Marilyn: A Biography (6 page)

“
I really don’t know why Miss Monroe tells
these terrible stories about us. And people print them, whatever
she says. We don’t
have
to give the
children any work assignments. We have a staff of twenty-one here,
including a housemother for every ten children. We have a staff in
the kitchen fully capable of attending to the dishes. But we do
give the children small jobs and pay them for it. We do this
deliberately to give the child a feeling of being useful, of her
own importance, and to give her money to spend as she wants to
spend it. Now this story of Marilyn’s that we made her wash dishes
three times a day is just plain silly. It would take a child four
hours to wash that many dishes. How would Marilyn have had time to
go to school and do homework and be in bed by nine, which is
lights-out time, if she was washing that many dishes three times a
day?”

“
How many dishes did she wash?”

“
Oh, she never washed any dishes and she
never scrubbed toilets. The most she did was to help dry the dishes
an hour a week, one hour. That’s all. She had to make her own bed
and keep her section of the girls’ cottage tidied up, is
all.”

“
How much did you pay her?”

“
It wasn’t really payment. It would be
much easier for us just to give the children a dime a week and let
it go at that, because it actually makes it harder for us in the
kitchen when we have them helping out. They get in the way. But
it’s our theory that giving the child five cents a week, which was
what Marilyn received, is good for a child’s morale. She feels she
has a place in the world. No institution can ever take the place of
a family or a good foster home. We know that. We know the children
here do suffer from feelings of rejection. The idea of having them
do little tasks and giving them money is to make them feel proud of
themselves. We do it even now.”

While the children did have to go to public
school together and return together and were thereby marked by
other children as from the Home, still they wore no uniforms —
Norma Jean had a plaid skirt and a sweater. And if they were
obliged to live in a dormitory, there were large windows for air
and sunlight. They all had their own beds and chests of drawers.
There were five acres to play on, swings, seesaws, exercise bars, a
sandbox. Zolotow even mentions a swimming pool! Inside were toys
and games, a radio and phonograph, an auditorium and stage. The
sense of plastic surfaces, communal living, and indifferent mass
food is probably worse in any student union in any American
university today — at least any union that has recently been built.
(In fact, Norma Jean’s orphanage consisted of several buildings
that were not without a little bit of architectural distinction.)
If there was cruel and unusual punishment, it was in the brute fact
of the orphanage itself — the emptiness at the core of every tender
sensation. One housemother for ten orphans — how can an institution
afford more? — and yet what competition to get the fragment of good
feeling available in a woman who must divide that small pie of her
working heart into ten slices. How little can be there, yet for the
children what huge and ruthless elbowing to get up under her nose
for award, often by telling the most skillful lies, all the while
knowing the most complete loneliness if one is to the rear. The
real horror is that slowly, progressively, the child loses all
sense of inhabiting even the fair volume of its own body. Since it
is existing on the lowest levels of social significance,
supervisors tend to look through the child as if it is to a degree
invisible.
The
volume it inhabits is without
importance
. Indeed, one of Monroe’s wittier remarks concerned
people being rude: “I guess they think it’s happening to your
clothing.” At its worst, in the orphanage one was nothing but an
item recognizable by its garments. Given this diminution of the
ego, the hours of play have to turn vacuous. To whom does one refer
a triumph? It is like conceiving of an orgy where everyone is
finally spent. Who is left to offer a compliment? Silences work at
the void in oneself and enlarge it. We need look no longer for an
explanation to any void in her portrayal of sex (which void
paradoxically has made her more sexual, since it suggested she is
available to all), no, that hollow was shaping in all the tolerance
for apathy and torpor she would develop during the twenty-one
months when she was nine, then ten and now eleven and still in the
orphanage — the dreadful spread of the habit to be bored, which is
equal to saying that a rootless resentment would occupy central
positions of power in her psyche. The explanation for her future
inability to be on time, memorize lines or bring her concentration
to focus quickly — all these professional vices which will bring
her into murderous wars with the studios — all have their
beginnings in the drabness of these orphanage hours over twenty-one
months. The itch to kill love in many a life around her will form
in these years, and all the future wastes of her life, all
collecting. Yet it is even worse than that. If we are indeed born
with a double psyche and so are analogous in our mental life to
twin trees, possessed of one personality which is plunged into the
life before us, and of another karmic root that retains some
unconscious recollection of another existence from which we derive,
it is not the same as saying that because each of us builds a
mental life on two fundamentally separate personalities, that we
are all therefore, in the old-fashioned sense, schizophrenic. Two
personalities within one human being may be better able to evaluate
experience (even as two eyes gauge depth), provided the
personalities are looking more or less in the same direction. A
fragmented identity is the refusal of one personality within
oneself to have any relations with the other. If such a notion has
value, let us assume that the conditions of an orphanage are suited
to creating too wan a psyche and too glamorous a one. Since the
orphan’s presence in the world is obliged to turn drab, the life of
fantasy, in compensation, can become extreme. We are all steeped in
the notion that lonely withdrawn people have a life of large inner
fantasy. What may be ignored is the tendency to become locked into
a lifelong rapture with one’s fantasy, to become a narcissist. The
word, however, fails to suggest the hermetic imprisonment of such a
love affair, or the depth of the incapacity to love anyone else,
except as a servant to one’s dream of glamour. Since there is also
a great tendency for every bastard to become a narcissist – the
absence of one parent creating a sense of romantic mystery
within oneself
, within one of the two governing senses of
self, the future of Marilyn Monroe was by illegitimate birth
already in a royal line of narcissists. The orphanage would confirm
it. She would come out an orphan – which is to say a survivor –
which is to say her love affair would be of necessity with herself.
It could be said that if it is the tendency of families, happy
families at any rate, to give personalities to their children which
are more comfortable and expansive at home than in the world –
because the home obviously is safer and more encouraging than the
world – so in the psychology of the survivor, the opposite is true.
One is drab and quiet at home, there in the deadening lack of
amplitude of home, and one is glorious in the world, or possessed
at least of the potential for moments of high glory in the world.
Combat heroes are such survivors.

