The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (16 page)
Read The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Online
Authors: Donald H. Wolfe
“Suddenly, I wasn't in the orphanage anymore,” Marilyn remembered.
I was placed with a family who were given five dollars a week for keeping me. I was placed with nine different families before I was able to quit being a legal orphan. I remember one where I stayed for just three or four weeks. I remember them because the woman delivered furniture polish made by her husband. Every morning we'd load up the backseat of her car with the bottles and she'd take me along. We'd bump along the roads and the car smelled like polish, and I'd get
so
carsick. I can still hear the awful sound of the car starting and her yelling, “Norma Jeane! Get in the car! Let's go!”
After that I only lived in the orphanage off and on. The families with whom I lived had one thing in commonâa need for five dollars. I was also an asset to have in the house. I was strong and healthy and able to do almost as much work as a grown-up. And I had learned not to bother anyone by talking or crying. I learned also that the best way to keep out of trouble was by never complaining or asking for anything. Most of the families had children of their own, and I knew they always came first. They wore the colored dresses and owned whatever toys there were. My own costume never varied. It consisted of a faded blue skirt and white waist. I had two of each, but since they were exactly alike everyone thought I wore the same outfit all the time.
Every second week the Home sent a woman inspector out to see how its orphans were getting along in the world. She never asked me any questions, but would pick up my foot and look at the bottom of my shoes. If my shoe bottoms weren't worn through, I was reported in a thriving condition. I never minded coming “last” in these families except on Saturday nights when everybody took a bath. Water cost money, and changing the water in the tub was an unheard of extravagance. The whole family used the same tub of water. And I was always the last one in. One family with whom I lived was so poor that I was often scolded for flushing the toilet at night. “That uses up five gallons of water,” my new “uncle” would say, “and five gallons each time can run into money.”
I was always very quiet, at least in front of the adults. They used to call me “the mouse.” I didn't say very much except to other children, and I had a lot of imagination. The other kids liked to play with me because I could think of
things. I'd say, “Now we're going to play murderâ¦or divorce,” and they'd say, “How do you think of things like that?” No matter how careful I was, there were always troubles. Some of my troubles were my own fault. I did hit someone occasionally, I'd pull her hair, and knock her downâ¦and I was often accused of stealing thingsâa necklace, a comb, a ring, or a nickel. I never stole anything. When the troubles came I had only one way to meet themâby staying silent. Aunt Grace would ask me when she came to visit how things were. I would tell her always they were fine because I didn't like to see her eyes turn unhappy. In a way they were not troubles at all because I was used to them. When I look back on those days I remember, in fact, that they were full of all sorts of fun and excitement. I played games in the sun and ran races. I also had daydreams, not only about my father's photograph but about many other things. I daydreamed chiefly about beauty. I dreamed of myself becoming so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed. And I dreamed of colorsâscarlet, gold, green and white. I dreamed of myself walking proudly in beautiful clothes and being admired by everyone and overhearing words of praise.
Norma Jeane, the Human Bean
Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator.
âSigmund Freud
W
hen Norma Jeane had her “troubles” she was often sent back to the orphanage until Grace Goddard could find another foster family to take care of her. Many of the families were among those who had been lured to the golden dream of Southern California in the roaring twenties, only to find themselves stuck in their stucco crackerboxes in the desperate thirties. While the foster families had a common need for five dollars, they also had in common a family relationship to Grace Goddard. The five dollars a week that Grace's relatives received from the state for looking after Norma Jeane went a long way in the midst of the Depression: in 1936 gasoline was nine cents a gallon, hamburger was eight cents a pound, movies were fifteen cents, oranges were a dime for three dozen. As the court-appointed guardian, Grace received $325 a year, comparable in purchasing power to approximately $3,500 in the mid-1990sâenough to buy groceries rather than wait in line at Helms Bakery for stale bread.
