J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Jim’s mother, Ethel, who had always been an ally for Norma Jeane, also disapproved of her modeling. Not only did she keep her son up to date on Norma Jeane’s activities (and in a way that probably made them seem like trouble in the making), but she also made it clear to her daughter-in-law that what she was doing was unseemly and could create problems in her marriage. Norma Jeane responded by moving out of the Dougherty house and back into the lower half of her aunt Ana Lower’s duplex. Now more than ever, she was proving herself to be the strong, self-reliant girl Ida Bolender had tried to mold. She knew what she had to do, and she was going to do it. When Jim returned on leave in the spring of 1945, he found that he was no longer the center of Norma Jeane’s world. She was busy. She didn’t need him. She still loved him—maybe—but she no longer felt that she needed him to survive. The dynamic had changed between them, and he didn’t like it at all.

Gladys Is Released

G ladys Baker had tried everything she could to be released from Agnews State Hospital in San Jose. Finally, in August of 1945, doctors decided that she could be discharged. The condition was that she spend a year with her aunt Dora Graham in Oregon. Norma Jeane didn’t know what to make of her mother’s release. She knew that Gladys still wasn’t well. Her few visits with her—one at the hospital and one over lunch with Aunt Ana—had been not at all good. Berniece was much more excited about Gladys’s return to the outside world. She equated it with the good news that the war had ended that same month and called Gladys’s release her “personal miracle.” Of course, Berniece didn’t know Gladys at all. She had romanticized about her over the years and hoped to have a relationship with her. Norma Jeane had actually gone through the troubling experience that was Gladys Baker, so she was more realistic.

Soon after Gladys was released, she became completely immersed in Christian Science, which had been recommended to her by Aunt Ana, a practitioner of the faith. Christian Scientists believe in the power of prayer as the cure for emotional and physical ailments. The sect is controversial and has been so ever since it was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1908. Gladys could not stop reading the many books given her by Ana about the faith. It seemed to be the only thing in which she was truly interested.

Gladys’s fascination with the Christian Science doctrine made sense. After all, she had known for years that no matter what people said or did, they couldn’t fix her—doctors couldn’t, friends couldn’t, even her own mother couldn’t. Perhaps she thought that by poring over Christian Science books, she might discover a certain secret or fact and then finally she would be happy.

Also at this time, Gladys began wearing a white uniform, white stockings, and white shoes every day as if she were a nurse. She never explained why, and her family could never figure it out. Perhaps she had idealized the nurses she’d known at the sanitarium and thought they led good lives. After all, they were free to leave at the end of the day and be with their loved ones while she and the rest of the patients had to remain locked up. Or maybe she just viewed the nurses as powerful and in command—as she never had been in her own life. As soon as she was out, she began taking temporary jobs in convalescent homes. Norma Jeane found it disconcerting that her mother was tending to people in any kind of medical setting. Others, like Dora, actually hoped Gladys would become a practical nurse, now that she had finally gotten the freedom she so longed for.

Gladys’s Plea to Norma Jeane

I n December 1945, Jim Dougherty returned from his tour of duty for the Christmas holidays. He had been gone for eighteen months. In that time, things between him and Norma Jeane had definitely changed, and he knew it as soon as she greeted him at the train station. “She was an hour late,” he recalled. “She told me she had a modeling job, and that was her excuse, which didn’t exactly make me happy. She embraced me and kissed me, but it was a little cool. I had two weeks off before resuming shipboard duties along the California coast, but I don’t think we had more than three or four nights together during that time. She was busy modeling, earning good money. It was my first inkling of her ambition.”

Norma Jeane wasn’t totally finished with her marriage. She still hoped that she would wake up one day to find that Jim had had a sudden change of heart. “Yes, yes, yes,” he would tell her in her fantasy. “I get it now. I understand. And yes, I approve of your career!” Perhaps she hoped for just such a reaction when she showed him her recent photos taken by a rather famous photographer named André de Dienes. She hoped he would like them—she knew they were very good—and perhaps they might convince him that she had found her calling. She also displayed some of the many magazine covers on which she had appeared of late. She was keeping a scrapbook, which she also proudly displayed, thumbing through the pages and explaining where each photo was taken and for what purpose. By this time, she had even been doing pinup modeling in bathing suits—which she must have known wouldn’t make him very happy. The cumulative effect of all of this accomplishment was impressive even to her, as perhaps it would have been to most people, considering how many covers she had racked up in such a short time—how could her husband not be amazed at her achievements? How could he not want her to continue? How could he not want her… to be happy?

“So far as I was concerned, she was turning into another human being,” he later recalled. “She showed me the pictures, her new dresses and shoes—as if I cared about such things. She was proud of her new popularity at Blue Book [the modeling agency with which she had signed] and she expected me to be, too.” Jim’s lackluster reaction did not bode well for him or his marriage. Norma Jeane was disappointed and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t at least try to act as if he were happy for her.

Jim felt that he needed time alone with his wife so that he could talk to her and try to resolve some of their issues—in other words, get her to acquiesce to his desire that she quit her career. He decided that the two of them should drive to Oregon and visit Gladys at her Aunt Dora’s home. Norma Jeane agreed, though reluctantly. She knew she had to see her mother, but she also knew that every time she had done so in the past she had regretted it. She also probably had ambivalent feelings about being alone in a car with her husband for so many days, especially since they were not getting along.

The visit did not go well, according to Jim. “My first encounter with Gladys was a little of a shock,” he later recalled. “She didn’t seem to connect with me at all. Her mind was out in left field somewhere.” Jim also was surprised at how much Gladys and Norma Jeane resembled each other. “You could almost see what Norma Jeane was going to look like when she got to be that age. Gladys was a pretty woman. With proper makeup and her hair done, she would have been a gorgeous person.”

Gladys sat upright in a wicker chair and was completely unresponsive when he and Norma Jeane walked into the room. She was wearing a white nylon dress and blouse and white stockings and shoes—her “nurse’s uniform.” Norma Jeane knelt at her mother’s feet and held her delicate hands, gazing into her vacant eyes, trying to divine what it was she was thinking, how she felt about seeing her.

“How are you, Mother? Are you happy to finally be out?” she asked her, somewhat tentatively.

Gladys smiled absently.

Still on her knees in front of her mother, Norma Jeane tried to fill the void by talking about her recent trip to see Berniece. “She can’t wait to come and see you, Mother,” she told Gladys. However, it didn’t matter what anecdote Norma Jeane relayed, nothing seemed to interest her mother. “Mother, please,” Norma Jeane said, a searching expression on her face. Gladys answered her plea with total silence. But then, suddenly, Gladys tightened her grip on Norma Jeane’s hands, leaned in, and whispered in her ear that she wanted to come and live with her.