The Secret Life Of Marilyn Monroe Part 3

Jim stood at the front window in the darkened living room for the better part of an hour. Then, in the black and motionless streetscape, he saw a shock of white. It was his wife, wearing only the nightgown in which he had last seen her, and she was walking very quickly-almost running-toward the house. Jim quickly moved to the bedroom and pretended to be asleep. A minute later, Norma Jeane bolted through the front door and jumped into the bed next to her husband, clinging to him desperately.

"There's a man after me," she whispered urgently.

"What?"

Norma Jeane repeated that a man was after her. She explained that she needed to leave the house, and as she was walking away she noticed someone following her. Jim said it made sense that she was being followed, given that she was wearing a nightgown. "He probably thinks you're out of your mind," he opined.

Anxiously, Norma Jeane went on to explain that the man she had seen was especially quick. He was in a tree at one point, she recalled. Then she saw him sitting in a darkened house... a parked car. To Jim, either this man had superhuman abilities or was, he feared, a figment of his new wife's imagination. She then asked Jim to search the house for her stalker. He disappeared for a moment and came back claiming he had done it. He hadn't, though.

He turned to Norma Jeane, who was now visibly shaking. "See? I told you, there's no one here," he told her calmly. According to what Jim Dougherty recalled to friends, this was the first time he saw his young wife as a woman with more than simple insecurities. He began to wonder if her future might hold the same terrible fate as her mother's.

"But he was was following me," she replied. following me," she replied.

A deep sigh escaped his lips. "Come on, Norma Jeane," Jim said. "This guy couldn't have been everywhere. Don't you see how that sounds crazy?"

Jim's last word-"crazy"-hung in the air as the young woman's anxious and alert eye contact faded. She silently lay down, her expression now blank and distant.

Gladys's Clever Plan.

Norma Jeane and Jim never again discussed her strange stalking incident. It was just pushed aside as if it hadn't happened. In most other respects, their marriage seemed to be going fairly well into 1943. However, there were other troubling signs. For instance, Norma Jeane insisted on calling Jim "Daddy." Martin Evans, one of Jim's friends at the time, recalled, "He told me he didn't like it. It worried him, considering that she didn't know who her father was and it was an issue for her. He said, 'I don't want her to think of me as her father. I'm her husband.' He also told me that she would threaten to do herself harm if anything happened to their union. 'I'll jump off a bridge, Daddy,' she would say, and it didn't seem like a figure of speech to him. He suspected that she might actually do it. She was intensely insecure but, yes, the Daddy business bothered him the most. He felt that if he corrected her or chastised her, she would melt into tears. He was always walking on eggsh.e.l.ls around her, I think."

During this period of time, Norma Jeane's mother, Gladys Baker, was still inst.i.tutionalized. Gladys's life at the mental hospital in San Jose was, in many ways, one of fantasy. She was constantly in a state of delusion. * * She desperately wanted to be released and had done everything she could think of to get out of the sanitarium, even contacting her long-lost daughter, Berniece. However, Gladys seemed to know the sad truth: No one wanted her. Rather than face this, she fantasized a scenario that included her being a part of the lives of her daughter Norma Jeane and even her daughter's father. She was clever in the way she went about trying to manifest it as well. She decided that a man from her past might just provide the ticket she needed to obtain her freedom. She desperately wanted to be released and had done everything she could think of to get out of the sanitarium, even contacting her long-lost daughter, Berniece. However, Gladys seemed to know the sad truth: No one wanted her. Rather than face this, she fantasized a scenario that included her being a part of the lives of her daughter Norma Jeane and even her daughter's father. She was clever in the way she went about trying to manifest it as well. She decided that a man from her past might just provide the ticket she needed to obtain her freedom.

By this time, Grace G.o.ddard had moved to Chicago. During a brief visit to California, she decided to visit Gladys Baker in the San Jose sanitarium, and then visit with her friend Ethel Dougherty in Los Angeles. On the morning Grace came to visit, Gladys told her that she had some stunning news. She revealed that Charles Stanley Gifford-the man with whom she'd begun having an affair before she was divorced from Edward Mortenson so long ago-was Norma Jeane's father. Of course, as the story goes, Gladys had told Gifford that he was the baby's father seventeen years earlier when she got pregnant, but he refused to believe her. Grace was not surprised by Gladys's revelation. The two women had talked about Gifford in the past and Grace had her suspicions, but this was the first time Gladys actually confirmed them.

So what was going on in Gladys's head? What was her motivation behind confiding in Grace? It's not far-fetched that she hoped Grace would tell Norma Jeane the news and that her daughter would then track down Gifford and inform him that he was her father. Then, in Gladys's fantasy, Gifford's response would be to acknowledge his beautiful daughter and decide to start a new life with her. Once father and daughter were at long last united, who would be missing in the equation? Gladys, of course-the mother. Indeed, it would seem that Gladys found a way of possibly enrolling someone entirely new, someone yet to be approached-Charles Stanley Gifford-to get her released from the sanitarium.