That Norma Jeane was farmed out by Grace Goddard to numerous foster homes, but never stayed for any period of time with Doc and Grace, may be attributed to Grace's practicality. While Grace was quick to do a kindness, she drew the line at any inconvenience to her private life. Her
coworker Leila Fields stated, “Grace was fun, outgoing and generous, but ultimately Grace never did anything unless it was right for Grace.” However, shortly after Norma Jeane's eleventh birthday, she moved into the Goddards' small house on Barbara Court in Hollywood's Cahuenga Pass. On June 12, 1937, Norma Jeane left the orphanage for the last time.
After twenty-one months of being shuttled from orphanage to foster home and back, Norma Jeane believed she had finally found a permanent home with the Goddards. The house on Barbara Court was not far from Hollywood Boulevard, where Grace would take her to the beauty shop, C. C. Brown's Ice Cream Parlor, and the movie palaces.
“Grace could have no children of her own, and so she lavished her affection on Norma Jeane, whom she considered to be as much or more hers than Gladys's,” Doc's daughter Bebe Goddard observed. “Grace was very perceptive. From this very early time she had the idea that Norma Jeane was going to be a movie star, and she did everything in her power to bring it about.”
According to Grace Goddard's friend Olin Stanley, Grace would bring Norma Jeane to the studios and show her off. She'd be wearing a pretty dress and shiny Mary Jane shoes, and have her hair done up in curls. Grace would fuss over her and exclaim, “Olin, isn't she pretty? Norma Jeane, turn around and show the nice man the big bow on the back of your dress. Now walk down that way and turn aroundâ¦Good! Now walk back here again. Tell Olin what you're going to be when you're all grown up. Say, âa movie star,' baby! Tell him you're going to be a movie star!”
Norma Jeane loved the attention: “Grace was always wonderful to me,” Marilyn Monroe commented in later years. “Without her, who knows where I would have landed?”
But the idyll at the Goddards' Barbara Court home came to a sudden end. In November 1937, scarcely five months after her arrival, Norma Jeane was again uprooted and sent to the house of Ida Martin and “Aunt Olive” Monroe in nearby Lankershim.
Marilyn Monroe stated in 1960 that the move took place because “Doc and Aunt Grace were very poor, so they couldn't care for me.” But the truth was that Doc drank too much. By 1937 both Doc and Grace were well on their way to becoming confirmed alcoholics, and according to Norma Jeane's first husband, James Dougherty, Doc got roaring drunk one night, causing a scene that convinced Grace to send Norma Jeane away.
“At first I was waking up in the mornings at the Goddards' and thinking
I was still at the orphanage, then, before I could get used to them, I was with another âAunt' and âUncle,' waking up and thinking I was still at the Goddards'â¦. It was all very confusing,” Marilyn recalled.
Aunt Olive and Ida Martin's home in Lankershim was on Oxnard Street, not far from Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Olive Monroe was a true aunt, having been married to Gladys's younger brother, Marion Monroe. Shortly before the birth of the couple's third child, Marion walked out of the house for a newspaper and never returned. Left destitute, the family moved in with Olive's mother, Ida Martin, at the house in Lankershim.
While it was gratifying to meet relations, Norma Jeane found her new home a difficult experience. “I don't think Ida Martin was a very nice person, as I remember,” Bebe Goddard confided. “And Olive kind of gave Norma Jeane a bad time because she wasn't too fond of Marion's family after his disappearance.”
Norma Jeane shared a bed with Ida Mae, who was ten years old. They also shared lively imaginations. Ida Mae recalled years later, “Norma Jeane and I were just kids. We did things kids do. I remember the time we decided to make wine. We had a big tub in the back yard. We gathered grapes and piled them into the tub and tromped them with our bare dirty feet. When my mother called we hid the tub under the back porch and forgot about it. For weeks the house and yard reeked of rotten grapes and nobody knew why except Norma Jeane and I, and we were afraid to tell my mother. Once we decided to run away from home. We were going up to San Francisco to look for my father, who was Norma Jeane's uncle, because someone said they had seen him there, but we never really went, of course. But I'll never forget Norma Jeane. She stayed with us until the San Fernando Valley flood.”
