Marilyn Monroe, page 2
I hoped I would never get to know sweet Marilyn Monroe’s vengeful side firsthand. I rose and said, “You’re doing very well, Marilyn, and I’m sorry to stop you, but our time is up. I will see you again the next time, if you care to make another appointment.”
Marilyn was offended at the disruption. She glared at me ferociously and took her time getting her things together and rising from the couch. It’s a good thing looks don’t kill, I thought.
FEBRUARY 3, 1959
Marilyn indeed put herself down for another session—for the very next day—and she immediately picked up where she had left off in telling me about her mother, her fit of pique seemingly forgotten.
“Two weeks after I was born in the charity ward, my dear mother, unable to get her mother to take on my care, turned me over to a foster family.”
I gasped, and hoped she had not heard me. Rejected at two weeks of age! The poor baby never had a chance. I noticed Marilyn’s stutter emerging once again as she spoke to me haltingly. “I was a mistake. My mother never wanted me. I still wish—wish every d-day that she had wanted me.” She shook her head, recovering a little. “But when I said my mother was a nut, I wasn’t kidding. When I was seven years old, she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and placed in a state mental institution, where she remained for much of her life. In fact, she’s still there.”
Marilyn may have heard my earlier gasp, for she added, “But she didn’t reject me altogether. Before she went into the institution, she came and stayed weekends with me at the foster home and took me out to the beach or the movies. We both loved movies. Although I hate to remember it, when I was little, I looked forward to her visits like nothing else. What else does a child living in an orphanage have to look forward to? I desperately waited for her visit each week.
“Gladys always said she was going to buy us a house and we’d live together like other families. As the years passed and I realized we were never going to live in that house,I stopped looking forward to her visits. What good were they, if she never was going to be a mother to me? They just made me blue when she left. I think that’s when I realized she was a liar and stopped loving her, and haven’t really trusted anyone since. I determined then that if I ever have a little girl, I’ll always tell her the truth, no matter how painful it is. I can live with anything as long as it’s the truth.
“A publicity man at Fox said he’d never heard me tell a lie. I was happy to hear that, because if I’m not myself, who am ? But my reputation for being frank isn’t always good for me and has sometimes gotten me into trouble. When I’ve upset someone with what I honestly think, then try to pull back, they think I’m being coy. I’m supposed to have said that I don’t like being interviewed by women reporters. I never said such a thing. I might be dumb, but I’m not as dumb as all that. What I did say is that I honestly prefer men reporters, because I find them more stimulating.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, I have a kind of sincere stupidity. In interviews, I don’t want to tell every reporter the same thing. I want to give each one something fresh, so my fans don’t feel cheated and say, ‘I know that! Why is she saying the same thing over and over again?’
“But I never will allow an article to be published in my name in a movie magazine. When I was a little girl, I used to follow fan magazines religiously, and often based my conduct on what the movie stars said. Well, what do you know, but that editors make enormous changes to such interviews. I wouldn’t want to have that kind of influence on young girls unless I was sure it was really my words being passed onto them.
“The same thing is true about being funny. People say I have a great sense of humor. They don’t realize that I’m simply telling the truth. George Bernard Shaw said it better: ‘My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.’”
She was right. When I went over her published remarks in my mind, I saw that they simply represented her innocent way of telling the truth. For example, a reporter asked her, “What do you wear when you’re sleeping?” Her answer was, “Chanel No. 5.” As the whole world knew, Marilyn Monroe slept in the nude.
When I looked at my watch, I saw that the end of the hour had long passed. That was most unusual for me. Patients said they could set their clocks by how punctually I began and ended their sessions. I realized that I had been so fascinated by Marilyn’s words, I had not noticed the passage of time. I thought, I’ll have to watch that. A psychoanalyst must be objective at all times!
