one of her first complete sentences was “There goes a mama!” when she saw a woman holding a child by the hand.

When Gladys visited on Saturdays she would frequently take Norma Jeane on outings to the beach. Often they would ride the trams that traversed the colorful oceanfront from Venice to Santa Monica, and sometimes they would walk out on Santa Monica Pier, where Gladys would let Norma Jeane ride the merry-go-round; but for years Norma Jeane never knew exactly who the pretty lady with the red hair was.

Though she wasn't to call Ida “Mama,” Norma Jeane assumed that Wayne Bolender was her father, and she called him Daddy. “I used to sit
on the edge of the bathtub in the morning and watch him shave and ask him questions—which was east or south, or how many people there were in the world?” Marilyn Monroe later recalled. “He was the only one who ever answered the questions I asked.”

One day Ida Bolender said to Norma Jeane, “You are old enough to know that I'm not related to you in any way. Neither is Wayne.”

“But,” Norma Jeane protested, “He's my daddy!”

“No, I'm not your mother, and Wayne is not your father. You just board here. Your mama's coming to see you tomorrow. You can call
her
Mama if you want to.”

The next day was Saturday, and the woman she was to call “Mama” arrived. It was the woman with the red hair. “She was the pretty woman who never smiled,” Marilyn remembered. “I'd seen her often before, but I hadn't known quite who she was. When I said, ‘Hello, Mama' she stared at me. She had never kissed me or held me in her arms or hardly spoken to me.”

One Saturday Gladys picked up Norma Jeane and took her for a visit to her rooms in Hollywood. “I used to be frightened when I visited her and spent most of my time in the closet of her bedroom hiding among the clothes,” Marilyn remembered.

The person in the picture with the lively smile in his eyes, who looked like Gable, was a man Gladys had met in Venice Beach….

 

Known as “the Playland of the Pacific,” Venice was a Los Angeles tidal marshland that had been transformed by developers into a plaster facsimile of Venezia, complete with winding canals, Venetian gondolas, arched bridges, and the odor of sewage. In 1917, when the pretty woman with the red hair was only fourteen, she lived there with her mother, Della.

When the oily sulfuric scum that bubbled to the surface of the Venice canals proved to be black gold, one of the wildcatters who arrived in Venice was Charles Grainger. He met Della at a gala New Year's Eve dance on the boomtown waterfront and became a frequent visitor to her apartment at 27 Westminster Street. Though they weren't yet betrothed, Della was soon gondoliered into Grainger's Venice bungalow. Young Gladys, who didn't like the oily Mr. Grainger, proved to be an inconvenience. The problem was solved, however, when Gladys met Jasper Baker, an amusement concessionaire at Pickering's Pleasure Palace on Ocean Park Pier. Attracted by Gladys's beauty and youthful charms, Jasper soon gave Gladys an unanticipated amusement zone gratuity. When it was discovered that Gladys was pregnant with his child, a marriage was quickly arranged.

On May 17, 1917, swearing that her fourteen-year-old daughter was eighteen, Della was witness to Gladys's marriage to the reluctant concessionaire, who was twelve years older than his child bride. Jasper never wanted the child, and demanded that she have an abortion. Nevertheless, Gladys insisted on having her baby, and six months after the wedding, on November 10, 1917, Robert “Jackie” Baker was born. A daughter, Berniece, was born in July 1919.

Gladys was barely out of childhood herself when she married, and her unstable childhood had ill prepared her for marital life and motherhood. From the beginning the marriage was fraught with problems. Jasper was prone to drink and fits of violence, and friends noted that Gladys often wore dark glasses to conceal blackened eyes. In later years, in one of his rare references to his wife, Jasper complained to his daughter Berniece, “She wouldn't cook, and she wouldn't clean house. She wouldn't do anything. She just liked to get out and roam around…. She was a beautiful woman, but she was very young—too young to know how to take care of children.”

During a trip to visit Jasper's relatives in Flat Lick, Kentucky, Gladys went hiking with Jasper's younger brother. When they returned after dark, Jasper was in a drunken rage and beat Gladys across the back with a bridle until she bled profusely. Townspeople saw her running hysterically down the street, begging to be protected from her husband.

