The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

The Voices Return

For just a few months—August until October—life was relatively tranquil for young Norma Jeane Mortenson. She was adjusting well to living with Gladys and the Atkinsons. In September 1933, Norma Jeane enrolled in the second grade at the Selma Avenue elementary school, and she seemed to be settling in with her fellow classmates and teachers. As far as she was concerned, it felt like Gladys was really trying to make it work with her, which no doubt gave her a sense of security. Would it have been too much to ask for it to last more than two months?

Unfortunately, in October, everything was ruined by a letter Gladys received from her former brother-in-law, Audrey. She hadn’t heard from him in years. Now he was writing to give her the horrible news that her thirteen-year-old son, Jackie, had died back in August of tuberculosis of the kidneys. Gladys always hoped that her children were happy in the care of their father and his wife. She didn’t know that Jasper had done a questionable job of raising Jackie. For instance, he’d taken him out of the rehabilitation center against the advice of doctors. Then, there was an incident with a firecracker, which cost the boy an eye. Shortly after, his kidneys began to fail him. “Daddy should have taken him to the hospital,” Gladys’s daughter Berniece once recalled. “Finally, Jackie’s kidneys failed completely.”

Remember that Jackie and Berniece had been born into a relatively stable home. In their first few years, Gladys had every intention of raising them herself. After they were taken from her by Jasper, Gladys reconciled the loss and began to wait for the unfolding of a different period in her life, one where she would be emotionally equipped to be a mother to her two children. She believed that day would come when the children were adults.

In contrast, Norma Jeane was born under vastly different circumstances: illegitimately to a single mother fighting a losing battle with her own psyche. Gladys knew she was giving up this baby—there was no question about it. In her reasoning, Norma Jeane was the child who mattered the least to her. Of course, Norma Jeane always sensed as much. However, on this day, she was reminded of her place in the cruelest of ways. In her anguish, Gladys lashed out at her, “Why wasn’t it you? Why wasn’t it you?” Gladys felt she could have dealt with Norma Jeane’s death—but not Jackie’s.

After that awful day, Norma Jeane had no choice but to watch as her mother went from bad to worse.

Shortly after the news of Jackie’s death, Gladys received a telephone call from a family member: Her grandfather had passed away. During the call, her cousin went on for some time about how Tilford Marion Hogan had apparently gone mad before his death. Also, it wasn’t a death from natural causes—he had hanged himself. Gladys believed that both her parents had gone mad, and now her grandfather too? Worse yet, she had always wondered about her own sanity. With that phone call, the question grew louder: Was she next?

Gladys had tried to disregard the voices in her head for many years. But with tragedy all around her, they became more insistent, impossible to ignore. In trying to cope with her two recent losses, she became delusional, saying that she had heard her son calling out to her, beckoning her to come outside and play with him. She also said she saw her grandfather sitting in different rooms in the house. Both of the Atkinsons were alarmed enough to not even want to be near her. For her part, Grace was also frightened and at a loss as to how to handle the desperate situation—unusual for her in that she was a formidable woman capable of solving almost every problem. However, this one seemed to have no solution. Gladys was slipping away. “It was as if a light went out in her,” Grace would later say. “From that time on, she was in total darkness.”

As if fate hadn’t dealt Gladys enough disappointment and misery, more was on its way. Within weeks of her learning of the suicide of her grandfather, the studio where she and Grace worked was struck by the union. “It seemed like a lot of things happened all at once to put pressure on her,” Grace later told Berniece in what was arguably an understatement.

The first few months of 1934 were dreadful. Norma Jeane spent most of this time watching her mother go further out of her mind. “The poor child witnessed so many hair-raising experiences in the first six months of that year, it’s hard to imagine the way it may have shaped her life,” said Mary Thomas-Strong. “When family members talk about this time, they tend to gloss over it. I think it’s because everyone knows that Norma Jeane suffered through it in many ways, and that there was nothing anyone could do about it. She was living in the house with a mother who was going crazy. Who knows what day-to-day horrors she witnessed? I can tell you, though, that Grace was concerned enough to ask Ida to talk to the girl.”

Indeed, during this time, Ida did telephone Norma Jeane. “Do you want to come back here and live with us, dear?” she asked, unable to keep the concern from her voice. “Because if that’s what you want, Daddy will come and get you. In fact, I think that would be best.” Norma Jeane said that she would have to ask her Aunt Grace for permission. (Norma Jeane knew that Grace wasn’t really her aunt, but she liked to call her so.) When she did, however, Grace became extremely upset and phoned Ida back immediately. “I asked you to speak to the girl just to tell her you still loved her,” Grace said angrily, according to the family’s history. “I certainly didn’t think you were going to try to take her from us again.” Again? Ida’s feelings were immediately hurt. “All I have ever wanted is for that child to feel that she was loved,” she told Grace. “How dare you speak to me like this! I love her too. I raised her for seven years! Have you forgotten?” Grace hung up on her. It would seem that, by this time, raw nerves were barely being controlled.

By the middle of 1934, it was clear that something needed to be done for Gladys. Grace finally decided to take her to a neurologist, where Gladys spent a day undergoing a battery of tests. However, no doubt because mental care in the 1930s was so unsophisticated, there was no clear-cut diagnosis. It was simply decided that she was going insane and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Then one day Grace came home and found Gladys lying on the couch, having what appeared to be some sort of seizure. “She started kicking and yelling,” Grace later recalled. “She was lying on her back, staring up at the staircase and yelling, ‘Somebody’s coming down those steps to kill me.’ ”

There are many conflicting accounts of what happened in the following minutes, some claiming that Gladys had brandished a knife in order to fight off her imagined “attackers.” Marilyn remembered the fallout of the event in her memoir. She and “the English couple” (the Atkinsons) were having breakfast when she heard someone fall down the stairs. It was her mother. Though she was told to stay in the kitchen, the little girl peeped out and managed to catch a glimpse of Gladys screaming, laughing, and acting in a completely irrational manner. With eyes alert and knowing—not even fearful—Norma Jeane seemed to realize that this moment would be a defining one where her mother was concerned. Indeed, Gladys Baker had suffered a severe psychotic break. Because it appeared that she was now a danger to herself and others, the police were called and it was quickly determined that she would be sent for psychiatric evaluation.

Once she was at a hospital, a number of doctors came to the same conclusion. Gladys was diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic and would now have to be committed to the state mental institution, Norwalk Hospital, indefinitely. It seemed to have happened so fast—or had it? Truly, it had been coming for years. Schizophrenia is an often misunderstood brain disorder that affects over 1 percent of the country’s adult population. Each year more than one hundred thousand people are diagnosed with schizophrenia in the United States alone. One in four of them will attempt suicide at least once in their lifetime, and one in ten will succeed. Paranoid schizophrenia—a severe and disabling form of the condition—has frightening symptoms, which most commonly include sufferers hearing voices, thinking others can read their minds, and believing that plots are being developed to harm them. Often, schizophrenics have no signs of the disease until a certain period after adolescence, when a mental shift takes place. While this change in behavior occurs earlier in men (their late teens and early twenties), women sufferers can experience this dramatic shift later, usually in their twenties and thirties.

It’s worth noting that this terrible diagnosis came with some sense of relief for Gladys, as well as for those who loved her. After years of worrying about a total mental collapse in the future, that fear was now relegated to the past. At thirty-two, Gladys Baker had spent much of her life battling the voices—and now, undoubtedly, the voices had won.