I stood up and said, “We will have to stop now.” She remained seated for a few long moments, a bewildered expression on her face. Then the most beautiful woman in the world silently rose and tied the babushka around her head. Again, an amazing transformation occurred. It was as if a light inside of her suddenly was turned off. And the drab little woman I first met in the waiting room silently shuffled out the door.
FEBRUARY 6, 1959
Which Marilyn will come in today? I wondered, as I walked to the waiting room to welcome her to her third session. Would she be the effervescent, glowing, incredibly beautiful woman the world knew, or the dingy little creature one might suspect was homeless? At least this patient isn’t boring! I thought.
Marilyn this time was someone in-between. “Hi, Doc,” she said, plopping herself down on the couch. “I’m really getting off on this analysis stuff. I wanna go on with the story of my life, if it’s OK with you.”
“Of course,” I answered. “I want to know as much about you as you want to tell me.”
Was I correct in thinking her face lit up a bit?
“Where wasI?” she asked. “I think I stopped where I was disillusioned with my dear mother. Oh yes, I told you I was placed with foster families, maybe ten or twelve of them. Some kept me longer, others got tired of me in a short time. I guess I made them nervous.”
Ye gods, I thought. Ten or twelve foster homes? It is amazing she is not in the asylum with her mother!
“My first and most important foster home,” she continued, “was with the Wayne Bolenders, where my mother placed me for the first seven years of my life.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. At least she had a family for seven years. But my relief wasn’t to last long.
“My mother boarded me out to Ida and Wayne Bolender in Hawthorne, California two weeks after I was born. No, wait a minute. If I remember correctly, she placed me with them when I was all of twelve days old.” She said reminiscently, “They had a comfortable six-room bungalow I remember very well. Although they didn’t have a great deal of money, they increased their income by taking in foster children.”
Marilyn digressed a little at this point, not quite ready yet to move on from thoughts of her mother. I must admit that life had dealt Gladys a rotten set of cards. Her S.O.B. husband not only left her, but kidnapped her first two children, and she never was able to recover them. That would drive me crazy, too.” She sighed, returning to the topic of her foster parents. “She had no choice but to board me out. She had financial problems, too. She had to go back to work at Consolidated Film Industries in order to support us, working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and there was no one to take care of me. She paid the Bolenders five dollars a week, probably half her salary, to look after me.
“Every Saturday, Gladys took the trolley to Hawthorne to visit me. In the early years, I desperately waited for her visit each week. One week, she didn’t show up, and I stood waiting by the front window until bedtime. Ida tried to pull me away, and said, ‘Norma Jeane, your mother isn’t coming today. You have to come eat your dinner.’
“‘No, no!’ I screamed. ‘She’ll come. Just you wait and see.’
“She kept yanking me by the shoulder. But I held onto the wall with my nails until a huge chunk of the plaster fell off into my hands. ‘You’re a bad girl, Norma Jeane,’ Ida said, and slapped me in the face.” Marilyn raised her hand to her cheek, which was wet with tears. She winced, and added, “It still hurts.”
Marilyn said that the Bolenders were a deeply religious couple who lived a comfortable lower middle-class life in an unstylish Los Angeles suburb.
“The house was still standing when I took my first husband Jim there to see it, although the name of the street had been changed from Rhode Island Avenue to West Hawthorne.”
Ida Bolender, it turned out, was a rigid, conscience-driven woman who forcefully pounded her beliefs into Norma Jeane. Ida made the little girl promise never to smoke, drink, or swear, and insisted that she attend church several times a week or she would go to Hell. She was not even allowed to go to the movies. “We are a churchgoing family, not a movie-going one” Ida repeatedly said. “Do you know what would happen if the world came to an end while you were sitting in the movies? You would burn in Hell with all the rest of the bad people.”
Marilyn began to laugh. “I was a smart little kid and, after a while, I asked myself, If Ida’s right, will there be enough room in Hell for all the ashes from all the movie theaters in all the world?