After leaving Gladys, Grace didn't know how to proceed with the news. Should she tell Norma Jeane? The girl was finally happy. What would this news do to her? Should she keep it to herself? Truly, she was in a quandary. She decided to talk to her close friend Ethel-Jim Dougherty's mother and Marilyn's mother-in-law.

Ethel was certain that Norma Jeane needed the information. "She deserves to know the truth," she said, according to one account. "But what if it's not true?" Grace wondered. "Can we trust what Gladys says? And how will it affect Norma Jeane?" Ethel was certain that Norma Jeane needed to hear Gladys's news, true or not. "It should come from you," Grace told Ethel. "I think it really should come from a family member."

Of course, Norma Jeane was surprised when Ethel told her that her father was a man named Charles Stanley Gifford. "She had mixed emotions, as I recall it," Martin Evans said, according to what Jim Dougherty had told him. "She was afraid of contacting him, but she knew she had to do it."

On February 1, 1943, Norma Jeane wrote to Grace G.o.ddard and told her that she was looking forward to actually meeting with Gifford. She'd fantasized about her father her entire life, she wrote, and felt certain that he would want to know her as well. After conducting some research, she located two former employees at Consolidated Studios who had known Gifford and from them got his telephone number. Then one night, with Jim and his mother, Ethel, at her side, Norma Jeane nervously made the call.

"This is Norma Jeane," she said, a tremulous quality in her voice. "I'm Gladys Baker's daughter." A few seconds later, she put down the receiver. "He hung up on me," she said. She began to cry. Jim tried to console her, but, of course, it was difficult.

"That was a real blow, Jim told me," said Martin Evans. "A real blow."

Today, Charles Stanley Gifford Jr., who is eighty-five, refuses to believe that story. "It never happened," he insists. "That sounds like fiction-something she [Marilyn Monroe] created. She made up all kinds of fanciful stories about her life. What I think is that she told told people she was making that call, and she even people she was making that call, and she even dialed dialed some number and called some number and called someone someone, but it wasn't my father. My father would not have hung up on her. He would have wanted to know more about her, about Gladys. I think she made it up, stood there, dialed a phone... then made the whole thing up in front of witnesses."

"She was disappointed," Jim Dougherty said many years later-and he was actually present at the call. "Gifford missed a good chance to be a father. I didn't have much respect for him, obviously. I just gave Norma Jeane some t.l.c. and she eventually came out of it alright. But it was sad."

Trouble in Paradise.

Always in the back of their minds was the reality that their marriage was not a love match, which was doubtless one of the primary reasons why Jim and Norma Jeane Dougherty decided early on not to have children. In fact, Norma Jeane was very much afraid of being a mother. She was just seventeen and, as she later put it, "terrified of the thought that I would become pregnant. Women in my family had always made such a mess of mothering." Later she would say that she always had a certain amount of dread that the marriage would end, Jim would take off, and "there would be this little girl in a blue dress and white blouse living in her 'aunt's' house, was.h.i.+ng dishes, being last in the bath water on Sat.u.r.day night."

In the spring of 1943, Jim Dougherty joined the Merchant Marine. He was soon a.s.signed to Catalina Island, just a short cruise s.h.i.+p ride away from Los Angeles. Therefore, he and Norma Jeane were able to take an apartment on the island. The Dougherty marriage was in trouble by the time the couple got to Catalina, though. Norma Jeane was popular there with her little bathing suits and big smile-and he didn't like it. Also, she began to drink alcohol-though not to excess-and that bothered him too, mostly because he was afraid that it might cloud her judgment and cause her to be unfaithful. He needn't have worried, though. "My fidelity was due to my lack of interest in s.e.x," she would later explain.

It's interesting that Norma Jeane referred to a trip she and Gladys took to Catalina in a three-page letter to her half sister, Berniece. (The trip obviously occurred sometime before Gladys was inst.i.tutionalized.) Responding to the first letter Berniece had sent her, she wrote from Catalina Island. In part, she wrote: "I just can't tell you how much you look like mother.... Aunt Ana [Lower] said that she could see a slight resemblance between you and I and that you looked more like my mother than I did. I have my mother [sic] eyes and forehead and hairline but the rest of me is like my dad. I don't know if you have ever heard of Catalina Island... my mother brought me over for the summer when I was about seven yr. old. I remember going to the Casino to a dance with her, of course I didn't dance, but she let me sit on the side and watch her, and I remember it was way after my bedtime too... the Maritime Services held a big dance at the same Casino and Jimmie and I went. It was the funniest feeling to be dancing on that same floor ten years later."

She continued, asking Berniece if she and her husband, Paris, would come out to California, and proceeded to give advice on what type of military service Paris should apply for: "the Maritime Service... so a person can disenroll honorably on his own accord and can go about and do pretty much the way he pleases."

