The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Trying to Understand Gladys

By the summer of 1946, Marilyn’s half sister, Berniece Baker Miracle, could wait no longer—she had to meet her mother, Gladys Baker. She had no memory of her at all. She had been just a little girl when Gladys left her in Kentucky all of those years ago. Now that Gladys was out of the hospital, Berniece felt the time had come for a mother-daughter reunion. Marilyn wasn’t so sure about it. Gladys had been living with her and Aunt Ana since her release, so Marilyn knew that she really was not well. She seemed totally incapable of expressing love or even warmth, let alone maternal feelings. She was also quite defensive and argumentative. Marilyn didn’t want to take the chance that Gladys would say or do something that would hurt Berniece’s feelings. “The image in your mind of our mother is much better than the reality of her,” she told Berniece. “Maybe you should just leave it be.” She didn’t want her half sister to be disappointed. However, there was no stopping Berniece. She wanted to see her mother and intended to stay at Aunt Ana’s for an extended three-month visit. She would be bringing her small daughter, Mona Rae, along with her. Her husband would stay behind since he would not be able to leave his job for such a long time.

When the day came for Berniece and Mona Rae to arrive from Michigan, Marilyn drove Ana, Grace, and Gladys to the Burbank airport to greet them. The women waited anxiously on the tarmac for the plane to land, anticipating the sight of their relatives. There must have also been a certain amount of apprehension from Marilyn, Ana, and Grace as to how Gladys might react when she saw her long-lost daughter. As soon as Berniece and Mona Rae appeared at the top of the jet plane’s metal stairs, Marilyn ran toward them. By the time they were at the bottom of the stairs, Marilyn was embracing them both. When she introduced the two of them to Aunt Ana, the three embraced. Then, of course, Grace hugged Berniece and her daughter. “And this is Mother, Berniece,” Marilyn finally said. Turning to Gladys, she said, “And Mother, this is Berniece.” Berniece would later say she first noticed Gladys’s gray hair, which was cut at this time in short curls. She also noted that Gladys stood rigid, her arms downward, and exhibited no emotion. Berniece was completely overwhelmed anyway, and hugged her mother. In response, Gladys placed her arms tentatively around Berniece’s waist for a moment and patted her back. The moment hung awkwardly. Of Gladys’s meeting with her daughter, Grace Goddard would later write to a cousin, “It looked to me like she was thinking to herself, why is everyone here sharing something and feeling something that I’m not sharing… and I’m not feeling.”

Once they were back at Ana’s, it was decided that Marilyn would sleep upstairs with Ana while Berniece and Mona Rae would sleep in the downstairs apartment with Gladys. That meant that Berniece and Gladys would be sleeping in the same bed, while Mona Rae slept on a small roll-away cot in the corner. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how these arrangements would have been difficult for Gladys. However, it was Marilyn’s idea. “She set it up that way specifically because she hoped her mother would bond with Berniece, on some level,” one relative explained. “She wanted nothing more than for her mother to feel something. She kept waiting for some kind of emotional process to take place in Gladys—and the heartbreaking truth was that it simply was not going to happen.”

As the days turned into weeks, Berniece became distressed by how often Gladys was critical of Marilyn’s new career. She recalled one incident during which Marilyn was practicing the enunciation of certain words in front of a mirror. “Oh, that’s just ridiculous,” Gladys told her daughter. “You should be doing something worthwhile with your life. Not this.” Marilyn tried to explain that she had to improve the elocution of certain words for her acting classes at the studio, but Gladys just didn’t want to hear it.

After witnessing that particular scene, Berniece cornered her mother. “You should be more encouraging to Norma Jeane,” she told her. “She’s trying so hard to make a go of it, and you’re being so difficult.” In response, Gladys said something under her breath. Berniece decided to just leave her alone.

Shortly after, Norma Jeane got a scare when she got a call from her agent, Emmeline Snively, telling her, “I just wanted you to know that your mother was here.” As it happened, Gladys had woken up that morning, put on her nurse’s uniform, called a cab, and was taken to the Ambassador Hotel where Snively’s company, the Blue Book Agency, was located. She marched into Snively’s office and told her that she was very unhappy about her daughter’s career and wanted her to convince Norma Jeane not to continue with it. Snively was a little surprised, but she handled it well. She said that it was a matter between a mother and daughter, not an agent and client, and that Gladys should take it up with Norma Jeane. Gladys left, but not before telling Snively, “It’s very wrong for you to allow young girls to come in here and ruin their lives with picture-taking.” When Snively later explained all of this to Norma Jeane, the young lady was, of course, embarrassed and upset. Gladys had asked her who was helping her with her career and Norma Jeane had mentioned Snively, but she couldn’t believe that Gladys had had the presence of mind to track her down and then talk to her. That evening, she and Gladys had a contentious exchange about it, ending with Norma Jeane telling her mother to “never interfere with my career again.” Gladys said, “Fine, if that’s the way you want it. Do what you want to do. See if I care.” She then went to her room and slammed the door so loud it echoed throughout the household. “Why is she so angry all the time?” Berniece wondered.

