The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (15 page)

When Grace McKee lost her job at Columbia she had moved in with her mother, Emma Atchinson, who kept an apartment on Lodi Place just off Hollywood Boulevard, and Norma Jeane stayed with Grace at the Atchinson apartment. “I could hear her friends arguing in her room at night when I lay in bed pretending to be asleep,” Marilyn remembered. “They advised her against adopting me because I was certain to become more and more of a responsibility as I grew older. This was on account of my ‘heritage,' they said. They talked about my mother and her father and brother and grandmother being mental cases and said I would certainly follow in their footsteps. I lay in bed shivering as I listened. I didn't know what a mental case was, but I knew it wasn't anything good….”

It was difficult for Grace to look after Norma Jeane, not only because of her financial situation but because she had fallen in love with “Doc” Goddard, a tall Texan who had also traveled to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. Goddard and Grace were married in Las Vegas on August 17, 1935, and Norma Jeane hoped she would be able to live with them, but it proved to be impractical. “Doc and Aunt Grace were very poor,” Marilyn was to recall, “so they couldn't care for me, and I think she felt that her responsibility was to her new husband.”

On the afternoon of September 13, 1935, when Norma Jeane saw “Aunt Grace” packing up her few belongings into a box, she knew she was going away again. Aunt Grace didn't tell her where she was going, but Aunt Grace had been crying all morning, and Norma Jeane had a sense of foreboding. Getting into the car, they silently drove to Vine Street and
turned east on Santa Monica Boulevard until they finally came to El Centro Avenue and headed south. Grace stopped the car in front of a stately three-story colonial brick building at 815 North El Centro. A flagpole stood in the midst of the sweeping lawn surrounding the walkway to the front door.

“This is where you will live now,” Grace said, “I hope you'll be happy here. I'll come and see you as often as I can. They'll take good care of you—better than I can at home. But I expect soon we'll get a house and then you will come and live with me again.”

“Yes, Aunt Gr-Grace,” Norma Jeane dutifully said, taking the box of her belongings and walking with Grace up to the front door. As they rang the bell and waited, Norma Jeane read the words of a bronze plaque beside the entry. It clearly stated, “Los Angeles Orphans' Home.”

“Orphan!” she exclaimed. “Bu…But I'm no orphan! I have a mother! I'm not going in there!” she screamed.

Her body stiffened as the matron opened the door. “I'm not an orphan! My mother's not d-dead! There's been some mistake!” she shouted hysterically as she was dragged inside. It was near dinnertime and the wards of the orphanage were in the dining hall having their supper. “There were about a hundred of them eating,” Marilyn remembered. Hearing her screams as she was forcibly ushered into the dining hall, they silently turned to stare at her, and Norma Jeane suddenly became quiet in the paralyzing comprehension that she had become one of
them
.

Throughout her school years Norma Jeane was registered under the last name of Baker, and Norma Jeane Baker was registered as the three thousand four hundred and sixty-third child to be admitted to the Los Angeles Orphans' Home. Ten years later number 3,463 would become Marilyn Monroe.

N
orma Jeane slept in a dormitory she shared with twenty-six other girls. After dark she often sat in the window and looked out at the city lights. Not far from the orphanage she could see the giant neon sign on top of the stages of a nearby film studio. “At night, when the other girls were sleeping, I'd sit up in the window and cry because I'd look over and see the studio sign above the roofs in the distance,” Marilyn later recalled. “It was where my mother had worked as a cutter.”

The studio had been named by Joseph P. Kennedy, who entered the motion-picture business in the year Norma Jeane was born. In 1926 Joe Kennedy was a multimillionaire whose bootlegging operations provided a lucrative income and the foundation for his successful stock market manipulations. In 1928 Kennedy had merged the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) vaudeville circuit to form a motion-picture studio. It was named Radio-Keith-Orpheum and a monumental reproduction of the studio trademark was erected on top of one of the Hollywood soundstages on the corner of Melrose and Gower—only blocks from the Los Angeles Orphans' Home. The large plaster globe
with an enormous radio tower on top was brightly illuminated at night, and flashing neon bolts of electricity emanated from the giant letters
RKO
.

By 1929 Joe Kennedy had made over five million dollars in his Hollywood ventures, and had established a reputation in the film capital as a shrewd man of numerous business affairs. He was also known for his numerous affairs with budding starlets plucked from the gardens of Hollywood beauties. Stories soon spread of his romances with Marion Davies, Betty Compton, and Gloria Swanson.

Young Jack Kennedy was also “brought up differently from the average American child.” Looking back on his childhood, Jack said that he was raised in an atmosphere of “institutionalized living.” Surrounded by servants and nannies, the Kennedy children saw little of their mother or father. Joe was frequently busy with his various affairs—always, it seemed, en route to London, or Paris, or Hollywood. When Joe was in London in 1928, Rose wrote him, “I am praying that I shall see you soon. Do pray too, and go to church, as it is very important in my life that you do just that.” But Joe was in London with Gloria Swanson and had little time for prayer. Joe's priorities were money and women. In Gloria Swanson he found both. One of Hollywood's top stars, Swanson was beautiful, sophisticated, wealthy—and titled. Her husband was the dashing Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye.