She ended the letter with, "I do hope you will write to me and tell me all about yourself.... With much love, Norma Jeane. P.S. Thank you again for the picture... everyone... asks, 'Who's that nice looking couple?' and of course I explain proudly that that is my sister and her husband."

After a year, Jim was transferred to the western Pacific. Despite any problems in the union, saying goodbye to him was still difficult on the day he set sail from San Pedro, California. Norma Jeane tried to be strong in the face of what must have seemed like yet another abandonment in her life, and for the most part she put up a brave front. She moved in with Jim's parents again and waited for word from her husband.

During this time, Norma Jeane Dougherty got her first job, at a place called Radioplane. Located in Burbank, the company manufactured drones, small planes that flew by remote control and were used as targets for war training. Her job was to spray varnish on the pieces that const.i.tuted each plane's a.s.sembly. "It wasn't an easy job," said Anna DeCarlo, whose mother also worked at Radioplane at the same time. "The hours were long, sometimes up to twelve hours a day. The varnish was smelly. It got in her hair and all over her hands and was impossible to wash away. She was late for work a lot. In fact, she started getting a reputation of being late for everything, all the time. However, she was very popular with the other employees. She was known as being very empathetic, someone you could go to with your problems."

With Jim gone so much of the time, Norma Jeane couldn't help but feel lonely. Therefore, at the end of October 1944 she decided to take all of the money she had earned at Radioplane and go on a trip by rail, first to meet her sister, Berniece, now twenty-five, who had moved to Detroit by this time, and then to see Grace G.o.ddard in Chicago. For Norma Jeane to finally be able to meet her sibling was almost unbelievable to her. She had antic.i.p.ated it for so long, and the time had finally come. When she got to Detroit she was met at the train station by Berniece, her daughter Mona Rae, and husband, Paris. Paris's sister, Niobe, was also there to meet Norma Jeane.

"Norma Jeane had written to tell me what kind of outfit she would be wearing and what color it would be," Berniece recalled. "Paris and Niobe and I walked out to the tracks and stood waiting while the train screeched to a stop. I wondered which one of us would recognize her first, or if we might possibly miss her. Well, there was no chance of missing her! All the pa.s.sengers stepping off looked so ordinary, and then all of a sudden, there was this tall gorgeous girl. * * All of us shouted at once. None of the other pa.s.sengers looked anything like that: tall, so pretty and fresh, and wearing what she had described, a cobalt blue wool suit and a hat with a heart shaped dip in the brim." All of us shouted at once. None of the other pa.s.sengers looked anything like that: tall, so pretty and fresh, and wearing what she had described, a cobalt blue wool suit and a hat with a heart shaped dip in the brim."

The visit was a good one, not surprisingly. The two sisters got to know one another and spent a great deal of time talking about family history, trying to put together the pieces of stories they'd heard, and looking at photos of relatives. While studying pictures of Gladys-so beautiful in her youth-Berniece wondered what she looked like now. Norma Jeane said she was "still fairly pretty," but also told her that Gladys never smiled. She also allowed that Gladys was "a stranger" to her. "Part of me wants to be with her," she said, "and part of me is afraid of her."

They also talked about Berniece's father, Jasper, the man who had taken her and her brother from Gladys so long ago and raised them with a new wife. As it turned out, Berniece confessed, she and her father weren't close either. She cited his drinking problem as an issue. She also said that she loved her stepmother very much-the woman who had raised her in Gladys's stead.

The pleasant visit was abruptly ended when Norma Jeane learned that her husband had an unexpected leave. So she raced off to see Grace in Chicago before returning to Van Nuys. It's interesting to note that Norma Jeane was at this time sending money to her "Aunt" Grace because apparently Grace and Doc had run into financial difficulties. Norma Jeane certainly wasn't making much at her job, but somehow she found a way to be generous with her salary to someone who had loved her very much over the years. It's also noteworthy that she seemed to forgive Grace for abandoning her when she and her family moved to Virginia without her. By this time, Norma Jeane probably knew that life has its complex twists and turns and people don't always get what they want-and that forgiveness is key to getting on with the business of living.

It was when Norma Jeane returned to California from this trip that her entire world was changed by a fluke moment, in a dramatic way that neither she nor anyone in her life could ever have imagined.

Overnight Success.

