The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (4 page)

She recounted the shocking, life-changing tale as follows: ‘I was passing his room when his door opened and he came out. I literally collided with him . . . I tried to see beyond him, but there was nothing to look at but this
monstrous man standing in the doorway . . . He said quietly, “Please come in here, Norma.”’ As Marilyn remembered, Kinnell closed and locked the door behind the cowering young girl, who stood motionless and stared back at the man.

When he put his arms around me, I kicked and fought as hard as I could but I didn’t make any sound. He was stronger than I was and wouldn’t let me go. He kept whispering to me to be a good girl. ‘I’ll be just a moment washing my hands,’ he said, as if my being there was an everyday matter. He came towards me, his hands outstretched, palms upward, as if pleading with me that, whatever he might have in mind to do to me, his hands
were
clean . . . .He then picked me up bodily, carried me to the sofa beyond the chair, sat down on it and dropped me into his lap. ‘Just take it easy and keep your mouth shut, kid and I won’t have to get rough with you.’ I tried to console myself by remembering scenes in which little girls I knew were placed in this special place by fond fathers. I myself had missed such a demonstration of fatherly affection, so was it possibly coming to me now? A moment later one of those enormous hands was travelling the way of the Ashman, only it was a hand much firmer and more determined in its course . . . I cried out lustily with my pain, but it appeared to make that relentless hand more determined.

Thankfully for the child, the torment soon ended. ‘When he unlocked the door and let me out, I ran to tell my aunt [i.e. her mother] to tell what Mr. Kinnell had done,’ she recalled. But when she came face-to-face with Gladys, she was unable to fully explain what had happened. Her traumatic experience had precipitated a stammer. ‘I want to tell you something, about Mr. Kinnell. He . . . he . . . ’

However, her mother was uninterested and moved swiftly to interrupt her troubled daughter. She smacked her across her mouth. ‘Take this for lying about a friend of mine. Don’t you dare say anything against Mr. Kinnell,’ Gladys screamed. ‘He’s a fine man. He’s my star boarder.’ The actor walked out of his room, handed Norma Jeane a nickel and told her to go and buy herself an ice cream. She picked up the coin, threw it back at his face and ran out of the house. Marilyn later revealed that that night, when recalling the horrendous incident, she cried herself to sleep and ‘wanted to die’.

‘A week later, the family, including Mr Kinnell, went to a religious revival meeting in a tent,’ Marilyn recalled to the London
Observer
in 1958. ‘My aunt [i.e. mother] insisted I come along. The tent was jammed. Everybody was listening to the evangelist. Suddenly he called on all the
sinners in the tent to come up and repent. I rushed up ahead of everyone else and started to tell him about my sin. I fell on my knees and began to tell about Mr Kinnell and how he had molested me in his room. But other sinners started wailing about their sins and drowned me out. I looked back and saw Mr Kinnell standing among the non-sinners praying loudly and devoutly for God to forgive the sins of others.’ She was innocent, yet had been abused and discarded like a piece of soiled linen.

It’s worth noting that – regardless of what we have been led to believe in the past, thanks mainly to the actress’s somewhat inflated recollections – Marilyn was
not
raped during the incident. Her first husband, James Dougherty, was among those who would verify the fact, saying he knew it was a lie on their wedding night. ‘She was a virgin, as I soon found out,’ he recalled in 1976. Eight years earlier, in a conversation with American reporter Darwin Porter, he had gone one step further by explicitly confirming that ‘her delicate threshold had never been crossed before’. In fact, Norma Jeane went into her marriage to 21-year-old Dougherty in 1942 so ignorant of sex that her aunt Ana had to purchase for her a guide book of ‘useful tips’ for the bride-to-be.

And there were doubts about the tale’s legitimacy. ‘Over the years, she told me three different versions of the same story, forgetting what she had said previously,’ Marilyn’s close friend, room-mate and fellow actress Shelley Winters once admitted. ‘In time, I think Marilyn could no longer distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t . . . Don’t get me wrong, I loved the girl dearly, but the biographers of Marilyn’s early life each bought into her fantasy.’

Whatever the precise details, the story goes that, immediately after this traumatic event, Norma Jeane began suffering from insomnia and night terrors. Along with her other childhood frights, the occurrence would return to haunt her in twisted shapes during her briefest snatches of slumber. Later in life, Marilyn compensated for her inability or disinclination to rest by reading or talking to friends or colleagues, usually by way of late-night phone calls. Also, before she attempted any kind of slumber she would place her pillows over her telephones. She did this for two reasons: first, pillows served as a frightening reminder of the suffocation attempt; and second, in order to avoid the risk of having her sleep disturbed she would sometimes (but not always) place her head rests in that position to deaden the noise of any possible telephone rings.

