The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

A New—and Temporary—Life

When Gladys Baker picked up her daughter from the Bolenders, she did not arrive alone. With her was her close friend who had once babysat Norma Jeane, the woman who, as it would turn out, would become a key figure in the young girl’s life, Grace Atchinson McKee. She was Gladys’s roommate for some time and worked with her at Consolidated Studios, also as a splicer, or “cutter,” of film negatives.

Consolidated was a film laboratory and processing company, the leader in its industry for many decades in Los Angeles. Finally, Gladys was making a good wage there and was able to settle into a more stable life. It was tedious work, though. Basically, she spent six days a week reviewing endless rolls of film negatives in order to cut the sections that had been previously marked by studio editors. She then handed the material over to another department for the final splicing. The walls of the building in which she worked were thick cement with not many windows. There was no air conditioning, and at times it was absolutely stifling inside. However, it was a steady job, and that was all that mattered. She’d also made a good friend there, Grace.

Born Clara Grace Atchinson in Montana, she was thirty-seven in 1933. Grace—a two-time divorcee by then—was a petite woman like Gladys, barely five feet tall. ^* In fact, they were able to wear the same clothes, and they often did. She was known for her personal magnetism. When Grace was in a room, it was difficult not to focus on her, so powerful was her presence. Although not beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, she was so vital and charismatic she gave the impression of beauty. Her wavy hair was usually dyed a peroxide blonde but sometimes left to its original brown color. She also had deep-set brown eyes and a thin mouth usually curled into a smile. Grace aspired to become an actress, but though she had plenty of ambition and maybe even some talent, she would never apply herself to that goal. She once wrote to a cousin, “If I could only have Jean Harlow’s life, what a good time I would have. To be an actress is my dream, I guess. I don’t know that it could happen. But, still, I can dream, can’t I?”

Grace and Gladys got along famously, even though they obviously did have their problems from time to time. It’s a testament to Grace’s loyalty to Gladys that they were able to get past that troubling stabbing incident, shortly after Norma Jeane was born. Both were good-time gals in the Roaring Twenties and as such had no problem finding bootleg liquor and men. To say that they merely enjoyed their flapper-girl lifestyles would be to understate their fun times. “We have FUN,” Grace wrote to her cousin, making sure to capitalize each letter in the word.

Moreover, Gladys began to depend on Grace for direction and advice in almost all areas of her life. With Della gone, she needed someone to lean on, and for now that would be Grace. They started acting as a team, making joint decisions about their lives. Grace was smart and self-sufficient, and she always felt she knew the solution to every problem—not just her own, but everyone else’s as well. She felt compelled to give people advice, even those who didn’t ask for it. It was one of the reasons her marriages had not worked out. For instance, she’d often start a conversation with the statement, “You know what your problem is?” Then she would proceed to explain the “problem” whether a solution was asked for or not. Gladys, who never had a guiding maternal influence, gravitated to Grace and appreciated that her best friend cared enough about her to offer advice.

“In many ways, Grace lived her life through others,” Bea Thomas, who knew Grace, observed in 1976. “Some felt she wasn’t particularly attractive and that she tried to do for others what she couldn’t do for herself in terms of beauty. She had an inner beauty, though, and you can see it from her photos. However, she gave Gladys a complete makeover. When she told her that her brunette hair made her look ‘mousy’ and suggested bright red as a more suitable color, Gladys promptly dyed her hair. When she told Gladys that her clothing style was too conservative and suggested she be more provocative, Gladys agreed. The two went shopping for new dresses and it was Grace—not Gladys—who selected each one of them. Grace also felt that Gladys’s vocabulary should be expanded, and often corrected her grammar when the two were with friends. Grace couldn’t have children, so she encouraged Gladys to take more responsibility for Norma Jeane.”

At this time, Gladys and Grace were living in a very small apartment in Hollywood. Norma Jeane had been there before. Occasionally, Gladys would pick her up at the Bolenders’ and bring her to her home for an awkward visit or sleepover. Marilyn would later say that she spent most of this time with her mother “in the closet of her bedroom hiding among her clothes. She seldom spoke to me except to say, ‘Don’t make so much noise, Norma.’ She would say this even when I was lying in bed at night and turning the pages of a book. Even the sound of a page turning made her nervous.”

Now, suddenly, mother and daughter were expected to forge a happy relationship. It wouldn’t be easy. After all, they didn’t even really know each other. Once Norma Jeane began living with her, Gladys became convinced that the girl was unhappy. “She spent seven years living on a spacious farm, and now this?” she asked Grace. “I’m sure she’s miserable here.” In fact, Gladys was not wrong. Norma Jeane missed her Aunt Ida terribly, as well as her foster siblings. She was just a little girl who had been uprooted from the only life she’d known, the only people she’d ever loved. It must have seemed so unfair. She certainly couldn’t hide her emotions about it, even if they did upset her mother. “Are we going to visit Aunt Ida soon?” she kept asking. However, Gladys and Grace had made the decision that it would be best if they not allow Norma Jeane to spend any more time at the Bolenders’. They felt it would just make her adjustment to her new life all the more difficult.

“Meanwhile, Gladys’s depression was deepening during this time and she seemed more confused than ever,” said Esther Thompson, whose mother, Ruth, worked with Grace at Consolidated. The two were very close friends. “She said she needed more time to make some changes. She wanted to be more settled and possibly even be living in a house when she finally had her daughter in her care. Then Grace, who believed that anything was possible, encouraged her that such a thing could happen if they just put their heads together.”