The flood, which caused the Los Angeles River to overflow and flood Lankershim, occurred in March 1938, and Norma Jeane was again uprootedâthis time by an act of God. It proved to be the beginning of more fortunate circumstances.
“I had a real happy time while I was growing up when I went to live with a woman I called âAunt Ana,'” Marilyn remembered. “She was Grace McKee's [Goddard's] aunt. She was a lot older. She was sixty, I guess, or somewhere around there, but she always talked about when she was a girl of twenty. There was a real contact between us because she understood me somehow. She knew what it was like to be youngâ¦. And I loved her dearly. I used to do the dishes in the evening and I'd always be singing
and whistling, and she'd say, âI never heard a child sing so much!' So I did it during that time. Aunt Anaâ¦I adored her.”
“Aunt Ana” was Edith Ana Atchinson Lower, the sister of Grace's father. She was fifty-eight years old when Norma Jeane moved into the duplex she owned at 11348 Nebraska Avenue in West Los Angeles. Like Grace and Gladys, she was a Christian Scientist. In her devotion to the belief formulated by Mary Baker Eddy, she had advanced to the level of healing practitioner.
Norma Jeane was loving by nature and responded to the concept of God as love, and every Sunday she accompanied Aunt Ana to the Christian Science Church, whose essential transcendental belief was that God the Creator is Loveâthe only Reality. Mary Baker Eddy believed that the passing material world was unreal, and therefore evil and corruption had no reality. Norma Jeane's lifelong ability to become aloof from the evils that surrounded her and remain forever the guileless child perhaps stemmed from her early protective belief in Mary Baker Eddy's creed that “evil is the awful deception and unreality of existence.”
Aunt Ana's duplex was in the Sawtelle district of West Los Angeles, and when Norma Jeane moved there, she entered the seventh grade at Emerson Junior High School, a two-mile walk from Sawtelle. “The other girls rode to school in a bus, but I had no nickel to pay for the ride. Rain or shine, I walked the two miles from my aunt's home to school. I hated the walk, I hated the school. I had no friends. The pupils seldom talked to me and never wanted me in their gamesâ¦. The first year at Emerson, all I had was the two light-blue dress outfits from the orphanage. I sure didn't make any best-dressed list. In school the pupils often whispered about me and giggled as they stared at meâ¦. I was very quiet. They called me dumb and made fun of my orphan's outfit. You could say I wasn't very popular. Nobody ever walked home with me or invited me to visit their homes. This was partly because I came from a poor part of the district where all the Mexicans and Japanese lived. It was also because I couldn't smile at anyone.”
According to Norma Jeane's classmate Gladys Phillips, “In the thirties Los Angeles was a very divided, class-conscious society, and this was unfortunately true of school life, too. All the students were immediately, unofficially classified according to where they lived, and Sawtelle was simply not the place to be from.” Her teacher, Mary Campbell, remembered, “Norma Jeane was a nice child, but not at all outgoing, not vibrantâ¦.
She looked as though she wasn't well cared for. Her clothes separated her a little bit from the rest of the girls. In 1938 she wasn't well developed.”
By the age of twelve, when Norma Jeane entered the seventh grade, she was tall for her ageâfive feet five inches, almost her full height. But she was skinny. The boys at Emerson jokingly referred to her as “Norma Jeane, the human bean.” But “Norma Jeane, the human bean” was trembling on the evanescent vine of adolescence, and the faded orphan's outfit became the chrysalis of nature's revenge.
“My body was developing and becoming shapely, but no one knew this but me,” she recalled.
I still wore the blue dress and ragged blouse, and I started to look like an overgrown lummox. I tried to cheer myself up with daydreams. I dreamed of attracting attention, of having people look at meâ¦. This wish for attention had something to do, I think, with my trouble in church on Sundays. No sooner was I in the pew with the organ playing and everybody singing a hymn than the impulse would come to me to take off all my clothes. I wanted desperately to stand up naked for God and everyone else to see.