Naturally, Gladys was also distressed by the assault. On Tuesday 15 January 1935, her brave new attempts at motherhood came to a shuddering halt when she suffered a nervous breakdown, precipitated no doubt by her continuing failure as a mother and the molestation of her child, and was forced to move out of their new home. But there was
another
reason why she had to do so. A fact that has been somewhat lost over the ensuing years is that, in the opening weeks of 1935, shortly after the incident with the young child, actor George Arliss left Hollywood to travel to Paris to shoot the movie
Cardinal Richelieu
with Maureen O’Sullivan. Naturally his co-star and close friend, Kinnell, travelled too. The loss of Kinnell’s rent money was so significant that Gladys had no option but to relinquish the premises and move into other, more squalid accommodation.

In a 1956 interview, Marilyn revealed she could remember the precise moment when her mother’s fragile mind finally snapped. ‘I will never forget how my mother stabbed a friend in front of me as I sat crying,’ she recalled.

The incident she was recalling occurred when, late one evening, Gladys sat talking with her good friend, divorcee Grace Atchison McKee. The pair were working together at Columbia Pictures: McKee as film librarian, Gladys as a film cutter. Their encounter became heated when Gladys accused Grace of trying to poison her. She lunged at her with a kitchen knife and stabbed her. The police were called and Gladys was immediately escorted to California’s Norwalk State Asylum, where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Gladys spent much of the next 35 years in various institutions; despite making monthly provisions for her care in 1953 when, after months of allowing the press to believe that both of her parents were dead, the true details of Marilyn’s parentage became known, the actress rarely contacted or visited her mother. On Monday 26 October, however, Marilyn created a trust fund for Gladys, to which she transferred 100 shares of preferred stocks of ‘Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.’

With Gladys now institutionalised, Norma Jeane had once again lost her mother. ‘No one will ever quite understand the warmth and sweetness between my mother and me until the day the police broke into our house and plucked her out of my life,’ Marilyn would later recall. Unsurprisingly, Grace was installed as both guardian of the child and custodian of Gladys’s estate. Her home and the furniture within were promptly sold off, except for the white baby grand piano, which was held for Norma Jeane by Grace’s aunt Ana.

Naturally, the child moved in with McKee. However, their time together was short: just seven months. In 1962 Marilyn recalled, ‘Grace was my legal guardian . . . But when she remarried all of a sudden the house became too small and someone had to go and you can guess who that someone was. On Monday 9 September 1935, she packed my clothes and took me to her car. We drove and drove without her ever saying a word.

‘When we came to a red brick building she stopped the car and we walked up the stairs to the entrance of the building. At the entrance there was this big black sign with bright gold lettering . . . emptiness came over me. My feet absolutely couldn’t move on the sidewalk. The sign read “Orphan Asylum – The Los Angeles Children’s Home Society”. I began to cry, “Please, please don’t make me go inside. I’m not an orphan. My mother’s not dead. I’m not an orphan. My mother’s just sick and can’t take care of me.”’

The building has often been depicted as a shabby, run-down wreck. In fact it was a fine, well-kept 18th-century style mansion. At the front of the privately endowed, 24-year-old building, in the middle of a large playing field, there was a flag pole on which the Stars and Stripes proudly flew. At the rear, there were five acres of land, on which the children could run and play. Visitors, keen to see where the young Marilyn lived and expecting to discover a dingy, dirty, depressing-looking place, were shocked to find the orphanage was sparklingly clean and extremely well-equipped.

Norma Jeane became child number 3463. The young girl later learnt that Grace McKee cried all day afterwards. ‘When a little girl feels lost and lonely and thinks nobody wants her, it’s something she doesn’t forget as long as she lives,’ Marilyn remarked in 1958. ‘I think I wanted more than anything in the world to be loved. Love to me then and now means being wanted and when my aunt Grace put me in that place, the whole world around me crumbled. It seemed nobody wanted me, not even my mother’s best friend.’

