They Say Marilyn Monroe’s Mother Was Insane. I’m Not So Sure.
Depression, abuse and trauma are not insanity
When she went to the pier that day, she had no idea what was about to happen to her or the toll it would take on the rest of her life, forever and ever, amen.
Gladys Pearl Monroe was a pretty little thing, all of 14, and she was very unhappy with her mama at that moment.
See, Gladys’s daddy had died when she was 7, and soon after, her mama started entertaining widowers. That’s what a woman did in 1909, especially a woman with a child. She needed a man to provide for them.
There weren’t many jobs for women and what there was didn’t pay much. Half what a man would get if he was doing the same job.
Her mama had remarried when Gladys was 10, but her stepdaddy lost his job and cost them everything, including their home. Then he up and left, so her mama got a divorce.
Now there was a new boyfriend. Again. So Gladys started going to the pier every day. It got her away from her mama and that new boyfriend of hers.
One day at the pier, Gladys met a man that took a shine to her.
He was 25 and his name was John “Jasper” Newton Baker. He didn’t care that she was only 14, he wanted to marry her. So he asked her mama.
Turned out her mama worked for Mr. Baker when the last husband cleaned them out. Hard to say no to the only man who gave her a job. Even when he wants your 14 year old daughter. So Gladys’s mama gave consent and signed the forms.
When they got married, Gladys wasn’t even 15 yet.
A year later, they had a little boy, nevermind that Gladys was a child herself. They named him Robert Kermit Baker, but called him Jackie. A year later, they had a bright eyed baby girl they named Berniece.
At 21, Gladys was standing in front of a judge crying.
The judge listened to her and then granted a divorce on the grounds of extreme and brutal abuse. He also gave her full custody of the children, which was rare back then. Usually children were considered property of the husband.
Her relief was short lived.
One weekend, Jasper took the kids for a visit and never brought them back. Picked them up and disappeared. She thought he took them to Kentucky, where he was born. A long way from California for a girl with no money.
So Gladys got a job as a film cutter. She shared an apartment with a friend from work. Gracie McKee. Sharing rent allowed her to save more.
She vowed she was going to save the money to get her kids back.
A six month marriage and a baby carriage…
In 1924, Gladys married a Norwegian immigrant named Martin Edward Mortensen. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was too hard being a woman in an era that paid women half a man’s salary. Maybe she was lonely.
Anyway, it didn’t last. Six months later, he’d abandoned her and when it appeared he wasn’t coming back, she filed for divorce.
Gladys was only 23, and already twice divorced.
She moved back in with her friend Gracie and kept working and saving. She was going to save up to get her kids. That was all she cared about.
A year later, she was pregnant.
People whispered that the baby daddy was someone at work, but no one knew for sure because she refused to say.
Stop and think about that, k? If it was a boyfriend, someone she loved, wouldn’t someone know? Her best friend, maybe? What might it mean if a single girl was pregnant and refused to tell anyone, even her mama or her best friend?
Years later, we’d learn that her boss fathered the child. A married man.
Anyway, when Norma Jean was born on June 1, 1926, mother and daughter were in the charity ward at the hospital.
She put Mortenson’s name on the birth certificate, even though he was long gone. Some say it was to make the child look legitimate. Maybe. Maybe it was so the father couldn’t lay claim to the child this time. No one would be running away with this baby. But who knows. It was a secret she took to her grave.
7 years of struggle to keep her little girl…
When she had that baby in the charity ward, she sobbed that she’s not losing this one. Not. She can’t lose another baby, she said. Can’t.
She’d already lost two babies. Little Jackie was only 6, Bernice 5. She ached for them every day. No one was taking this baby away from her. No one.
Her mama pointed out the obvious. How would she work and care for a baby? Her mama had neighbors that fostered. For $25/month, Ida and Al Bolanger would raise her baby and she could visit every weekend.
So she brought them her baby. For seven long years, she faithfully paid the monthly fee and visited her little girl on the weekends.
Lots of “crazy” stories of her trying to sneak her child out, keeping her too long, not wanting to leave her behind. Crying. Refusing to leave. That doesn’t make her crazy. She worked her job, paid her rent, paid her bills and hated that someone else was raising her child. Can anyone fault her that, really?
One day when Norma Jean was a toddler, she accidentally said “mama” to Ida and got slapped for it. “Never call me that,” she shrieked at the child. I am not your Mama. The lady with red hair is your mama.
