The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

How Gladys Lost Her Children

She’s been through so much in her life,” Norma Jeane told Jim. “I can’t put her out on the street.”

“But she’s crazy,” Jim said in protest.

“If you’d been through what she’s been through, maybe you’d be crazy, too.”

Norma Jeane had a great deal of empathy for her mother because she was privy to a story only those closest to the family knew. It was the story of how Gladys’s children—Norma Jeane’s half brother and sister—were kidnapped.

Back in 1922, Gladys Baker—who was twenty-two, just two years older than Norma Jeane was in 1946—had already married and divorced Jasper, her first husband. She now had custody of their children, Berniece and little Jackie. However, Jasper was concerned about his ex-wife’s behavior, claiming that she was unfit due to her overactive social life and her heavy drinking. Despite his concerns, Jasper left Los Angeles and headed for his native Kentucky, vowing to return to check in on his children.

Months later, he arrived unexpectedly at his mother-in-law Della’s home and found the children alone with her. He easily tracked Gladys down at a speakeasy a few blocks away. Gladys didn’t see him, though, when he arrived at and then left the smoke-filled “diner.” A few minutes later, one of the other revelers mentioned to Gladys that he had just seen her ex-husband. It was impossible, Gladys said, because Jasper wasn’t even in town. “But I could’ve sworn I just saw him,” her friend said. The moment hung awkwardly. Gladys shrugged and returned to her tipsy afternoon with the fellows. To hear her later recall the incident to relatives, she had convinced herself, at least for a short time, that her friend was mistaken. Yet, as she sipped on her drink, she grew concerned that maybe Jasper had been skulking around. As she sat thinking, her mind became flooded with terrible memories of their troubled relationship. He had told her on more occasions than she could count that she wasn’t fit to be a mother. It didn’t take long before Gladys’s worry built to the point where she simply had to leave the diner and return home to make sure her children were safe.

As she reached her block, she began sprinting toward her home, her youth apparent as she flew down the street. When she finally got to the house, she stopped dead in her tracks. On the front steps stood her mother, Della, smoking a cigarette and weeping. Gladys bolted up the steps and burst through the front door. Her children were gone.

The first few weeks without her son and daughter were a confusing period for Gladys Baker. After she contacted Jasper’s family and they convinced her that he had not returned to Kentucky, she set out on foot to find him and her two children. First she headed to San Diego, where he had once mentioned he might find work as a longshoreman. Thus began a four-month-long odyssey of hitchhiking, cheap motels, and the obligatory speakeasies that had become Gladys’s only social outlet. From the road, she wrote to a cousin, “I am doing what I can. I do not know if it is enough. I don’t know how I am getting by.” The trip was fruitless. Gladys seemed hardened by her pointless quest, and Della decided that she would never interrogate her daughter about her awful time searching. “It was as if her smile had died,” Della told one relative a number of years later. “She always seemed like a child to me before, but when she returned she was a woman. To tell you the truth, I had grown used to arguing with her. But she had no gumption left. She was just a very sad woman.”

After Gladys returned to her mother’s home, she found a letter from her brother-in-law, Audrey, which had been delivered in her absence. Concerned for her emotional well-being, Audrey confessed in his letter that he’d been concealing vital information from her: His brother, Jasper, had actually been living with their mother for the past four months in Flat Lick, Kentucky—with the children. He suggested that Gladys move on with her life and not attempt to contact Jasper.

Della later recalled watching tears run down Gladys’s face as she read Audrey’s letter. Although Della tried to lighten her daughter’s spirits, there was nothing she could do for her on that day. It was spent mostly in somber silence. That night, before bedtime, Della brought Gladys a large bowl of soup. The next morning, when she went in to awaken her daughter, the dish sat on the nightstand, untouched—and Gladys was gone.

Gladys hitchhiked most of the way to Kentucky, riding the occasional bus when she grew tired of thumbing rides and being passed up. Her first stop was Louisville, where she decided to spend a day putting herself back together. She knew that the months spent traveling had not been kind and she wanted to at least appear well-rested when her children saw her for the first time.

On the day she got to Flat Lick, her plan was to march up to her mother-in-law’s front door and demand that her children be handed over to her. They would all then return to Los Angeles and, hopefully, forget the events of recent months. Gladys’s intentions to wrench her children from their paternal grandmother’s arms did not go as she intended, however. Something had gotten in the way of her plan, something so simple—laughter.

