The Genius and the Goddess (3 page)

He felt extra fine and had been thinking joyous thoughts. . . .
He was a young man again, in the grip of a first love, which
was – happily – carrying him out of control. He didn't read like
the constricted man I'd known. I remembered the lovely light
of lechery in his eyes as he was dancing with Marilyn in Charlie
Feldman's softly lit living room. I hadn't known he had it in
him, that light in his eyes. I'd really done something for my
friend, something he could not have done for himself.
⁴

Egocentric and self-satisfied as ever, Kazan was proud of his role as
go-between and felt as if he, not Marilyn, had fired up and liberated
Miller.

"Family breakdown," a social historian observed, "is truly a feature
of Los Angeles . . . a city of loneliness." Marilyn grew up in the
lower depths of Hollywood during the Depression, in the world of
unattainable hopes and shattered illusions that Nathanael West satirized
in
Miss Lonelyhearts
. Born into an impoverished
family, who went in
for bigamous marriages and petty crime, she was subjected to a fatal
mixture of fundamentalist religion and sexual molestation. Both made
her feel sinful and guilty, polluted and ashamed.

Marilyn's maternal grandfather,
Otis Monroe, worked for the
Mexican National Railway and lived just across the Texas border, in
Piedras Negras, about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio. Otis died
of tertiary syphilis in an insane asylum. His wife Della (according to
Marilyn's autobiography, ghostwritten by
Ben Hecht), "had also been
taken off to the mental hospital in Norwalk [part of Los Angeles] to
die there screaming and crazy. And her brother had killed himself."
Marilyn's mother,
Gladys Monroe, was born in Mexico in 1902. It's
not clear why Della didn't cross the border to give birth in the United
States.

Extremely good-looking and eager to escape from her ghastly
family, Gladys married a businessman,
John Baker, when she was only
fourteen, in 1917. She had a son, Jack, that year, and a daughter,
Berniece, in 1919. The following year,
Jackie fell out of a car and
became permanently crippled. (He died at the age of fourteen.) The
couple were divorced in 1921, Baker took the children to be brought
up by relatives in his native Kentucky, and Gladys soon lost touch
with them. She married her second husband,
Martin Mortensen – a
handsome, religious man, with a steady job – in October 1924, but
left him, after only four months, in February 1925. In September she
became pregnant with Marilyn, who did not find out that her two
siblings existed until the end of her life.

These stark facts reveal Gladys' troubled background: broken
families, unwanted pregnancies, lost children and a history of insanity,
all of which would recur in Marilyn's life. But Gladys was a good-time
girl – fond of dancing and drinking (during the Prohibition
era), attractive to men and sexually promiscuous. By the time she
was twenty-three, she'd been divorced twice, had two children and
been abandoned by the father of her third child.

Gladys had a low-level, mechanical job in the movie business, where
she gossiped about the stars and longed for their glamorous way of
life. She worked as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries, a
lab that developed and printed the daily scenes, or rushes. They were
viewed in the studio the next morning and showed the progress of
the movie. Another lab where she worked, the RKO film-cutting
room, was housed in a small, one-story, low-roofed cottage with thick
cement walls. Editors perched on high stools, wearing white cotton
gloves, running strips of film from one spool to another, winding and
unwinding them, snipping away frames and gluing them to other
pieces of film. There were no windows or air-conditioning, and the
room was uncomfortably warm. A large red no smoking sign warned
that the celluloid film was inflammable.

Marilyn's father was the handsome, mustachioed, philandering lab
supervisor,
Stanley Gifford. He jilted Gladys on Christmas Eve, when
she told him she was pregnant, and did not acknowledge the child
nor offer to help. Marilyn said that "he walked off and left her . . .
without ever seeing me,"
¹
and never recovered from the stigma of
illegitimacy and the wound of rejection. She was born Norma Jeane
Baker, in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, and named for the popular
actress Norma Talmadge. In 1926, in the era of silent films, Ramon
Novarro appeared in
Ben Hur
and John Barrymore in
Don Juan
.

Hemingway published
The Sun Also Rises
, which portrayed the
wounded spirit of the Lost Generation who'd fought in the Great
War. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work Marilyn
admired, died; and Queen Elizabeth II, whom Marilyn would meet,
was born.

