“That’s your father,” she said.
I felt so excited I almost fell off the chair. It felt so good to have a father, to be able to look at his picture and know I belonged to him. And what a wonderful photograph it was. He wore a slouch hat a little gaily on the side. There was a lively smile in his eyes, and he had a thin mustache like Clark Gable. I felt very warm toward the picture.
My mother said, “He was killed in an auto accident in New York City.”
I believed everything people told me in that time, but I didn’t believe this. I didn’t believe he was run over and dead. I asked my mother what his name was. She wouldn’t answer, but went into the bedroom and locked herself in.
Years later I found out what his name was, and many other things about him—how he used to live in the same apartment building where my mother lived, how they fell in love, and how he walked off and left her while I was getting born—without ever seeing me.
The strange thing was that everything I heard about him made me feel warmer toward him. The night I met his picture I dreamed of it when I fell asleep. And I dreamed of it a thousand times afterward.
That was my first happy time, finding my father’s picture. And every time I remembered how he smiled and how his hat was tipped I felt warm and not alone. When I started a sort of scrapbook a year later the first picture I put in it was a photograph of Clark Gable because he looked like my father—especially the way he wore his hat and mustache.
And I used to make up daydreams, not about Mr. Gable, but about my father. When I’d be walking home from school in the rain and feeling bad I’d pretend my father was waiting for me, and that he would scold me for not having worn my rubbers. I didn’t own any rubbers. Nor was the place I walked to any kind of a home. It was a place where I worked as a sort of child servant, washing dishes, clothes, floors, running errands and keeping quiet.
But in a daydream you jump over facts as easily as a cat jumps over a fence. My father would be waiting for me, I daydreamed, and I would come into the house smiling from ear to ear.
Once when I lay in a hospital after having my tonsils out and running into complications, I had a daydream that lasted a whole week without stopping. I kept bringing my father into the hospital ward and walking him to my bed while the other patients looked on with disbelief and envy at so distinguished a visitor; and I kept bending him over my bed and having him kiss my forehead and I gave him dialogue, too. “You’ll be well in a few days, Norma Jean. I’m very proud of the way you’re behaving, not crying all the time like other girls.”
And I would ask him please to take off his hat. But I could never get him in my largest, deepest daydream to take his hat off and sit down.
When I went back to my “home,” I almost got sick again. A man next door chased a dog I had loved and who had been waiting for me to come home. The dog barked because he was happy to see me. And the man started chasing him and ordering him to shut up. The man had a hoe in his hand. He swung the hoe. It hit my dog’s back and cut him in half.
My mother found another couple to keep me. They were English people and needed the five dollars a week that went with me. Also, I was large for my age and could do a lot of work.
One day my mother came to call. I was in the kitchen washing dishes. She stood looking at me without talking. When I turned around I saw there were tears in her eyes, and I was surprised.
“I’m going to build a house for you and me to live in,” she said. “It’s going to be painted white and have a back yard.” And she went away.
It was true. My mother managed it somehow, out of savings and a loan. She built a house. The English couple and I were both taken to see it. It was small and empty but beautiful, and it was painted white.
The four of us moved in. I had a room to myself. The English couple didn’t have to pay rent, just take care of me as they had done before. I worked hard, but it didn’t matter. It was my first home. My mother bought furniture, a table with a white top and brown legs, chairs, beds, and curtains. I heard her say, “It’s all on time, but don’t worry. I’m working double shift at the studio, and I’ll soon be able to pay it off.”
One day a grand piano arrived at my home. It was out of condition. My mother had bought it secondhand. It was for me. I was going to be given piano lessons on it. It was a very important piano, despite being a little banged up. It had belonged to the movie star Fredric March.
“You’ll play the piano over here, by the windows,” my mother said, “and here on each side of the fireplace there’ll be a love seat. And we can sit listening to you. As soon as I pay off a few other things I’ll get the love seats, and we’ll all sit in them at night and listen to you play the piano.”
But the two love seats were not to be. One morning the English couple and I were having breakfast in the kitchen. It was early. Suddenly there was a terrible noise on the stairway outside the kitchen. It was the most frightening noise I’d ever heard. Bangs and thuds kept on as if they would never stop.
“Something’s falling down the stairs,” I said.
The Englishwoman held me from going to see. Her husband went out and after a time came back into the kitchen.
“I’ve sent for the police and the ambulance,” he said.
I asked if it was my mother.
“Yes,” he said. “But you can’t see her.”
I stayed in the kitchen and heard people come and try to take my mother away. Nobody wanted me to see her. Everyone said, “Just stay in the kitchen like a good girl. She’s all right. Nothing serious.”
But I went out and looked in the hall. My mother was on her feet. She was screaming and laughing. They took her away to the Norwalk Mental Hospital. I knew the name of the hospital in a vague way. It was where my mother’s father and grandmother had been taken when they started screaming and laughing.
All the furniture disappeared. The white table, the chairs, the beds and white curtains melted away, and the grand piano, too.
The English couple disappeared also. And I was taken from the newly painted house to an orphan asylum and given a blue dress and a white shirtwaist to wear and shoes with heavy soles. And for a long time when I lay in bed at night I could no longer daydream about anything. I kept hearing the terrible noise on the stairs and my mother screaming and laughing as they led her out of the home she had tried to build for me.
I never forgot the white painted house and its furniture. Years later when I was beginning to earn some money modeling, I started looking for the Fredric March piano. After about a year I found it in an old auction room and bought it.
I have it in my home now in Hollywood. It’s been painted a lovely white, and it has new strings and plays as wonderfully as any piano in the world.
2
My mother’s best friend was a woman named Grace. I called nearly everybody I knew Aunt or Uncle, but Aunt Grace was a different sort of make-believe relative. She became my best friend, too.
Aunt Grace worked as a film librarian in the same studio as my mother—Columbia Pictures. She was the first person who ever patted my head or touched my cheek. That happened when I was eight. I can still remember how thrilled I felt when her kind hand touched me.
Grace had almost as rough a time as my mother. She lost her job in the studio and had to scrape for a living. Although she had no money, she continued to look after my mother who was starting to have mental spells—and to look after me. At times she took me to live with her. When she ran out of money and had only a half dollar left for a week’s food, we lived on stale bread and milk. You could buy a sackful of old bread at the Holmes Bakery for twenty-five cents. Aunt Grace and I would stand in line for hours waiting to fill our sack. When I looked up at her she would grin at me and say, “Don’t worry, Norma Jean. You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you grow up. I can feel it in my bones.”