We are ready to leave the orphanage, but few
facts are worth recording plus one coincidence. There is reference
by all authors to the lot across the field from the Home. There a
movie company’s sound stages are visible from the window by her
bed. At night, a repeating flash of forked neon lightning shows
“RKO” through the window. Sixteen years later she will make
Clash by Night
for RKO release.

Otherwise, she makes no friends for the
future, and leaves little record of herself. Her reports said she
was “normal,” “bright and sunshiny” – even here! – “well-behaved,”
“cooperative.” If she lied by offering a face more alive than the
deadening pool of her feelings, the asylum lied back with the
fiction of pleasant adjectives and good reports. They have to be
false. Otherwise, how can one explain her desire to tell such lies
about the orphanage later? Or account for her attempt to
escape?

One new habit is of significance. She gets
her first taste of makeup. Grace McKee, Gladys’ friend, who comes
to visit on Saturdays, will buy her a soda, take her into a
clothing shop, treat her to a movie – she loves movies the way
invalids cling to life for a good day – and, ecstasy of stolen
sweets, will “permit Norma Jean to try on her lipstick.” What a
leap! As she looks in the mirror, does she see the face with which
she will fall in love? Grace will even take her for a marcel. The
beloved is having its hair done. Guiles gives us a glimpse of a
moment of sexual beauty, altogether pristine, with the directress
of the Home:

That lady – whose sensibilities were more
easily touched than the matrons’ – called Norma Jean into her
office one Saturday. She sat behind a highly waxed walnut desk in a
corner office at the front of the main building, a Pekinese dog
near her feet. Norma Jean feared one of the matrons had reported
her for some misdemeanor and she tried to recall just what might
have provoked this confrontation.

“
You have such a lovely skin, dear,” the
Directress said. Norma Jean, embarrassed by the compliment, went
crimson and stooped by to pet the dog.

