Marilyn: A Biography (5 page)

Gladys now gets some days off from work to
take care of her child and before the illness is over has spent
three weeks in Ida’s guest room with Norma Jean, the longest period
she has been with the child since the birth. Since she is now a
film cutter at Columbia, and making better money, the desire to
afford a place for her daughter and herself begins to assert itself
again. Glimpses of Gladys are few indeed, and Marilyn will speak
coldly of her later, but the mother’s motivation remains something
of a moral enigma. It may be worth assuming once more that she has
some premonition of the value of the child she is bearing. While
little in Gladys’ life suggests anything other than egocentric
preoccupations, and she does not seem superstitious if she can list
her first two children as dead — one wonders if they expressed a
clear enough preference for the father to leave her vindictive —
still, she
chooses
to have Norma Jean, does not give her up
for adoption, and works seven long years to scrape together a
situation where she can bring her child to live with her. That is a
project of the sort to hold a mind together.

Let us dare the argument that Gladys had
early intimations of an exceptional baby who would carry out the
balked ambitions of her own career. If it is said of a child who
looks exactly like the father that there is no need for wonder
since the woman never took her eyes off the man while carrying,
what has to be said of Marilyn, whose working mother never took her
eyes off movie film?

At the time of the whooping cough, however,
Gladys is still several years away from taking Norma Jean to live
with her, and a new event is about to occur at the Bolenders’ that
will yet create caverns of fright in the child, although it first
produces real happiness. Since it comes at the end of the whooping
cough, it may even seem a species of compensation for her illness –
a black and white dog follows Mr. Bolender home from the trolley
one evening, and the child plays with this pet through her
convalescence. When kindergarten begins in the fall, Lester and
Norma Jean walk the four blocks to school together; the dog, Tippy,
will follow and wait around the school yard until recess. Norma
Jean is in cotton dresses, starched and changed every day, a big
bow in her hair – she and Lester are given roller skates and race
together; the dog chases them. Contrast with the picture given to
Zolotow:

She dreamed of becoming “so beautiful that
people would turn to look at me as I passed.” When she was six she
imagined herself going naked in the world. This fantasy often
possessed her in church. As the organ thundered out hymns, she
quivered with a desire to throw off her clothes and stand naked
“for God and everyone else to see. My impulses to appear naked had
no shame or sense of sin in them. I think I wanted people to see me
naked because I was ashamed of the clothes I wore. Naked, I was
like other girls and not someone in an orphan’s uniform.”

We have just been bombarded with factoids –
whether Marilyn’s or Ben Hect’s is hard to say – but we know she
was in no orphan’s uniform at the age of six. The passage is all
the more worth quoting as an example of the kind of systematic
misrepresentation of her childhood Marilyn would usually
collaborate upon with any near reporter and suggests that she
either did not have the literary instinct to present the quieter
facts with their own pain, or, on the contrary, had everything to
teach us about the American addiction to factoids. In actuality,
the horrors of her childhood were not so much apocalyptic – “naked
for God and everyone else to see” – or Chaplinesque – “someone in
an orphan’s uniform” – as they would be, on occasion, deadening.
Whatever her fear of the world, and we can hear the last echo of
that dear in the tininess of her voice, we can recognize her dear
was justified. The end of the love affair with Tippy proved
traumatic. In 1932, when Norma Jean was almost six, Tippy began to
get out of the house on spring evenings and make his run in the
dark. One night a blast rolled down the street, and the milkman
found the dog’s body in the dawn and told the postman Bolender. A
neighbor, sitting on his porch, had waited for Tippy with a
shotgun. For three nights running Tippy had rolled in the
neighbor’s garden. On the third night, the neighbor shot him. We
can sense that man. There is dog heat and dog body, dog funk
leaving its odor on his new greens, rolling dog lusts on the garden
crop. That’s one night for you, dog, he counts to himself; two
nights for you, dog; on the third night – with what backed-up
intensity of the frontier jammed at last into a suburban veranda we
can only hear in the big blast – the dog is dead. The fears of the
Bolenders have stood on real ground. And their timidity also stands
revealed. For there is no record of confronting the neighbor and
his shotgun. So to the child, a catastrophic view of history must
have begun. It is the view which assumes that at the end of every
sweet and quiet passage of love, amputation or absurdity is
waiting. Whole washes of the apathy that would sit upon her in
later years, that intolerable dull and dead round she passed
through in the year after her marriage to Miller was over, is
probably sealed in the reflex of sorrowing for Tippy, as well as
her descent in school from a bright child to an average child. We
know that she was ordinary in class, and timid. It was only in the
Bolender house that she was bold. But the institution of school
must have seemed part of the
other
world outside the
Bolender house, a reflection of powerful men with shotguns who sat
on porches. Did her stammer begin then as well? If the first joy of
speaking in her fifth year must have been to whistle for her dog,
now the dog was obliterated, and the joy of speech was jammed.

