The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn’s Mother, Gladys

From all outward appearances, Gladys Pearl Monroe had always seemed like such a happy youngster, surprising considering her tumultuous youth. She was born on May 27, 1900, to Otis and Della Monroe in Piedras Negras, Mexico—at the time called Porfirio Diaz, after Mexico’s president José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori. It was here that her father had found employment with the Pacific Electric Railway. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Los Angeles.

Gladys’s mother, Della, always caused heads to turn as she sashayed down the street. However, she was apparently as tough as she was eye-catching. Early photographs taken of Gladys’s parents show a handsome, somewhat robust woman with a severe countenance—that would be Della—standing next to a gentleman who looks rather scared to death—Otis. If he ever thought he would be able to tell Della what to do, Otis soon found out it was not the case. Della was never one to acquiesce to anyone’s will. Therefore, the arguments between them started on their honeymoon and never ceased. In one of the family’s photographs Otis has a deep scar on his cheek, and there’s no telling how he got it. However, one thing is clear: He doesn’t have it in pictures taken before he married Della.

Soon, Gladys and her brother, Marion Otis—born in 1905—became accustomed to a transient lifestyle as the Monroes moved in and out of nearly a dozen different rented apartments and houses in California between 1903 and 1909. Otis, who couldn’t keep a job, began to live a reckless and cavalier life. Not only was his drinking a growing problem, but he also started having sudden blackouts and frightening memory lapses.

By 1908, when Otis was just forty-one, his health and emotional state had declined so rapidly it became clear that something was very wrong with him. He was temperamental and unpredictable, and his body seemed to always be in a tremulous state. His headaches would become so numbing and severe, he could barely stand. When not physically debilitated, he was filled with blind rage. On occasions when he would fly into fits of fury, Della would have no choice but to take their frightened children to a neighbor’s home and wait for the storm to pass. Doctors were at a complete loss to explain Otis’s mystifying behavior. “Otis has lost his mind, and I’m just going to have to come to terms with it,” Della wrote in a letter at this time.

In 1909, Otis Monroe died of syphilis of the brain. He was just forty-three. “How will I explain this to my children?” Della asked the doctors at the hospital. Because the professionals were of no help to her, Della simply told Gladys, nine, and Marion, four, that their father had gone mad and died. In years to come, some family members would argue that he actually hadn’t died an insane man but rather had contracted syphilis, which then led to his death. Others would say that it was precisely because of the syphilis that he had gone insane. Back in the early 1900s, though, such distinctions were generally not made outside of the medical community. “He went nuts and then went to God,” is how Della described it, and she hoped that would be the end of it. However, this would most certainly not be the end of it. In fact, a fear of genetic madness would hold the Monroe descendants in its suffocating grip for decades to come—and it all started with Della’s declaration that Otis Monroe’s death was the direct result of insanity.

After Otis passed away, Della—just thirty-three years old—was on her own with two small children. She was attractive and usually fun to be around, but she could also be unpredictably volatile and, if in one of her moods of despair, even morose. In March 1912, when she was thirty-five, she married a railway switchman supervisor named Lyle Arthur Graves, six years her junior. That union was over quickly. After the divorce, Della began to date an assortment of characters, some respectable but most unsavory, who came and went from her life swiftly, most not before spending at least one amorous night with her. In fact, it was at this time, after the end of her second marriage, that Della developed a looser sense of morality and didn’t seem particularly concerned as to how it might adversely affect or otherwise influence her two children, Gladys, who was now twelve, and Marion, seven.

By the time she was a teenager, Gladys Monroe wore her chestnut brown hair—though it sometimes appeared more reddish—in soft waves and long curls that cascaded luxuriously down her back. She was a real looker, with Wedgwood blue eyes, a full mouth, a dazzling set of white teeth, and skin that glowed with vitality. Enviably thin and petite, as an adult she would grow to only five feet tall. However, an oversized personality and captivating quality made her well-liked at school and the life of any party.

When Gladys was about sixteen, her mother banished Marion, eleven, from the household. Because he was constantly in trouble at school and obstreperous at home, Della didn’t know what to do with him. Disciplining him didn’t seem to work. Stubborn and willful, he tried her patience. Therefore, one morning she collected all of his toys and tossed them into a pillowcase. Then, as Marion cried softly in the backseat and Gladys sat quietly staring straight ahead in the front passenger seat, Della drove to San Diego. There she left the boy in the care of a cousin, and that was the last anyone ever heard of Marion.

At about this same time, in 1916, Gladys met a young businessman named John Newton Baker, known primarily as Jasper. He’d just moved to Los Angeles from Kentucky after serving in the military. Jasper was tall and lanky with a lean, angular face and straight dark hair that he parted with great purpose to one side. Seeming genuinely interested in Gladys from the start, he not only wanted to hear about her many problems at home but also assist her in coming up with reasonable solutions. Twelve years her senior, he had more experience than her and seemed eager to insulate her from her troubled life and maybe even protect her from future heartache. Therefore, when he asked for her hand in marriage, she eagerly agreed. Della not only accepted the coupling of her young daughter with Jasper, she wholeheartedly encouraged it.

