The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane in an Orphanage

The next chapter in young Norma Jeane’s life has always been confusing to Marilyn Monroe historians. In the fall of 1935, Grace McKee decided to take nine-year-old Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home Society at 815 North El Centro Avenue in Hollywood. ^* The question has always been why Grace, who not only had strong maternal instincts toward Norma Jeane but also a goal of stardom in mind for her, would suddenly put her in an orphanage. Some Marilyn Monroe historians have theorized that the Atkinsons had become abusive to Marilyn, though she never suggested as much in any of her interviews. However, Grace McKee did tell Berniece many years later that she learned they had not been treating Norma Jeane well and dismissed them. That may have been true, but the Atkinsons also felt they had film opportunities in London and decided to return to their homeland.

At this same time, Grace became the legal custodian of all of Gladys’s affairs and, as such, took on the complicated responsibility of caring for all the loose ends her friend had left behind before being institutionalized. One of her first decisions was to sell Gladys’s home in order to pay off her debts, mostly medical expenses. Next on her agenda was the possibility of adopting Norma Jeane. It was just a seed of an idea, but it was something she would discuss openly with her friends (most of whom seemed to be against it). Grace already thought of the girl as her own and she knew that Gladys would not oppose the idea. For her part, there was no one else Norma Jeane would have wanted to be with at this time, other than perhaps her Aunt Ida. She loved her “Aunt Grace” and felt that she could do no wrong.

By this time, Grace had married and divorced a third husband and was on her fourth. That she was barren had become an issue in all three of her earlier marriages. In fact, it was specifically responsible for the demise of at least one of them and caused tension in the other two. In her fourth marriage, she found a man who came with a ready-made family. Her new husband was Ervin Silliman Goddard—known as Doc. Ten years her junior, he was divorced and had custody of his three children, aged nine, seven, and five. An amateur inventor by trade—thus the nickname—his profession wasn’t exactly a lucrative one. Grace felt that she had to make this marriage work. In her forties, she viewed it as her last hope for true happiness. As strong-minded and self-sufficient as she was, she still wanted to have a romantic partner in life. “I just don’t want to end up old and alone,” she had said. She also felt that little Norma Jeane would be a perfect addition to her new family. However, there was to be a big stumbling block in her way.

Because Norma Jeane had grown so attached to Grace, it became difficult for her to watch her guardian alter her focus and direct some of it not only to a man but, more troubling, to his daughter, Nona, the only one of his three children who was living with him at this time. There’s little doubt that it called to mind Norma Jeane’s growing abandonment issues. She had lost so much in her nine years, and now it must have felt like she might lose Grace as well. Doubtless in reaction to these disconcerting feelings, Norma Jeane suddenly became obstreperous. She started having surprising temper tantrums and alarming emotional outbursts. She also began making impossible demands of Grace, crying whenever she couldn’t be with her. Sometimes she and Nona got along beautifully, but often they did not. Grace found herself being harsh and exacting where Norma Jeane was concerned, and that wasn’t like her at all.

Norma Jeane’s fear of losing Grace quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doc felt that they didn’t have enough money to support the one child living with them, and he wanted to bring his other two children into the household at some point soon. “I think she has to go,” he said of Norma Jeane. Grace feared that if something didn’t change very quickly, she would end up alone again. She definitely didn’t want to lose her new husband. What she really wanted was to adopt Norma Jeane, bring her into the domestic fold, and have all of them live happily together. At a loss as to how to handle this complicated situation, she made a difficult decision. Taking Norma Jeane for a short, private walk, she explained to her that she would have to put her into an orphanage, “but just for a little while, I promise.” Of course, Norma Jeane didn’t understand. “I can be a good girl,” she said, crying. “Please don’t send me away.” Grace tried to calm her, but it was useless.

Somehow, it’s not known how, Ida Bolender heard that Norma Jeane was going to be sent to an orphanage. “ ‘Over my dead body’ was her reaction,” said a relative of hers. “She said that she simply wouldn’t allow it. She called Grace and said, ‘Please, I am begging you to now allow us to adopt that child. Or, at the very least, let us take care of her again. Don’t put her in an orphanage. Think of what’s best for her. Her brother and sisters miss her. We love her. She has a home here. Don’t do this!’ ”

It was clear that, by this time, Grace Goddard did not like Ida. In fact, she felt that Ida had been much too territorial where Norma Jeane was concerned. Besides, she had made a promise to Gladys that she would never allow Ida to have the girl again. Gladys had apparently told Grace that she was afraid that if they allowed Ida to ever take in Norma Jeane, they would never see her again. Of course, this was Gladys’s sickness talking, yet Grace allowed it to influence her. Thus the two women had it in their heads that Ida Bolender was the enemy, and there was nothing Ida could do to change that perception.