Unsurprisingly, no doubt borne out of the horrifying suffocation attempt, the molestation and the deep-rooted realisation that no one wanted her, Norma Jeane’s stammer continued to blight her. ‘The day they brought me there [the orphanage], after they pulled me in, crying and screaming, suddenly there I was in the large dining room with a hundred kids sitting there eating, and they were all staring at me. So I stopped crying right away [and] I stuttered.’ Her speech impediment became so bad that she could not even finish her sentences. In a 1955 discussion with the American columnist Maurice Zolotow, Marilyn recalled, ‘I guess you might say I gave up talking for a long while. I used to be so embarrassed in school. I thought I’d die whenever a teacher called upon me. I always had the feeling of not wanting to open my mouth, that anything I said would be wrong or stupid.’ One day, the young girl managed to escape from the orphanage. However, her attempt to flee was thwarted by a policeman who immediately escorted her back.

Each day at the institute began at 6am and before the 60 other children went off to school, they would have to do their chores. ‘We each had a bed,
a chair, and a locker,’ Marilyn remembered (although officials for the orphanage would dispute her account of daily life there). ‘Everything had to be very clean and perfect because of inspection. And I worked in the kitchen, washing dishes. There were a hundred of us, so I washed a hundred plates and all those spoons and forks. I did these three times a day, seven days a week. But it wasn’t so bad. It was worse to scrub out the toilets.’

Dressed in a blue dress and white shirt-waist, Norma Jeane earned five cents a month for cleaning those dishes, one penny of which went into a Sunday church collection plate. The remaining cent allowed the young girl a little childish luxury: a ribbon for her hair. Despite her solitary attempt at fleeing, Norma Jeane’s conduct in the orphanage was best described as ‘prim and proper’. An early report on her time at the institution read, ‘Norma Jeane’s behaviour is normal and she is bright and sunshiny.’ Grace McKee visited the child every week and regularly handed over clothes and gifts. Thanks to her constant support, many close to Marilyn would see McKee as an unsung hero in the woman’s life. (Later, she would even pay for the girl’s singing and dancing lessons.)

Norma Jeane slept at nights in a room crammed with 27 beds, and as a prize for good behaviour the children could work their way up to the ‘honour bed’. But her own time in the room’s most comfortable berth was short-lived. ‘One morning,’ the actress recalled, ‘I was late and was putting on my shoes when the matron said, “Come downstairs!” I tried to tell her I was tying my shoes, but she said, “Back to the 27th bed.”’

The festive season was always a poignant time for the young child. In 1951, Marilyn remembered, ‘When Christmas came there was a big tree and all the kids in the house got presents but me. One of the kids gave me an orange. I can remember that Christmas day, eating that orange all by myself . . . and I could look up and see the RKO [film studios] water tower. I cried because I knew my mother had worked there. I think that was when I decided that some day, I would be an actress and maybe I would get inside that studio.’

Norma Jeane’s veneer of self-confidence naturally became increasingly vulnerable and seemingly began to crack apart at the slightest repulse. For instance, during her second Christmas at the orphanage, she was given a part in a school play, but lost it when her current teacher, fearing she would forget her lines and embarrass the class, asked the person in charge of the production to give the part to someone else. Another knock-back to her confidence came one Easter when she was on a stage for the first time, at the Hollywood Bowl as one of 50 black-robed youngsters forming a cross.

‘We all had on white tunics under the black robes,’ Marilyn recalled in
1951, ‘and at a given signal we were supposed to throw off the robes, changing the cross from black to white. But I got so interested in the people, the orchestra and the hills that I forgot to watch the conductor for the signal and there I was; the only black mark on a white cross.’ As she grew older, Norma Jeane became tall and gawky with short, straw-like hair. Her manner was still described as hesitant, shy and scared, and she still suffered from her stammer.

On Saturday 26 June 1937, Norma Jeane left the orphanage and briefly moved back in with Grace McKee, who at this time was living with her husband, amateur inventor Erwin ‘Doc’ Silliman Goddard, in a small town near Los Angeles. Despite being most welcoming, they had their faults. With little prospect of being properly fed, due to Grace’s new and quite unexpected penny-pinching ways, the young child would while away the hours in the local food stores, picking up whatever items she could and consuming them when no one, in particular the proprietor, was watching. She favoured stores selling fruit, particularly small peaches, cherries and plums. Acquisitions not eaten on the spot, such as the extremely large Wolf River apples, were discreetly hidden in her apron and transported home for consumption later. As Marilyn horrifyingly recalled, ‘he [Erwin] was terribly strict. He brought me up harshly, and corrected me in a way I think they never should have; with a leather strap.’ (It’s worth pointing out that, despite the account of a previous Monroe biographer, at no point during his time with the young child did Goddard ever sexually molest the young child.)