The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

A Shocking Discovery About Grace

Grace Goddard’s husband, Doc, told Marilyn and Berniece that her death had been very sudden—as he put it, “the cancer just took over.” He hadn’t been aware of how long Grace had been battling the disease. “Grace’s death seemed terribly sad and needless to Marilyn and me,” said Berniece years later, “and we never really got over it.”

Of course, the funeral, on October 1, was very difficult for Marilyn. “I feel an anchor is gone,” she told Berniece in a tearful telephone call after the funeral. She said that it seemed that “life is just one loss after another.”

Berniece said she hoped Joe DiMaggio could be of some comfort. Marilyn told her that without a doubt, he was more important to her now than ever before.

After the funeral Marilyn had a warm telephone call from Ida Bolender. It had been many years since the two last spoke. Marilyn’s life had taken so many twists and turns, she’d actually lost touch with the Bolenders. However, Ida and Wayne were alive and well, and still living in Hawthorne. In speaking to Marilyn, Ida explained that she and her husband had moved next door to the house in which Marilyn was raised. They had turned the old residence into a boarding house for employees of a nearby factory. With that income, she said, they were doing quite well. “I hope you know that if you need anything at all, money or anything, I would love for you to call me,” Marilyn told her, according to what Ida later recalled to her foster daughter Nancy Jeffrey. “You did so much for me. I would love to help you.” Ida said she appreciated the offer but they were doing just fine. “I wanted you to know how sorry I am about your Aunt Grace,” Ida told her. Ida then acknowledged the long-smoldering grievances between her and Grace and said, “Truly, I don’t know, to this day, why she disliked me so much. I don’t know what I ever did to her. Do you know?” Marilyn said that it was probably best for them to not even try to figure it out all of these years later. “I know that you both loved me, and that’s what’s important,” she concluded. Ida also told Marilyn that she was unhappy about the way Marilyn’s life at the Bolenders’ had been recently depicted in the press. “They are saying that we were mean to you and that we were poor,” Ida said. “I don’t understand that, Norma Jeane.” Ida said that she had read somewhere that Marilyn recalled Grace bringing her a birthday card with fifty cents in it. Apparently, Marilyn told the reporter that Ida took the money from her because she had dirtied her clothing. “But that never happened, Norma Jeane,” Ida said. “You know that never happened, don’t you?” Ida said she would never have done such a thing and that it broke her heart to read about it. Marilyn then tried to explain show business public relations to her foster mother, telling her that she shouldn’t believe anything she read, “especially,” she said, “when it comes to Marilyn Monroe,” referring to herself in the third person. In truth, though, Marilyn constantly fed the flames of controversy about her times with the Bolenders by painting a more dismal picture than was true, and she also never did anything to rectify any falsehoods. The phone call ended with both women expressing their love for each other and promising to stay in touch.

After speaking to Ida, Marilyn apparently called Gladys to tell her that her old friend Grace had died. Gladys said that it was probably for the best. According to a later recollection, she said that Grace had been being followed for years and that if she hadn’t died when she did, “someone was going to kill her.” Marilyn listened patiently, trying not to become upset. By now, she thought, she should be used to hearing these kinds of upsetting proclamations from her mother. She’d hoped that Gladys would be upset by her friend’s passing. Maybe such sadness would have suggested a bit of a healing on Gladys’s part, but that was not the case. Marilyn told her mother that she intended to visit her very soon. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Gladys said. Then she hung up.

Many years later, long after even Marilyn’s death, it would be revealed that Grace Goddard had actually committed suicide. The death certificate reads, “Death by barbiturate poisoning—ingestion of phenobarbital.” Apparently, Grace, a woman who always had the solution to everyone’s problems, had finally come up against one for which she could not find a solution—cancer. At the very end of her life, the biggest dilemma she faced was how to end the suffering her family would experience by watching her slowly waste away. So she ended her life quickly to save others from continued sadness, in the same selfless fashion as she had lived.

After the funeral, Marilyn Monroe was taken by limousine back to her apartment. She was once again alone in the place where she had attempted to nurse Grace back to health and had failed. Her Aunt Grace was gone forever. The one woman Marilyn could always depend upon had receded into the family history. Now it seemed that all that remained of Grace Goddard in Marilyn’s home was what might make the loss just a little easier to handle: bottles and bottles of pills.