Marilyn: A Biography (4 page)

It is the classic American small town comedy.
People are going mad on quiet shabby end-of-town streets while envy
is generated, proprieties are abused, and proprieties are
maintained. Yet the fundamental sense of the American madness, that
violence which lives like an electronic hum behind the silence of
even the sleepiest Sunday afternoon, is incubating in the balmy
smog-free subtropical evenings of Hollywood: the vision of the
American frontier has gone into a light-box and come out as
ten-foot ghosts upon a screen.

If a void in one’s sense of identity is equal
to a mental swamp where insane growths begin, then America is an
insane swamp more than other lands. With the exception of the
Indians, we are a nation of rejects already once transplanted by
the measure of every immigration of the last three hundred and
fifty years. And the Indians, having originally possessed a
relation to land and sky more sensitive than the telepathies of the
TV set, have been driven mad by our disruption of their balance, so
we are, yes, twice an insane land, Indians and others — it is, at
the least, a working hypothesis. Los Angeles had to be the focus
within such focus, the deepest swamp of the national swamp, the
weed of weeds, for in the period which began after World War I some
of that same intimation of oncoming insanity if one failed to move
(which had already moved tens of millions over here from Europe)
now picked up many a soul who felt himself a weed in his
surroundings and transplanted him still again to the West Coast.
And there in Hawthorne in 1927, the weed Della Hogan Monroe
Grainger, festering in the psychic swamp life of quiet Hawthorne,
is believed to have crossed the street one afternoon, picked up the
baby, taken her to her home, and there begun to suffocate her with
a pillow. No witnesses are present and no evidence is with us other
than Marilyn Monroe’s own recollection. She would prove more than
once a confirmed source of inaccuracy, but still it is her first
recollected image, accurate or no — “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.” So it is
recorded by Guiles as told to Arthur Miller by Marilyn, and she was
to tell it to others. It is one of the stories she always told.
While other such dramatic items are usually false — she was, for
example, probably not raped at the age of seven or eight although
she told the tale to reporters for years — still Della was
committed about this time to the Norwalk asylum after a series of
accelerating attacks. Ida Bolender would claim no knowledge of an
assault on the baby, but it is agreed Della stopped seeing Norma
Jean almost completely a few weeks before she was committed.
Besides, there is something in the prodigious tortures of Monroe’s
later insomnia that all but insists on traumatic origin. “Sleep was
her demon,” Miller was to say, “the fundamental preoccupation of
her life,” and no one was in a better position to know.

For what it helps to explain, let us assume
some sort of partial suffocation probably occurred. Obviously a
thirteen-month-old baby does not push away a pillow pressed down
upon her by a grown woman, not unless we assume the baby has as
much sudden strength and agility — in such a crisis — as a kitten
fighting for its life. But then there is no need to envisage a
struggle. The grandmother may have played too vigorously until the
baby was caught beneath blankets and in a panic for fresh air, or
as easily laid a pillow for an instant upon the child’s face, and
held it there an instant more, then held it longer, as though
hearing the first note of a far-off spell — and time began to pass
— was there time enough for both to travel that long aisle which
leads from the pounding heart of consciousness down into death,
long enough for the grandmother to know that the spell she had
entered spoke of murder; and for the baby to have been forced into
suffocation long enough to take a fix on the onset of death, and be
in part attracted to its dimensions, attracted enough so that the
fall into sleep in later years would ring every alarm, for death
was not unseductive. If this is Marilyn’s first memory, oncoming
sleep may suggest death is near — so, adrenaline may electrify her
limbs.

We have now transgressed every border of
history. But then it is hardly possible to conceive of grandmothers
attacking grandchildren unless we also accept the first logic of
insanity: “I am a soul of the most mighty dimensions engaged in a
dialogue with eternity.” Should someone like Della decide that her
relation to eternity is evil, then so are her offspring: the duty
is to kill offspring. It is a logic considered insane only when
grandmothers set out to suffocate one-year-olds; it is not nearly
so insane when one-year-olds are ignited from one mile or more up
in the sky by young men who are not related – no, it must be that
all acts of violence, love, and war presuppose some unconscious
dialogue with eternity. A clean-cut twenty-two-year-old American
pilot does not drop firebombs on hamlets, nor do the citizens of a
great nation support the act by re-electing his Godfather, unless
our unconscious dialogue with eternity assumes that America is
closer to God’s will than other lands. It is the pride of the weed
that knows it is the true flower of the garden. By this logic,
Della Monroe Grainger was an American as most.

