through it in many ways, and that there was nothing anyone could do about it. She was living in the house with a mother who was going crazy. Who knows what day-to-day horrors she witnessed? I can tell you, though, that Grace was concerned enough to ask Ida to talk to the girl.”
Indeed, during this time, Ida did telephone Norma Jeane. “Do you want to come back here and live with us, dear?” she asked, unable to keep the concern from her voice. “Because if that’s what you want, Daddy will come and get you. In fact, I think that would be best.” Norma Jeane said that she would have to ask her Aunt Grace for permission. (Norma Jeane knew that Grace wasn’t really her aunt, but she liked to call her so.) When she did, however, Grace became extremely upset and phoned Ida back immediately. “I asked you to speak to the girl just to tell her you still loved her,” Grace said angrily, according to the family’s history. “I certainly didn’t think you were going to try to take her from us again.” Again? Ida’s feelings were immediately hurt. “All I have ever wanted is for that child to feel that she was loved,” she told Grace. “How dare you speak to me like this! I love her too. I raised her for seven years! Have you forgotten?” Grace hung up on her. It would seem that, by this time, raw nerves were barely being controlled.
By the middle of 1934, it was clear that
Then one day Grace came home and found Gladys lying on the couch, having what appeared to be some sort of seizure. “She started kicking and yelling,” Grace later recalled. “She was lying on her back, staring up at the staircase and yelling, ‘Somebody’s coming down those steps to kill me.’ ”
There are many conflicting accounts of what happened in the following minutes, some claiming that Gladys had brandished a knife in order to fight off her imagined “attackers.” Marilyn remembered the fallout of the event in her memoir. She and “the English couple” (the Atkinsons) were having breakfast when she heard someone fall down the stairs. It was her mother. Though she was told to stay in the kitchen, the little girl peeped out and managed to catch a glimpse of Gladys screaming, laughing, and acting in a completely irrational manner. With eyes alert and knowing—not even fearful—Norma Jeane seemed to realize that this moment would be a defining one where her mother was concerned. Indeed, Gladys Baker had suffered a severe psychotic break. Because it appeared that she was now a danger to herself and others, the police were called and it was quickly determined that she would be sent for psychiatric evaluation.
Once she was at a hospital, a number of doctors came to the same conclusion. Gladys was diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic and would now have to be committed to the state mental institution, Norwalk Hospital, indefinitely. It seemed to have happened so fast—or had it? Truly, it had been coming for years. Schizophrenia is an often misunderstood brain disorder that affects over 1 percent of the country’s adult population. Each year more than one hundred thousand people are diagnosed with schizophrenia in the United States alone. One in four of them will attempt suicide at least once in their lifetime, and one in ten will succeed. Paranoid schizophrenia—a severe and disabling form of the condition—has frightening symptoms, which most commonly include sufferers hearing voices, thinking others can read their minds, and believing that plots are being developed to harm them. Often, schizophrenics have no signs of the disease until a certain period after adolescence, when a mental shift takes place. While this change in behavior occurs earlier in men (their late teens and early twenties), women sufferers can experience this dramatic shift later, usually in their twenties and thirties.
It’s worth noting that this terrible diagnosis came with some sense of relief for Gladys, as well as for those who loved her. After years of worrying about a total mental collapse in the future, that fear was now relegated to the past. At thirty-two, Gladys Baker had spent much of her life battling the voices—and now, undoubtedly, the voices had won.
As an adult, Marilyn Monroe would recall having overheard a conversation between Grace McKee and friends as they tried to convince her not to take on the responsibility of raising the child. They said she was a “mental case.” Marilyn said that she lay in bed “shivering” because even though she didn’t know what a mental case was, she was sure it wasn’t good. Indeed, Grace’s friends talked about all of the people in Norma Jeane’s family who had mental problems and said they were sure the same fate would befall the little girl. Still, Grace decided that she would take care of her friend’s daughter, somehow. She soon filed the necessary papers and became her legal guardian.
It was decided, though, that Norma Jeane would continue to live, at least for the time being, with the Atkinsons. Therefore, for the rest of 1934, she stayed with them in the Arbol Drive home. After just becoming accustomed to having her mother around, now she had to readjust to living without her. For weeks, she would ask where Gladys was and when she was going to return. Even though she’d had that terrible exchange with her mother where her mother wished her dead, Norma Jeane felt that they’d gotten closer in recent months. She was finally happy. Now it seemed as if it were all over, and she wanted to know why. As always, Grace was very patient with her. “Your mommy is gone, sweetheart,” she told her, “and she’s not going to be back for a long time. But I’m here for you now.”
Following the union strike at Consolidated Studios, Grace was working at Columbia Pictures in the movie company’s film library. Because she worked on the periphery of show business, she knew a great many people in the movie business and often discussed with them the current crop of movie stars and their careers at Columbia. Columbia Pictures, though, was considered a “poverty row” operation, not the huge film company it would become in later years.
In the early 1930s, Columbia was a fledgling company that laid claim to the most popular comedy trio of the day, the Three Stooges, who would display their screwball slapstick comedy in 190 short films between 1934 and 1957. The studio’s primary focus was low-budget comedies, westerns, Saturday afternoon serials, and any story that could be shot in a week and in theaters in another week. Speed and economy were its strong suits, and Columbia was the best studio in Hollywood for that kind of fare. Grace was inspired by her surroundings and began to wonder if perhaps she could become involved in the movie business in some way other than as a film cutter.
As Grace came to know Norma Jeane better, she began to believe that the young girl had some potential in show business, maybe as an actress. Not only was she very pretty, but there was something more complex about her. Her eyes were large and intelligent. She was interesting to look at, to watch. She had unusual charisma for such a young child. Of course, it is easy to make such a retrospective judgment about the girl who would one day become Marilyn Monroe, but it was really true just the same. Grace told everyone she knew that she had a strong feeling about the child and that, as she put it, “there might be something there.” Today it would be said that what Grace perceived in Norma Jeane was the “X” factor—a quality that can’t be described but that somehow conveys stardom.
“My mother told me that Grace would dress her up in the prettiest little outfits and bring her to work,” recalls Dia Nanouris, whose mom was an assistant film editor at Columbia. “She doted on her and seemed to love her very much, as if she was her own daughter. In fact, most people did think they were mother and daughter.
“Grace was a big fan of Jean Harlow’s and my mom thought it was Jean Harlow’s career that Grace had in mind for Norma Jeane. One thing was sure, Grace had made up her mind that Norma Jeane would be in show business, and from what was known about Grace, once she had her mind made up about something, it usually happened. She took Norma Jeane to see several Jean Harlow films back then and talked a lot about Harlow to the little girl.”
Arriving in Hollywood during the declining years of the silent era, Jean Harlow (nee Harlean Carpenter) traveled the usual starlet route, appearing in Hal Roach shorts and bit parts in forgettable films, before her career took off like a rocket thanks to the legendary Howard Hughes, who cast her in the principal female role in his 1930 World War I aviation epic,