In her twenties, when Marilyn was a promising movie star, she
hired a private detective to track down her mysterious, elusive and
long-sought father. Her friend and confidante,
Natasha Lytess, recalled
that "he owned a dairy farm near Palm Springs and she wanted me
to drive there with her. . . . She wanted him to love her immediately,
and she tried to look her prettiest." When they arrived and Natasha
phoned the house for her, Gifford "was incredibly rude and horrible.
His voice was common, pinched, with a mid-western nasal quality.
He said he was married and had a family and didn't want to know
anything about this girl Marilyn Monroe. And when I turned the
receiver over to Marilyn, she said she wanted nothing from him, but
only to see him for the first time, to talk to him. He refused. He was
filthy in his conversation with her."

In another version of this story, Marilyn drove out to Palm Springs
with the gossip columnist
Sidney Skolsky. On this occasion her father,
more reasonable in his refusal, spoke to her and acknowledged his
paternity, but he did not want to get involved with her, admit he'd
behaved badly or make any emotional reparations. He said,"Marilyn,
I'm married. I have children. I don't want you to start any trouble
for me now, like your mother did years ago." After finding her father,
Marilyn hoped that he would accept her and love her, but instead of
achieving a healing reconciliation, her visit reopened old wounds and
made her embittered. Abandonment and then rejection by her father
taught her early on that men were selfish and irresponsible. But she
was compelled to repeat her mother's mistakes. Like Gladys, she
married in her mid-teens, and later became pregnant and was jilted.

Marilyn always believed, with good reason, that her birth disgraced
Gladys and her mother didn't want her, that she got in Gladys' way
and interfered with the carefree life she wished to lead. Marilyn also
claimed that her grandmother,
Della Monroe, tried to smother her
in her crib when she was a year old. It's difficult to believe that a
helpless infant could resist an adult who tried to smother her, or
remember an incident, however traumatic, that occurred at such an
early age. But Della
was
insane and the baby
was
unwanted, and shortly
afterward Norma Jeane's grandmother was confined in an insane
asylum. Marilyn may have been told about the episode later on, or
this memory, real or imagined, may have emerged during her extensive
psychoanalysis.

Gladys could not take care of her baby when she was working.
She therefore paid foster parents,
Albert and Ida Bolender, five dollars
a day for Norma Jeane's board and lodging, from her birth until the
fall of 1933. Albert had a secure job and steady income as a postman,
and never lost a day's work during the Depression. The Bolenders
lived in Hawthorne, on the same street as Norma Jeane's crazy grandmother,
a working-class district near what is now Los Angeles
International Airport. The modest bungalows had front porches, weed-filled
vacant lots stood between the houses and the graveled streets
turned to mud after a rainstorm. In
Farewell, My Lovely
(1940), Raymond Chandler
described a similar place, reeking of poverty and
decay. A character lives in "a dried-out brown house with a dried-out
brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around
a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden
rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last
year's poinsettias tap-tap against the stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish
half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard."

The Bolenders, fundamentalists who loved Jesus, were devout
members of the United Pentecostal Church, and loyal followers of
the flamboyant, fraudulent but extremely popular evangelist Aimée
Semple McPherson. When off duty Albert turned out little tracts on
salvation from his own printing press. The Bolenders were resolutely
opposed to smoking, drinking, card-playing and frivolous entertainments.
Ida taught Norma Jeane to vow, in a little jingle during her
nightly prayers, "I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell,
or give alcohol while I live. From all tobacco I'll abstain, and never
take God's name in vain." Ida also warned her, with threats of fire
and brimstone, that even minor transgressions would send her straight
to Hell: "If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies,
do you know what would happen? You'd burn along with all the bad
people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers."
²

Norma Jeane spent her first seven years with the strict but decent
Bolenders. Better parents, by far, than Della and Gladys, they provided
a proper home and did not mistreat her. Yet these respectable people
were quite fanatical, imposed severe and inflexible discipline, and
considered Norma Jeane a bastard, an outcast and a sinner. They
constantly ordered her to stop doing anything that gave her pleasure,
stifling her natural feelings and making her feel she was dirty. She
learned to avoid conflict by being passive and docile, and as a child
she retreated into a fantasy life. She said she had a powerful impulse
to take off all her clothes, before all the pious worshippers in church,
and stand up naked so God and everyone else could see her. (
Obsessed
with her own sensuous figure, Marilyn was never ashamed of nudity.
She loved to show off her naked body at home and in public, in
photographs and in films.)