Of course, short of Marilyn’s dubious
witness, we do not know that Della ever touched the child. Perhaps
the memory was no more than a recollected sense of terror the baby
used to experience when alone with Della; and the grandmother, poor
woman, could have been innocent, and Norma Jean merely tangled in
her own blanket and then rescued by Della. It is even conceivable
Marilyn made it all up as still one more exercise of the skill with
which she would later invent particular histories to attract pity.
On the other hand, if there is nothing to the story, then there is
also no dramatic explanation for her acute insomnia. Let us leave
it there. Easier evidence on the shaping of her character can be
found in the atmosphere of the first year of her life, spent living
in the Bolenders’ house of piety. Certainly when Norma Jean would
call Ida “Mama,” she was rebuked. “The lady with the red hair is
your mama,” would be the answer. One of Norma Jean’s first
sentences on seeing a woman walk by holding a child’s hand was,
“There goes a mama.” It is a touching tale, told by Ida Bolender,
but one can sense her fear of Gladys’ wrath if the baby should
think to call the wrong woman mama in front of the actual
red-headed mother. But it is of Della, however, that Ida is truly
afraid, Della who does not go to church any longer, Della who
scorches the most casual conversation with a flare of anger hot as
burning gasoline, Della building to a riot of the cataclysmic for a
Hawthorne street.

But we may as well give the description to
Fred Guiles to tell, since it is his biography we have been using
up to here.

Early that critical Saturday, Albert Wayne
Bolender heard a commotion in his front yard. (He could remember
the details vividly even forty years later.) Della, in a rage, was
hurrying up the walk toward their porch. Seeing her approach he
slammed the front door and bolted it.

No one could make out a word she was saying.
It was clear, however, that the subject was Norma Jean; she had no
other reason to be there. Ida came into the living room from the
kitchen and peered out at the woman, who was now pounding on their
door. “Call the police, Wayne,” she said. “Hurry!”

Within minutes, a black patrol car pulled up
in front of the Bolender home. By this time, Della had succeeded in
breaking a panel of the door, injuring her hand. Two policemen
subdued her and dragged her to the car. Her head was thrown back as
though seeking God’s help.

A few weeks after her entrance into the
asylum at Norwalk, mercifully Della died of a heart attack during
her last seizure on August 23, 1927.

Of course, we do not know if the heart attack
was merciful. It could have been created by still another excess of
rage at having failed in her mission to extinguish Norma Jean.

* * *

Della’s death takes place in the summer of
1927, and in Whittier on the other side of Los Angeles, out past
Pasadena, maybe twenty miles away, another American, Richard
Milhous Nixon, is fourteen years old and growing up to form his
ideas of the Silent Majority. If we are certain of anything in the
childhood of Marilyn Monroe it is that she spent her first seven
years in a home which was hymn and fundament, flesh and spine,
thesis and axis of the world-view of the Silent Majority. For
“Aunt” Ida and “Uncle” Wayne Bolender were poor, pious, stern,
kindly, decent, hard-working, and absolutely terrified of the
lividity of the American air in the street outside. Indeed we do
not require much more than the description of their rush to bolt
the door to understand how much the Silent Majority lives in dread
of the danger which lies beneath appearances. It is the home in
which Norma Jean grew up, and most certainly it must have helped to
establish that pleasant middle of her personality — at least as it
appeared on screen — that clean scrubbed girl who lived next door.
There is ice cream on her tongue, and the Church Visible in the
bland expression of the spaced-out eyes. If that is a fair and
cruel description of many a good American cheerleader, and will yet
fit Marilyn on occasion, it is not accurate to speak of her as
spaced-out so early. She is a vigorous-looking baby with keen eyes
and good tough little features; nothing of her future beauty is
particularly indicated — rather it is her good health. In later
years on those occasions when she was relatively free of sleeping
pills, friends will speak of her extraordinary vitality and Miller
will attribute part of her readiness for pill-taking to her powers
of recuperation, which left her willing to take greater chances
with her health — a confidence found in many a junkie.

