The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Gladys’s Sheets, Soaked with Blood

The very week that Marilyn Monroe was suffering through her experiences at Payne Whitney in New York, her mother was having similar problems in the Rock Haven Sanitarium in California.

Gladys Baker Eley, who was now sixty, had by this time been officially diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. It had been clear for many years that this was the case with her. She was extremely unhappy at Rock Haven; indeed she had never been happy at any sanitarium over the years. No one at Rock Haven seemed to believe in or understand Christian Science, which was something Gladys simply could not accept. She was as devout about the religion as ever, sending pamphlets and brochures about it to everyone she knew on a weekly basis, including her daughters, Marilyn and Berniece. Now, with her mental illness affecting her intensely, she’d become firmly convinced that the doctors at Rock Haven had been poisoning her food. She wrote to her daughters that she needed to be released very soon or, as she noted to Berniece, “I will most certainly die in here from all of the poison.” She also believed she was being sprayed with insecticides while she slept. Moreover, because of her faith, she steadfastly refused to take medications that had been prescribed to control her schizophrenia. Therefore, there was no relief for her; her mental state worsened with each passing day.

One evening during the time that Marilyn was in Payne Whitney, Gladys saw a news account of her daughter’s apparent mental breakdown on the television that was watched by the patients at the sanitarium. Apparently upset by what she had seen, she retired to her room. When nurses went to check on her a couple of hours later, her bedsheets were soaked with blood. Gladys was unconscious. Apparently, she had slit her left wrist with a razor blade—where she got it would always remain a mystery. However, instead of slicing her wrist horizontally, which would cause the most blood flow and thus result in a quick death, she cut it in the other direction. Therefore, the bleeding was slower and eventually led to her unconscious state. She was rushed to Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, where she spent three days. Berniece was called. However, she asked that the hospital not contact Marilyn because she felt her half sister already had enough to worry about. Berniece didn’t want to burden her.

Rose Anne Cooper, a nurse’s aide at Rock Haven, recalls, “I personally tried to contact Marilyn Monroe to tell her what had happened. I somehow ended up talking to a man named John who said he was her manager. [Note: Likely this was John Springer, Marilyn’s publicist.] He was very abrupt with me. ‘Is she alive?’ he wanted to know. I said she was. ‘Fine,’ he told me, ‘then Miss Monroe doesn’t need to know this news right now. She has enough problems.’ He told me to call Inez Melson [Marilyn’s business manager]. I did. She was worse. ‘You are being paid handsomely to make sure Mrs. Eley does not hurt herself,’ she said angrily. When I told her that we couldn’t monitor her twenty-four hours a day, she asked, ‘Why not? I would think you would be able to do that. If not, then why are we paying you?’ It was all very unpleasant. Finally, I asked if she would please tell Marilyn that her mother had tried to commit suicide, and she said, ‘I most certainly will do no such thing. I am not going to upset her with this news.’ She told me that it was incumbent upon me to keep very secret anything having to do with Gladys being in Marilyn’s life. She said, ‘This is a secret we have been trying to keep for years, and we expect you to act with great discretion where this is concerned because the studio will otherwise be very upset with the sanitarium.’ I didn’t know what she meant by that and before I had a chance to ask, she hung up. Eventually, I tracked down Gladys’s other daughter, Berniece. She was a lot more sympathetic, but even she said she was not going to give Marilyn the news. ‘I don’t think she could handle it right now,’ she told me. Then she told me to contact Fox’s publicity department. That made no sense to me. If I was supposed to keep this a secret, why would I call the studio’s publicity department? It felt like no one knew what they were doing… so I dropped it.”

When Gladys was finally returned to the sanitarium, she remained heavily sedated for many weeks, never leaving her room. Much later, when she was no longer sedated, she was taken on an outing. Rose Anne Cooper recalled, “A group of women—including Gladys—had been authorized to leave the premises with two nurses as chaperones in order that they may shop for some personal items at a local drugstore. At one point, a nurse realized that Gladys was missing.”

A frantic search commenced to find Gladys. Luckily, a half hour later, they found her sitting at a bus stop. Gladys explained that she was headed to Kentucky. “I need to find my children,” she said. “My husband has kidnapped my children.”