My impulse to appear naked and my dreams about it had no shame or sense of sin in them. Dreaming of people looking at me made me feel less lonely. I think I wanted them to see me naked because I was ashamed of the clothes I woreâthe never-changing faded blue dress of poverty. Naked, I was like the other girlsâ¦.
One morning Norma Jeane found that her last ragged blouse was torn, and she borrowed a sweater from a friend. “She was my age, but smaller,” Marilyn later remembered, “I arrived at school just as the math class was starting. As I walked to my seat everybody stared at me as if I had suddenly grown two heads, which in a way I had. They were under my tight sweater. At recess a half dozen boys crowded around me. They made jokes and kept looking at my sweater as if it were a gold mineâ¦. After school four boys walked home with me, wheeling their bicycles by hand. I was excited but acted calm.” Norma Jeane had brought a new equation to the math class.
I didn't think of my body as having anything to do with sex. It was more like a friend who had mysteriously appeared in my life, a sort of magic friend. A few weeks later, I stood in front of the mirror one morning and put lipstick on my lips. I darkened my blond eyebrows. I had no money for clothes, and I had no clothes except my orphan rig and the sweater. The lipstick and the mascara were the clothes, however. I saw that they improved my looks as much as if I had put
on a real gownâ¦. My arrival in school with painted lips and darkened brows, and still encased in the magic sweater, started everybody buzzing.
By the time she entered the eighth grade in September 1939, “Norma Jeane, the human bean,” had become the hubba-hubba-
mmmmmmm
girl. One of the older students who had noticed Norma Jeane's magical metamorphosis was Chuckie Moran. “There's the
mmmmmmm
girl!” he'd inevitably comment as they passed in the hall. Her renown in the halls of Emerson as “the
mmmmmmm
girl” had its origins in a humming sound Norma Jeane used for suggestive emphasis. It was undoubtedly borrowed from her idol Jean Harlow, who frequently used the sensual
mmmmmmm
sound to good effect on Clark Gable in
Red Dust
and
China Seas
. What worked on Gable apparently also worked on Chuckie Moran. Chuckie, a popular ninth-grader, had an old jalopy he was turning into a hot rod, and he often took Norma Jeane to the school dances, or the drive-in. Sometimes they'd go to the Aragon Ballroom on the Ocean Park Pier, where Pickering's Pleasure Palace once stood, and dance to one of the popular big bands like Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, or Benny Goodman. Norma Jeane loved to do the Lindy, the Big Apple, and the Rumba, and she and Chuckie could out-jitterbug anybody on the dance floor.
We danced until we thought we'd drop, and then, when we headed outside for a Coca-Cola and a walk in the cool breeze, Chuckie let me know he wanted more than just a dance partner. Suddenly his hands were everywhere! But I thought, well, he isn't entitled to anything else. Besides I really wasn't so smart about sex, which was probably a good thing. Poor Chuckie, all he got was tired feetâ¦.
By the end of the 1930s the Depression was on the wane and the New Deal was in full power. If war clouds were looming over Europe, Hollywood was preoccupied with making movies and making money: 1939 was the year of
Gone With the Wind, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights
, and
The Wizard of Oz
. But while Hollywood was grinding out politically innocuous fantasies, Hitler's Gestapo was rounding up Jewish “undesirables,” Mussolini was gassing Ethiopians, Stalin was launching a series of deadly purges, and the Japanese were invading Manchuria. Fascism, communism, and militarism were vanquishing humanism, but according to Dorothy Parker the only “ism” Hollywood was interested in was plagiarism.
Many of those in the film business who had genuine concerns over the plight of the oppressed joined the Anti-Nazi League, which was organized
by Hollywood communists John Howard Lawson and Donald Ogden Stewart. The growing threat of fascism formed an alliance of Hollywood liberals and communists, and the Anti-Nazi League attracted a wide spectrum of supporters, including Eddie Cantor; actress Florence Eldridge; Ring Lardner, Jr.; Fredric March; and Ernst Lubitsch.
