The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Wayne Bolender’s Fatherly Advice

Marilyn Monroe didn’t know what to make of her recent time with her mother, Gladys Baker. She didn’t know if she had made any difference in her life at all. She just hoped the time they’d spent together had done Gladys some good. However, as she would later say, she knew that Gladys wouldn’t miss her or Berniece in the least, and that was a reality that penetrated her heart like a steel blade. Interestingly, she turned to her ex-husband, James Dougherty, for comfort during this time—at least in correspondence. Martin Evans, Dougherty’s friend, recalled, “Jim told me he received a very impassioned letter from Norma Jeane saying that she had recently spent a lot of time with her mother and that it hadn’t been easy. He said that she wrote that the woman was very mentally ill and that she had vanished without a trace. She wanted to know if it were possible for the police to begin a search for her… what steps they should take to have the West Coast combed in order to find her. Jim wrote back and told her that he would be happy to discuss it with her in person. He said it was too complicated to get into in a return letter. However, as far as I know, that discussion never took place.”

Complicating matters at this time for Marilyn was that, during a recent gynecologist’s exam, certain problems were discovered that might make having children difficult. She hadn’t been able to make up her mind about whether or not she wanted a child. On some days she thought she shouldn’t. What if she couldn’t take care of the baby and it ended up as she had—in an orphanage? On other days she felt that she would be an excellent mother and that she would be able to do for the child what her own mother had not been able to do for her: love and nurture the baby and give him or her a good life. But then there were days when a different thought would haunt her: What if her child were to end up like her grandmother and mother? In fact, there had been times recently when she began to doubt her own sanity. Was it a good idea to bring a baby into the world under such troubling circumstances? She wasn’t sure what to think about it. Therefore, she decided to go back to the place where she really felt genuine love as a young girl—to the Bolenders’—and ask for some guidance. As an excuse for her visit, she said that she needed to ask her foster brother, Lester, if he would help move some furniture that she still had at Jim Dougherty’s house. She drove out to Hawthorne by herself. When she got there, Ida was not home. Wayne answered the door and let her in, and she met one of his nieces, also visiting. Her foster sister Nancy Jeffrey quoted a letter that niece wrote regarding Marilyn’s visit:

“I came to see Wayne one day and Norma Jeane came in. She had asked Lester to help her move after her separation from her first husband. She had a very deep conversation with Uncle Wayne, some things that were bothering her. Her deepest thought that day was having a child and whether it would turn out like her mother. She needed to, I guess, have Uncle Wayne’s blessing. He was the only stable man in her life, as far as I know.”

After Marilyn explained her worry, Wayne was very clear in his advice. “You are nothing like your mother or your grandmother,” he told her, according to a later recollection. “I knew Della and I know Gladys and I can tell you that you are nothing like them.”

Marilyn could only hope that what her “Daddy” had told her was the truth.

Shortly after her divorce, Marilyn moved out of Aunt Ana’s and into her own apartment in Hollywood. In that respect, the rest of 1946 and the whole of 1947 had moments of both frustration and exhilaration. First, the studio prepared her biography, to be sent out to the media. It said that she was an orphan who’d been discovered by a 20th Century-Fox executive while she was babysitting his child—classic movie studio malarkey. There would be other untrue press tidbits, as well—years of them, actually. It was, according to Berniece Miracle, Grace Goddard’s idea to say that Marilyn’s parents were both dead. What she wanted to avoid—and Marilyn certainly agreed with her about it—was the possibility of any reporter tracking down Gladys. This tactic worked… for a while, anyway.