At the end of 1944, when Norma Jeane Dougherty returned to work after her vacation, she and a few other women who worked with her were asked to pose for photographs by a military unit that was making a film for army training purposes. The pictures would also appear in a government magazine called Yank. Yank. She wasn't at all sure that she could do it, but she knew she wanted to try. For many years, Grace G.o.ddard had told her that she was pretty, that she was special, and that one day she would be in show business. Of course, this wasn't exactly show business. However, it was definitely exciting. On the day that the photographers, including one named David Conover, came to take her picture in her work clothes-drab gray slacks and a green blouse-she couldn't have been more thrilled. It came easy to her. She wasn't at all nervous. A single moment can alter a person's entire future, and just such a moment occurred when Conover took his first frame of footage of the voluptuous yet somehow chaste-seeming Norma Jeane. Her life changed in that second. "My own future with Norma Jeane was in jeopardy the moment that army photographer clicked his shutter," Jim Dougherty once observed. "Only I didn't know it." She wasn't at all sure that she could do it, but she knew she wanted to try. For many years, Grace G.o.ddard had told her that she was pretty, that she was special, and that one day she would be in show business. Of course, this wasn't exactly show business. However, it was definitely exciting. On the day that the photographers, including one named David Conover, came to take her picture in her work clothes-drab gray slacks and a green blouse-she couldn't have been more thrilled. It came easy to her. She wasn't at all nervous. A single moment can alter a person's entire future, and just such a moment occurred when Conover took his first frame of footage of the voluptuous yet somehow chaste-seeming Norma Jeane. Her life changed in that second. "My own future with Norma Jeane was in jeopardy the moment that army photographer clicked his shutter," Jim Dougherty once observed. "Only I didn't know it."

The phrase "overnight success story" is often used when describing the rapid ascent of certain celebrities to the upper echelons of show business. Often it's just hyperbole. In the case of Norma Jeane Mortensen-soon to be Marilyn Monroe-it happens to be the truth. The story has been told so many times, it can be easily explained by saying that she became popular with photographers and very quickly became an in-demand model. Of course, over the years it has been speculated and even reported as fact that she had s.e.x with these photographers in order to get ahead in the business. But the motivation of the photographers who later claimed to have had romantic relations.h.i.+ps with Marilyn has always been suspect. None ever said anything about having s.e.x with her until she became very famous and it was considered quite the conquest to have had this great s.e.x symbol in bed. One by one, though, stories-and even books!-by these photographers have fallen apart over the years when it comes to detail and specificity. For her part, Marilyn always gave the impression that she was not interested in s.e.x during those years. Maybe that was just public relations malarkey on her part-but she was consistent about it just the same. It would be very surprising, say those who knew her well, to find that she actually slept with photographers in order to advance in the business. After all, it's not as if she wasn't beautiful enough to make it on her appearance alone. In fact, she became successful enough to soon be signed by a modeling agency, which sent her out on even more interviews for work. By the spring of 1946, she had appeared on more than thirty magazine covers.

Besides the speed of her success, what was also fascinating about Norma Jeane's first photo sessions was how quickly she seemed to understand the business of modeling. She was very inquisitive about the process and also highly critical of her appearance. For instance, she asked David Conover questions about lighting, about different camera lenses, about how he coaxed his models into giving their best performances. In meetings with him after the sessions, she would study the contact sheets with the kind of careful scrutiny one might expect from a professional model. She wanted to know what she'd done wrong if an exposure didn't meet with her approval. If her appearance didn't meet her high standards, the picture was rejected. Every single shot had to be perfect, or she would not be happy with it.

Maybe it's not that surprising that Norma Jeane was so intuitive about her appearance on film. After all, from a very early age, she had been attempting to win the favor of others. If Ida loved her enough, maybe she would allow her to call her mother. If she was good enough, maybe Gladys would want her too. If she was pretty enough, maybe she would be praised by Grace. The whole concept of how she was being received by others had always been foremost on her mind, fueled by her insecurity. She had been studying other people for years-those with whom she trafficked in her life, to see what they had to do to gain acceptance in the world, as well as those she didn't know in movie magazines, to see what made them so special. Now, at the age of eighteen, she could step outside of herself and view herself as if she were a separate ent.i.ty. Without even realizing it, she was making an art of communicating human emotion in photographs.

At the same time Norma Jeane's exciting new modeling career was unfolding, Jim Dougherty was overseas on duty. He would have preferred it if she had been home alone, pining for him. In fact, he wrote her a very stern letter telling her that modeling was fine and good temporarily, but that as soon as he got home he expected her to get pregnant and have a family, "and you're going to settle down. You can only have one career, and a woman can't be two places at once." It was interesting that now that she had found something she enjoyed, he had unilaterally decided that they were going to have a baby.

Jim's mother, Ethel, who had always been an ally for Norma Jeane, also disapproved of her modeling. Not only did she keep her son up to date on Norma Jeane's activities (and in a way that probably made them seem like trouble in the making), but she also made it clear to her daughter-in-law that what she was doing was unseemly and could create problems in her marriage. Norma Jeane responded by moving out of the Dougherty house and back into the lower half of her aunt Ana Lower's duplex. Now more than ever, she was proving herself to be the strong, self-reliant girl Ida Bolender had tried to mold. She knew what she had to do, and she was going to do it. When Jim returned on leave in the spring of 1945, he found that he was no longer the center of Norma Jeane's world. She was busy. She didn't need him. She still loved him-maybe-but she no longer felt that she needed him to survive. The dynamic had changed between them, and he didn't like it at all.

Gladys Is Released.

