The Silver Age of Hollywood Movies, 1953: 1963 - Vol I: Marilyn Monroe

The Silver Age of Hollywood Movies

1953 -1963

Vol : Marilyn Monroe

James R Ashley

Copyright 2015

Smashwords edition

Table of Contents

Introduction

Early Years

Education

Jobs

Love Life

Persona

Medical History

Marilyn's Doctors

MOVIE CAREER

Marilyn's Drama Coaches

Films

DEATH

The Last Day of Marilyn's Life

The Murder Stories

The Police Investigation

The Medical Examination

The Witnesses

Marilyn's Funeral

Estate

Bibliography

Introduction

Marilyn had a simply horrible childhood. She was raised by her grandmother and mother, who were both out-and-out fruitcakes. Never once was Marilyn ever shown any maternal love by either - never hugged, never kissed, never complimented. Marilyn's mother treated her more than an unwelcome stranger than a daughter. Marilyn's fathers were all worthless bums, who played no part in her life. When Marilyn's mother finally went around the bend, Marilyn was placed in an orphanage and was passed around to a number of families, who returned her to the orphanage whenever it became inconvenient to keep her around.

The only reason Marilyn married her 1st husband was to keep out of the orphanage. She had little in common with Jim Dougherty and when they parted, she made a number of similar bad marriage choices, being beaten black and blue regularly by the male chauvinist pig and former baseball player Joe DiMaggio and largely ignored by the playwright Arthur Miller. If Marilyn got any enjoyment out of her various marriages, they was little evidence of it.

When Marilyn reached her teenage years, she made her decision to be an actress. Although having little talent for the profession, Marilyn did have a great body and made her way to the top on her back, sleeping with anyone who could advance her career. Her cutesy face, waddling walk, and baby-girl breathless voice typified the ideal bimbo men went wild over at that time and for no good reason other than that, she became a star. Her claim to fame was based totally on a screen presence, for she had no real acting ability. She was unable to remember a 3-word line, and would have to reshoot a scene 25 times or more before she was able to get it right. She was overly-sensitive and would run sobbing to her dressing room at the last little criticism. She would also regularly pop her cookies before going on set, so great was her fear of the camera. Unable to sleep at night, she swallowed downers by the handful and did the same thing with uppers during the day. She soon turned into both an alcoholic and drug addict.

When Marilyn hit middle age, not only did her looks and body start to go, but the cutesy airhead bimbo image she had tried so hard to cultivate was quickly becoming passé. And although Marilyn's movie career and status as a sex symbol was clearly over, her big scene was still to be played out. Marilyn had once again fallen in love with some bad apples and this time it was with the Kennedy brothers: Jack, the President of the United States, and Bobby, the Attorney General of the United States. They were both hit-and-run bums, like their father, and after they had blown Marilyn off, she was pissed enough to go public about what she knew about them, and she knew a lot. And that quickly brought the curtain down on Marilyn's miserable life.

Although in life Marilyn was a sexy movie star who was renowned at her time for her beauty and sexiness, ironically it was in her death that she ensured her immortality, as it became one of the great conspiracy murder-mysteries of all time. The manner of Marilyn's death elevated her to a bigger than life cult icon and guaranteed that she would not soon be forgotten, as so many other glamour girls were of her era. So turn the page and be there alongside Marilyn on her journey to immortality.

Early Years

Gladys Monroe (Marilyn's mother) Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortensen on the morning of June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Marilyn received her last name from Martin Edward Mortensen, Gladys Monroe’s 2nd husband. However, since they were separated at the time and since Gladys did not know where he lived, his address on Marilyn’s birth certificate is listed as unknown. In all likelihood the man Gladys was living with at the time, Stan Gifford, had fathered Gladys' child, but because Gifford had wanted nothing to do with marriage (Gladys was actually still married to Mortensen then) nor a child, Gladys had given Marilyn the last name of Mortensen, to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy, which thanks to the Roman Catholic church, carried with it a significant social stigma at the time.