In the summer of 1927 Joe Kennedy had acquired the Hyannisport summer house on the east coast of Cape Cod that would one day be expanded into the Kennedy compound. Neighbors recalled the extraordinary event that took place in the summer of 1929 when Gloria Swanson arrived at Hyannis: “Miss Swanson and her party landed in the harbor near the breakwater not far from Kennedy's summer house, in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. Hyannisport residents gaped from the beach as Miss Swanson—petite, chic, flawlessly coiffed and a member of the aristocracy since her marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye—deplaned.”

It was a bizarre situation. Swanson found it incredible that Rose Kennedy pretended to know nothing of the affair. Swanson wondered, “Was she a fool, I asked myself with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”

The Kennedy children referred to the Hollywood film star as “Aunt Gloria.” Aunt Gloria even left her autograph on the wall of the children's playhouse, and Jack wrote her a thank-you note for gifts received. Ac
cording to children of the Kennedy's neighbors, Joe Kennedy took “Aunt Gloria” sailing in the family sailboat named after Mrs. Kennedy, the “Rose Elizabeth.” He and Swanson were interrupted in their nautical lovemaking by young Jack, who had stowed away aboard the
Rose Elizabeth
. When he peeked up from below deck and was surprised to find his father on board “Aunt Gloria,” the horrified and bewildered boy panicked and jumped overboard. Joe Kennedy dove in after him and hauled him back to the boat.

What occurred that summer afternoon in 1929, when Jack was twelve years old, was undoubtedly a traumatic event for this young Catholic boy. But Gloria Swanson was only one of the parade of attractive young women who visited the Kennedy compound. Neighbor Nancy Coleman recalled that Rose Kennedy would be driving out to the airport in her Rolls-Royce for one of her frequent trips abroad, and almost simultaneously Joe Kennedy would be driving into the driveway with a girlfriend. Young Jack and the other sons soon learned that promiscuity was an inherent masculine right.

“My own special interest in clothes developed during this period,” Rose Kennedy later explained. “Not just from this episode, but from the general circumstances of which it was an especially vivid part…. Obviously, I couldn't compete in natural beauty, but I could make the most of what I had by keeping my figure trim, my complexion good, my grooming perfect, and by always wearing clothes that were interesting and becoming.”

During the next few years Rose Kennedy would accomplish this by making at least seventeen trips to Europe in which she would haunt the Paris fashion houses, seeking out the latest styles and shopping for particularly interesting diamond jewelry. Rose confided to a neighbor that she made her husband pay for his infidelity. “I made him give me everything I wanted—clothes, jewels, everything!”

Jack Kennedy was particularly sensitive regarding his mother's long absences from home. He confided to a friend that he used to cry each time Rose packed her bags for one of her extended trips abroad, and he protested, “Gee, you're a great mother to go away and leave your children alone.” He later angrily exclaimed to one of his school chums, “My mother was either at some Paris fashion house, or else on her knees in some church. She was never there when we really needed her…. My mother never really held me and hugged me. Never! Never!”

Rose Kennedy's retreat from her husband and her family was resented perhaps more by Jack than the other children, and he was to tell his friend
Mary Gimbel, “My mother is a nothing!” He grew up with a hostile attitude toward marriage and family. Women were viewed as no more than sex objects. His experience of family life involved “institutionalized living—children in a cell block.”

 

Though the childhoods of Jack Kennedy and Norma Jeane were quite different, the sense of parental isolation and emotional denial was to a certain extent a shared experience.

 

“In the orphanage I began to stutter,” Marilyn recalled. “My mother and the idea of being an orphan—maybe that's the reason. Anyway, I stuttered. Later on in my teens at Van Nuys High School, they elected me secretary of the English class, and every time I had to read the minutes I'd say, ‘Minutes of the last m-m-m-meeting.' It was terrible. That went on for years, I guess, until I was fifteen.”

She attributed the cause of her speech disorder to “my mother and the idea of being an orphan—maybe that's the reason.” However, the chronology of events indicates that the stuttering was related to the molestation incident.

The stammering problem never went away entirely. In 1960 Marilyn Monroe stated, “Sometimes it even happens to me today if I'm very nervous or excited. Once when I had a small part in a movie, in a scene where I was supposed to go up the stairs, I forgot what was happening and the assistant director came and yelled at me, and I was so confused that when I got into the scene I stuttered. Then the director himself came over to me and said, ‘You don't stutter.' And I said ‘Tha-Tha-That's what you th-thi…think!' It was painful, and it still is if I speak very fast or have to make a speech…terrible.”

The children from the orphanage attended the Vine Street Elementary School several blocks away and walked there in a group. Norma Jeane found it difficult to make friends at Vine Street because the children from the orphanage were considered homeless. “They're from the place for homeless hooligans,” it was whispered, and the orphans were never invited to visit and play at the homes of the more fortunate students. In her unhappiness at the orphanage, Norma Jeane made plans for escape. She tried to run away with another girl from the dormitory, but they got only as far as the front lawn before being discovered.

