J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane looked at her, a startled expression lingering on her face. She didn’t know how to respond. Truly, that was the last thing she’d expected, or even wanted. She was getting ready to leave an old life—her marriage—behind, and, hopefully, begin a new one—her career. Gladys represented a huge responsibility. No doubt, if the two had enjoyed a warm relationship over the years, she would have been much more inclined to take on such a burden. However, this woman before her was one she didn’t know at all, and was also unstable and unpredictable. Yet, still, she was her mother. Quick tears came to Norma Jeane’s eyes. She let go of Gladys’s hands and stood up. “We have to go now, Mother,” she said, gathering her coat while shooting Jim a desperate look. “I’m going to leave you Aunt Ana’s address and phone number, so you know where I am. Call me anytime.” Then, with tears by now streaming down her face, she bent down and kissed Gladys on the forehead. Gladys had no reaction. Norma Jeane and Jim turned and walked away.

The days driving back to Los Angeles were spent quietly, Norma Jeane deep in thought and terribly unhappy. The trip certainly did not go as Jim had planned. He didn’t have the chance to really talk to Norma Jeane about his concerns relating to their marriage and her career. However, when they got back to Aunt Ana’s, it all came out. “I’ve had enough of this modeling business,” he told Norma Jeane, putting his foot down. “I’m not going to put up with it another moment. Here’s what’s going to happen. When I get back here in April on my next leave, I want you back in our own house. And I want you to have made up your mind that you’re finished with this silliness, and then we’re going to have children. Do you understand, Norma Jeane?” She nodded, but didn’t say a word. She would later recall her heart pounding so much that evening, she couldn’t sleep. A photographer had given her a bottle of prescription sleeping pills in case she was unable to get a good night’s sleep before a session, but she was afraid to take them.

Jim Gets a Surprise: Gladys

T he first four months of 1946 were busy. Norma Jeane, now almost twenty, had never worked so hard. All of the photographers who took her picture were amazed at how well they came out, and it was clear that she was no longer a novice. She’d known what she wanted in terms of results from the very beginning. Now she was getting those results. She was working nonstop—so much so that one friend, Jacquelyn Cooper, wondered if perhaps she was sleeping with the photographers. “I said she could tell me because I won’t breathe a word of it if you’re having affairs with these fellows,” she recalled. “She said, ‘Absolutely not!’ And what did I think she was? Very bothered, like that, like I’d hurt her feelings even wondering if she was sleeping with these fellows. In fact, she was so bothered she didn’t pay attention to me for days.”

“Men who tried to buy me with money made me sick,” Marilyn recalled years later. “There were plenty of them. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up.”

She was working a great deal. But she confided in one photographer that she would sometimes, as she put it, “get down in the dumps.” She said that she would have “dark moods that came from nowhere.” In those times, she said, it was as if she “didn’t have the answers to anything.” These particular comments from her are interesting because they call to mind what her grandmother, Della, and mother, Gladys, used to call “the doldrums.” But perhaps the following terribly prophetic statement says it best about Marilyn’s dark mood swings during this time in her life: “Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.”

During this time, while Jim was away and she was working with a series of different photographers, something else happened that would change things for Norma Jeane and, in a lot of ways, for future generations of admirers. It occurred in February 1946. At the suggestion of her agent, Emmeline Snively, Norma Jeane had her hair first straightened and then stripped of its chestnut brown color and changed to a shade of golden blonde. It was all in preparation for a shampoo print advertisement. Now, more than ever, Norma Jeane Baker Mortensen Dougherty was starting to look very much like Jean Harlow. But more important, she began to look like another great screen star, one of the greatest, in fact, of all time. She began to look like Marilyn Monroe. The transformation was almost complete. Norma Jeane Mortensen was almost a woman of the past, certainly as far as her husband was concerned.

In April, Jim returned from duty—as he had promised. However, Norma Jeane did not meet him at San Pedro Bay—as she had promised. Upset, he jumped into a taxi and went straight to the small house that the couple shared in Van Nuys. After paying the cabbie, he walked toward the home and noticed the drapes open. He peeked in. All of the furniture seemed to be in place. He caught a glimpse of Norma Jeane walking by. Apparently, she had done what he had demanded. She was there, at least. Now he might have a chance to talk some sense into her, and perhaps save his marriage. He must have been relieved. However, any sense of relief was to be short-lived. Jim Dougherty put his key into the lock and opened the door. And there she stood.

Not Norma Jeane.

Gladys.

How Gladys Lost Her Children

S he’s been through so much in her life,” Norma Jeane told Jim. “I can’t put her out on the street.”

“But she’s crazy,” Jim said in protest.

“If you’d been through what she’s been through, maybe you’d be crazy, too.”

Norma Jeane had a great deal of empathy for her mother because she was privy to a story only those closest to the family knew. It was the story of how Gladys’s children—Norma Jeane’s half brother and sister—were kidnapped.

Back in 1922, Gladys Baker—who was twenty-two, just two years older than Norma Jeane was in 1946—had already married and divorced Jasper, her first husband. She now had custody of their children, Berniece and little Jackie. However, Jasper was concerned about his ex-wife’s behavior, claiming that she was unfit due to her overactive social life and her heavy drinking. Despite his concerns, Jasper left Los Angeles and headed for his native Kentucky, vowing to return to check in on his children.

Months later, he arrived unexpectedly at his mother-in-law Della’s home and found the children alone with her. He easily tracked Gladys down at a speakeasy a few blocks away. Gladys didn’t see him, though, when he arrived at and then left the smoke-filled “diner.” A few minutes later, one of the other revelers mentioned to Gladys that he had just seen her ex-husband. It was impossible, Gladys said, because Jasper wasn’t even in town. “But I could’ve sworn I just saw him,” her friend said. The moment hung awkwardly. Gladys shrugged and returned to her tipsy afternoon with the fellows. To hear her later recall the incident to relatives, she had convinced herself, at least for a short time, that her friend was mistaken. Yet, as she sipped on her drink, she grew concerned that maybe Jasper had been skulking around. As she sat thinking, her mind became flooded with terrible memories of their troubled relationship. He had told her on more occasions than she could count that she wasn’t fit to be a mother. It didn’t take long before Gladys’s worry built to the point where she simply had to leave the diner and return home to make sure her children were safe.