* * *

Gladys put together the money for a down
payment on a bungalow off Highland Avenue in Hollywood, bought some
furniture at auction, and rented all but two rooms of the house to
an English couple who worked in pictures, the husband as a stand-in
for George Arliss and the wife as a “dress” extra, which is to say
an extra who could look convincing in chic party gowns. (Since
their daughter was a stand-in for Madeleine Carroll, the moral has
been pointed — when it comes to work, the British know how to
locate a niche!)

Her economics thus assured, Gladys moved into
the two rooms with her child. Life with Ida was over. For Norma
Jean, up from Hawthorne and now in Hollywood thirteen years before
she would begin her career, the shift must have been equal to
moving from gravity into weightlessness. Or is it the other way?
The English couple was either wild nor cruel — they merely drank
and smoked, talked shop and played records, and were bored, and, of
course, appalled, when Norma Jean sang “Jesus Loves Me.” Their
daughter gave parties, that was all, but it must have been not
without oppression to the child, for in addition to the shock of
moving from the Bolenders’ home, where prohibition liquor was the
essence of sin, into a house of polite and elegant people who
showed no concern at being damned and probably asked her upon
occasion to fetch them the bottle, she entered as well into the
environs of an English accent, and this could have had its effect.
While Marilyn would never sound English, there is something
analogous to an English accent in her voice — perhaps it is the
knowledge (which also resides in a good Southern accent) that
language says more when savored. Most Americans speak to
communicate an idea, but a good English accent puts emphasis on
those words which carry the personality. So Marilyn may have
learned from the English couple how to communicate more than a
single thought with one speech. In films, she was usually saying
two things at once. When she will fall off the piano bench in
The Seven-Year Itch
and as quickly says to Tom Ewell that he
must not feel bad because men always made passes at her, she is
blonde, full-blown, and altogether nurturing to the thin quivering
banjo-string repressions of thin Tom Ewell, she is all of that, but
she is also the mistress of that great remote female void where
wonder at the comedy of men’s urgencies resides. “What is it I got
that makes them twitch?” is what she is also saying. It is why we
laugh. When we perceive a paradoxical truth just long enough to be
warmed by the novelty, but not so long that we must pay by altering
our ideas, we laugh. The truth she is offering in the scene is that
ubiquitous sex appeal — there for everyone! — seems to depend on
the existence of a void. But, already, her arch little voice, so
much in control of its paradoxes, is moving on to some new artful
and double expression of what had been hitherto a single thought.
So we do not stop to think — we laugh. And maybe we enjoy the
influence of that English accent she heard in her childhood.

We will hardly know for certain. One would
have to go through the payrolls of old George Arliss movies to
discover the couple’s name, and they would be dead. Sixty years old
then, they would be a hundred now. Besides, it is the least of the
mysteries in this period of Norma Jean’s life. For Gladys will not
be with her long. In no more than three months the mother will go
mad, will literally be carted away by force, and will end — now, we
are
looking at scenes from a Chaplin film — will end in the
state asylum at Norwalk where her own mother died. Gladys’ sanity
must have been maintained for years as an act of will, a species of
discipline in the name of her grand project. Now the grand project
was manifest in a little girl who wandered around the house, stared
at people drinking, sang “Jesus Loves Me,” disappeared into movies
on Saturday, and had no relation to her mother other than an
occasional numb embrace. It is worth supposing that this relatively
undramatic condition, this increment of Gladys’ long continuing
depression, was finally enough to pull apart whatever fine membrane
of sanity she had wrapped over all her isolated traps and fires.
She woke up one morning in a depression too complete to go to work
— the horrors were upon her. Then came a psychic explosion. The
English couple was distraught. Attendants from the hospital, called
in to subdue her, had to take her away lashed to a stretcher. The
Englishman gives a gentle word to Norma Jean when she comes home
from school. “Your mother,” he tells her, “was taken ill today.
She’s gone to the hospital.” She would not learn what was wrong
with Gladys until she was a woman herself, nor would she live with
her again for twelve years.

