Chapter 1The Mother's Ward

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about women who make things. Designers, mostly — the women who run ateliers and fashion houses and creative departments, who take fabric or imagery or an idea of how a woman might look and turn it into an object the world will pay for. My subjects have generally had a workroom, a label, a corporate structure with their name on the door. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about Marilyn Monroe, the response was polite puzzlement. She was an actress. She was, they meant, not my subject.

I thought she was exactly my subject. Because the thing I have spent twenty years documenting — the process by which a woman designs an object, brings it to market, and then watches the market decide what the object means — is written across Marilyn Monroe's life more plainly than across the life of any designer I have ever profiled. The difference is only that the object she designed was herself. The platinum hair, the walk, the voice pitched half a breath above speech, the name that was not the name she was born with: these were not accidents of nature. They were design decisions, made across years, some of them hers and some of them made for her by a studio that regarded her as inventory. I wanted to know which were which. That is the whole book, really — the attribution question, applied to a person.

I expected, when I began, to write a book about image. I found myself writing a book about housing. The record kept returning me to rooms: the charity ward where she was born to a mother who could not keep her, the dozen foster placements, the orphanage dormitory with the studio lights visible from the window, the borrowed farmhouse in Connecticut where she incorporated herself, and at the end the small bedroom in the small Brentwood house that was the first home she had ever owned. A career in fashion writing teaches you that every constructed surface is an answer to some earlier deprivation. I had not expected the deprivation to be so literal, or so unrelenting, or so exactly the shape of the surface built over it.

A word about method is owed. I did not know Marilyn Monroe; no one now writing can have known her. This book is built from the public record — the films, the photographs, the press coverage of four decades, the court and probate filings, the coroner's file, the published memoirs and interviews of the people who worked beside her, and the substantial shelf of prior biography, which I have used gratefully and, where its speculations outran its evidence, warily. Where the record is genuinely uncertain, I have said so. She has been ill served, for sixty years, by writers who preferred a good theory to an honest gap. I have tried to leave the gaps visible. They are part of the design.

What I did not anticipate was how much of the story would be corporate. The woman who is remembered as the century's decorative object was also, in 1955, the actress who walked out on her studio, formed her own production company, held the majority stake, and starved the negotiation until the contract broke her way. My designers would recognize that manoeuvre instantly; it is the founding move of every house I have ever written about. That she made it — undercapitalized, uninsured, publicly mocked — and won, is the fact the mythology has spent decades declining to find interesting. I found it the most interesting fact of all.

Why does she warrant another book? Because the attribution question has never been settled, and because the industry that owns her image has no incentive to settle it. Her face still moves product across every commercial surface on earth; the woman who wore the face has been, in the process, progressively simplified into a logo. The work of this book is the opposite of simplification. It is an attempt to walk back through the archive and separate the designer from the design — to establish what she made, what was made of her, and what the difference cost. Every woman I have ever written about has lived somewhere along that line. Marilyn Monroe lived at its absolute end.

— Vivien Beauchamp, London

Chapter 1 · The Mother's Ward

Los Angeles County General Hospital in the spring of 1926 was a charity ward. The women's obstetric service was part of the county's provision for the city's swelling working-class population, and its maternity floor served, almost exclusively, the women whose pregnancies had no private physician, no prepared nursery, and no unambiguous father to absorb the births into a formal domestic life. Gladys Pearl Baker, twenty-four years old, a film-negative cutter at the Consolidated Film Industries laboratory, belonged to the ward by all of its usual qualifications. She could not afford a private hospital. She was not married to the man who had fathered her child. She had been, for most of her pregnancy, unclear herself about the child's paternity, and by the time she was admitted to the hospital she had arrived at a working identification of the father, a salesman at the same film laboratory named Charles Stanley Gifford with whom she had had a brief relationship the preceding autumn, that Gifford himself, when informed, had declined to acknowledge.

The daughter was born at 9:30 on the morning of June 1, 1926. Gladys named her Norma Jeane, spelled in the precise combination that would become, across the subsequent decades, one of the few things about the daughter that no publicist would ever revise. The surname on the birth certificate was recorded as Mortenson, the name of a previous husband of Gladys's, a Norwegian immigrant from whom she had separated, and the child's legal identity was accordingly Norma Jeane Mortenson. Whether the legal father was the actual father was a question Gladys herself seems, in later years, to have been uncertain about, and the biographical record preserved her uncertainty for nearly a century — until 2022, when DNA testing conducted for the documentary Marilyn, Her Final Secret, matching a preserved lock of Marilyn's hair against a sample from a Gifford descendant, confirmed Charles Stanley Gifford as the biological father.

What Gladys did not have, on the morning of her daughter's birth, was any plausible means of taking care of the baby. She was working six days a week at Consolidated Film Industries. She had no family in Los Angeles capable of absorbing an infant. Her own mother, Della, lived in Hawthorne but was in failing physical and mental health; she would be committed to the Norwalk State Hospital the following year, diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis, and would die there within weeks. Gladys herself had, by 1926, experienced instability enough to know what she could not manage. She was, at twenty-four, already managing, with considerable difficulty, the arithmetic of her own daily existence. A baby would topple the arithmetic entirely.

