The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Gladys: “I’d Like to Have My Child’s Love”

Marilyn Monroe had just successfully coped with the surprising release of her nude photography when another scandal broke out around her. For years, she had told the world that she was an orphan, that her parents were both deceased. Where her father was concerned, this may as well have been the case because he played no role in her life. But her mother was a different matter.

In May 1952—right before Marilyn turned twenty-six—part of the story of her mother leaked out and caused a painful public relations quagmire for her. A reporter named Erskine Johnson from the Hollywood Reporter learned that Gladys was indeed alive, and he found her. He assumed in his report that she had just been released from Agnews State Hospital, but by this time she’d been out for seven years. In a story he called “Marilyn Monroe Confesses Mother Alive, Living Here,” which ran in the Reporter on May 3, 1952, he reported that Gladys was working at a private nursing facility in Eagle Rock, California, called Homestead Lodge. The thrust of the story wasn’t so much that Gladys was alive as that Marilyn had lied about it. It caused no end of problems for Marilyn in the media. For instance, she had just done an interview with a reporter for Redbook about her sad childhood, being raised an orphan after both her parents died. It was too late for the magazine’s publisher to pull it from circulation. The story—“So Far to Go Alone”—not only made Marilyn look like a fabulist but also jeopardized the credibility of the publication and the writer of the feature, Jim Henaghan. Henaghan phoned Fox and complained to the publicity department, calling Marilyn a liar; he was very upset. Marilyn did what she did best—she handled the matter openly and honestly. She wrote a letter to Redbook for publication, stating, “I frankly did not feel wrong in withholding from you the fact that my mother is still alive… since we have never known each other intimately and have never enjoyed the normal relationship of mother and daughter.”

Since becoming famous, Marilyn had still been in constant communication with her half sister, Berniece. When her nude calendar made headlines, her first impulse was to call Berniece and warn her about it. (Berniece’s husband, Paris, had already come home from work with a dozen publications featuring the photos.) The two sisters then discussed how at the time Marilyn posed for the pictures, one of her greatest fears had been that her Aunt Ana would one day see them. How would she have explained them to Ana? In her mind, that would have been much tougher than explaining them to America. Ana was gone now, so it was a moot point, but others in her life were still alive and could be affected by the scandal. Marilyn knew her Aunt Grace—now more devoted to Christian Science than she had been even when Ana was alive—might take issue with the photographs, but she also knew that Grace understood show business and public relations and would eventually reconcile all of it in her head. Gladys was another story. Marilyn and Berniece just hoped that Gladys wouldn’t see the pictures. It turned out that in 1952, Gladys had more important problems.

Four years earlier, when Marilyn had learned from Johnny Hyde that her mother’s new husband was a bigamist, she had immediately called her Aunt Grace to tell her the startling news. Grace in turn told Gladys. “And who told you this?” Gladys wanted to know. “Norma Jeane,” said Grace. That was all Gladys needed to hear to become convinced that Marilyn was trying to ruin her marriage, “because that’s how much she hates me. She’ll do anything to ruin my life because she still believes I ruined hers.” There was no talking Gladys out of her point of view. She insisted that John did not have another wife and that it was all a lie that Marilyn had come up with, “like the rest of her stories.”

Gladys had other problems with Eley, though. The man was a heavy drinker and emotionally abusive. In 1951, Gladys decided to file for divorce. However, before the paperwork could be completed, Eley became ill with heart disease. Gladys felt she had no choice but to stay at his side and utilize her belief in Christian Science to possibly heal him.

In the winter of 1951, Gladys got the job at Homestead Lodge, referred to in the Hollywood Reporter story about her. Then, on April 23, 1952, John Eley died at the age of sixty-two. Gladys moved in with Grace Goddard. After a time, she decided to look up Ida Bolender, and proceeded to move in with her. “Mother could never turn anyone down,” said Ida Bolender’s foster daughter Nancy Jeffrey. However, once she was at Ida’s, Gladys said that she was sorry she had moved in with her. The two women just did not get along. Gladys wanted to leave the Bolender home, but apparently Grace didn’t want her moving back with her. On top of all of this, Marilyn hadn’t acknowledged John Eley’s death with a sympathy card. Even though Marilyn was sending Gladys a monthly allowance, Gladys was still unhappy about what she perceived as her daughter’s indifference, and she wrote her this stinging letter:

Dear Marilyn,

Please dear child, I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.

Love,

Mother

Though Marilyn found the letter very upsetting, she would keep it as a memento. She also kept a framed photograph of Gladys on her nightstand.