Ida Bolender wrote Grace Goddard a long letter at this time, reminding her of all she had done for Norma Jeane. “We loved her, we cared for her… when she was sick, we were there for her. My husband and I feel that we were the only family she had ever known and we would happily take her back rather than see her be sent to a frightening place like an orphanage.”

“Thank you for your kind offer,” Grace wrote back to Ida. “But we have already made suitable arrangements for Norma Jeane.”

On September 13, 1935, Grace packed up Norma Jeane’s things in one suitcase and one shopping bag and drove the little girl to her new home.

“I thought I was going to a prison,” Marilyn would remember many years later. “What had I done that they were getting rid of me? I was afraid of everything and afraid to show how scared I was. All I could do was cry.”

Norma Jeane was nine years old when she found herself in the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. The adult Marilyn Monroe would always paint her time there—roughly a year and a half, from 1935 to mid-1937—as one of the darkest periods of her life. “Do you know what it’s like to be forced into uncertainty?” she once asked. She would also recall that she did not feel like an orphan since her mother was still alive and she also had her Aunt Grace. She didn’t want to go to the orphanage, and she stood on the steps of the building crying out, “But I’m not an orphan. I’m not an orphan.” It was just another cruel twist of fate in a life already filled with this kind of despair.

Magda Bernard’s stepbrother, Tony, was at the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home at the same time as Norma Jeane. She recalls, “My family’s circumstances were such that Tony had to stay at the orphanage until we could take him in, but we went to visit him every week. I clearly remember Norma Jeane as being this pretty blue-eyed girl with a big heart who seemed to just want to be loved. She was a beautiful but somehow sad-seeming child.

“The orphanage wasn’t as bad as you might think it was if you judge it only on what Norma [as an adult] would say about it. Personally, I think they did a pretty good job with the kids. There were about sixty children there, twenty-five of them being girls. There were twelve beds to a room. The age range was from about six to fourteen.

“There were holiday parties, day trips to the beach. The orphanage actually had a beach house, so the kids got to go there quite often and play in the sand and ocean. There were presents for everyone at Christmastime. They had a bit of pocket money for sweets. They went to the circus, had many kinds of day trips like that… the Griffith Park Observatory, for instance. They went to the RKO film lot for tours, got to meet celebrities. During the week, they attended the Vine Street School in their gingham uniforms. On Sundays they would get dressed properly so that they could attend the Vine Street Methodist Church. It actually was quite nice for the kids, I think.

“I know in later years Marilyn complained about all of the chores she had to do at the orphanage. I remember reading that she said she had to wash hundreds of dishes and was stuck doing laundry for hours and hours at a time. She said she had to clean toilets and wash floors. She was exaggerating!”

After Marilyn was famous, an orphanage official named Mrs. In-graham was quoted as saying, “I really don’t know why Miss Monroe tells these awful stories about it. And people print them, whatever she says. This story of Marilyn washing dishes is just silly. She never washed any dishes. She never scrubbed toilets. She dried dishes an hour a week. That’s all. She had to make her own bed and keep her section of the girls’ cottage tidy, and that was all.”

“I used to wake up and sometimes I’d think I was dead,” Marilyn once told her friend Ralph Roberts of this time, “like I had died in my sleep, and I wasn’t part of my body anymore. I couldn’t feel myself and I thought that the world had ended. Everything seemed so far away and like nothing else could bother me.”

Perhaps what’s most interesting about these terrible days in her childhood is the way Marilyn described how she would pass the time. She would fall back into her fantasy world, and now her dreams were about being picked from the lot of other children as something special. “I dreamed of myself becoming so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed,” she would recall. “I dreamed of walking very proudly in beautiful clothes and being admired by everyone—men and women—and overhearing words of praise. I made up the praises and repeated them aloud as if someone else were saying them.” ^*