Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming Page B

Twentieth Century–Fox with information that Marilyn’s mother, a fifty-year-old former mental patient, was very much alive. In other words, it appeared that Marilyn, the self-styled courageous little orphan girl, had misled the press, and this time she was not going to be able to handle the matter as blithely as she had the question of the nude calendar. In some quarters, Marilyn was being accused of having lied to her fans. Would the public turn on her? Marilyn, everwatchful for threats to her dream, had reason to fear that the bad publicity would jeopardize her role in
Niagara.
    In addition to her concerns over the film, Marilyn worried that reporters might actually seek out her mentally ill mother, who was then living with Grace and Doc in Van Nuys. It had been Grace who advised Marilyn to claim that her parents were dead. Better to lie, she counseled, than to allow people to find out about Gladys.
    In the beginning, Norma Jeane hadn’t even known that Gladys was her mother. For her first seven years, she had lived in a six-room house in Hawthorne with a religious couple named Wayne and Ida Bolender, who took in foster children to augment Wayne’s salary as a mailman. Every so often a small, strange, silent woman visited Norma Jeane in the living room, which was decorated with a red print rug, a ramshackle piano, a coffee table piled with religious books, a pair of ceramic cry-baby dolls, and an old rocking chair. “The woman with the red hair,” as Norma Jeane called her, was Gladys Baker. Norma Jeane feared and dreaded her visits, which recalled her earliest, inexplicable memory—Gladys’s attempt to smother her in her crib.
    Once, when Ida Bolender was giving Norma Jeane a bath, the three-year-old called her “mommy.”
    “I’m not your mommy,” Ida corrected her. “Call me Aunt.”
    “But he’s my daddy!” said Norma Jeane, pointing to Wayne.
    “No, we’re not your parents,” said Ida. “The one who comes here with the red hair, she’s your mother.”
    Gladys was born in Mexico on May 27, 1902. Her mother, Della May Monroe, was later diagnosed as suffering from manic-depressive psychosis. Her father, Otis Elmer Monroe, an American house-painter who had crossed the border in search of employment, had syphilis. Soon after Gladys’s birth, the Monroes returned to California, where Della gave birth to a son, Marion, in 1905. Syphilis caused Otis’s mental health to deteriorate, and in 1908 he entered Southern California State Hospital in Patton. Suffering from dementia in the final stages of syphilis, he died on July 22, 1909.
    Della, lamenting that Gladys and Marion would no doubt wind up in a mental institution like their father, remarried. Her second husband, Lyle Graves, had a drinking problem and a violent temper. In one outburst, he hurled Gladys’s pet kitten against a brick wall. The cat died andDella fled with her children. She sent Marion to live with relatives and found a one-room apartment in Venice. The landlord, thin-lipped, jug-eared Jap Baker, hired her to manage the property while he operated a game concession at the beach. Before long Della had a new boyfriend, Charles Grainger. She wanted to move in with him, but he objected to her daughter’s presence.
    By this time, Gladys, fine-boned and barely five feet tall, had full high breasts, a long narrow tapered back, and rounded hips. Her reddish hair fell back in waves from her prominent widow’s peak. At fourteen, Gladys became pregnant by her mother’s twenty-six-year-old employer. Instead of being upset, Della instantly saw a way to realize her dream of moving in with Charles Grainger. Ten days before Gladys’s fifteenth birthday, Della, giving the child’s age as eighteen, signed her daughter’s application for a marriage license.
    The marriage was calamitous from the first. Gladys was unprepared for the responsibilities of motherhood, and Jap Baker proved to be a violent drinker like her stepfather. Gladys’s first child