Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (3 page)

Monroe's appearance didn't last long, but it left an indelible mark on American culture. It was perceived by some as a public airing of Monroe's alleged sexual relationship with JFK. One newspaper columnist wrote that the actress's performance was like “making love to the President in direct view of 40 million Americans.” (The first lady had declined to attend.) The event stoked Monroe's two provocative images as sex symbol and ditzy blonde. The first she seemed to encourage; the second she came to hate. Kennedy thanked the actress, saying, “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday' sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” The crowd roared.

Lawford's use of the word “late” was meant to be a ribbing of Monroe's notorious and exasperating tardiness in her personal and professional life. In retrospect, it haunts like the grim reaper. Three months after her tribute to the president, she would indeed be the late Marilyn Monroe. “Our angel, the sweet angel of sex,” as Norman Mailer famously referred to her, would be dead at the age of 36.

M
ARILYN
M
ONROE IS AND ALWAYS
has been everywhere. Instantly recognizable, ever tantalizing. Just weeks after she was interred in a crypt at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, Andy Warhol debuted his famous silk screen diptych of Monroe's face—50 images, half in color, half in black-and-white. Performers from Madonna to Scarlett Johansson have transformed themselves into Marilyn Monroe look-alikes, with her seductive smile and platinum hair. In 2015, the cosmetic company Max Factor announced a new ad campaign featuring the actress as their “global glamour ambassador.” No matter that she's long gone—her allure is eternal.

Underneath it all, however, Marilyn Monroe was a profoundly troubled and complicated woman who yearned for love and stability. Dozens of biographers have told her story, complete with sordid details that may or may not be true. All varieties of literary heavyweights have weighed in, including Mailer, Diana Trilling, Joyce Carol Oates, and Gloria Steinem. But nobody has completely figured her out. Monroe was a paragon of contradiction. She loved children and desperately wanted to be a mother, but conflicting accounts say she may have had several abortions. She was the embodiment of life, beauty, and sensuality, and yet self-destructive and suicidal. Great disparities exist in how she perceived herself and how she has been viewed by others. Was she a manipulator who abused her privileges
of stardom? Or was she used by a greedy Hollywood industry that exploited her for money? A good actress, or a woman hired just for her looks? Flighty or shrewd? A willing victim of sexual stereotyping, or a feminist before her time? Depends on whom you ask.

What is clear is that Monroe suffered severe mental distress. Her symptoms included a feeling of emptiness, a split or confused identity, extreme emotional volatility, unstable relationships, and an impulsivity that drove her to drug addiction and suicide—all textbook characteristics of a condition called borderline personality disorder. “Borderline,” in this context, does not mean “marginal” or “almost.” The word dates back to the Freudian era, when a New York psychoanalyst used it to refer to patients whose symptoms lay on the border between two camps of psychological impairment: neurosis (depression and anxiety) and psychosis (schizophrenia and delusional disorder). Borderline patients were found to be very despondent at times, a key symptom of depression. Like people with schizophrenia, they often had unrealistic ideas and tended to be paranoid. And they exhibited features of antisocial personality, with their impulsive behavior and their unwillingness to cooperate. “They seemed to be a little bit this and a little bit that, and it wasn't clear that there was any center,” says Dr. John Gunderson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a pioneer in the field. “They didn't fit into any other diagnostic category.”

To this day, borderline personality disorder is poorly understood by the public and even by mental health professionals, who often confuse it with depression and bipolar disorder. For patients, feelings of frustration, desolation, anger, and emptiness become allconsuming as they search, often in vain, for relief. Marilyn Monroe spent her short life seeking a cure. She never had the chance to find it.

F
ROM DAY ONE OF
M
ARILYN
M
ONROE
'
S LIFE
, nothing was as it seemed. Her mother, whose given name was Gladys Pearl Monroe, gave birth to her daughter on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles County Hospital. She named the baby Norma Jeane, though the “e” at the end would be inconsistent throughout her life. Gladys had a son and a daughter with her first husband, John Newton Baker, a man she had married when she was just 15. At the hospital, Gladys claimed that the children were dead, even though they were living with their father in Kentucky. She listed her second husband, from whom she was apparently separated, as the baby's father, but misspelled his name as Edward Mortenson instead of Edward Mortensen. Later, she alleged that Stanley Gifford, a man she worked with as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood, was the baby's real father. She subsequently changed her daughter's name from Norma Jeane Mortenson to Norma Jeane Baker, which would later be replaced by Marilyn Monroe when the actress began her career in Hollywood. It was a labyrinth of confusion that marked the beginning of Monroe's lifelong quest to figure out who she was—and who, if anybody, she belonged to.

People with borderline personality disorder often experience significant traumas early in life—separation from a parent, death of a parent, or neglect from caregivers. Gladys was a troubled mother, unable to provide for her newborn. She had little money and suffered from severe mood swings and possibly postpartum depression. When Norma Jeane was just a few weeks old, her mother paid a strict churchgoing couple five dollars a week to become foster parents, a contract that would last for about seven years.