Sixteen-year-old Gladys Monroe took John Newton Baker as her husband on May 17, 1917. They had two children, Robert Kermit—nicknamed Jack—and Berniece, before their marriage began to crumble. It turned out that Jasper was an alcoholic with a violent temper. He beat Gladys, making her young life a misery, often striking her about the head and twice giving her concussions. When she finally divorced him, Jasper took both of their children and moved to Kentucky because he’d decided she’d been an unfit mother. Gladys didn’t have any say in the matter, and she certainly didn’t have the money for an attorney.

In 1924 Gladys, who was twenty-four, took a second husband, Martin Edward Mortenson—known as Edward. The twenty-seven-year-old son of Norwegian immigrants, Mortenson was not classically handsome in the strictest sense of the word, but he was nonetheless a good-looking man with a broad brow, high cheekbones, and a full, wide smile. Tall and solid, he seemed like a stable and amiable fellow who only wanted to please and take care of his new wife. It was impossible for him to do so, though, because by the time she was in her mid-twenties it was clear that something was terribly wrong with Gladys. Like her mother, she began experiencing mood swings and crying jags. With the marriage all but over after just four months, Edward Mortenson filed for divorce.

Once she felt free of her matrimonial bonds, though she was not yet divorced, Gladys Baker mirrored her mother’s behavior and became notoriously promiscuous. Taking many lovers, she developed a terrible reputation at her job at Consolidated Studios, where she worked as a film editor or “cutter.” Soon she began an affair with a man named Charles Stanley Gifford, a sales manager at the company.

Stanley Gifford was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1898. When he was twenty-seven, he moved to Los Angeles after an unsuccessful marriage during which he had fathered two children. He found employment at Consolidated, as foreman of the day shift. When Gladys met him, she fell hard. A good-looking man with a thin mustache, dark eyes, and wavy jet black hair, he was both elegant and distinctive. Debonair and personable, he was a real lady-killer. He had a quick wit, a wonderful sense of humor, and, as someone who came from a family with a little money, he also enjoyed the occasional game of polo. His family had made a fortune in the shipbuilding business and Gifford was well-off enough to be able to afford two houses in Los Angeles during the Depression, a bleak period when most people were fortunate to even have one.

“He had a decent job,” says his son, Charles Stanley Gifford, who today is eighty-six years old. “He had a good life. Along with polo, he enjoyed hunting and fishing. I was born in 1922, and he and my mother divorced in 1926. Still, he was a wonderful father to both me and my sister. I knew the only three women that he seriously dated over the years. He married two of them, my mother and then his second wife, Mary. Gladys was not one of the three women. The other one was a Catholic woman, a very nice lady he decided not to marry for his own personal reasons—not Gladys. I don’t believe he was ever serious about Gladys, or he would have told me about it at one time or another over the years. He said he knew her, they dated casually, but that was it. The truth is that Gladys was a very attractive woman and she dated many people back then.”

In late 1925, Gladys learned that she was pregnant. But who was the father? It’s been published repeatedly over the years that Gladys didn’t have a clue, that she wasn’t keeping score of her lovers, she was just enjoying them. That’s not the case, though. In fact, she always insisted that Stanley Gifford was the father of her child, and she never wavered from that belief. Biographers and other historians over the years have simply not wanted to believe her, citing her mental instability and promiscuity as reasons for doubt. However, it seems unfair to conclude that just because Gladys had serious problems, her identification of her daughter’s paternity should be completely dismissed, especially since she was so consistent about it over the years.

In 1925, when Gladys told Stanley Gifford he was the father of her child, he refused to accept responsibility, claiming that he knew she’d been with other men. The more she insisted, the angrier he got, until finally he stormed off. She would see him a few more times, but he simply never believed her. She knew she would have to raise the child on her own, and was prepared to do so—or at least that’s what she thought at the time.

In the 1940s, as we will later see, Gladys would continue to insist that Gifford was the baby’s father. Then, in the 1960s, she would again confirm what she had been saying all along about him. In fact, in 1962, right after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Gladys discussed the actress’s paternity with Rose Anne Cooper, a young nurse’s aide at the Rock Haven Sanitarium in La Crescenta. Cooper was just twenty at the time she worked there. Gladys was sixty-two. “She was very clear,” recalls Cooper. “She said that she’d been intimate with a number of men, and she talked about her past, openly saying that when she was young she was, as she put it, ‘very wild.’ However, she said that the only kind of intimacy that could have resulted in a pregnancy was what she had shared with the man she called ‘Stan Gifford.’ She said she had always been bothered by the fact that no one seemed to want to believe her, but that it was the truth. She said that even her own mother didn’t believe her. ‘Everyone thought I was lying,’ she said, ‘or that I just didn’t know. I knew. I always knew.’ ”