“
Stay that way for a minute,” the lady
told her, and she took out a powder puff and began applying a
delicately fragrant powder to her face. “Now look in the mirror,”
she said. Norma Jean got up and walked to an antique mirror on the
wall. Her face was soft, alabaster smooth as her mother’s had
been.

“
Since it’s Saturday, you may wear it all
day, Norma Jean.”

Zolotow, telling the same story in the years
when Marilyn was working like a pearl diver for her legend, relates
it this way:

About four or five months after she moved
into the orphanage, she fell into a depressed mood. It came on
during a rainy day. Rain always made her think of her father and
set up a desire to wander. On the way back from school, she slipped
away from the line and fled. She didn’t know where she was running
to and wandered aimlessly in the slashing rainstorm. A policeman
found her and took her to a police station. She was brought back to
Mrs. Dewey’s office. She was changed into dry clothes. She expected
to be beaten. Instead, Mrs. Dewey took her in her arms and told her
she was pretty. Then she powdered Norma Jean’s nose and chin with a
powder puff

In 1950, Marilyn told the story of the
powder puff to Sonia Wolfson, a publicity woman at the
20
^th
Century-Fox and then confided,
“This was the first time in my life I felt loved – no one had ever
noticed my face or hair or me before.”

Let us assume it even happened in some
fashion. For it gives a glimpse as the powder goes on and the
mirror comes up of a future artist conceiving a grand scheme in the
illumination of an instant – one could paint oneself into an
instrument of one’s will! “…Noticed my face or hair” – her
properties – “or me…”

Of the foster homes she entered after the
orphanage there is not too much to tell. Zolotow places her
altogether in seven or eight and has her raped before the age of
nine, but he has been reading Marilyn ben Hecht’s childhood, and
that is a rainbow of tear-washed factoids. We are told of the
scrubbing of floors, nights on knees for prayer, revival meetings
with religious fanatics, beatings with a hairbrush, even the
accusation she stole a pearl necklace, to which she refers: “I have
never forgotten the shame, humiliation, and the deep, deep hurt.”
On Saturday night, living with a factoidal family, she was obliged
to take her bath last in the dirty bath water of the others! What
an imagination she possessed: of clean America forgiving her any
sin after that fearsome immersion! Only Richard Nixon thinks as
well! Once Grace McKee left her a factoidal fifty-cent piece, and
it was taken away because she dirtied her clothes. At one foster
home she sleeps in a closet without windows and is raped by the
wealthiest boarder in the house, who invites her into his room.
Yes, it is all in Zolotow (out of Hecht), and it is all untrue.
According to Dougherty, her first husband, who is now a cop, she
was a virgin when they married. Of course we have only his word for
it, and we need never depend on the word of a policeman, but then
where is the wealthy boarder to be found if she spent the first
seven and a half years of her life with the Bolenders, and close to
the next two with the English couple? It is more likely that her
rape comes exactly out of Marilyn’s knowledge of the limits to good
copy about Ida Bolendcr’s sewing machine, or the English couple who
thought to improve her grammar. That would make one good
grammatical sentence in a feature story.

No, the less extraordinary truth, if we are
to rely on Guiles, is that Norma Jean was in three foster homes
before the orphanage — with the Bolenders, the English couple, and
the well-to-do Giffens who wished to adopt her but went to
Mississippi; then she was in only two more after she left the
orphanage at the age of eleven. Here is Guiles’ account of the
first, which was “the home of a couple in Compton, California, who
sold furniture polish made by the husband”:

The wife spent most of each day with Norma
Jean by her side in a battered old Chevrolet. It was summer, and
the girl was to remember that vacation as one spent mostly rocking
back and forth over back roads seeking out small hardware stores. .
. . There was no escape. While she dawdled over her breakfast, the
woman was in the garage loading up the back seat of the car with
white bottles. Later, Marilyn recalled, she would hear the
offensive sound of the old engine revving up and the woman’s voice
crying out the same words every morning, “Norma Jean! Let’s go!
Lock the door as you come out.” In less than a month Norma Jean
knew the name of every village in Los Angeles County.