The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (3 page)

The actress’s mother had become besotted with the stout, dark-haired Gifford during his stint in charge of the day shift at Consolidated Film Industries in early 1925. Gifford’s employment with the motion picture plant Thomas H. Ince Studios in Culver City had recently been terminated and his wife, Lillian Priester, was suing him for divorce. Her claims against him (he associated himself with low-life women, was addicted to narcotic drugs and had beaten her on numerous occasions) made it abundantly clear what kind of man he was. In an attempt to rebuild his life and earn some useful dollars, Gifford took a post at Consolidated as a
hypo-shooter and developer and, within months, had worked his way up to the position of superintendent of the night crew. By the spring, the pair were having an affair and on Wednesday 6 May, his divorce became final. Twenty days later, on Tuesday 26 May, Gladys walked out on her husband, Mortensen. Her intention was clear to everyone; she had set her sights on becoming the next Mrs Gifford. However, he saw Gladys as just another fling and, by Christmas Eve 1925, had tired of it and promptly fled. But there was a catch: Gladys was now three months pregnant. Norma Jeane would become that child.

The idea of placing Norma Jeane with neighbours Albert and Ida Bolender on Sunday 13 June 1926, just 12 days after the baby’s birth, came from Gladys’s mother, Della. She had asked the couple, who lived across the road at 215 Rhode Island Avenue in Inglewood, Los Angeles County, to watch over her granddaughter while she travelled to South America to reconcile with her husband.

Contrary to the long-held belief that Gladys totally abandoned her daughter, she actually resided with Norma Jeane at the property and dutifully paid Albert and Ida $25 a month rent. Della knew Gladys and Norma Jeane would be in good hands and that a visit to them would always be just a short distance away. ‘Mrs Baker [i.e. Gladys]
was
with me,’ Ida confirmed in 1956. ‘She stayed in Hollywood when working nights as a negative cutter, and stayed with me while working days . . . She [Norma Jeane] was never neglected and always dressed nicely. Her mother supported her all the time and bought all her clothes.’

Incontestable proof that both Gladys and her daughter lived under the Bolenders’ roof can be found in an official census of Inglewood Township, Los Angeles County (enumeration district no. 19). Details of that Rhode Island Avenue house, as registered on Tuesday 1 April 1930, revealed that, besides Gladys and Norma Jeane, the other occupiers of the building were Albert, aged 46, Ida, 42 and their son Lester, 3. (Albert made a mistake when he filled out the form, noting Gladys as being 27 years of age and Norma Jeane as 63.)

In spite of his carefree, unconcerned exterior, Gifford did not (despite what we have been told before) wash his hands of the child. When Norma Jeane was just one or two years old, after learning of the child’s placement with the Bolenders, the concerned father actually came forward and tried to adopt her. However, Gladys now despised the man; still smarting at how he had absconded during her pregnancy, she was having none of it and his request was denied.

With the Bolenders ably watching over her child, Gladys returned to work at the Consolidated Film Industries. Each Saturday she would take her
child on an outing, usually a walking tour to the streets outside the movie stars’ homes in the Hollywood hills. Another of Gladys’s favourite journeys was to the recently opened Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, famous for its red-carpet movie premieres. Norma Jeane and her mother would stare down adoringly at the world-famous foot and hand prints captured in cement outside the building. Norma Jeane would intently place her small hands and feet over the imprints.

Despite her mother’s warmest intentions to display love and affection to her daughter, however, Norma Jeane would forlornly recall Gladys only as ‘the woman with red hair’ or ‘the pretty woman who never smiled’. She did not regard her as her real mother. In her primary years, she looked upon Ida and Albert as her true parents and would call them ‘Mama’ and ‘Daddy’.

It is intriguing to see how often Monroe’s childhood has been portrayed in despondent, dull, quite depressing tones, insisting that she was, for the better part of her young life, unloved, unpopular and poor. The truth is that, from birth until she was eight years old, Norma Jeane lived in only one place, the cosy yet austere, old-fashioned six-room home in the middle-class city of Inglewood belonging to the devoutly Catholic Albert and Ida Bolender. Even as far back as 1952, Hollywood spokespeople were dramatising Marilyn’s upbringing at the Bolenders’ by saying that she was pounded with religious precepts that dictated damnation for her slightest transgression, brainwashed into thinking that ‘drinking, smoking and dancing was the works of the devil’, made to promise she’d never drink or swear, ordered to scrub and polish the house’s floors and forced to attend church several times a week. True, the young girl
did
attend church with the Bolenders, but quite happily.