The only time Gladys seemed to really become invested in anything was when Ana would take all of the women in the household to Christian Science services on Sunday. Gladys’s intense interest in Christian Science had not wavered since her release from the sanitarium. The subject of mind over matter fascinated her; it was as if she knew she could not manage her life and wanted to do whatever she could to seize back some control over it. At the same time, Ana and Marilyn would stay up into the early morning hours reading from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, the most important Christian Science book. Marilyn had been interested in the belief system before her marriage to Jim Dougherty, and when the marriage collapsed she turned back to it. One person who would later know Gladys at a home in which she spent some time in the 1970s has an interesting theory about Marilyn’s devotion to Christian Science:

“She had always been a student of human interaction, if you think about it: how people reacted to her if she was one way, how they would be drawn to her if she was another way. What did she have to do to make people love her? She had made a study of all this. I think it was because she always knew her mother’s mind was not right. And I think she knew that she may very well have a predisposition for the same kinds of mental problems, too, because her grandmother and her mother both experienced similar fates. So the whole concept that there was a way of understanding the human brain and changing your life by changing your mind appealed to her. It was as if she was hoping to get in on the ground floor of something big, as if she was saying, ‘If I study this now and know all about this by the time I’m at the age when Mother started to flip out, maybe I’ll be able to control it better than she did.’ I think she always feared she had a ticking time bomb inside her.”

Interestingly, at this same time—the summer of 1946—Gladys sent a series of letters to Margaret Cohen in Kentucky, the woman whose child, Norma Jeane, she raised for one year in 1922. That child was now twenty-seven years old. Gladys wrote that she wanted to see the girl because, as she put it in one of the letters, “my own daughters do not understand me, nor are they willing to try.” The Cohen family found Gladys’s letters disturbing. First of all, they couldn’t imagine how she had tracked them down. They’d moved to a different town since she worked for them so many years earlier. Secondly, they received five letters in just one week, all rambling missives about wanting to see Norma Jeane. Then they were dismayed by all of the Christian Science literature Gladys included in her correspondence. In one of these letters, she mentioned Marilyn’s career. “I am sorry to say that my own Norma Jean [sic] has decided on the moving picture business as a career. I am very much opposed to this. However, whenever I mention it to her, she raises her hand in my face and tells me that she doesn’t want to hear about it and that it is none of her mother’s business. I would love to have a child who values my opinion but that is not what I have in Norma Jean.” The Cohen family decided against responding to any of Gladys’s letters.

It wasn’t all angst in the household during Berniece’s long stay at Aunt Ana’s. There were some good times. For instance, Marilyn couldn’t wait to show her half sister the screen test she made for Fox. She arranged for her to have a private screening of it at the studio. There were other light moments as well. Sometimes the entire family would go out to dinner together. On weekends, Marilyn would drive them around Los Angeles on sightseeing excursions to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Farmer’s Market, the homes of certain celebrities (maps sold by youngsters on street corners were usually accurate in pinpointing these addresses, much to the chagrin of the stars), and other West Coast locales she thought they’d be interested in, including the beach. There are actually quite a few photographs of the women at Santa Monica beach. Marilyn and Berniece would chatter incessantly during these day trips; they got along famously. Meanwhile, Ana and Grace would try to engage Gladys in conversation. Sometimes, they were successful, but usually Gladys stayed in her shell. “Why can’t she just have a good time? I just don’t get it,” Marilyn is said to have wondered.

While living in the institution, Gladys Baker had become used to each day having structure. There were certain times for eating meals, engaging in outdoor activities, reading, and then going to sleep. She had been living with those circumstances for so many years that when she left and moved in with Ana and Marilyn, she still wanted that kind of structure in her life. She wanted to know that every day was to be the same. It made her feel safe, secure. However, Berniece’s arrival totally upset any routine she had been trying to establish at Ana’s. For three months, she never knew from one moment to the next where she was going or what she would be doing once she got there. Still, Marilyn wanted to at least come up with activities that her mother would enjoy, and also some that might elicit some emotional response from her.

One day, she asked Grace to take them all to the home that Gladys’s father, Otis Elmore Monroe (who had died by hanging himself), had built by hand. But even this potentially nostaligic excursion failed to reach Gladys; she had no reaction to seeing the old homestead.

Marilyn then asked Grace to take them all to the house in Hollywood that Gladys had bought so many years ago. It was here that Gladys had lived for a short time with Marilyn and the Atkinsons. Surely she would have some reaction to this place. It was also here that she had had the psychotic episode, and from here that she was taken to the mental hospital. The women sat in their car on the street in front of the house for a long time, telling stories of the furniture that had once been in there—the piano that Marilyn so loved and that Gladys promised she would one day play well, the flowers always in the living room, the sunny kitchen. Nothing. Gladys felt nothing.