Gladys had been talking for some time about going to Florida to visit Berniece. There was some trepidation about this possibility from all quarters. Berniece wanted to know her mother and welcomed the notion of a visit, but Marilyn and Grace had strong reservations about it because they knew Gladys a lot better than Berniece and weren’t so certain it would be a good experience. Still, Berniece wrote to Gladys and said she was open to a visit from her and hoped she would come to Florida as soon as possible. Even though she had her doubts about the wisdom of such a visit, Marilyn decided that she would pay for all of Gladys’s traveling expenses. The matter was then left up in the air; no one knew what Gladys was going to do next.

During the summer of 1952, while Gladys worked at Homestead Lodge, her daughter was getting more attention and publicity than ever before. It was impossible to miss her on the cover of some magazine or on television in a news report, especially after her many movies and personal appearances, the calendar scandal, and her budding romance with Joe DiMaggio. Gladys would go to work and often be confronted by the image of her daughter in a newspaper or, especially, on the TV set in the “television room” where the guests of the home would while away the hours.

Ever since Gladys started working at Homestead, she had been telling people she was Marilyn Monroe’s mother. According to two women who worked at the facility at that time, Gladys would insist, “I’m telling you that Marilyn Monroe is my kid. I don’t know why you don’t believe me.” In turn, she was inevitably told that she was being ridiculous because everyone knew that Marilyn’s mother was dead; Marilyn had said so publicly—repeatedly. From all available evidence, it seems that Marilyn and Grace—who together had the idea to proclaim Gladys dead in an effort to protect her from the media—had never told Gladys their PR strategy. She became defensive about it and believed her integrity was called into question when people at her job felt she was lying.

Soon, according to one of two women on duty at that time at Homestead Lodge with Gladys, “She came in one day with photos of her and Marilyn Monroe—or at least a girl who looked like she could have been Marilyn Monroe except that she was young and had dark hair. ‘See, this is me and Marilyn Monroe,’ Gladys said, very proudly. ‘Do you believe me now?’ No one knew what to think. This was some big news, let me tell you. Yes, it had to be true, everyone decided. I mean, she had pictures. Gladys felt better, and everyone went about his or her business. However, we all looked at Gladys a little differently at that time. We certainly wondered how it came to pass that this woman, Marilyn Monroe’s mother, was working here at an old folks’ home. It seemed very odd… very sad.”

Like ripples in a pond, the repercussions of Gladys’s revelation were sure to spread out far and wide from Homestead Lodge to… the world. It was just a matter of time before someone would tell someone else—who would then tell someone else—that Marilyn Monroe’s mother was alive and working in Eagle Rock, California. It’s not known who called Erskine Johnson with the tip, and Johnson would never reveal his source. While this backstage drama was going on, Fox renewed its contract with Marilyn. Now she would be receiving $750 a week. At about the same time Homestead Lodge was abuzz over Gladys’s revelations, Marilyn was in the hospital having her appendix removed. While she was still recovering, Johnson’s article about Gladys appeared in the Hollywood Reporter. The surprising news that Marilyn’s mother was alive traveled around the world at the speed of light. Fox was unhappy about it. Marilyn was told that her mother’s existence should have been kept a secret, and some of the executives blamed her for allowing the news to come out. Marilyn disagreed. “The cat’s out of the bag now,” she said. “The secret is no more.” Then, taking the matter into her hands quickly, the first thing she did was call Erskine Johnson from her hospital bed. She would repeat what had worked so well with Aline Mosby of United Press International when the nude calendar scandal broke. She gave Johnson an exclusive interview.

“Unbeknownst to me as a child,” Marilyn said, “my mother spent many years as an invalid in a state hospital. I was raised in a series of foster homes arranged by a guardian through the County of Los Angeles and I spent more than a year in the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. I hadn’t known my mother intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her, I have contacted her. I am helping her now and want to continue to help her when she needs me.”

Marilyn would later say of Gladys, “I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life, and I had in mine. I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works.”

Because it seems that Gladys hadn’t been told Marilyn was keeping her existence a secret, it also would seem that Gladys wasn’t trying to hurt Marilyn in revealing her existence.

As mentioned earlier, Erskine Johnson’s May 1952 story assumed that Gladys had just been released from Agnews State Hospital (whereas she had been released seven years prior); and because Marilyn never set anyone straight on this detail, the public has formed a lasting impression of Marilyn Monroe as a heartless person who had disowned her mother from the time Gladys had been committed to the mental hospital, right up through 1952. In all the years since 1952, the true date of Gladys’s release from the hospital still hasn’t become widely known. This biography sets the record straight: Marilyn’s PR decision to portray her mother as deceased had nothing to do with her being ashamed of Gladys. On the contrary, we now know that Marilyn throughout her life did everything she could to help her mother.