However, some truly disturbing incidents did happen to her in that time. First, in July 1927, her grandmother Della attempted to smother her with a pillow. For no perceptible reason, she walked over to the Bolenders’ home in a state of complete undress, smashed her way in through the glass in the front door and made an unprovoked attack on the young child. The ramifications from the incident were immense. A few weeks later, on Thursday 4 August, she was committed to Norwalk’s Metropolitan State Hospital where, just 19 days afterwards, she died of a heart attack. She was found to be suffering from manic-depressive psychosis.

The second incident came when Gladys attempted to murder her. ‘Her mother tried to kill her three times,’ Marilyn’s third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, shockingly revealed in an April 1968 interview for the BBC. ‘Her mother was quite mad.’ Throughout most of her life, Marilyn often remarked how she could still vividly recall these horrific encounters.

Due to the highly dependable statements of both Miller and the Bolenders, I believe these events
did
happen; most of the other accusations
about Norma Jeane’s time with the family were, however, untrue. ‘People like to make things sensational,’ Nancy, the youngest Bolender sibling and by then the only surviving family member, admitted in 1996. ‘Because she [Norma Jeane] was moved around later, they want to make it sound like it was
all
awful, but it wasn’t. She was happy in our home.’ Over the ensuing years, Nancy naturally became resentful and angry about the way Monroe’s time in Inglewood was inaccurately portrayed. In a 1966 interview for the
Daily Breeze
newspaper, Ida Bolender added, ‘When my mother was alive, she was very upset about it. We treated her [Marilyn] like our own child because we loved her.’

Quite possibly, the only accusation one could hurl at the Bolenders was that Norma Jeane was inadvertently made to feel like an outsider in their home. For instance, during the regular, once-a-week bath time, the children would all share the same water and, according to her, she would always bathe last. Another example came on Christmas Day morning 1926, when she happily made her way over to her first gift-laden festive tree. Aware that she was going to receive a present from Albert and Ida, she waited patiently for her turn while the other children unwrapped their expensive gifts of huge toys and bicycles. However, when her present was brought out, it was nothing more than a cheap trinket purchased from the five and ten cent (nickel and dime) store. Frantically, she tried to hide her dejection. She knew then that she was regarded as an outcast in the family. (Marilyn often remarked how extremely vivid her memories as a young child were. ‘I can remember when I was just six months old,’ she once admitted. ‘I know you’re not supposed to, but I
do
.’)

Norma Jeane was, in general, lovingly doted on by Ida and her husband, Albert, a postman by trade. In time, she went on to enjoy a warm relationship with the dwelling’s five other siblings, Lester, Mumsey, Alvina, Noel and Nancy. She grew particularly close to Lester. Norma Jeane also relished normal schoolgirl activities, such as playing hopscotch, learning the piano and (from December 1933, at 7.30 each Friday evening) listening to her favourite radio show,
The Lone Ranger
, starring Earle W. Graser. (It has long since entered Marilyn folklore that she also used to enjoy tuning in to
The Green Hornet
during this time, but that is incorrect. The show did not reach American radio until January 1936, by which time she was living away from the Bolenders’ home.)

Other pleasurable pursuits for the young child were her frequent visits to the cinema and her play-acting the role of a detective, prowling up and down the nearby streets, intently jotting down the numbers of the local motor car licence plates. Gambolling with her small black and white dog, Tippy, was another favourite pastime. However, their time together was cut short when the pet was tragically sliced in two by Raymond J. Ernest,
her hoe-wielding next-door neighbour, who became enraged over the dog’s incessant barking. ‘I loved that dog,’ Marilyn sorrowfully announced, ‘and he loved me. He was the only one who did love me in all those years. I told him everything.’

