The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (5 page)

Legend has it that, when news of what happened leaked out, Norma Jeane was palmed off to another foster home and thus found herself, during a three-month period, embarking on a nightmarish roller-coaster ride of 11 different foster homes and successive real-life horror stories such as being scalded for merely flushing the toilet at night. But that was completely untrue. ‘After the orphans’ home,’ child carer Ida Bolender revealed in 1956, ‘Norma Jeane stayed with Aunt Ana and Grace McKee Goddard until she got married . . . I don’t know where those stories came from about her staying in 12 foster homes.’

So, just where did this tale start and, most importantly, why? To answer these questions we must go forward to Tuesday 1 January 1952, when a new year was dawning and a pristine men’s calendar was being pinned to the walls of garages, warehouses and barbershops across America. Represented on each was the colour photograph of a beautiful young lady, lying nude across a red velvet drape. The female in question was Hollywood’s hottest new movie star, Marilyn Monroe.

When news of it reached 20th Century-Fox, the studio to which she was contracted, and RKO Pictures, the producers of her latest movie, the drama
Clash By Night
, a crisis of epic proportions was almost reached. Studio heads attempted at first to dismiss it, but that was not easy to do. America in the early 1950s was a country rife with strait-laced public morals. As panic began to intensify, RKO even contemplated delaying the release of their new film because of it. A strategy was urgently needed.

Following a hastily called meeting between one of the movie’s producers, Jerry Wald, studio executives and the actress herself, an exercise in damage limitation was decided upon and 39-year-old, Montana-born UPI Hollywood film columnist Aline Mosby was drafted in to help. Between them, in an attempt to gain public sympathy, a story about how Marilyn did the nude shoot simply because ‘she was broke and needed the money badly following a sorrowful upbringing in a string of foster homes’ was hastily concocted. They figured that nobody on earth could be angry or disgusted by the sad tale of a young girl who had been forced to exploit her body just to survive.

The story confirming that Marilyn was in fact the nude on the calendar was released to the American press on Tuesday 11 March 1952. It appeared one day later. As Mosby wrote:

A photograph of a beautiful nude blonde on a 1952 calendar is hanging in garages and barbershops all over the nation today. Marilyn Monroe admitted today that the beauty is she. ‘Oh, the calendar’s hanging in garages all over town,’ said Marilyn. ‘Why deny it? You can get one any place. Besides, I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong.’ . . . In 1949, she was just another scared young blonde, struggling to find fame in the magic city, and all alone. As a child she lived in a Hollywood orphanage. She was pushed around among twelve sets of foster parents before she turned an insecure sixteen.

This first part of the narrative was quite true. The session, in a cramped Los Angeles studio belonging to photographer Tom Kelley, had taken place on Friday 27 May 1949. Twelve years later, Monroe recalled truthfully, ‘I was hungry. I needed the $50 . . . I’d do it again if I had to.’ Since she was too embarrassed to pose during the day, the pictures had to be taken at night.

‘Modelling jobs were few and far between then,’ she remarked in another March 1952 interview. ‘I had some modelling jobs but not enough to pay the bills. There was this photographer [Kelley] I had worked for and he kept telling me he would pay me $50 if I posed in the nude as
a calendar girl. I kept telling him, “No, thanks.” Not that there was anything wrong in posing for a calendar, but it just wasn’t something I would do. But when I had no work and no money, out of desperation, I called him up and said, “Kelley, I need that $50 but promise you won’t tell anyone.” He promised no one would know except for his wife, who was also his assistant.’

Her reasons for doing the shoot had escalated by the time she met the Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons one month later. ‘The truth is, I was not only one month behind in my rent but four months,’ Marilyn announced. ‘I expected to be thrown out in the street. I didn’t have enough money even to eat, and when Tom Kelley asked me to pose, I was glad to accept.’

‘The session took three hours,’ Kelley admitted to the
American Weekly
in 1955. ‘I must have stood about ten feet above her. She was lying on the floor.’ When it came to signing the model release form, due to her nervousness, embarrassment and attempts at anonymity, she signed her name as ‘Mona Monroe’. ‘I sold all my rights in it [the pictures] for a lousy $500,’ the photographer solemnly announced. ‘A guy out in Chicago, John Baumgarth, he made a fortune on it. Sold close to 8,000,000 calendars!’ (In fact two different Marilyn Monroe nude calendars were released: one entitled
Golden Dream
, the other
A New Wrinkle
. The former was the bigger seller.)