In fact, as we look at those early
photographs, it is a rugged little boy-girl who grins back, an
early record of a child who seems more likely to turn out an
athlete than an actress. And although she will not become the
world’s greatest dancer, it is impossible to study her films
without being obliged to recognize how well she has trained herself
to move — she has easily enough coordination to be on a girl’s
softball team or in a roller derby. Even a snapshot taken at the
age of four with foster-brother Lester, two months younger than
herself, shows Norma Jean preempting the leadership of their two
bodies, while her face has the rugged bulldog solidity, the wide
jaws and wide nose of her father’s features. She grew up with
Lester in these first years, played with him, ate with him, and was
even set next to him for sunning in the same baby carriage. Since
girl and boy were referred to as “the twins” by the Bolenders,
Lester is Norma Jean’s first mate, or at any rate the first of
future habits she formed for living with a mate are with Lester.
Since she was stronger and “got into more trouble than the other
kids” it suggests her first relation with men was to dominate.
Early relations do not engrave one’s sexual possibilities for life
so much as set up a school of habits to call upon. So her years
with Lester can explain some of the difficulty she found with men
who had independence of her (such as her three husbands).

It should be added that the Bolenders adopted
Lester legally, which they did not care to do for Norma Jean or
could not afford to do. Besides, Gladys still wanted her child. The
adoption of Lester, however, had to establish a difference in
treatment. Ida Bolender claims she loved Norma Jean “just like my
own,” and there is evidence in the photographs. Norma Jean even
looks pampered in one snapshot where she is wearing a ruffled dress
and scalloped bonnet. When we learn the outfit was put together by
Ida Bolender on her sewing machine, the idea of a child who was
utterly ignored in her first years has nothing to sustain it. Too
much craft has gone into the making of the dress.

Still, there is a difference. Lester could
address Ida as his mama, Norma Jean could not; both could undress
(at least once) in the front yard to examine each other, but Norma
Jean was the one who would catch the blame — it is part of the
scenario of dread in the mind of the Silent Majority that a boy’s
penis is, on occasion, exhibitable, but murder draws a rifle sight
on open vagina. Ida Bolender may well have been scolding Norma Jean
to protect her from the future wrath of neighbors — a fear not
altogether out of contact with real ground, as we will yet
discover. Quiet Hawthorne streets. Norma Jean’s first song learned
at Sunday school was “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know,” and she sings
it to the world at large, once even in a crowded cafeteria.

If, however, she was giving signs of vivacity
and eagerness to perform, a subtle envy had to be created again in
Ida — it is no joy to have adopted the less interesting child.
While equality was the order of treatment, and a tricycle was
bought for the use of both children as a Christmas present, it is
not beside the point that Lester was riding it when Norma Jean
pushed him over, and thereby excited Ida to give her a whipping
with a razor strop. Gladys comes to visit, and agrees with Ida’s
explanation of the punishment when Norma Jean complains to her.

But then, Gladys was trapped in
embarrassments. Just previously, she had come to visit with dark
glasses — she was hiding a black eye! Under Ida’s shocked scrutiny,
she lit a cigarette — it is 1929! — then asked if Ida minded.

“It’s not a thing I would do,” said Mrs.
Bolender, “but this is your house when you are here.”

Of course, Norma Jean can hardly be too
afraid of Ida if she dares to protest so visibly to Gladys, but on
the other hand, Gladys has accepted Ida’s version of the accident.
It must reach the child with shock — is the guard of forces being
altered? Norma Jean comes down with whooping cough. She has caught
it from Lester — a sibling transaction. His twin can knock him off
his bike, but he will infect her back — the relations between
strong and weak nations are in capsule here!