Deprivation was an occasional occurrence for Norma Jeane. Once, when she requested from her mother a white pair of shoes, she was given a black pair instead, because they were cheaper. Yet in her posthumously published, ghost-written, highly embellished 1974 book,
My Story
, on the subject of her childhood, Marilyn paradoxically wrote, ‘When I look back on those days, I remember, in fact, that they were full of all sorts of fun and excitement. I played games in the sun and ran races.’

In 1962, she reminisced to American show business columnist Bob Thomas, ‘When I was five, I think that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim.’ Two years later, at the age of seven, Norma Jeane became fascinated by screen actress Jean Harlow. ‘I had white hair,’ she recalled. ‘I was a real towhead and she was the first grown-up lady I had ever seen who had white hair like mine.’

In July 1934, Norma Jeane and her mother moved out of the Bolenders’ home. Using money saved from her job as a negative film cutter, and an advance from the California Mortgage Company at Long Beach, Gladys managed to put down a payment on a three-bedroom, six-room bungalow situated at 6812 Arbol Drive, a short distance away from the world-famous concert venue, the Hollywood Bowl. ‘It was a pretty little house,’ Marilyn recalled in 1961, ‘with quite a few rooms. But there was no furniture in it, except for two cots that we slept on, a small kitchen table and two kitchen chairs. The living room was entirely empty, but I didn’t mind. It was a very pretty room.’

The house’s most prized fixture was an early 20th century white baby grand piano, a belated eighth birthday present from Gladys to her daughter. Previously owned by eminent Tinseltown actor Fredric March, it had been secretly secured by Gladys at an auction of his household effects (although others say she actually purchased it on credit, along with the other furniture in the home). ‘After several weeks,’ Marilyn continued, ‘my mother came home from work in a truck. I watched two men carry in the first furniture she had bought for our house. It was a wonderful-looking white piano. It was put in the living room. There wasn’t any piano bench. It just stood there by itself. Neither my mother nor I could play it. But it looked very beautiful to me . . . I always remembered the white piano. I saw it in my mind every night as I grew up.’

Procuring hospitalisation and life insurance and even paying regular
deposits of money into her bank account for emergencies, Gladys seized every means possible to ensure her daughter’s new-found home life would be permanent. Marilyn excitedly recalled how, during this period, she and her mother would attend all the openings at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel, positioning themselves outside to watch the glamorous stars arrive. Sometimes they would wait for several hours until the movie ended just to see a very special favourite of theirs walk by. Unfortunately, it was at this point that another truly harrowing incident in the young child’s life occurred.

In the second half of November 1934, to safeguard further the life she had envisioned for her daughter, Gladys decided to raise extra money by renting out three rooms of her house to a married English couple; people who were employed in the Hollywood film industry. The woman was working on the fringe, earning a wage as a movie extra. It has often been stated that her husband was Mr Kimmel, the stand-in for the Academy Award-winning 20th Century-Fox actor, George Arliss. In fact he was 45-year-old, London-born Murray Kinnell, who had been instrumental in acquiring actress Bette Davis’s first big break in the movies. By the time he and his wife moved in, Kinnell’s main claim to fame was as a co-star to Arliss on five of his productions, namely
Old English
(1930),
A Successful Calamity
and
The Man Who Played God
(both 1932),
Voltaire
(1933) and
The House of Rothschild
(in 1934). A suggestion by Marilyn biographer Donald Spoto that actor George Atkinson was the boarder was inaccurate; he and Arliss worked together only once, in 1929 on the film
Disraeli
, some five years prior to the time Gladys and her daughter moved into the property.

However, Norma Jeane would not see the Kinnells as stars of the silver screen. Instead, she would view them as nothing but unpleasant, foul-mouthed alcoholics. The problems began soon after the couple moved in. Her already frail self-confidence was shattered further when the uncouth thespians asked if she would perform a dance for them. Suggestions of the Spanish fandango, the hula-hula and the sailor’s hornpipe were offered. She agreed. But instead of applause, they laughed. Further attempts to appease Kinnell and his wife were greeted with similar callous rebuffs, and in turn, Norma Jeane would come to expect identical putdowns from each new set of adults she would confront. And one afternoon in January 1935, just six months after moving into the delightful new home, eight-year-old Norma Jeane horrifyingly, in her own, rather embellished words, ‘found out about sex without asking any questions’.