Her life is washing out of the last nets of
social life. Norma Jean is on the edge of institutional life
herself. The English couple still take care of her during this
period (which lasts for almost a year), but are obliged to sell her
mother’s furniture to meet the taxes and mortgage payments. They
are even obliged to sell the prize of the house, a white piano,
reputedly owned once by Fredric March and bought by Gladys at
auction for her daughter to play. (Norma Jean, when still with the
Bolenders, had taken piano lessons with a teacher named Marion
Miller; it is one arm of the coincidence that she will run across
the white piano again when she is a star and buy it and keep it in
her apartment in New York with Arthur Miller — at every step of her
life, coincidences spring underfoot like toadstools.)

Since there are not too many other objects to
sell, and work for the English couple has become insecure — the
Depression is heavy over Hollywood in 1934 — they decide at last to
go back to England. Norma Jean is taken in by some neighbors, the
Giffens, who are fond enough of her to think of adoption when they
learn that Mr. Giffen’s job will oblige him to move to Mississippi.
Even from the asylum, however, Gladys says no.

The child goes instead to an orphanage. Her
only connection to the past will be in the weekly visits of Grace
McKee, her mother’s best friend, a film librarian at Columbia, who
is now her legal guardian. There is a moment when Norma Jean goes
through the portals for the first time which tolls a bell as loudly
as any sentimental event since Charles Dickens wrote, “Please, sir,
can I have some more?” For a clue to how legions of publicity
writers have gilded this historic moment, we can pick up a hint
from Guiles’ usually restrained account:

Norma Jean could read the sign [Los Angeles
Orphans’ Home] on one of the columns clearly, and she knew she was
not an orphan. Her mother was alive. Someone was making a terrible
mistake.

She refused to walk in and they had to
drag her all the way into the central hall.
“I’m
not an orphan!”
she screamed. Her cries could be heard by
several of the children nearest the tall arched doorway at the rear
. . .

The clue to the quieter reality of the
situation is in the next few sentences: “. . . it was their dinner
hour. Some children’s faces turned; Norma Jean became embarrassed
and fell silent.” She would undergo her horrors while in the orphan
asylum, but they would not be the dramatic exploitations of Fagin
and Scrooge; rather the monotonous erosion of her ego. The Los
Angeles Orphans’ Home, to which she was taken by Grace McKee, was
not a factory to sweat child labor — an impression she was to give
in publicity stories — but rather an organized and flat
environment. Her hatred at what that boredom did to her was cause
enough to lie in later years about the experience. Besides, it is
almost impossible for people who live in institutions not to tell
lies, since an institution works best if none of the inmates tells
the truth. Honesty creates bureaucratic snarls and opens questions
— the end of a chain of open questions is the revolutionary
question, “By what right does this institution stand and govern?”
Lies, on the other hand, reflect the bureaucratic need for certain
answers. “How do you feel today, Inmate? — I feel fine, sir.” The
interrogator is hearing the reply as he speaks; the bureaucratic
need is to move on to the next question. Or to the next inmate and
his lies. Besides, the inmate population feels a false happiness
that they are successfully cheating the institution; in fact, their
lies keep the population in a state of uneasiness where they are
more vulnerable to discipline. So if one is going to blame the
orphanage for anything, it is probably for confirming her into a
liar, and reinforcing everything in her character that was
secretive. Let us assume it was even worse. If she was bound to be
somewhat unstable considering the concentrated insanity of her
inheritance, and had possibly been given a future of insomnia by
Della, and certainly known trauma in the murder of her dog, it was
probably her future capacity for happiness that was most injured by
the twenty-one months she spent in the orphanage. But this was not
because she had to “wash 100 plates, 100 cups, 100 knives, forks
and spoons, three times a day, seven days a week . . . scrub
toilets and clean bathtubs,” and for this receive ten cents a month
for working in the kitchen. Zolotow quotes the superintendent, Mrs.
Ingraham, speaking more than twenty years later.