While standing across the street from her mother-in-law’s modest home, Gladys watched as Jackie and Berniece playfully chased each other. As the two giggled and ran around the yard, she couldn’t help but notice little Jackie’s pronounced limp. How well she remembered that injury. It had happened back in 1920, when Jackie was three. While driving from Los Angeles to visit Jasper’s mother at this very home, the couple began a fierce argument. Jackie had been sitting in the backseat, unattended. In a moment almost too terrible to imagine, the toddler tumbled out of their 1909 Ford Model T roadster, a doorless vehicle, while his parents were busy arguing. When they finally arrived in Kentucky with the injured child, Jasper’s family was of course horrified and wanted to know what in the world could have happened. Even though Jasper had been the one at the wheel, he told everyone that his negligent wife had been responsible for the accident because she’d not been properly minding their child. For her part, Gladys was already distraught because of what had occurred, and to now be solely blamed for it by Jasper was almost more than she could bear. She couldn’t fathom that the man she so loved had turned against her that way. Meanwhile, young Jackie had suffered a serious hip injury, from which he would never fully recover.

Now the boy’s limp was a reminder of his terrible accident. Gladys watched her children for a bit, unnoticed. They seemed so happy in the large yard with a tire swing amid what appeared to be acres of woods surrounding the home. Gladys turned and walked away, unseen.

However, she simply couldn’t leave Kentucky without her children. But how would she ever be able to retrieve them from the place they currently called home? She knew that her deficiency as a mother would be Jasper’s primary defense for having taken Jackie and Berniece. If she were going to get them back, she saw only two options. She could steal them—just as Jasper had done. Or she could prove that she was a new woman. If Jasper and his family saw her as someone capable of caring for her children, maybe they would willingly allow her to take them. So, for a time, Gladys would begin a new life in Louisville.

Within weeks, she had altered her appearance dramatically, wearing simpler, more matronly attire. She also began to go without makeup, something she hadn’t done for many years. Her toned-down appearance may have helped her land the precise position she sought. She was hired as a nanny for a well-off couple, Margaret and John “Jack” Cohen, on the outskirts of town. This job would not simply be a way for her to survive financially, it would afford her the opportunity to become the kind of woman she hoped her ex-husband would approve of, a woman worthy of being called a mother.

The Cohens were a happily married couple, and their daughter, Norma Jeane, was a well-behaved three-year-old child. The new Gladys was, in this family’s mind, the ideal caretaker, treating their daughter as if she were her own. However, Gladys’s only goal was to one day regain custody of her own children.

Months later, when she believed her transformation had been completed, she knocked on the Bakers’ front door. Her mother-inlaw answered, with only a few awkward words spoken through the crack in the door. When her ex-husband appeared, he asked Gladys to come into the house. As she entered, she saw a wide-eyed little girl standing by the kitchen. However, before Gladys even had a chance to say hello, the youngster’s grandmother grabbed the girl and disappeared with her into another room.

Gladys’s meeting with Jasper was strained, her attempts to present herself as an improved woman falling on deaf ears. Jasper was firm in his position that she would not get the children back, no matter what she said or did to convince him that she had changed. She asked if she could at least visit them. Jasper said she could see Berniece, but not little Jackie. After months of being in agonizing pain, the boy was now in a hospital and there was no telling how long he would have to remain there. Jasper reminded Gladys that her neglect was primarily to blame for the child’s desperate condition. Devastated, Gladys then spent a short time with Berniece before her ex-mother-in-law asked her to leave.

Now, back in the home of the perfect family with the perfect child, things felt different to her. She no longer saw the Cohens as role models. In fact, their very existence seemed to mock her inability to change, to truly alter the woman she had once been and become someone new, someone respectable. “Each idyllic day with that family was another dagger in Gladys’s broken heart,” says a cousin of hers interviewed for this book. “She couldn’t help but mourn the loss of what once was, what could have been.”

While Gladys did her best to appear as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred during her weekend away—supposedly with her aunt—her sinking mood made that impossible. As had happened so many times in her past, she slipped into the dark place that was by now all too familiar to her. The progress she had made, the many joyful scenarios she had imagined, the hope she once had—all of it was gone. The “new” Gladys Baker was dying a slow death.