That’s just to give you some idea what Gladys knew her child was living. It might make me a little crazy, too. Not insane. Just a little crazy.
Gladys buys a house!
When Norma Jean was 7, Gladys qualified for credit to buy a house. She bought a tiny white clapboard, not far from Hollywood Boulevard and finally brought her little girl home. She was going to be a real mama. Finally.
She left her job and took in boarders to make ends meet. That was pretty common way to earn income for women who didn’t have a husband back then.
For two years, they had a “normal” life. Mother and daughter side by side. They’d clean house together, cook for the boarders and walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard holding hands and looking in the windows.
The first time she got committed…
One day, Gladys’s boarders called the police. They arrived, sirens screeching.
She lost her mind, they said. There she was, laying on the kitchen floor screaming and crying, pounding the floor with fists and feet.
Jackie was dead. Her little boy. Drowned in the river, they told her. He was just shy of turning 15. She was inconsolable.
Later, the autopsy would say tuberculosis, but when she got the message, they told her he drowned. And if that wasn’t bad enough? Her beloved grandfather had hung himself. Two people she loved with all her being. Gone.
The police called a doctor. Fast as you can blink, Gladys Pearl Baker was taken to a mental hospital. Norma Jean was almost 9.
Her friend Gracie came and got Norma Jean. Promised to take care of her. But by then, Gracie had a husband and two kids of her own. A year later, Gracie’s husband raped Norma Jean when she was 10.
Gracie went and got a court order permitting her to put Norma Jean in the foster care system. No more temptation for her husband, I guess. When they came and told Gladys that Norma Jean had been put in foster care, she had another meltdown.
Schizophrenic, they called her.
They said she was insane, but I’m not so sure…
If you were to look up Gladys Pearl Baker, what you’ll find is people saying she was crazy as a loon. Spent her life in mental institutions, they say. But she didn’t. She spent more time “not” in institutions than “in” them.
She did go into asylums several times over her lifetime. Every time another horrible thing happened, she was hauled to an institution.
Like when she fell in love and got married again…
During the time Norma Jean was divorcing the fellow she was forced to marry at 15, mother and daughter lived together. Norma Jean was a rising star in modeling and film, and Gladys met a man and fell in love.
Finally. Someone to love her. She married him, dear reader. And then found out he already had a wife and children. She fell to pieces, and back to the asylum she went.
Poor Gladys just can’t keep it together, they said.
Like when a reporter splashed her life all over the papers…
When Norma Jean signed a contract with 20th Century Fox, they changed her name and said she was to say she’s an orphan and her parents were dead. She agreed, because she didn’t want her mama hounded by paparazzi.
Gladys was fine. Working in a nursing home. She’d excitedly tell people Marilyn Monroe (the rising star!) is her daughter, and they’d laugh at her. Marilyn Monroe is an orphan, they told her.
Poor crazy Gladys. Thinks Marilyn Monroe is her daughter. Crazy as a loon.
But then a gossip columnist got a tip that Marilyn’s mother was alive, so she dug in and then wrote an expose. Splashed Glady’s life and photos all over the newspapers. Including Jackie.
When she saw her Jackie all over the papers, Gladys fell apart, and back to the sanitarium she went.
Like when her daughter was found dead…
When Gladys heard that Norma Jean was found dead, she pulled the hairpins from her hair and started stabbing the veins in her wrist, crying that she just wants to die. My baby, she sobbed, my poor baby.
A few months later, she made a rope out of two uniforms and climbed out the window of a closet in the asylum. Then she started walking.
24 hours later, they found her quietly sitting in a church 15 miles away.
The media got there before the police. She made the papers again.
Depression, abuse and trauma are not insanity
The center photo below was taken as they were bringing her back from the church to the asylum.
After Marilyn’s death, Gladys moved in with her daughter Berniece. In Kentucky, where her husband had fled with the kids decades ago.
After a couple of years, she moved into a senior’s apartment nearby, where she lived on her own for almost 20 years, until her death in 1984.
People love to say she was insane.
They forget that men had a nasty habit of putting women in asylums for being “hysterical.” Hysteria was an actual diagnosis, and until the late 50s, it only took two signatures to put a woman away. One if the signature was a judge or doctor.
Once peace finally found her, she lived a quiet and uneventful life, sipping coffee with her daughter, talking, laughing, visiting family and watching her granddaughter grow up.
Was she insane? I’m not so sure. Depression, abuse and trauma are not insanity. But maybe the way they treated her was.
“When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.”
―Arthur Golden