J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“I think all of this business said much more about Grace, than it did Ida,” Bea Thomas posited. “Please. Ida had no thought of trying to get Norma Jeane into the movies in order to exploit her. How would she have gone about it? She had no connections. It was Grace who had all the connections. In my mind, this just spoke to Grace’s own very strange paranoia.

“It got extremely contentious between the two ladies, especially when Ida found out she was barred from visiting Norma Jeane. You can imagine her reaction when she got to the orphanage one day and was told in no uncertain terms by Mrs. Dewey that she could not visit the little girl. Let’s just say she did not go quietly into the night.”

Finally, on June 26, 1937, Norma Jeane left the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home to live once again with Grace and Doc Goddard. A month earlier, the young actress whom Grace had hoped to fashion Norma Jeane after—Jean Harlow—had died at just twenty-six. With typical flair for the dramatic, Marilyn Monroe recalled many years later that she had a “strange feeling I was being set free into a world in which Jean Harlow no longer lived.” *

Grace had hoped that when Norma Jeane moved back into her home, she would be able to convince Doc that she belonged there. However, it was not meant to be. The second time Norma Jeane was with the Goddards, there was enough domestic turmoil to convince Grace that, again, her marriage could be in jeopardy. It’s difficult to believe that one little girl could cause so much havoc, and in retrospect it sounds like Grace experienced problems with Doc that probably had nothing to do with Norma Jeane. He was drinking heavily at this time, and Marilyn would recall many years later that he made her feel extremely uncomfortable. “A couple of times he said, ‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’ I would sneak out of the room. He scared me.” However, six months after she got to the Goddards’, her bags were being packed and she was on the move once again. “But I really want to stay here,” she told Grace. “I know,” Grace responded. “But it’s time for you to go.” Indeed, it was always time for Norma Jeane to go, wasn’t it? Perhaps Grace should have just left her in the orphanage. However, every time she went to visit her, the girl was so clearly miserable.

In December 1937—around the time eleven-year-old Norma Jeane was enrolled in the Lankershim Elementary School—Grace asked the girl’s aunt, Olive Monroe, to take her into her home in North Hollywood. Olive Monroe had her own problems. Ten years earlier, her husband, Marion Otis—Gladys’s brother, the one who had been banished from the family by Della—had deserted her and her three children. Her mother, Ida Martin, a strict disciplinarian, had moved in with her and the two did not get along well. The broken family had little money and was barely scraping by. It’s a wonder that Olive agreed to take in Norma Jeane, and that Grace asked her to do so suggests that Grace must have been quite desperate to find a home for her little charge. Once she got there, Norma Jeane didn’t like living with the Monroes at all. “The other kids knew I was related to them,” she recalled, “but I felt on a desert island with natives or primitive people out of the hills of Appalachia. I was more alone and separated from anything than I had ever been. I was feeling the predicament of my life, and that frightened and depressed me so much I would get sick and couldn’t eat. When I did I would often throw up.” As an adult, Marilyn would later recall that she was last in line after her cousins for “everything from breakfast to play time to bath time and then bed.”

Norma Jeane Learns She Has a Half Sister

B y the winter of 1938, Gladys Baker was more desperate than ever as she continued her unhappy life, now as a patient in the Agnews State Hospital in San Jose, California. In fact, she almost managed to escape. Precipitating her attempt was a series of telephone calls from Edward Mortenson, her former husband and the man she’d listed on Norma Jeane’s birth certificate as the child’s father. Gladys actually thought Mortenson was dead by this time, but he was alive and well and telling her he was interested in resuming their relationship. How could that occur, though, if she was locked up? Gladys—who would prove with the passing of the years to have the greatest determination when it came to trying to gain her freedom—somehow got her hands on a nurse’s uniform, put it on, and then slipped out of the sanitarium. It was hours before she was found, walking down the street with no apparent destination. She later explained that Mortenson had promised to meet her at a specific location if she managed to escape, but that he didn’t show up. She was returned to the facility with no trouble, though she was heartbroken. Later that same week, when Grace Goddard arrived for a visit, Gladys begged her to “get me out of here.” However, Grace knew better. Gladys was obviously mentally incompetent and was exactly where she needed to be at that time in her life. Grace had no choice but to turn down her friend’s pleas. However, Gladys then decided to try another route. She wrote to her long-lost daughter, Berniece. Of course, she didn’t know exactly how to locate her, so she sent the letter to the address of one of her ex-husband’s relatives in Flat Lick, Kentucky. Somehow, the correspondence ended up in Jasper’s hands. He wasn’t sure how to proceed, but after discussing the matter with his wife he reluctantly decided to give it to Berniece. By this time, Berniece was nineteen. She’d just been married, was living in Pineville, and was pregnant with her first child—Gladys’s grandchild.

Berniece was stunned to receive a letter from her mother, a woman she had long ago decided was probably dead. Though she didn’t know much about Gladys, what she did know was not favorable. For years, her stepmother, Maggie, had criticized Gladys for leaving her children behind, as if Gladys had had a choice in the matter. Berniece’s daughter, Mona Rae Miracle, says that anything her mother learned about Gladys had to be “squeezed like water from a stone from Jasper and Maggie.” Berniece, however, was still always curious about her mother and kept a small framed photograph of her on her dresser. Often she would remark to Jasper about Gladys’s beauty. Jasper agreed that, indeed, Gladys was a gorgeous woman, but, he said, she was also an irresponsible woman. It seemed clear to Berniece that she would never have much of a relationship with her mother, and so after many years of wondering, she had made up her mind that Gladys was dead. Then, out of the blue, she received a letter from her. Most of Gladys’s missive was a long rant begging her daughter to help her get out of the mental hospital. She asked Berniece to get in touch with an aunt of Gladys’s, Dora, in Oregon and ask her to also try to get a release for her. Then she gave Berniece some stunning news. She told her that she had a twelve-year-old half sister named Norma Jeane. Gladys also sent Norma Jeane’s and Grace Goddard’s addresses to Berniece and suggested that she contact both of them.

Berniece was surprised: She was amazed that her mother was alive, stunned to learn that Gladys was in a mental hospital, and shocked to learn that she had a half sister. There was no question about it: She wanted a relationship with her. She decided to first write to Grace. A week later, she received a return letter from Grace, who was elated to hear from her. She suggested that Berniece write to Norma Jeane. Then Grace told Norma Jeane that she had a half sister. “Grace decided that it might do Norma Jeane some good to know that she wasn’t really alone in the world,” recalled a relative of Grace’s, “that she had a family member who wanted to know her. It all seemed to come together at the same time, Gladys’s letter to Berniece, Grace’s decision that it was the right thing to do to have Berniece contact Norma Jeane, and then telling Norma Jeane about Berniece.”