Within twelve days of the birth, she had placed Norma Jeane with foster parents.

The foster parents were Albert Wayne Bolender and his wife Ida Mae, who lived in a small stucco bungalow on Rhode Island Avenue in Hawthorne, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, across the street from Della, whose proximity had suggested the placement. Wayne Bolender was a mail carrier and a Pentecostal lay preacher. Ida Mae was a dedicated evangelical Christian of the kind the early-twentieth-century American religious scene was generating in great numbers. They had no children of their own. They took in foster children for the modest monthly stipend Los Angeles County paid for such placements and because their religious convictions had persuaded them that child-fostering was the social vocation they had been called to. They had good reputations among the county's social workers. They were, in the judgment of the woman who placed Norma Jeane with them, a reliable home.

The Bolenders kept Norma Jeane for seven years.

It has been a long-standing convention of Marilyn Monroe biography to render the Bolender years as a period of unrelieved Pentecostal severity from which the emerging Norma Jeane was emotionally starved into the conditions of her adult life. The convention is partly true and partly unfair. Ida Mae Bolender was, by the recollections of everyone who knew her, a rigid and religiously conservative woman who ran her foster home on the principles of the early-twentieth-century Californian Pentecostalism her faith community practiced. She did not permit the children in her care to attend the cinema. She required them to attend church at least twice each Sunday. She enforced dietary rules and Sabbath rules and behavioral rules with a consistency that her foster children, across the years, remembered with varying degrees of warmth.

What Ida Mae also was, however, was in no meaningful sense cruel. She was not a woman who withheld food, or struck her children, or operated the home as a mechanism of deliberate deprivation. She provided, within the limits of the Pentecostal framework she operated within, adequate care. Norma Jeane, across the Bolender years, was fed, clothed, sent to school, and raised in conditions that were neither abusive nor neglectful in the forensic senses the terms now carry. What she was not given, in those years, was the form of parental warmth her later emotional life would reveal she had required. Ida Mae did not hold her. Ida Mae did not tell her that she was loved. Ida Mae did not bend her own rule structure to accommodate the emotional needs of the child who happened, for seven years, to be living in her home.

The distinction matters. Norma Jeane's childhood was not, in the sense of the tabloid cliché, a Dickensian horror. It was an adequately provisioned childhood of religious austerity in which the ingredients of her emotional formation, which included, above and beyond adequate provisioning, the requirement of warmth, were not present. She learned, across those years, that physical care and emotional care were not the same thing. She learned that she could be fed, clothed, and sheltered by adults who did not love her in the way she required. She learned, as small children learn such things, that love was not guaranteed by the bare fact of being a child in someone's house.

She visited her mother occasionally. Gladys, who had continued at Consolidated Film Industries, would come on Saturdays to Hawthorne. Norma Jeane recalled, in interviews decades later, that the visits had the quality of encounters with a glamorous stranger. Gladys was pretty, light-haired, quiet. She brought small gifts. She did not stay long. She would take Norma Jeane for short walks in the neighborhood and then return the girl to the Bolenders and drive back to Los Angeles. Norma Jeane understood, in the way small children understand such things, that the woman who was her mother was not her actual caretaker, and that what the two of them shared was at an emotional pitch the Bolender household did not reach.

In 1933, when Norma Jeane was seven, her mother attempted, briefly and disastrously, to take the girl back.

Gladys had, across the preceding years, accumulated some small savings, and she borrowed additional money against a mortgage. She had brought Norma Jeane back from Hawthorne by the late summer of 1933, and that autumn she purchased a small house on Arbol Drive in Hollywood, near the Hollywood Bowl. From the summer of 1933 into the beginning of 1934, mother and daughter lived together, latterly in the house on Arbol Drive, as a domestic unit. Gladys worked at Consolidated Film. Norma Jeane was enrolled at the Vine Street Elementary School. The arrangement, in the small narrow window of its operation, was the closest thing to a conventional mother-and-daughter life that Norma Jeane would ever have.

It collapsed in January 1934.

Gladys experienced, in the early weeks of that year, an acute psychotic break. The break was, in the retrospective reconstruction conducted by the psychiatric staff who would subsequently treat her, the full manifestation of the manic-depressive illness that had been visible in her family for at least two generations. Gladys's own mother had been committed. Gladys's father, Otis Monroe, had died in a state hospital in 1909. Gladys's grandfather, Tilford Hogan, had taken his own life in 1933. The family's hereditary psychiatric condition had, across the stress of Gladys's attempt to reconstitute her maternal role, erupted. She was hospitalized in January 1934, and after a year of rest homes and hospital wards was committed, at the beginning of 1935, to the Norwalk State Hospital, where her own mother had died. She would spend, with intermittent discharges, much of the rest of her life in institutional psychiatric care; released for the last time in 1967, she lived her final years with her elder daughter Berniece and then in a Gainesville, Florida retirement home, where she died of heart failure in March 1984.

