The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Gladys Marries

While Marilyn Monroe was navigating delicate terrain with Natasha Lytess and Johnny Hyde, her mother, Gladys, was involved in her own little romantic escapade. Surprisingly enough, sometime in April 1948 she ran off and married a man named John Stewart Eley. Marilyn was thunderstruck by the news. Certainly, Gladys was not emotionally equipped to be in a marriage with anyone, yet she had once again done the unexpected by taking a husband. “But who is this guy?” Marilyn asked Grace Goddard. “I have no idea,” Grace said, according to a later recollection. “Oh, no. Now, I’m really worried,” Marilyn said. Marilyn immediately felt that she was at fault. However, she wasn’t even sure where Gladys had been, and it was thus difficult to monitor her. Grace told Marilyn that it was impossible for Marilyn to have a career in show business and also be responsible for her impulsive and troubled mother. “She has to live her life,” Grace said. “Oh, my God,” was all Marilyn could say in response.

Still working for the William Morris Agency under Johnny Hyde, Bill Davis recalled, “I was in the office with Johnny when Marilyn rushed in looking wild-eyed. I remember she had on a white blouse that was buttoned all the way to the top with long sleeves. And she had on white slacks. The reason I remember this is because it struck me that for someone known as a sex goddess she sure didn’t show much skin in her day-to-day activities.” ^*

“Johnny, oh, Johnny. I need your help,” Marilyn said, according to Davis’s memory.

“Sure, doll. What’s the problem?”

“My mother has married some loser and I’m very worried about her,” Marilyn said, upset. She sat down in a chair, seeming exhausted. She then said that she wanted Johnny to find out anything he could about John Eley. “I cannot believe my mother would get married,” she said. “Can you even believe it?”

Since Johnny had never met Gladys, he didn’t have an opinion about her marriage. However, he would definitely help Marilyn, he said. And he had the right connections to be successful at it. While she sat before him, he picked up the telephone and hired a private investigator to look into the matter.

A couple weeks later, Gladys wrote to her daughter Berniece, who had just moved to Florida with her husband and child. She explained that Eley was from Boise, Idaho, and had just arrived in California “for work,” though she didn’t specify what kind of employment. She sent a picture of him. “He looks nice enough,” Berniece told Marilyn during a telephone call. “Well, Johnny is looking into it for me,” Marilyn told Berniece. “He’ll get to the bottom of it. I trust him.”

Soon, information from Johnny’s PI began to trickle in about John and Gladys. Apparently, they had met at a bar somewhere in Santa Barbara. Eley had told his friends that he’d “landed Marilyn Monroe’s old lady,” and that he was waiting for the moment when he might meet the screen star. Meanwhile, he was going to try to take care of her mother, whom he described as “the craziest broad you’ve ever met.” He said that Gladys heard voices in her head, talked to herself, and, as he put it to one friend, “scares the shit out of me.” When Johnny Hyde relayed this information to Marilyn, she was angry. “That bastard,” she said. “Is he trying to use my mother to get to me?” Hyde wasn’t sure, but he agreed that it appeared that way. He promised to continue looking into the matter.

A few weeks later, Marilyn received a letter from John Eley, sent to her home. He wrote that he was taking care of her mother but that he needed money to do it. If she cared anything about Gladys, he wrote, then she would not ignore his request and would send him a check for a thousand dollars. She brought the letter to Johnny and asked what she should do. “Well, you can’t give this sonofabitch a thousand bucks, that’s for sure. That’s a lot of money,” Johnny said. It was decided that Marilyn shouldn’t respond to the letter at all. If she did, Johnny reasoned, Eley would believe that he had a communication with her and would not stop with the money requests. All of this was very difficult for Marilyn, and it weighed heavily on her. “I think I’m going to be dealing with this kind of thing for the rest of my life,” she told Johnny Hyde. He smiled at her gently. “You always said you wanted a mother, sweetheart. Well, you got one. We don’t get to choose our mothers, kid.”

Shortly thereafter, Berniece received a letter from Eley. Now he wondered if it would be possible for him and Gladys to move to Florida and live with Berniece and her husband and child. He said that he repaired appliances to make a living and was working out of his truck. His plan was to park his truck in front of the Miracle home; he and Gladys would live with the family as he worked. This sounded like a terrible idea to Berniece. When she told Marilyn about it, Marilyn was also skeptical. She said that she didn’t know what her mother had gotten herself into with John Eley, but she was certain it wasn’t anything good.

She was right.

In about a month’s time, Johnny Hyde’s PI came back with the news: John Eley was a bigamist—he had another wife in Idaho.