Gladys Baker had tried everything she could to be released from Agnews State Hospital in San Jose. Finally, in August of 1945, doctors decided that she could be discharged. The condition was that she spend a year with her aunt Dora Graham in Oregon. Norma Jeane didn't know what to make of her mother's release. She knew that Gladys still wasn't well. Her few visits with her-one at the hospital and one over lunch with Aunt Ana-had been not at all good. Berniece was much more excited about Gladys's return to the outside world. She equated it with the good news that the war had ended that same month and called Gladys's release her "personal miracle." Of course, Berniece didn't know Gladys at all. She had romanticized about her over the years and hoped to have a relations.h.i.+p with her. Norma Jeane had actually gone through the troubling experience that was Gladys Baker, so she was more realistic.

Soon after Gladys was released, she became completely immersed in Christian Science, which had been recommended to her by Aunt Ana, a pract.i.tioner of the faith. Christian Scientists believe in the power of prayer as the cure for emotional and physical ailments. The sect is controversial and has been so ever since it was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1908. Gladys could not stop reading the many books given her by Ana about the faith. It seemed to be the only thing in which she was truly interested.

Gladys's fascination with the Christian Science doctrine made sense. After all, she had known for years that no matter what people said or did, they couldn't fix her-doctors couldn't, friends couldn't, even her own mother couldn't. Perhaps she thought that by poring over Christian Science books, she might discover a certain secret or fact and then finally she would be happy.

Also at this time, Gladys began wearing a white uniform, white stockings, and white shoes every day as if she were a nurse. She never explained why, and her family could never figure it out. Perhaps she had idealized the nurses she'd known at the sanitarium and thought they led good lives. After all, they were free to leave at the end of the day and be with their loved ones while she and the rest of the patients had to remain locked up. Or maybe she just viewed the nurses as powerful and in command-as she never had been in her own life. As soon as she was out, she began taking temporary jobs in convalescent homes. Norma Jeane found it disconcerting that her mother was tending to people in any kind of medical setting. Others, like Dora, actually hoped Gladys would become a practical nurse, now that she had finally gotten the freedom she so longed for.

Gladys's Plea to Norma Jeane.

In December 1945, Jim Dougherty returned from his tour of duty for the Christmas holidays. He had been gone for eighteen months. In that time, things between him and Norma Jeane had definitely changed, and he knew it as soon as she greeted him at the train station. "She was an hour late," he recalled. "She told me she had a modeling job, and that was her excuse, which didn't exactly make me happy. She embraced me and kissed me, but it was a little cool. I had two weeks off before resuming s.h.i.+pboard duties along the California coast, but I don't think we had more than three or four nights together during that time. She was busy modeling, earning good money. It was my first inkling of her ambition."

Norma Jeane wasn't totally finished with her marriage. She still hoped that she would wake up one day to find that Jim had had a sudden change of heart. "Yes, yes, yes," he would tell her in her fantasy. "I get it now. I understand. And yes, I approve of your career!" Perhaps she hoped for just such a reaction when she showed him her recent photos taken by a rather famous photographer named Andre de Dienes. She hoped he would like them-she knew they were very good-and perhaps they might convince him that she had found her calling. She also displayed some of the many magazine covers on which she had appeared of late. She was keeping a sc.r.a.pbook, which she also proudly displayed, thumbing through the pages and explaining where each photo was taken and for what purpose. By this time, she had even been doing pinup modeling in bathing suits-which she must have known wouldn't make him very happy. The c.u.mulative effect of all of this accomplishment was impressive even to her, as perhaps it would have been to most people, considering how many covers she had racked up in such a short time-how could her husband not be amazed at her achievements? How could he not want her to continue? How could he not want her... to be happy?

"So far as I was concerned, she was turning into another human being," he later recalled. "She showed me the pictures, her new dresses and shoes-as if I cared about such things. She was proud of her new popularity at Blue Book [the modeling agency with which she had signed] and she expected me to be, too." Jim's lackl.u.s.ter reaction did not bode well for him or his marriage. Norma Jeane was disappointed and couldn't understand why he wouldn't at least try to act as if he were happy for her.

Jim felt that he needed time alone with his wife so that he could talk to her and try to resolve some of their issues-in other words, get her to acquiesce to his desire that she quit her career. He decided that the two of them should drive to Oregon and visit Gladys at her Aunt Dora's home. Norma Jeane agreed, though reluctantly. She knew she had to see her mother, but she also knew that every time she had done so in the past she had regretted it. She also probably had ambivalent feelings about being alone in a car with her husband for so many days, especially since they were not getting along.

The visit did not go well, according to Jim. "My first encounter with Gladys was a little of a shock," he later recalled. "She didn't seem to connect with me at all. Her mind was out in left field somewhere." Jim also was surprised at how much Gladys and Norma Jeane resembled each other. "You could almost see what Norma Jeane was going to look like when she got to be that age. Gladys was a pretty woman. With proper makeup and her hair done, she would have been a gorgeous person."