Norma Jeane was seven. She was removed from the Arbol Drive house. She was placed in the orbit of a friend of her mother's named Grace McKee, a small, intense Montana-born woman who had been Gladys's closest confidante at Consolidated Film, and, later, of Grace's subsequent husband Ervin Goddard. Grace and Ervin had three children from Ervin's previous marriage. Norma Jeane joined the household as an additional fostered child. She was told, Grace told her, in the explanation that was, in retrospect, one of the more traumatic exchanges of her young life, that her mother was "sick," that her mother would be away for some time, that she should not expect her mother to come back soon.

She understood. She did not ask the questions a more verbal seven-year-old might have asked. She had, across the preceding seven years of living with the Bolenders, developed a temperament that did not press its case when told things. She absorbed the information. She went on.

What she carried, from the winter of 1934 forward, was the new fact about herself that the commitment had delivered: she was not merely a girl in a foster home, she was a girl whose mother was mentally ill. The fact would register, across the remaining years of her childhood and the whole of her adult life, as a permanent feature of her self-understanding. She had inherited something. Whatever her mother had, might be in her. The fear that it was in her, that she, too, would someday lose her mind the way her mother and grandmother had lost theirs, would organize substantial portions of her subsequent psychological life. She would speak about it, in various forms, for the rest of her life.

The subsequent placements, the placements that would take Norma Jeane across the subsequent eight years of her childhood through the approximately dozen foster homes and institutional arrangements that the Los Angeles County welfare system would arrange, began in the spring of 1934. Grace McKee would hold primary responsibility for the girl across most of the period, but Grace's ability to house Norma Jeane was intermittent. The Goddard household was cash-strapped. Ervin Goddard had drinking difficulties. The family moved several times across the 1930s, and Norma Jeane's presence in the household was, at various points, more than Grace could accommodate. The girl was sent, periodically, to the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society, an institution at 815 North El Centro Avenue that the children who passed through it knew as the Los Angeles Orphanage.

She entered the Orphanage for the first time on September 13, 1935, at nine years old. She would later say, to interviewers and to her successive therapists, that the day she was delivered to the institution had been one of the darkest of her early life. She had not, she said, understood she was an orphan. Her mother was alive. She had believed, in the way a nine-year-old child believes such things, that her mother's illness would lift and that her mother would return. The Orphanage's sign above the entrance, with the word ORPHANAGE spelled out in carved institutional letters, had, she said, confronted her with an official version of her situation that she had not previously accepted.

She stayed at the Orphanage for twenty-one months. She was returned to the Goddards in June 1937. She would move, across the subsequent five years, through at least four additional foster placements before her 1942 marriage at sixteen. The chronology of the placements has been reconstructed, with some difficulty, by subsequent biographers; the homes have been identified with varying confidence; the events at each placement have been recovered from her own interview statements and from the recollections of the various foster parents and their children.

What the chronology establishes, at minimum, is this. Norma Jeane Baker, from birth to sixteen, did not have a single adult who remained consistently present in her life across more than a few years at a time. She had her mother, intermittently and at emotional distance, for the first seven years. She had the Bolenders for seven continuous years. After the Bolenders, she had no continuous adult carer. Grace McKee functioned as her legal guardian across much of the period but housed her only episodically. The various foster placements provided housing but not continuity. By the time she emerged from the foster system, at sixteen, she had lived in what she herself would later estimate as twelve different homes, had attended at least nine different schools, and had experienced the accumulated emotional pattern of permanently provisional attachment that institutional childhood deposits in its survivors.

The chapters that follow render the shape this childhood produced, the blonde, the studio star, the photographed body whose surface seemed to broadcast what the inner life could not deliver, as the subsequent adult construction of a girl who had been taught, from infancy, that her presence in any household was conditional on her ability to be the kind of child that household was willing to keep. She had learned, across a dozen placements, to calibrate herself to what adults wanted. She had learned that beauty, when it emerged, was a currency that worked. She had learned that what she said was of little consequence and what she was seen to be was of the greatest consequence. She was, when she finally escaped the foster system at sixteen, into a marriage she did not want, a girl who had been taught, by her entire lived experience, that the only mechanism by which she could secure continuous love was to continuously produce the self that other people would love.

The Orphanage period requires its own brief acknowledgment. The Los Angeles Orphans Home Society at 815 North El Centro Avenue, where Norma Jeane spent twenty-one months from September 1935 through June 1937, had been founded in 1880 as a Christian charitable institution and had, across the subsequent decades, accumulated the institutional shape that mid-twentieth-century American orphanages typically operated within. The dormitories were segregated by age and sex. The children were required to perform domestic labor as part of their daily routine, were given institutional clothing, were taken to Sunday services, and were enrolled in the local public elementary schools across the academic year. Norma Jeane, across her twenty-one months at the institution, would later say that the months had registered as the formative experience of her childhood. She had developed, across the period, the habit of staring out of dormitory windows at the lights of the Hollywood film studios visible across the Los Angeles basin. The lights had become, in her imagination of them, the future she would someday inhabit. She would say, in later interviews, that she had already decided in those months that she would be a movie star someday.

She would spend the next quarter-century producing that self. It would become the most famous self in the world.