Four and a half years on, in December 1953, a new men’s magazine appeared on the American news-stands. It was called
Playboy
. Its creator was Hugh Hefner. The first issue sold over 54,000 copies, an amazing tally for a new journal with no advance publicity. The startling sales of that first copy can be attributed to Hefner’s good fortune of finding an exceptional double-page, centrepiece ‘Sweetheart Of The Month’ photo to lure America’s hot-blooded males to the news-stand. Inside that maiden edition was Kelley’s photo of the nude 22-year-old Monroe lying outstretched across a red velvet sheet.

However, the second half of Mosby’s March 1952 report, the part about ‘twelve sets of foster parents’, was far from the truth. This had actually been unveiled to the American public in the
Cedar Rapids Gazette
newspaper, among others, nine weeks earlier on Sunday 7 January 1952, just six days after the calendar first appeared. In the article, Mosby wrote, ‘Marilyn had eleven sets of foster parents before she was 16. She was shunted from one set to the next, unloved and unwanted.’ Hastily prepared comments by the actress accompanied the piece. ‘They’d keep me for six months, or a year,’ she declared, ‘then they’d say, ‘You make me nervous,’ and the county would find me another home. The families I lived with were all poor.’

The true catalyst of Marilyn’s foster-home stories was in fact her adopted sister, Beebe Goddard, a girl who truly did encounter an unhappy childhood and a string of different guardians. (Marilyn’s last encounter with Goddard took place in June 1953, when the actress celebrated her 27th birthday.) During their occasional encounters, Goddard held Monroe captive with her mournful tales. The actress would later use these as the nucleus for the grand deception perpetrated by herself, Fox and RKO.

Indeed, aside from the revisionist work of Marilyn’s overzealous Hollywood publicists, a great part of this misinterpretation of the truth – as we know – regrettably came from Monroe herself, who enjoyed perpetuating the myth of what a poor, sad, orphaned girl from a deprived background could achieve. In June 1952, with the Hollywood news wires awash with the news that the actress was an orphan, Marilyn came clean – possibly out of guilt – and exclusively revealed to the Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson that Gladys was still alive and that, after urging from Fox, she was actually helping to support her. Her confession just happened to coincide with
Redbook
magazine’s current article on the actress, entitled ‘Orphan’s Life’, in which they naturally focused on the sad loss of Marilyn’s parents. However, the actress was unrepentant about the misleading information she had contributed and drafted a note to the publication’s editor, Wade Nichols, telling him so. In part, it read, ‘I frankly did not feel wrong in withholding from you the fact that my mother is still alive . . . Since we have never known each other intimately and have never enjoyed the normal relationship of mother.’

In 1955,
Life
magazine’s Hollywood correspondent Ezra Goodman was another writer to face a brick wall when attempting to decipher the conflicting stories about Marilyn’s formative years. Due to the conspiracy of silence still surrounding it, he encountered first-hand the many people who were determined to either hinder his research or complicate matters. As he wrote in his finished article, ‘much of what she and her publicists have said about her past simply do not ring true’. ‘The truth is,’ as her future publicist, Arthur P. Jacobs, would recall, ‘she loved to create gossip. She didn’t need
Confidential
magazine; she touted her own dirty linen.’

‘She made up those stories to win the public sympathy,’ her first husband, James Dougherty, corroborated in 1968. ‘When she was revealed as the model who had posed for that nude calendar hanging in every men’s toilet, in every garage in America, she got the sympathy vote.’ The deceit worked. Public sympathy was achieved, a new legion of fans gained and, with all the extra publicity, crowds flocked to see
Clash By Night
when it was released in June 1952. To this day, fans, historians, documentary makers and movie columnists repeat how Marilyn grew up as an orphan in a succession of foster homes. On both counts, that was totally incorrect.
In fact, in September 1937, at the age of 11, Norma Jeane was moved to West Los Angeles to live with Grace McKee’s childless 62-year-old aunt, Ana Lower. It was there that she finally found the warmth and maternal affection she had so badly been deprived of.