Gladys sat upright in a wicker chair and was completely unresponsive when he and Norma Jeane walked into the room. She was wearing a white nylon dress and blouse and white stockings and shoes-her "nurse's uniform." Norma Jeane knelt at her mother's feet and held her delicate hands, gazing into her vacant eyes, trying to divine what it was she was thinking, how she felt about seeing her.

"How are you, Mother? Are you happy to finally be out?" she asked her, somewhat tentatively.

Gladys smiled absently.

Still on her knees in front of her mother, Norma Jeane tried to fill the void by talking about her recent trip to see Berniece. "She can't wait to come and see you, Mother," she told Gladys. However, it didn't matter what anecdote Norma Jeane relayed, nothing seemed to interest her mother. "Mother, please," Norma Jeane said, a searching expression on her face. Gladys answered her plea with total silence. But then, suddenly, Gladys tightened her grip on Norma Jeane's hands, leaned in, and whispered in her ear that she wanted to come and live with her.

Norma Jeane looked at her, a startled expression lingering on her face. She didn't know how to respond. Truly, that was the last thing she'd expected, or even wanted. She was getting ready to leave an old life-her marriage-behind, and, hopefully, begin a new one-her career. Gladys represented a huge responsibility. No doubt, if the two had enjoyed a warm relations.h.i.+p over the years, she would have been much more inclined to take on such a burden. However, this woman before her was one she didn't know at all, and was also unstable and unpredictable. Yet, still, she was her mother. Quick tears came to Norma Jeane's eyes. She let go of Gladys's hands and stood up. "We have to go now, Mother," she said, gathering her coat while shooting Jim a desperate look. "I'm going to leave you Aunt Ana's address and phone number, so you know where I am. Call me anytime." Then, with tears by now streaming down her face, she bent down and kissed Gladys on the forehead. Gladys had no reaction. Norma Jeane and Jim turned and walked away.

The days driving back to Los Angeles were spent quietly, Norma Jeane deep in thought and terribly unhappy. The trip certainly did not go as Jim had planned. He didn't have the chance to really talk to Norma Jeane about his concerns relating to their marriage and her career. However, when they got back to Aunt Ana's, it all came out. "I've had enough of this modeling business," he told Norma Jeane, putting his foot down. "I'm not going to put up with it another moment. Here's what's going to happen. When I get back here in April on my next leave, I want you back in our own house. And I want you to have made up your mind that you're finished with this silliness, and then we're going to have children. Do you understand, Norma Jeane?" She nodded, but didn't say a word. She would later recall her heart pounding so much that evening, she couldn't sleep. A photographer had given her a bottle of prescription sleeping pills in case she was unable to get a good night's sleep before a session, but she was afraid to take them.

Jim Gets a Surprise: Gladys.

The first four months of 1946 were busy. Norma Jeane, now almost twenty, had never worked so hard. All of the photographers who took her picture were amazed at how well they came out, and it was clear that she was no longer a novice. She'd known what she wanted in terms of results from the very beginning. Now she was getting those results. She was working nonstop-so much so that one friend, Jacquelyn Cooper, wondered if perhaps she was sleeping with the photographers. "I said she could tell me because I won't breathe a word of it if you're having affairs with these fellows," she recalled. "She said, 'Absolutely not!' And what did I think she was? Very bothered, like that, like I'd hurt her feelings even wondering if she was sleeping with these fellows. In fact, she was so bothered she didn't pay attention to me for days."

"Men who tried to buy me with money made me sick," Marilyn recalled years later. "There were plenty of them. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up."

She was working a great deal. But she confided in one photographer that she would sometimes, as she put it, "get down in the dumps." She said that she would have "dark moods that came from nowhere." In those times, she said, it was as if she "didn't have the answers to anything." These particular comments from her are interesting because they call to mind what her grandmother, Della, and mother, Gladys, used to call "the doldrums." But perhaps the following terribly prophetic statement says it best about Marilyn's dark mood swings during this time in her life: "Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren't entirely black-not yet. When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you're laughing again."

During this time, while Jim was away and she was working with a series of different photographers, something else happened that would change things for Norma Jeane and, in a lot of ways, for future generations of admirers. It occurred in February 1946. At the suggestion of her agent, Emmeline Snively, Norma Jeane had her hair first straightened and then stripped of its chestnut brown color and changed to a shade of golden blonde. It was all in preparation for a shampoo print advertis.e.m.e.nt. Now, more than ever, Norma Jeane Baker Mortensen Dougherty was starting to look very much like Jean Harlow. But more important, she began to look like another great screen star, one of the greatest, in fact, of all time. She began to look like Marilyn Monroe. The transformation was almost complete. Norma Jeane Mortensen was almost a woman of the past, certainly as far as her husband was concerned.

