J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Again, Nancy Jeffrey disagrees with that piece of history. “The truth is that we were only not allowed to go to the movies on Sundays. However, we really didn’t go to movies that much anyway. We were little kids. How many movies were we going to see between the ages of one and seven? I just don’t think Mother would have frightened Norma Jeane like that. She may have said something like, ‘We are churchgoers not moviegoers.’ That sounds like her. But the rest of it, burning with bad people? That doesn’t sound like Mother to me.”

Whether or not she went to the movies—and of course she wasn’t going without an adult anyway—it sometimes seemed that there wasn’t much Norma Jeane could ever do to please Ida. No matter how hard she tried, she could never measure up to the Bolender matriarch’s standards of cleanliness or behavior. “Poor Norma Jeane always seemed to be in some kind of trouble,” said Mary Thomas-Strong. “She loved to play in dirt, like a lot of kids. Ida would be unhappy about that. Ida would dress her in pretty clothes and Norma Jeane would go and play and come back thirty minutes later, dirty again. It drove Ida crazy. She wanted Norma Jeane to toe the line. She was strict, at times.”

Yes, Ida Bolender could be difficult—there seems to be no argument there from any quarter. She was tough and resilient, an indomitable woman. “But I believe to this day that she was one of the major stabilizing influences in Norma Jeane’s young life, and truly the first powerful woman she’d been exposed to,” says her foster daughter Nancy Jeffrey. Maybe Ida sensed there might be a shortage of stable and decisive adults in Norma Jeane’s world, and she was determined to be one of them—no matter what her foster daughter or anyone else thought of her. “I was hard on her for her own good,” she once explained to Jeffrey. Then, with great positiveness, she added, “But I know I raised her the right way. I know it in my heart.”

Many of Ida Bolender’s best character traits were impressed upon Norma Jeane Mortensen during her seven years at the Bolender home. Because she was born to a mother who was in emotional disarray, perhaps it served the young girl well to be molded by a foster mother who was firm and controlled. Indeed, it was Ida’s strength and determination that Norma Jeane would one day need to draw upon in order to make it in show business. However, Gladys’s traits of extreme vulnerability and emotional instability were also an undeniable part of Norma Jeane’s biology. For instance, she would be well equipped to handle rejection in her professional life, just as Ida would have in her place. However, to handle it in her personal life would prove to be very difficult—just as it would have been for Gladys.

“All she ever wanted for Norma Jeane was for her to be strong, like she was,” said Nancy Jeffrey of her foster mother. “She always knew that [Norma Jeane] would have a very difficult life. She could see that her family background was not going to be helpful to her and, in fact, could possibly be the downfall of her. So she wasn’t going to coddle her. She would say, ‘The girl will face stronger foes than me, I can tell you that much. She has to be able to stand on her own. For all I know, she may hate me now, but she will be strong. She will have a good life.’ ”

A Frightening Encounter with Gladys

B y the fall of 1929, with Della Monroe dead for two years, Gladys had become accustomed to not having anyone in her life upon whom she could totally depend. She hadn’t been able to make any of her romantic relationships last, and her children had either been taken from her or given away by her. Her job at Consolidated Studios offered her little opportunity to build friendships. In fact, as a film cutter, her role was menial. She was told where and how to cut and splice together pieces of film so they could be viewed as a whole. The irony of that vocation most likely never occurred to Gladys, but it could be considered an interesting metaphor representing the major challenge of her mental state: putting the pieces of her life together. It’s true, she had made a good friend in Grace McKee. However, since Della’s death, Grace hadn’t been able to reach Gladys. It was as if something in Gladys had been switched off and she simply didn’t care that much about connecting with other people. Perhaps it was because Gladys was simply not able to quiet the increasingly loud voices in her head. After all, only her mother had possessed the key to settling her back into a more reasonable thought process. On her own, she lacked the ability to view her circumstances from a distance. Without that perspective, each moment became about exactly what was happening right then and there. Goals were impossible to set, consequences impossible to calculate. She was in a mental tailspin, and everyone in her life knew it but didn’t know what to do about it.

While her moment-to-moment experiences may have been torturous, Gladys was still able to complete tasks. For instance, she could show up for work on time, go grocery shopping, and remember to water the plants. Therefore, if someone’s life could be judged solely by her daily agenda, Gladys Baker would have appeared quite unspectacular. Yet it was how she experienced and reacted to the string of events that made her different.

Even toward the end of Della’s life, she had been a somewhat stabilizing factor for her daughter. In part, it may have been because Gladys was responsible for managing her mother’s health and state of mind. This duty helped keep her focus off her own paranoid delusions. That paranoia, however, was now building—and during Gladys’s time alone she began to find it more difficult to remain rational. Naturally, her first plan of action was to find a man, which she would do often at one of the nearby speak easies. Of course, these unions rarely lasted more than an evening or two. Also, it was getting harder for her to lure the opposite sex, not so much because of her reputation as a woman of loose morals, but because something just seemed a little “off” about her. Through it all, though, Gladys felt she had a reasonable expectation of having at least one person with her all the time: Norma Jeane. She was her daughter, after all. When she gave her to Ida, it was in the hope that she would one day be capable of caring for the baby herself.

One afternoon, in the middle of what must have been a full-force episode of paranoia, Gladys pounded on the front door of the Bolender home. The daughters of a friend of Ida’s from church—both interviewed for this book—explained for the first time the exchange that occurred, as described to them by their mother:

“Where’s Norma Jeane?” Gladys demanded, pushing past Ida.

“What is it, Gladys?” Ida replied, regarding her carefully. “What’s happened?”

Gladys said that Norma Jeane could no longer stay at the Bo-lenders’. She had come to take her, she insisted, as her eyes darted about the small home. It was impossible to reason with her. Ida told her that she wasn’t making any sense and suggested that she sit down and talk to her. However, Gladys was adamant. With her eyes flashing, she cried out again that Norma Jeane was her daughter and that she was taking her home. Ida grabbed Gladys’s arm, delaying her momentarily. “This is her home,” she told her. “We just haven’t made it official yet… but once we get the adoption papers together…” Gladys then insisted that there would never be an adoption. Norma Jeane was hers, she said, not Ida’s. With that, she yanked herself free and ran to the backyard, where the three-year-old was playing with a dog that had followed Wayne home one day and whom Norma Jeane had named Tippy. Ida followed Gladys into the backyard, begging her to come to her senses. However, Gladys insisted that she was only taking what was rightfully hers. Then she scooped up a now crying Norma Jeane and said, “You’re coming with Mommy, sweetheart.”