‘This woman was the greatest influence on my whole life,’ Marilyn recalled in a 1962 interview with photographer George Barris. ‘I called her aunt Ana. The love I have today for beautiful and simple things is because of her. She was the only person I ever really loved with such a deep love you can give only to someone so kind, so good and so full of love for me. One of the reasons why I loved her was because of her understanding of what really mattered in life . . . She was quite a person . . . She didn’t believe in sickness or disease or death. She didn’t believe in a person being a failure either. She believed the mind could achieve anything. She changed my whole life.’

Inside Lower’s home was an item she had retained for Norma Jeane, the one symbol of life with her mother: her white baby grand piano. Lessons for the instrument began anew. Aunt Ana taught the young Monroe how to play the one-fingered piano waltz ‘Chopsticks’.

Marilyn’s reunion with the instrument was brief and, as her career began to blossom, she once more found herself estranged from it. But not for long. In 1962 she recalled, ‘I got my first good part, in
The Asphalt Jungle
(1950), and I had enough money to do what I’d always dreamed of doing. I started looking for that white piano. I went to all the warehouses and old auction rooms in Los Angeles and after a month I found it. It was just as white and beautiful as ever, I knew it was the same piano because Fredric March’s name was engraved on it. I bought it for $100 and took it home. It stood in my room for several years without a piano bench, just a white piano I couldn’t play.’ The instrument would nevertheless stay by the actress’s side, coast to coast, house to house, marriage to marriage, for the remainder of her short life. To her, it symbolised the permanency of a home and the family security she never had.

In September 1938, the miracle of Norma’s young physique ripening into womanhood arrived, and with it came a change in her fortunes. A survival instinct instilled in her made her aware that her frame, while wearing a borrowed tight white sweater, was attracting an unusual amount of attention: envious glances from other girls and desire in boys. The change in the attitude of the latter was startling; their previous gibes of ‘Norma Jeane, string bean’ had changed into appreciative wolf-whistles.

‘The boys knew better than to get fresh with me,’ Marilyn recollected in 1953. ‘The most they ever got was a good-night kiss.’ In her posthumously published 1974 book,
My Story
, she wrote, ‘I wasn’t aware of anything
sexual in their new liking for me . . . I didn’t think of my body as having anything to do with sex. It was more like a friend who had mysteriously appeared in my life, a sort of new friend.’ She was now attracting the attention she had so desperately wished for.

In 1941, at the age of 15, because of aunt Ana’s advancing years and ill-health, Norma Jeane was forced to move again – back to the home of Grace McKee and Erwin Goddard, who by this time were living in a rambling bungalow on Odessa Street in Van Nuys, California. During her stay there she met Goddard’s 11-year-old daughter, Nona Jeannette, who later became famous as the Columbia Pictures movie star Jody Lawrance. ‘I remember she was a shy, introverted little girl,’ Lawrance recalled to reporter Ezra Goodman in 1955. ‘We made a tree house with boards in a pepper tree in our front yard. We used to crawl up there when we thought we’d get in trouble. We knew my father and stepmother could not climb up there. That tree house was our escape.’ Local boys on bicycles would happily drop by and watch while Norma Jeane hung upside-down from the tree. ‘I used to look like a monkey,’ she remembered in 1952. ‘I guess I was a little shy about coming down but I did get down to the curb . . . I would ask the boys, ‘Can I ride your bike now?’ And they’d say, ‘Sure,’ and I’d go zooming, laughing in the wind, riding down the block. They’d all stand around and wait till I came back.’

In 1942, due to Erwin’s job transfer, the Goddards were forced to move to West Virginia and they were unable (or unwilling) to take Norma Jeane with them. So she was faced with a dilemma. ‘I’d had enough of the orphanage,’ she remarked, ‘more than enough. What could I do? So I got married.’ Grace’s matrimonial eye soon chanced upon their 21-year-old neighbour, James Dougherty, an employee at Lockheed Aircraft. Their marriage, at 8.30pm on Friday 19 June 1942, was held at the home of the Goddards’ close friends, Mr and Mrs Chester Howell, because of its winding staircase, similar to those which appear in the movies. Grace made the arrangements for the wedding just prior to her departure for West Virginia. Ana Lower gave the bride away. She was the only representative of Norma Jeane’s family present. It was, in truth, a marriage of convenience.