In April, Jim returned from duty-as he had promised. However, Norma Jeane did not meet him at San Pedro Bay-as she had promised. Upset, he jumped into a taxi and went straight to the small house that the couple shared in Van Nuys. After paying the cabbie, he walked toward the home and noticed the drapes open. He peeked in. All of the furniture seemed to be in place. He caught a glimpse of Norma Jeane walking by. Apparently, she had done what he had demanded. She was there, at least. Now he might have a chance to talk some sense into her, and perhaps save his marriage. He must have been relieved. However, any sense of relief was to be short-lived. Jim Dougherty put his key into the lock and opened the door. And there she stood.

Not Norma Jeane.

Gladys.

How Gladys Lost Her Children.

She's been through so much in her life," Norma Jeane told Jim. "I can't put her out on the street."

"But she's crazy," Jim said in protest.

"If you'd been through what she's been through, maybe you'd be crazy, too."

Norma Jeane had a great deal of empathy for her mother because she was privy to a story only those closest to the family knew. It was the story of how Gladys's children-Norma Jeane's half brother and sister-were kidnapped.

Back in 1922, Gladys Baker-who was twenty-two, just two years older than Norma Jeane was in 1946-had already married and divorced Jasper, her first husband. She now had custody of their children, Berniece and little Jackie. However, Jasper was concerned about his ex-wife's behavior, claiming that she was unfit due to her overactive social life and her heavy drinking. Despite his concerns, Jasper left Los Angeles and headed for his native Kentucky, vowing to return to check in on his children.

Months later, he arrived unexpectedly at his mother-in-law Della's home and found the children alone with her. He easily tracked Gladys down at a speakeasy a few blocks away. Gladys didn't see him, though, when he arrived at and then left the smoke-filled "diner." A few minutes later, one of the other revelers mentioned to Gladys that he had just seen her ex-husband. It was impossible, Gladys said, because Jasper wasn't even in town. "But I could've sworn I just saw him," her friend said. The moment hung awkwardly. Gladys shrugged and returned to her tipsy afternoon with the fellows. To hear her later recall the incident to relatives, she had convinced herself, at least for a short time, that her friend was mistaken. Yet, as she sipped on her drink, she grew concerned that maybe Jasper had had been skulking around. As she sat thinking, her mind became flooded with terrible memories of their troubled relations.h.i.+p. He had told her on more occasions than she could count that she wasn't fit to be a mother. It didn't take long before Gladys's worry built to the point where she simply had to leave the diner and return home to make sure her children were safe. been skulking around. As she sat thinking, her mind became flooded with terrible memories of their troubled relations.h.i.+p. He had told her on more occasions than she could count that she wasn't fit to be a mother. It didn't take long before Gladys's worry built to the point where she simply had to leave the diner and return home to make sure her children were safe.

As she reached her block, she began sprinting toward her home, her youth apparent as she flew down the street. When she finally got to the house, she stopped dead in her tracks. On the front steps stood her mother, Della, smoking a cigarette and weeping. Gladys bolted up the steps and burst through the front door. Her children were gone.

The first few weeks without her son and daughter were a confusing period for Gladys Baker. After she contacted Jasper's family and they convinced her that he had not returned to Kentucky, she set out on foot to find him and her two children. First she headed to San Diego, where he had once mentioned he might find work as a longsh.o.r.eman. Thus began a four-month-long odyssey of hitchhiking, cheap motels, and the obligatory speakeasies that had become Gladys's only social outlet. From the road, she wrote to a cousin, "I am doing what I can. I do not know if it is enough. I don't know how I am getting by." The trip was fruitless. Gladys seemed hardened by her pointless quest, and Della decided that she would never interrogate her daughter about her awful time searching. "It was as if her smile had died," Della told one relative a number of years later. "She always seemed like a child to me before, but when she returned she was a woman. To tell you the truth, I had grown used to arguing with her. But she had no gumption left. She was just a very sad woman."

After Gladys returned to her mother's home, she found a letter from her brother-in-law, Audrey, which had been delivered in her absence. Concerned for her emotional well-being, Audrey confessed in his letter that he'd been concealing vital information from her: His brother, Jasper, had actually been living with their mother for the past four months in Flat Lick, Kentucky-with the children. He suggested that Gladys move on with her life and not attempt to contact Jasper.

Della later recalled watching tears run down Gladys's face as she read Audrey's letter. Although Della tried to lighten her daughter's spirits, there was nothing she could do for her on that day. It was spent mostly in somber silence. That night, before bedtime, Della brought Gladys a large bowl of soup. The next morning, when she went in to awaken her daughter, the dish sat on the nightstand, untouched-and Gladys was gone.

Gladys. .h.i.tchhiked most of the way to Kentucky, riding the occasional bus when she grew tired of thumbing rides and being pa.s.sed up. Her first stop was Louisville, where she decided to spend a day putting herself back together. She knew that the months spent traveling had not been kind and she wanted to at least appear well-rested when her children saw her for the first time.

