The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

in five films the following year for five different studios, including The Public Enemy, a groundbreaking gangster film that established James Cagney as a superstar and Warner Bros. as the premier studio for the gangster genre. This was also the year—1931—that Columbia Pictures’ top director, Frank Capra, cast her in a film, Platinum Blonde, whose title provided her with a lifelong identification.

Grace McKee’s prediction about Norma Jeane’s film future was perhaps more prescient than even she could have imagined. Saratoga, Jean Harlow’s last film, though incomplete, costarred Clark Gable, and with an irony that’s hard to ignore, Marilyn’s last film completed was The Misfits, also starring Gable. (Some Monroe biographers list as her final film Something’s Got to Give, but the picture was never finished and never released to theaters.) ^*

“There was something a little unusual about Grace’s intense interest in Jean Harlow,” recalled Dia Nanouris. “My mom said that every time she brought the girl to work it was like an audition. She would have her prance about and pose or pout. ‘Show them how pretty you are, Norma,’ she would say. ‘Just like Jean Harlow! Or show them how you smile. Just like Jean Harlow. Show them.’ My mom thought it was strange. After all, Norma Jeane was just eight. The girl was wearing a little bit of makeup, she had her hair curled, and Grace was talking about having her nose ‘fixed’! Grace gave her an enormous wide-brimmed hat to shield her little face from the sun. ‘Doesn’t it look stylish?’ she would ask. But Grace was always a little eccentric. If you look at pictures of her back then, she had peroxided blonde hair, wore a lot of makeup—but wore it well. She wasn’t trashy. She was very theatrical. When I see those pictures today in family scrapbooks, I can’t help but think, yes, this is where Marilyn Monroe got it from.”

Marilyn Monroe summed it up best herself: “Aunt Grace would say things to me like no one else would ever talk to me.… She would sit me down and tell me things and hold my hands. I felt as whole as a loaf of bread nobody’s eaten.”

Norma Jeane’s Troubling Visit with Gladys

Late in 1934, it was decided that Gladys Baker would be able to obtain leave from the sanitarium on occasional weekends. Because her medication seemed to be working, her doctors thought it might be beneficial if she were able to travel in the outside world, just as long as her time away from the facility was supervised by a responsible person. Grace, of course, was eager for her friend to regain some sense of normalcy in her life and said she would be more than happy to be accountable for her during these intermittent sojourns. However, as it would happen, these weekends with Gladys—once every month or so—which began in September, were to be quite difficult. Gladys, though better than she was when first institutionalized, was still not well.

On one such weekend in late November 1934, Grace took Gladys and Norma Jeane to the Ambassador Hotel for what she hoped would be a lovely lunch in elegant surroundings. The Ambassador, a grand, sprawling hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, was quite the “in” place at this time, its Coconut Grove nightclub a destination point for an evening on the town for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. In fact, because the sixth annual Academy Awards presentation had taken place in its Fiesta Room eight months earlier, Grace was certain that a luncheon at such an auspicious place would be a special treat for all of them. Moreover, Grace was proud of the physical transformation that had taken place in her little charge over the last year, and she wanted Gladys to see it for herself.

Norma Jeane now wore her long blonde hair in dangling curls. Of course, she had those cornflower blue eyes, and now even a touch of red brushed across her pouting lips. Somehow, she seemed much more precocious than the last time Gladys saw her. Actually, some in Grace’s circle found the makeover a tad disconcerting. It was as if Norma Jeane were far more mature than her eight years, perhaps even being forced into adulthood—not that her childhood had been, thus far, one to cherish. However, Grace had a specific image of how she wanted the youngster to appear and comport herself in public, and she’d spent many hours tutoring her in order that she would rise to those standards. For instance, she’d taught her to curtsy, to be polite, to look people in the eyes when speaking to them, and also to speak clearly and enunciate every syllable. It was as if Grace were running a charm school with only one pupil.

According to a later recollection, when Gladys laid eyes on this new version of her daughter, she didn’t seem interested one way or the other. “I think we could have eaten in the coffee shop downstairs and that would have been a lot better than this,” she told Grace, ignoring Norma Jeane from the outset. She seemed angry. In fact, the severity of her expression did not change during the entire meal. “I shouldn’t be in that place,” she kept insisting, speaking of the sanitarium, “and I want out.”

Obedient and very quiet, Norma Jeane just picked at her food while Grace struggled to engage Gladys in conversation.

In truth, Gladys was too self-involved at this point in her sickness to care about Norma Jeane or anyone else. So immersed was she in her mental illness and in her desire to obtain her freedom, it didn’t matter to her that her daughter was sitting before her. This kind of scene would be repeated for many years to come, whenever Norma Jeane would have an occasional weekend with her mother. “I just don’t think she even liked me very much, let alone loved me,” is how the adult Marilyn would recall it. Of course, there were myriad reasons for Gladys’s emotional disconnect from her daughter, so many that it had become impossible for others—like Grace—to even begin to understand the complex machinations of Gladys’s mind.

At one point during the troubling meal, Grace said to Norma Jeane, “Tell your mother what you want to be when you grow up.” Norma Jeane, perhaps hoping to impress her mother with her exciting goal, turned to Gladys with eager brightness and said, “I want to be a movie star.” In response, Gladys just looked at her daughter with eyes cold as steel. Then she went back to her meal without saying a word.

Norma Jeane in an Orphanage

The next chapter in young Norma Jeane’s life has always been confusing to Marilyn Monroe historians. In the fall of 1935, Grace McKee decided to take nine-year-old Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home Society at 815 North El Centro Avenue in Hollywood. ^* The question has always been why Grace, who not only had strong maternal instincts toward Norma Jeane but also a goal of stardom in mind for her, would suddenly put her in an orphanage. Some Marilyn Monroe historians have theorized that the Atkinsons had become abusive to Marilyn, though she never suggested as much in any of her interviews. However, Grace McKee did tell Berniece many years later that she learned they had not been treating Norma Jeane well and dismissed them. That may have been true, but the Atkinsons also felt they had film opportunities in London and decided to return to their homeland.

At this same time, Grace became the legal custodian of all of Gladys’s affairs and, as such, took on the complicated responsibility of caring for all the loose ends her friend had left behind before being institutionalized. One of her first decisions was to sell Gladys’s home in order to pay off her debts, mostly medical expenses. Next on her agenda was the possibility of adopting Norma Jeane. It was just a seed of an idea, but it was something she would discuss openly with her friends (most of whom seemed to be against it). Grace already thought of the girl as her own and she knew that Gladys would not oppose the idea. For her part, there was no one else Norma Jeane would have wanted to be with at this time, other than perhaps her Aunt Ida. She loved her “Aunt Grace” and felt that she could do no wrong.

By this time, Grace had married and divorced a third husband and was on her fourth. That she was barren had become an issue in all three of her earlier marriages. In fact, it was specifically responsible for the demise of at least one of them and caused tension in the other two. In her fourth marriage, she found a man who came with a ready-made family. Her new husband was Ervin Silliman Goddard—known as Doc. Ten years her junior, he was