On a homeless child's birthday, the orphanage followed a prescribed ritual. A large, elaborate birthday cake would be wheeled into the dining hall on a tea cart while all the orphans dutifully sang “Happy Birthday” to the celebrant. The birthday child would then blow out the candles. However, the jubilation would often be as wooden as the cake, which had plaster frosting and was carved out of pine. The wooden cake had a triangular divot allowing for one slice of genuine cake, which was ceremoniously served to the orphaned celebrant. Much to the salivary disappointment of the novices, the wooden cake would then be wheeled into a closet where it remained until the next birthday festivities.

Whenever Grace Goddard visited the orphanage, Norma Jeane complained bitterly about her confinement in the hope that “Aunt Grace” would come to her rescue. In the months that followed, her guardian became Norma Jeane's “saving Grace.” Grace would often take her away from the orphanage on the weekends for visits to the small Hollywood home she shared with “Doc.”

On these special outings Grace permitted Norma Jeane to try her lipstick, and Grace would put her straight light-brown hair in curlers. Sometimes she'd be taken to a beauty parlor on Hollywood Boulevard to have her hair done. Guardianship records indicate that Grace bought dresses and shoes for Norma Jeane with the meager proceeds from the sale of Gladys's few possessions.

In time Norma Jeane was told the truth regarding her mother's mental illness and that Gladys was confined in Norwalk. Gladys was allowed to leave the asylum and lunch with Norma Jeane and Grace, but on these rare occasions Gladys remained withdrawn and uncommunicative, scarcely acknowledging her daughter's presence.

“Grace loved and adored Norma Jeane,” a friend and coworker at the studios, Leila Fields, recalled, “If it weren't for Grace there would be no Marilyn Monroe. She raved about Norma Jeane like she was her own. Grace said Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star. She had this feeling—a conviction. ‘Don't worry, Norma Jeane, you're going to be a beautiful girl when you get big—an important woman, a movie star!'”

Grace Goddard's compassion for Norma Jeane was entangled with her own frustrations. She had come to Hollywood to be a movie star like Mary Pickford, but ended up being an itinerant assembler of the movie stars' celluloid images. Unable to have children of her own, Grace became a foster “stage mother” and focused the transference of her frustrations on Norma Jeane. In photos taken by Grace during this period, Norma Jeane
is seen in Mary Pickford curls and makeup—a lost dream from an earlier generation. By the 1930s, Mary Pickford, the innocent child with the beautiful curls and the petulant pout, was fading into puffy oblivion. She had been supplanted by the overt sexuality of the vamps and the “it” girls. The shimmering platinum-blond sensuality of Jean Harlow in
Hell's Angels, Public Enemy
, and
Red Dust
had electrified audiences and catapulted Harlow into instant stardom. Harlow soon became Grace's new idol. She dyed her own hair blond and began divining a young Harlow in Norma Jeane. “There's no reason why you can't grow up to be just like her,” Grace would say.

Marilyn recalled, “Time after time Grace touched a spot on my nose and said, ‘You're perfect except for this little bump, sweetheart, but with the right hair and a better nose one day you'll be perfect—like Jean Harlow. And so Jean Harlow became my idol, too.”

On the weekends Grace frequently took Norma Jeane to lunch and a movie show at the Grauman's Chinese, where Norma Jeane remembered “trying to fit my feet into the footprints—but my school shoes were too big for the stars' slim high-heeled ones.” In 1935 she saw
China Seas
with Clark Gable and Harlow. Gable reminded her of the man with the mustache and the jaunty smile in the photo of Stan Gifford her mother had kept on the wall. When Gladys had been taken away, Gifford's photo was packed in a trunk by Grace, and it would be many years before Norma Jeane would see it once again. But in her dreams Gable became “the man I thought was my father.”

It was during her confinement at the Orphans' Home that a sleep disorder had its onset. The affliction was to haunt her the rest of her life. Marilyn Monroe suffered from “night terrors.” While insomnia is characterized by a restless wakefulness that prevents sleep, night terrors are characterized by the victim's sudden arousal from deep sleep by the “fight or flight” syndrome—the rush of adrenaline that accompanies panic and fear. In extreme cases the victim wakes in a cold sweat—screaming, trembling, and in mortal terror.

At the orphanage Norma Jeane would suddenly wake up at night screaming and shivering in the darkness. Anxieties and a sense of isolation may have been momentarily forgotten in merciful play, sports, and the duties of the day, but when she lay sleeping in the dark of the dormitory, her heart would race, her pulse quicken, her mind and body surge with adrenaline as the suppressed memory of her mad mother, her “heritage,” and the sudden severance of relationships engulfed her. Orphans often
vanished from their beds after dark, when the “night people” came and took them away before dawn.

Norma Jeane's world brightened when Grace McKee appeared one weekend and held out the hope of rescue. She indicated that one day she might be able to provide a home for her. Doc Goddard had three children from a previous marriage, and Grace was faced with her own practical considerations. However, the directress of the orphanage felt that Norma Jeane needed to be placed in a family situation, and it was arranged for Norma Jeane to be temporarily placed in a foster home until a more permanent arrangement could be made.