The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane Is Born

On the morning of June 1, 1926, Della Monroe’s daughter, Gladys Baker, gave birth to a child in the charity ward of the Los Angeles General Hospital (known today as the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center at 1200 North State Street). A collection had been taken up from concerned coworkers at Consolidated in order to tide Gladys over until she could return to work, and also for any medical expenses that would not be covered by charity. As she lay in the recovery room, bone tired from hours of labor, there was of course no expectant father pacing in a waiting room hoping for news about his child’s arrival. Even her own mother was nowhere in sight since she’d taken off for India the previous December.

It should be remembered that during this period, there was a tremendous judgment on single mothers. No doubt Gladys could feel the condemnation directed toward her from the nurses at General Hospital. The paperwork she was required to fill out upon admittance did little to quiet any uneasiness she felt because of her situation. For instance, one of the first questions asked on the form was the father’s name. Gladys wrote that a man named Edward Mortenson was the baby’s father, even though she had been separated from him for some time. She also misspelled his name as “Mortensen.” That she and the father didn’t share a last name was controversial enough, but it was the response to the next question that was sure to start tongues wagging: father’s residence. Examining the paperwork from that day as filled out by Gladys, the word “unknown” appears to be scrawled in a bolder, more deliberate handwriting. Indeed, filling out this paperwork had to have been difficult for her. She provided her address, which was no problem. Then, in answering the question of how many children she’d previously given birth to, her reply was “three”—odd, since she hadn’t yet had the third. The next question—“Number of children of this mother now living”—was either answered incorrectly or dishonestly, depending on her understanding of it. She said that only “one” of those three was still living. Of course, she had borne two other children, who were presently being raised by her ex-husband, Jasper. Yes, Gladys did have a colorful past. Maybe she’d been deliberately dishonest in order to garner sympathy from an attending nurse. Perhaps she thought that if her first two children had passed away, she could be forgiven for having this third child out of wedlock. Whatever her reasoning, the questions put to her and the way she responded certainly suggest that the day was difficult her. Years later she told a friend, “I keep dreaming of that [hospital]. Everything seemed bright, too bright, and the nurses all seemed like nuns to me, mean awful nuns.”

As is the case with many women, Gladys had a major emotional spiral immediately after the birth. Postpartum depression may have been a factor. It certainly appeared to many people in the family that her mother, Della, suffered from it as well—and maybe never got past it. Whatever the case, Gladys seemed disoriented and troubled for many days after giving birth. When the nurse brought the baby into the recovery room, the tiny child was placed on her mother’s chest. “She just held her, with her eyes closed,” Della later wrote to a family member when speaking of that moment, even though she wasn’t present for it. “I feel awful. I know she can’t keep [the baby]. She is not well. She needs to get her mind right first.”

Gladys would have two weeks with her baby girl before she would have to do what she had agreed to do: Before her mother had left town, Gladys had agreed to hand over the infant to a stranger, Ida Bolender. During those two weeks, something dreadful occurred, making it clear that the arrangement made between Della and Ida was necessary. A friend and coworker of Gladys’s at Consolidated Studios named Grace McKee came by the house to take care of the baby for an afternoon while Gladys went grocery shopping. (Grace would play a very important role in the lives of Gladys and Norma Jeane in years to come.) When Gladys returned, she went into a manic state for reasons unknown and began to accuse Grace of poisoning the child. One thing led to another, and somehow Grace ended up on the receiving end of a kitchen knife, stabbed by Gladys. Though Grace’s wound was superficial, it was clear that Gladys could be a danger to her baby. After that violent episode, which panicked and bewildered everyone, it was an easy decision to turn Norma Jeane over to Ida.

The emotionally charged transfer happened on June 13, 1926—that was the sad day Gladys Baker showed up on Ida Bolender’s doorstep with a two-week-old infant. After a long and difficult farewell, she walked out the front door of Ida’s house without the child named Norma Jeane Mortensen. ^* Norma Jeane was a help less infant who had entered this world without any form of welcome. There was no freshly furnished nursery awaiting her, no tiny wardrobe, and in fact no one on earth whose future plans included her. She spent the first few days of her life simply being sustained, not nurtured. She was a burden, one that needed to be unloaded. No one can know for certain, but it very well may have been at a tender age that she began to sense that something wasn’t quite right in her world—that there wasn’t sufficient attention being paid her. Indeed, she would spend much of the rest of her life trying to change those circumstances—but to do so, she would need to one day become… Marilyn Monroe.