J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn asked the patrolman to direct her to “whoever the man in charge is,” and despite her illegal and alarming arrival, the awestruck officer brought her inside the building and to a police captain.

“She was crying when she walked in the office,” explained the officer. “She said her mother was sick and that she’d been sent to a mental hospital before, so I knew where this was headed.”

Marilyn further explained that Gladys was easily frightened. She asked if the captain could simply call an ambulance to quietly approach Grace’s home and collect her mother without too much angst. “He felt bad for her, but there were procedures,” the officer recalled of the captain. “He had to send a [patrol] car first… try and talk to her first—and that was me.” The captain also explained to Marilyn that a specific officer was trained to respond to what he called “psych calls,” and then he directed the officer to contact that specialist. “I called Teddy [the ‘specialist’], who was supposed to be going to a kid’s ball game that day, and told him that Marilyn Monroe was sitting across from me,” said the officer. “He said he’d have his uniform on before he hung up the phone.”

While waiting for the responding officer to arrive at the precinct, Marilyn called Grace. Gladys was still in front of the house, she reported, and neighbors had been calling, asking if she was all right. Marilyn explained that there would be two patrol cars arriving, with no sirens. “She just wanted it quiet,” the officer recalls. “I told her she could see for herself that everything would be okay. We’ll follow Teddy and his partner, I told her, and she could see how good he was. He had a talent, that guy.”

In a matter of minutes, two police cars were rolling toward Grace Goddard’s home. In the first was Teddy and his partner, and in the second a police officer and a movie star. “When we turned onto the block we slowed the cars,” the officer explained, “Marilyn just kind of slid down in her seat.” The two vehicles parked one house away from Grace’s, from which vantage point they could see Gladys sitting on the front steps, arms crossed and appearing calm. The officer from the first car—Teddy—then approached her. The captain and Marilyn couldn’t hear what was being said, but it was quickly evident from Gladys’s expression and tone that she was now agitated at the sight of the uniformed patrolman. “I picked up the radio right away and called [for an ambulance], and I told Marilyn it was gonna be quick,” recalled the officer who had been sitting with her.

Marilyn sat quietly watching as the other officer successfully calmed Gladys.

“I got out of my car to give Teddy a quick signal that the ambulance was on the way,” the first policeman remembered, “and by the time I got back, the street was filling up.”

Indeed, neighborhood residents who had witnessed Gladys’s antics of the past hour from behind pulled curtains were now brave enough to get a closer look. As the first officer returned to his vehicle, he saw an odd sight: Marilyn had taken the jacket of an extra police uniform in the car and pulled it up over her head.

When he got back into the car, Marilyn asked urgently, “Did they see me?”

“No, they’re here to watch me,” he said, “they’re rubberneckers.” He then asked Marilyn if she’d like to get out of the vehicle and speak to her mother. She decided against it, saying that Gladys was clearly not herself at that moment, “and what good will it do?”

The two then waited as an ambulance drove up quietly. “Did you ask them not to use their sirens?” Marilyn asked. He said that he had. She then placed her hand on his knee. “You’re a kind man,” she told him. They watched as Gladys Baker—still very upset—was strapped onto a gurney and lifted into the ambulance. As the ambulance slowly passed their car, for just a moment they could hear the shouts of an insane woman coming from inside it. Marilyn winced and pulled the coat still on her head tightly down over her ears.

As the police officer and Marilyn followed the ambulance, not a word was said between them. Finally, Marilyn took the jacket off, studied it carefully, and softly brushed away some locks of hair left on its lining. “I asked her if she was okay,” recalled the policeman, “and she just kind of laughed for a moment.” They watched while the ambulance made a right turn, toward its destination.

As they drove back to the police precinct, the policeman and the actress continued to maintain their silence. Finally, Marilyn sighed deeply. “No one understands,” she said, her voice softening, “some people just can’t help who they turn out to be.”

Gladys’s New Home

O n February 9, 1953, Marilyn Monroe was scheduled to attend the Photoplay Awards, where she was being honored as “Fastest Rising Star.” A relative recalls that she didn’t want to go: “She didn’t think she could pull it off, be what was expected of her—become Marilyn Monroe—under the circumstances of what else was going on that day.”

Indeed, it was a difficult day.

That very same morning, Gladys was moved to Rock Haven Sanitarium at 2713 Honolulu Avenue in La Crescenta, California. It was a sprawling, Mexican-style complex on three and a half lush acres behind two gigantic iron gates with the metal words “Rock Haven” on top of the impressive entryway. Marvina Williams was eighteen at the time and had just been hired as an aide there. “It was a wonderful place,” she recalled. “Actually it was also called the Screen Actor’s Sanitarium, even though not a lot of movie stars stayed there. The only ones we all knew of were Frances Farmer and Florenz Ziegfeld. We got fan mail for them for years after they were gone. [Note: Actress Billie Burke, who had been married to Ziegfeld and was known for her role as Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz —was also a patient in the 1960s.] When I worked there, we had forty-two guests—we called them guests, by the way. We had forty-two beds, too, so it was full. Just before Gladys came in, someone had died—virtually the day before, actually. Gladys had been on the bottom of a very long waiting list, but when they found out she was Marilyn Monroe’s mother, they moved her to the top—not fair, but the truth.”

Though it was many years ago, Williams has distinct memories about Gladys because, as she put it, “There was something about her—you just felt so badly for her, I guess because you knew she was Marilyn Monroe’s mother. When I heard that she had been out of a sanitarium for seven years, I simply couldn’t believe it. I don’t think she was being properly medicated when she was on her own. On the day she showed up, I remember her saying that she had called her daughters—one, I think, was in Florida [Berniece], and she said the other was Marilyn Monroe. She said she had talked to Marilyn that day and that Marilyn said she was coming to get her. ‘I won’t be here long because Marilyn Monroe is coming for me,’ she kept saying. It seemed so tragic, the way she kept referring to her daughter as ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ I remember that there were some people who didn’t believe it was true that Marilyn was her daughter. Then someone came in with a newspaper article and we passed it around. There was a lot of astonishment about it.”

“Marilyn had, that same morning, agreed to pay for Gladys’s care in the new facility,” recalled accountant Wesley Miller. “However, she didn’t want to see her mother in a mental hospital any more than Gladys wanted to be there, but there was no alternative. It was this second stay—the one that happened in 1953—that really tore at Marilyn.

“She told me that she remembered visiting Gladys at the other institution when she was a young girl, and she never forgot how horrible it had been. She told me that there were patients in the hallways in beds and that the place smelled of urine. She said that everyone was dazed and on drugs, that she heard people screaming and that she just wanted to get her mother out of there. She said that she had nightmares about it all the time, that the memory of her mother in that place haunted her. She didn’t want her to end up back in a place like that, she said. Also, she said that the whole thing brought back memories of her own time in an orphanage, memories she said she had been working to forget.