The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

The First Norma Jeane

It’s been written in countless Marilyn Monroe biographies that Gladys Baker’s baby, Norma Jeane, was named after the actress Jean Harlow. However, this can’t be true, since Jean Harlow’s real name was Harlean Carpenter and wasn’t changed until 1928, two years after Gladys gave birth. Other accounts have it that the child was named after another actress, Norma Shearer. Still others insist it was Norma Talmadge. None of this is true. In the 1960s, Gladys explained the derivation to Rose Anne Cooper, a young nurse’s aide at the Rock Haven Sanitarium.

After her failed attempt to regain custody of Jackie and Berniece, Gladys returned to the Cohen household. The Cohens’ three-year-old daughter whom Gladys had been helping to raise for the last year was named… Norma Jeane. It would be with this little girl that Gladys would finally achieve what had been expected of her with her own children. Each and every day of the year she was with her, Gladys made it her priority to see to it that the tot was nourished, entertained—loved. However, after Gladys’s return from Flat Lick without her own children, things began to shift. In the simplest terms, her mind had begun to fail her. She was just twenty-three.

When Gladys’s problem became apparent to the Cohens, they were alarmed, and with good reason. Here’s the story, as passed down in the Cohen family:

One evening after a dinner date, Mr. and Mrs. Cohen found their child alone in the nursery. She was hysterical and the sheets were soiled, suggesting that she’d been left unattended for quite some time. When they finally found Gladys, she was crouched on the floor behind a grand piano, her knees pulled in to her chest. Her eyes were closed as she spoke quietly to herself. She was visibly upset, tears streaming down her cheeks. After a moment, she looked at Mrs. Cohen and said, “Are they gone?”

“Is who gone, Gladys?” replied the missus.

“The men.”

Gladys then explained that she had seen a group of men sneaking about the house for the previous few days, but she didn’t want to worry her employers.

At first the couple were deeply concerned for their own safety. However, as Gladys continued to describe her experiences, they began to have a new concern: their nanny’s sanity.

Gladys told of odd happenings that were beyond reason. She said she went to retrieve something from a cabinet under the kitchen counter and found there was a man lying inside it. Another man had walked into an upstairs bathroom, she said, and when she finally got the nerve to follow him in there, he was nowhere to be found.

The Cohens had a problem on their hands—a problem that needed to be dealt with quickly.

Gladys Baker lasted a few more days—though never alone with the child—before her employers made her termination official. At that time Gladys was weaving in and out of lucidity, appearing at one moment to be just fine, and the next claiming that she heard a voice. Indeed, there were many voices—but the voices were never really there.

Gladys’s dismissal was a civilized procedure, with the Cohens claiming they no longer needed a nanny.

But what about little Norma Jeane? The child had been the only constant for Gladys while she was in Kentucky during this very difficult time, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her. For a time, as she later told Rose Anne Cooper, she considered taking Norma Jeane back to Los Angeles with her to start a new life. However, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had experienced the misery of losing her own children and said she couldn’t inflict that kind of pain on Margaret Cohen.

After packing her things the night before she was to depart the household, Gladys recalled that she sat in her room alone. Her minimal belongings now stuffed into a tattered satchel, she crept down the dark hallway and quietly let herself into the nursery. She sat on Norma Jeane’s bed and stroked the child’s hair. She then kissed her on the forehead before tucking her back in. After gathering the rest of her things in the dark of night, Gladys Baker then disappeared from the Cohen family’s life.