“There wasn’t much I could do to please my foster mother. I could never measure up to her standards of cleanliness and behavior, and was always in some kind of trouble. Like many children, I loved to play in the dirt. Ida would dress me up in pretty, clean clothes and send me out to play. Twenty minutes later, I would bounce back into the house with my dress caked in mud. Ida wasn’t happy about it and gave me a wallop or two to punish me for my ‘bad behavior.’
“I don’t think that is such a terrible thing for a little girl to do, Doctor. Do you?”
“Absolutely not, Marilyn,” I answered. “It is perfectly normal behavior for a little child.” The inner light turned on again, as Marilyn’s face lit up in an enchanting smile.
One of her foster sisters, Nancy Jeffrey, believed that despite Ida’s severity, she was a good influence on Marilyn in many ways and a stabilizing influence in her life. Ida taught her foster children to love the Lord and each other, and gave Norma Jeane the only foundation she ever had, which served her well in her career. Without it, Marilyn Monroe might never have become the star she was. Ida told Nancy, at least as Marilyn recalled it: “I know I was hard on Norma Jeane, but it was for her own good. I was sure she would have a hard life, and I wanted to prepare her for it. I know in my heart I raised her the right way.”
Norma Jeane soon learned how to live with Ida’s strictness. “When she reprimanded me,I nodded, but I kept my fingers crossed behind me,” Marilyn said with a smile.
In order to avoid punishment, this highly intelligent little girl learned to conceal her desire to sing, dance, and act out a fantasy life. She attended the movies surreptitiously whenever she could and also found her own unique ways of handling boredom in church—sexual fantasies.
“I’ll tell you about them after I get to know you better,” Marilyn laughingly said. “After all, how do I know you don’t think like Ida Bolender?”
“Hmm,” I said. Marilyn’s comment signaled to me that she might be developing negative transference, conflating me with Ida Boldender and the negative associations Marilyn had with her. (Transference is the name for the patient’s tendency to project, on the analyst, qualities belonging to early important figures in his or her life. This process keeps analysis from becoming too painful.)I would need to resolve this issue and allow Marilyn to develop positive transference instead, making our sessions a place of trust and eventually growth for her.
FEBRUARY 9, 1959
When Marilyn next came to see me, she started off on a decidedly negative note. “That was a long weekend, Doc! It seemed like a whole week.”
Then she told me more about the Bolenders. In the days before the expression “stay-at- home mom” even existed, Ida took care of the house and several foster children, along with her and Wayne’s natural son. Wayne was the breadwinner, a postman fortunate enough to keep his job throughout the Depression. He added to their low income by printing religious pamphlets for distribution to the members of their church.
Marilyn was aware that though the Bolenders shared many of the same beliefs, they didn’t have much of a relationship. They rarely spoke to each other, and when they did, it was usually because Ida was chastising Wayne or chivvying him out of his reluctance to perform work around the house.
I thought it unfortunate that Marilyn missed the early chance to see a married couple getting along well with each other—a couple who could have served as a model for a union she could look forward to experiencing someday.
Nevertheless, she cared about Wayne, who usually was a pleasant, friendly fellow. “I can just see his big shoulders bulging with huge mailbags,” she recalled. “He used to carry candy in his pocket to throw to the dogs so they wouldn’t bite him. Sometimes he would give me a piece,” Marilyn said wistfully.
“He also could be terribly frightening. When I became what he considered boisterous, down came my pants and off came his leather belt, huge silver buckle and all. I’ll never forget the lash of his leather and the welts it caused on my bare buttocks as he pressed me against his genitals. I had to eat standing up for days. I have a sensitivity on my ass to the present day.
“But I loved Wayne at the time. What did I know? I thought that was how fathers were supposed to act—that they punished their children to teach them a lesson. You know the old story, ‘This hurts me more than it hurts you.’”
No wonder she wiggles her behind when she walks, I thought. Strange as it is to contemplate, the world has Wayne Bolender to thank for his part in giving us the sexiest behind in the history of the cinema.