In 1933 Gladys qualified for a government-sponsored, low-cost
mortgage. In the fall she reclaimed her daughter and moved into a
modest, three-bedroom house just next to the Hollywood Bowl. To
help meet expenses, Gladys took in tenants, a couple of English actors,
George Atkinson and his wife. George played bit parts; his wife was
an extra in crowd scenes and a stand-in for Madeleine Carroll. Like
so many camp followers in Hollywood, the Atkinsons were infatuated
with its glamor and fantasized endlessly about the big break that
would make them great stars.

Gladys' hedonistic regime, the complete antithesis of the Bolenders',
transformed Norma Jeane's daily life and moral values. Gladys loved
to indulge in cigarettes and alcohol, candy and perfume, frequent trips
to dance halls and long nights at the movies. Norma Jeane, with her
strict religious background, was shocked by her mother's wild life.
She thought Gladys would be sent to hell and spent a lot of time
praying for her. For the first seven years of her life she had never
known a mother's tender voice or affectionate touch. She now lived
with her mother, but did not feel close to her. Always self-absorbed,
Gladys never gave her the love and care she sought. Her mother never
smiled at her, never kissed or caressed her. She was so nervous, Marilyn
recalled, that she'd become upset when she heard someone turning
the page of a magazine.

Gladys had attempted suicide several times, swung perilously
between depression and mania, and had her first mental breakdown
in January 1935. She suddenly started to laugh, scream and curse
hysterically and, with a sudden outburst of violence, to shatter dishes
against the wall. She would lie on the floor, stare up the staircase and
yell that someone was coming down the steps to kill her. One night,
after accusing her co-worker and best friend,
Grace Goddard, of trying
to poison her, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed her. The tenants
called the police, and two officers finally overpowered her. She was
taken to Norwalk state hospital, where in 1927 her mother had died
in a straitjacket. The sight of Gladys' nervous collapse terrified
the eight-year-old Norma Jeane and remained, for the rest of her life,
a warning that the same thing might also happen to her. The
memories of her promiscuous and unstable mother were disturbing
and shameful.

Norma Jeane's half-sister,
Berniece, later explained the reasons for
Gladys' breakdown: "divorce, desertion, the death of her mother,
separation from two of her children, the frustration of dead-end dating,
the toll of working overtime, and now a strike at her company just
when she had taken on the huge financial obligation of a home."
Apart from brief intervals when she seemed to improve and was
temporarily released from confinement, Gladys spent the rest of her
long life in insane asylums. Norma Jeane occasionally saw her, but
since Gladys became a fanatical Christian Scientist and retreated into
herself, they could never establish meaningful contact. Norma Jeane's
first husband, who met Gladys during World War II, found her affectless,
remote and withdrawn: "Gladys seemed to be reaching for
something but there was nothing there to grasp. She couldn't find it.
I never saw her angry and I never saw her laugh. She was very pious
and apparently content."

The Hungarian photographer
André de Dienes, who drove up the
coast to the Northwest with Norma Jeane in 1945, described another
dutiful but dreary encounter. On that occasion, the forty-three-year-old
Gladys failed to respond either to her daughter or to the presents
she'd brought: "Norma Jeane's mother lived in an old hotel in the
center of Portland, in a depressing bedroom on the top floor. The
reunion between mother and daughter lacked warmth. They had
nothing to say to each other. Mrs. Baker was a woman of uncertain
age, emaciated and apathetic, making no effort to put us at our ease.
. . . A silence ensued. Then Mrs. Baker buried her face in her hands
and seemed to forget all about us. It was distressing. She had obviously
been released from the hospital too soon." The visitors escaped as
quickly as they could.

Despite her history of mental illness and apparent estrangement
from the world, Gladys recovered sufficiently to find another husband.
In April 1949, without bothering to get divorced, she contracted a
third marriage to an electrician,
John Eley. After his death three years
later, she sent a sad and rather paranoid letter from a state mental
hospital, which made Norma Jeane feel both guilty and distressed, as
she always did whenever they had any contact: "Please dear child Id
like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around
here & Id like to move away soon as possible. Id like to have my
childs love instead of hatred. Love, Mother."
³