On the day she got to Flat Lick, her plan was to march up to her mother-in-law's front door and demand that her children be handed over to her. They would all then return to Los Angeles and, hopefully, forget the events of recent months. Gladys's intentions to wrench her children from their paternal grandmother's arms did not go as she intended, however. Something had gotten in the way of her plan, something so simple-laughter.

While standing across the street from her mother-in-law's modest home, Gladys watched as Jackie and Berniece playfully chased each other. As the two giggled and ran around the yard, she couldn't help but notice little Jackie's p.r.o.nounced limp. How well she remembered that injury. It had happened back in 1920, when Jackie was three. While driving from Los Angeles to visit Jasper's mother at this very home, the couple began a fierce argument. Jackie had been sitting in the backseat, unattended. In a moment almost too terrible to imagine, the toddler tumbled out of their 1909 Ford Model T roadster, a doorless vehicle, while his parents were busy arguing. When they finally arrived in Kentucky with the injured child, Jasper's family was of course horrified and wanted to know what in the world could have happened. Even though Jasper had been the one at the wheel, he told everyone that his negligent wife had been responsible for the accident because she'd not been properly minding their child. For her part, Gladys was already distraught because of what had occurred, and to now be solely blamed for it by Jasper was almost more than she could bear. She couldn't fathom that the man she so loved had turned against her that way. Meanwhile, young Jackie had suffered a serious hip injury, from which he would never fully recover.

Now the boy's limp was a reminder of his terrible accident. Gladys watched her children for a bit, unnoticed. They seemed so happy in the large yard with a tire swing amid what appeared to be acres of woods surrounding the home. Gladys turned and walked away, unseen.

However, she simply couldn't leave Kentucky without her children. But how would she ever be able to retrieve them from the place they currently called home? She knew that her deficiency as a mother would be Jasper's primary defense for having taken Jackie and Berniece. If she were going to get them back, she saw only two options. She could steal them-just as Jasper had done. Or she could prove that she was a new woman. If Jasper and his family saw her as someone capable of caring for her children, maybe they would willingly allow her to take them. So, for a time, Gladys would begin a new life in Louisville.

Within weeks, she had altered her appearance dramatically, wearing simpler, more matronly attire. She also began to go without makeup, something she hadn't done for many years. Her toned-down appearance may have helped her land the precise position she sought. She was hired as a nanny for a well-off couple, Margaret and John "Jack" Cohen, on the outskirts of town. This job would not simply be a way for her to survive financially, it would afford her the opportunity to become the kind of woman she hoped her ex-husband would approve of, a woman worthy of being called a mother.

The Cohens were a happily married couple, and their daughter, Norma Jeane, was a well-behaved three-year-old child. The new Gladys was, in this family's mind, the ideal caretaker, treating their daughter as if she were her own. However, Gladys's only goal was to one day regain custody of her own children.

Months later, when she believed her transformation had been completed, she knocked on the Bakers' front door. Her mother-inlaw answered, with only a few awkward words spoken through the crack in the door. When her ex-husband appeared, he asked Gladys to come into the house. As she entered, she saw a wide-eyed little girl standing by the kitchen. However, before Gladys even had a chance to say h.e.l.lo, the youngster's grandmother grabbed the girl and disappeared with her into another room.

Gladys's meeting with Jasper was strained, her attempts to present herself as an improved woman falling on deaf ears. Jasper was firm in his position that she would not get the children back, no matter what she said or did to convince him that she had changed. She asked if she could at least visit them. Jasper said she could see Berniece, but not little Jackie. After months of being in agonizing pain, the boy was now in a hospital and there was no telling how long he would have to remain there. Jasper reminded Gladys that her neglect was primarily to blame for the child's desperate condition. Devastated, Gladys then spent a short time with Berniece before her ex-mother-in-law asked her to leave.

Now, back in the home of the perfect family with the perfect child, things felt different to her. She no longer saw the Cohens as role models. In fact, their very existence seemed to mock her inability to change, to truly alter the woman she had once been and become someone new, someone respectable. "Each idyllic day with that family was another dagger in Gladys's broken heart," says a cousin of hers interviewed for this book. "She couldn't help but mourn the loss of what once was, what could have been."

While Gladys did her best to appear as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred during her weekend away-supposedly with her aunt-her sinking mood made that impossible. As had happened so many times in her past, she slipped into the dark place that was by now all too familiar to her. The progress she had made, the many joyful scenarios she had imagined, the hope she once had-all of it was gone. The "new" Gladys Baker was dying a slow death.

The First Norma Jeane.

It's been written in countless Marilyn Monroe biographies that Gladys Baker's baby, Norma Jeane, was named after the actress Jean Harlow. However, this can't be true, since Jean Harlow's real name was Harlean Carpenter and wasn't changed until 1928, two years after Gladys gave birth. Other accounts have it that the child was named after another actress, Norma Shearer. Still others insist it was Norma Talmadge. None of this is true. In the 1960s, Gladys explained the derivation to Rose Anne Cooper, a young nurse's aide at the Rock Haven Sanitarium.