Then I thought angrily, How could he? Didn’t the man have a heart? How, for some imagined transgression, could he possibly tear into the flesh of the helpless little orphan girl he was supposed to be taking care of? The man should be investigated even now and sentenced to prison. I also could not help but wonder if little Norma Jeane was already attractive, and if Wayne Bolender derived sexual pleasure while beating her. Then I felt ashamed of the thought. Whether she was seductive or not had nothing to do with Wayne’s abuse. He was paid to be her guardian, and nothing gave him the right to mistreat her.
With the five dollars a week given them by Marilyn’s mother, the Bolenders managed to avoid the devastation suffered by most Americans during the Great Depression. I suspected that Norma Jeane remained a part of their household largely because of the income she brought in, if not for the sexual gratification she provided her foster father; this was probably the reason she was kept by the couple much longer than by any of her other foster parents.
Still, that wasn’t the whole story. It seemed that, in their own harsh way, the Bolenders loved Norma Jeane and wanted to adopt her. But in a rare show of motherly love, Gladys refused to allow it, because her persistent dream was that she would buy a home and take Norma Jeane to live with her in it.
“Ida Bolender thought I was beautiful,” Marilyn said, “and enjoyed brushing my hair, making me pretty clothes, and giving me moral ‘training.’ She believed in protecting a child’s spiritual, physical, and emotional health, in that order, although I believe her heart was largely in enforcing the first. One of the great disappointments of my life was when I asked if I could call her ‘Mother,’ so I could feel like a normal child. She wouldn’t allow it, insisting that I call her ‘Aunt Ida.’ She said she didn’t want to teach a charge of hers to lie! Also, she said that Gladys was terribly upset when she heard me call Ida ‘Mother.’
“I did call Wayne ‘Daddy,’ and nobody seemed to object. I got along better with him anyway, even with the beatings. He gave me a dog I treasured, both because I loved the dog and because my ‘Daddy’ had given him to me. I named him Tippy. I hope someday to make a film with a dog in it named Tippy. That’ll pay my debt to the best friend of my childhood.
“A few years ago, I phoned Wayne, and he said, ‘Norma Jeane, I’ll always love you and be there for you.’ Although years had passed since we had seen each other, a thrill ran down my body from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, just as it had when I was a little girl. Yes, Doctor, even in my ass.”
In my professional opinion, despite the terrible drawbacks of being raised by the God-fearing Bolenders and the traumatic, sexually-tinged beatings by her foster father, Marilyn was better off with their somewhat steady parenting than she would have been without any parents at all. They gave her a little emotional security and a consistent home, and built her a conscience, no matter how distorted.
Marilyn continued, “I told you that I lived with them until I was seven. By then, I never expected to live with my mother, no matter what she promised. But to my great surprise,” she smiled, “Gladys came through after all on her pledge to buy a house for herself and me. In August 1933, when I was seven years old, she signed a contract with the California Title Mortgage Company, which, when added to her savings, gave her enough of a down payment to buy a small white bungalow at 6812 Arbol Drive in Hollywood. Money was still scarce, but Gladys was resourceful. She said to me, ‘It’s all on time, so don’t worry.’ I wasn’t worried. It never entered my mind. I’m working a double shift at the studio,’ she said, ‘and soon I’ll be able to pay it off.’
“I guess Gladys wasn’t kidding when she said she really wanted me to live with her. I was ecstatic! For the first time in my life, I was able to live with my mother like any normal girl.
“The house even had a yard and a white fence around it,” Marilyn said with wide open eyes, as though she still couldn’t believe it. “At the time, Gladys was working as a film cutter at Columbia Pictures, but to supplement her low paycheck, she rented the whole house, except for the two rooms she saved for us, to an English couple who had minor film jobs. The husband was a stand-in for George Arliss, the character actor, and the wife worked as an extra.