Gladys visited on weekends, but she remained an enigma to her daughter. The actress later recalled that when she called her foster mother “Mama,” the woman told her, “I'm not your mother, the
one who comes here with the red hair, she's your mother.” But the red-haired mother didn't act like one. She didn't kiss her child or hold her in her arms. Even when Norma Jeane went to her mother's home, she felt uncomfortable and out of place. “I used to be frightened when I visited her and spent most of my time in the closet of her bedroom hiding among her clothes,” Monroe recalled in her autobiography,
My Story
. “She seldom spoke to me except to say, ‘Don't make so much noise, Norma.' ” Later, Monroe would say, “I was a mistake. My mother didn't want to have me.”

Gladys was clearly incapable of providing the comfort, love, and stability her daughter needed. Young Norma Jeane coped by crafting an imaginary relationship with the man she believed to be her father. At her mother's house, she saw a photograph of a handsome man with a thin mustache wearing a slouch hat. Her mother said it was her father; Norma Jeane thought he looked like Clark Gable. Monroe would never know her father's true identity, but nothing could stop her from envisioning him in her life. She imagined him waiting for her after school and kissing her forehead after she had her tonsils out. “The night I met his picture I dreamed of it when I fell asleep,” she recalled. “And I dreamed of it a thousand times afterward. That was my first happy time, finding my father's picture.”

Grace McKee, a fellow Hollywood film-cutter and friend of Gladys's, would become something of a surrogate mother to Norma Jeane. With McKee's help, Gladys took her daughter back from foster care when she was about seven years old, and they moved into a house near the Hollywood Bowl with a British couple, who helped pay the rent. For a while, there was some semblance of a normal life, with McKee providing the affection Norma Jeane so desperately needed. She remembered Aunt Grace, as she called her, saying, “Don't worry, Norma Jeane. You're going
to be a beautiful girl when you grow up. I can feel it in my bones,” while the two stood in line for bread at Holmes Bakery in Los Angeles. “Her words made me so happy that the stale bread tasted like cream puffs.”

But this interlude was short-lived. One morning during breakfast, when Norma Jeane was about eight, a clamor erupted from the stairway near the kitchen. “It was the most frightening noise I'd ever heard. Bangs and thuds kept on as if they would never stop,” Monroe later recalled. The bangs and thuds turned out to be her mother having a nervous breakdown, alternating between screams and laughter. She was whisked off to the Norwalk State Hospital, where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The place held family history; Gladys's mother had died there years earlier after being diagnosed with what is now known as bipolar disorder.

Researchers have found that disrupted family life and sexual abuse may be linked to the development of borderline personality disorder. Not long after Gladys's institutionalization, McKee took Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society, a residential shelter where she lived for a number of months before rotating through several more foster homes. Monroe later recalled wearing tattered clothes and being treated like Cinderella, forced to bathe in a dirty tub full of water. And she said she was sexually abused, possibly by a boarder in one of her foster homes.

Biographers question many of the recollections Monroe shared in interviews and in her autobiography, which was written in collaboration with the Academy Award–winning playwright Ben Hecht and published in 1974, 12 years after her death. This does not surprise experts, who say patients often dramatize their childhood experiences. “While many people who develop the disorder have had dysfunctional and neglectful families, it's also true that adult borderline patients sometimes color their backgrounds in
that direction,” says Gunderson. “In order to understand the early childhood of people with borderline personality disorder, you have to understand that sometimes, these were difficult kids.”

Whatever the truth, what matters is the end result. For Monroe, it was deep loneliness and feelings of abandonment. “As I grew older, I knew I was different from other children because there were no kisses or promises in my life. I often felt lonely and wanted to die,” she wrote. This profound emptiness is classic in borderline patients, who frequently report fearing abandonment, feeling hollow, and being uncertain of who they are. When asked, “How would you describe yourself?” they aren't sure how to respond, says Andrada Neacsiu, a clinical psychologist specializing in borderline personality disorder at Duke University Medical Center. When the question is, “Do you feel empty?” they don't hesitate. Their response: “Of course I do.”

Monroe seems to have dealt with this void by dreaming about who she could become. Eager to attract the attention she had been deprived of as a child, she envisioned being “so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed.” Puberty made it happen. One day, 13-year-old Norma Jeane ambled across a beach in her bathing suit, and the boys started whooping. That moment, she later recalled, “I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”

One of the hallmark features of borderline personality disorder is what psychiatrists call “identity disturbance.” The
DSM
defines this as a “markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.” Monroe struggled with this duality throughout her life: the child, Norma Jeane; the woman, Marilyn Monroe. She often
felt the presence of her younger self peering out from the grown woman. In a poignant and telling sentence in her autobiography, she revealed that “this sad, bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, ‘I never lived, I was never loved,' and often I get confused and think it's I who am saying it.”