Shortly after the Bakers returned to California, Gladys left her husband. On June 20, 1921, she filed divorce papers accusing Jasper Baker of “extreme cruelty by abusing [her] and calling her vile names and using profane language at and in her presence, by striking [her] and kicking [her].” Taking the children, she moved into Della's Venice bungalow. One weekend Jasper picked up the children for an outing, and little Jackie and baby Berniece never returned. Jasper took them back to his family's home in Flat Lick. Determined to reclaim her children, Gladys hitchhiked to Kentucky, where she found that Berniece had been put in hiding and Jackie was in a Louisville hospital suffering from an unexplained injury. Berniece recalled that Jackie suffered a series of “unfortunate accidents” and had a “never-ending run of bad luck.” When Jackie was three and a half, he severely injured his hip. “Daddy told me that Jackie fell out of a car,” said Berniece. The truth was that Jasper abused the son he had never wanted.

“Daddy and my grandmother kept me hidden, and they told my mother that she had better not go to that hospital and bother Jackie,” Berniece recalled. “Of course, mother went anyway. She visited Jackie, but Daddy had told the doctors not to let her take him out. So she got a job in Louisville as a housekeeper while she waited for Jackie to get better.”

Frustrated in her attempts to regain custody of her children, Gladys returned to Venice Beach in May 1923 and moved to the Westminster Apartments, where she met Stan Gifford, a salesman for the Consolidated Film Laboratories in Hollywood. A great deal had changed since she last lived in Venice. Her mother, Della, had married Charles Grainger and moved to nearby Hawthorne, and the Venetian community had become engulfed by oil derricks, roller-coaster rides, and all-night dance halls. The canals of the “Playland of the Pacific” led to speakeasies, jazz joints, brothels, and card rooms frequented by celebrants of the Jazz Age. Among the flaming youth was Gladys Baker, who hoped to forget her melancholy memories in the company of Stan Gifford.

In a 1923 divorce action filed by Gifford's wife, Lillian, she complained:

Gifford obtained employment for Gladys in the negative-assembly department at Consolidated, where her supervisor was Grace McKee, a young divorcée and casual acquaintance of Gifford's. According to Olin Stanley, a coworker, Grace McKee and Gladys became close friends. “They did, as you'd say, lots of fast living, lots of dates with fellows at the lab or from the studios. They frequently went down to gin joints at Venice with Gifford.”

Olin Stanley recalled that Gladys was very much in love with Stan Gifford and hoped to become his wife. But, disillusioned by Gifford's refusal to commit himself, Gladys began seeking the companionship of other men. In the summer of 1924 she met Edward Mortensen, an itinerant laborer of Norwegian descent. Mortensen offered Gladys the stability and security that Gifford denied her, and they were married in a civil ceremony on October 11, 1924. It wasn't long, however, before Gladys realized she had made a mistake. Stating to Grace McKee that her life with Mortensen was unendurably dull, in February 1925 Gladys walked out on her husband of four months and resumed her relationship with Gifford.

In late 1925, many months after she had left Mortensen, Gladys became pregnant with Gifford's child. Grace McKee recalled that Gladys desperately wanted Gifford to marry her and hoped the child would bring about the wedding. But on Christmas Eve there was a confrontation and Stan Gifford refused to marry Gladys.

And so it was that a Gemini child, destined to become the most celebrated film star of the twentieth century, was born on June 1, 1926, at 9:30
A.M.
in the charity ward of the General Hospital in Los Angeles—and Martin Edward Mortensen, address unknown, was named as the father. On Norma Jeane's birth certificate it states that the infant was the mother's third child; however, Gladys indicates that the first two born were “no longer living.” Perhaps to her broken heart it was as though Jackie and Berniece were, indeed, dead.

Years later, when Gladys lifted little Norma Jeane up on a chair to see the picture of her father, Gladys wouldn't answer when Norma Jeane asked the name of the man with the lively smile in his eyes who looked like
Gable. Instead, she went into her room and locked the door. His name was Stan Gifford.

“It must have hurt my mother very, very much. I don't think she ever got over the hurt,” Marilyn Monroe commented in July 1962. “When a man leaves a woman when she tells him she's going to have his baby, when he doesn't marry her, that must hurt a woman very much, deep down inside. A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child under those circumstances—I mean especially when she's not even married to him.”