It’s interesting that Grace McKee felt so certain she and Gladys would be able to buy a home, given that the economy in America was in such desperate shape in 1933. Almost fifteen million Americans were unemployed. Of these, about two million were wandering aimlessly about the country in search of work. Hundreds of thousands of people were homeless, living in tents or abandoned ramshackle dwellings. Banks in thirty-eight states were forced to close as anxious investors began withdrawing all of their deposits. It’s almost impossible to imagine the country in such turmoil, but indeed the Great Depression was a devastating time in our history. From the beginning, America’s new president, fifty-one-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tried to restore popular confidence. “The only thing we have to fear,” he said in his inaugural address in March 1933, “is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” One thing was certain about Grace McKee, and that was that she was fearless. Her confidence that she would find a way inspired Gladys to believe that maybe their future would be a bright one, despite what was going on all around them.

Therefore, it was the two women’s decision to give Norma Jeane to yet another foster family—the Atkinsons—but just temporarily. George and Maud Atkinson, both English, were in the periphery of show business as bit players in films. George had also worked as a stand-in for George Arliss, the distinguished British actor and the first Brit to win an Academy Award as Best Actor. He and Maud had a young daughter named Nellie who was around Norma’s age. It was decided that Norma Jeane could be happy with them while Gladys and Grace strategized their next move.

Roosevelt had promised that he would not stand by and watch the Depression deepen. He wanted to restore the public’s confidence in the government, and to that end he established a number of programs between 1933 and 1938 in his so-called New Deal for the country, a way to give relief and reform to Americans during such incredibly difficult times. Indeed, in order to make it possible for Americans with small incomes to purchase homes with low-cost mortgages, he established the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. In July 1933, Grace did her research and figured out a way for Gladys to take advantage of Roosevelt’s plan. She took care of all of the paperwork and navigated her way through all of the red tape in order to help make a real estate purchase. However, at the last minute, Grace had second thoughts about the timing of such a financial commitment after hearing the studio they worked for was going on strike and knowing that would mean trouble for them.

In August, Gladys purchased a two-story home with three bedrooms on Arbol Drive near the Hollywood Bowl. Gladys made the down payment of $5,000 by obtaining a loan from the Mortgage Guarantee Company of California. Interestingly, on the application she falsely stated that she was “Gladys Baker, a married woman.”

Once in the home, Gladys was unsure about raising Norma Jeane there. She simply could not get past the notion—or the excuse—that Norma Jeane would be unhappy, no matter how much Grace tried to convince her that this was not the case. In the end, Gladys was just nervous having Norma Jeane and assuming responsibility for her. It’s understandable. After all, she knew in her heart that she was unstable and was never sure how she would react to everyday situations. From time to time, she still heard those voices in her head, scaring her, taunting her, warning her of some imminent—and in truth, nonexistent—reality.

It was Grace’s idea to have the Atkinsons move in with Gladys and Norma Jeane so that Gladys wouldn’t feel the weight of too much responsibility. As it happened, the Atkinsons were having a difficult time financially and decided it would be a good idea. Though this was a strange turn of events, it did make Gladys more comfortable.

Whereas the Bolenders were religious and, where Ida was concerned, quite strict, the Atkinsons were more easygoing in nature. “They liked to drink a little, smoke, dance and sing and play cards, all the things that I had been taught were sinful,” Marilyn Monroe would recall many years later. “And they still seemed like very nice people to me.”

One day, George Atkinson showed Norma Jeane a magazine with the actress Joan Bennett on the cover and said that she looked like a younger version of Bennett. Norma Jeane didn’t think she resembled Bennett at all, she later said, “but it was an interesting moment for me. It made me think…” Indeed, it was during the months that she knew the Atkinsons that Norma Jeane began to appreciate films and start to wonder what it might be like to be on the screen herself.

The early 1930s were an interesting time in show business history. The strains of FDR’s rousing campaign song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” were still ringing in the ears of Americans in 1933, but Hollywood’s output did not reflect the same euphoria and upbeat mood. At least not yet. Dominating the film capital’s output in 1932 had been crime dramas from Warner Bros. (Scarface, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, both starring Paul Muni); horror pictures (Freaks, Murders in the Rue Morgue, White Zombie, The Old Dark House, The Mummy); the star-heavy Grand Hotel and the back-to-nature jungle movie Tarzan the Ape Man, both from MGM; and Marlene Dietrich’s vampy eastern, Shanghai Express. Quigley’s Almanac’s first annual Top Ten list of movie stars for 1932–33 was headed by sixty-four-year-old character actress Marie Dressler. She would be dead within two years from cancer, but her place would shortly be taken by the world’s soon-to-be most popular child star of all time, Shirley Temple. The following year, 1933, was a different picture, with a mix of Top Ten film fare that included three musicals from Warner Bros.—42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Gold Diggers of 1933. Grace knew just about all there was to know about all of these films—who was in them, who directed them, who produced them. She delighted in bringing Norma Jeane to see these kinds of films with the Atkinsons and encouraged the little girl that, one day, it might be her up on that screen.

Though Gladys didn’t know what to make of her daughter’s sudden interest in being an entertainer, she did sometimes take Norma Jeane to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to see the latest film. Like many generations of movie buffs to come, Norma Jeane Mortensen would put her hands and feet into the cement imprints of famous stars of the day, thrilled at the opportunity to be so “close” to the actors and actresses she’d grown to love by their work in her favorite movies. It’s worth noting, though, that during this time Norma Jeane would also feel the influence of the Bolenders in her life. She would remember feeling somewhat guilty about enjoying the more carefree lifestyles of Gladys, the Atkinsons, and even Grace. Therefore, she would get down on her knees at night and pray for all of them—as Ida Bolender might have insisted—in the hope that they be forgiven their sins.