Gladys’ was first married at age 15 to John Jasper Baker, who ran an amusement concessionaire at Pickering’s Pleasure Palace in Ocean Park. They started having intimate relations with each other and Gladys soon found herself pregnant with Robert Jackie Baker. Although Baker wanted Gladys to abort the child, she insisted on carrying him to term and gave birth to him 6 months after they were married, on November 10, 1917. A daughter named Bernice was born in July of the following year.

Baker turned out to be a real bum. He drank like a fish, and when he drank he became violent and beat Gladys so badly that she had to often wear sunglasses to conceal her black eyes. Baker’s rationale for Gladys' beatings were that they were necessary to prevent her from roaming around, in preference to doing her wifely duties of cooking and house cleaning for him.

When Gladys came home one day and caught Baker having intercourse with another women, he was the one who left, taking with him their 2 children, Bernice and Robert. Baker went to Kentucky, where he remarried. Gladys, upon finding out where Baker and their 2 children were living, hitchhiked from California to Flat Lick, Kentucky. Once there, she was told by Baker that under no circumstances would he relinquish their children to her, as she was an unfit mother. The best Gladys could arrange for was a short visit with both of her children before returning back to California. She would never see her son again and when, in later years, she saw her daughter Bernice, she stood motionless as her daughter hugged her, apparently completely devoid of any maternal feeling for her.

On October 11, 1924, the 24-year-old Gladys married her 2nd husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, who was an itinerant laborer. Gladys undoubtedly married him because he offered her economic stability and security, but it came at a high price - that of a dull and boring life. In February 1925, after only 4 months of marriage, Gladys walked out on Mortensen. On June 1, 1927, their divorce became final.

Gladys returned to Venice Beach in May 1923. There she met Stan Gifford, a sales manager for the Consolidated Film Laboratories in Hollywood, who was living at her apartment house. Before long they were going at it hot and heavy, and Gifford got her a job as a negative cutter and film splicer at Consolidated Studios. On Christmas Eve, 1925, Gladys informed Gifford that she was pregnant with his child (Marilyn), although she was still married to Mortensen. His response was to offer her some cash for an abortion. Unknown to Gladys, Gifford was a drug addict and a womanizer of the lowest class of women and was neither fit or amenable to be either a husband or a father. The realization of this threw Gladys into a deep depression. On July 1, 1926, Marilyn was born, with Gifford nowhere to be found. He knew Gladys was playing the field at the time with a great number of men and was convinced that the child was not his. Gladys named her daughter Norma Jean Mortensen. Gladys selected Norma as her child’s first name, because she worked on a number of Norma Talmadge films. She selected the middle name because she thought her blond daughter was going to be a bombshell, like the movie star Jean Harlow.

In later years, Marilyn obtained Gilford’s telephone number from 2 former employees at Consolidated Studios. When she called him, however, he hung up on her. She then paid him a visit at his 5-acre farm in Hemet, California, and was greeted at the door by Gifford’s wife, who gave Marilyn a business card with the family’s lawyer’s telephone number on it. In 1962, just before Marilyn’s death, Gifford was diagnosed with cancer and tried to contact Marilyn. She is said to have replied, tell the gentleman to contact my lawyer. Gifford died from cancer in 1965.

At Consolidated, Gladys had befriended her supervisor Grace McKee. Grace was single at the time and she and Gladys soon became close friends, painting the town red night after night. At work Gladys soon became known as the office slut, having banged every man there, young or old.

Being known as being both promiscuous and the mother of an illegitimate child, Gladys became a social outcast to be scorned by decent people. Gladys socialized with virtually no one, except a single friend at work, Grace McKee. Almost from the birth of Norma Jean, Gladys began to suffer from a deteriorating mental condition.

Della Monroe (Marilyn's Grandmother) On May 27, 1900, Gladys was born to Otis and Della Monroe. Otis was initially employed by the Pacific Electric Railway, but his heavy drinking and subsequent uneven performance forced him to drift from job to job. Otis’s frequent blackouts and memory losses were followed by a progressive decline in his mental health. By 1908, when Otis was 41, he was suffering blinding headaches and unpredictable and uncontrollable occurrences of blind rage. Della became so afraid for the safety of her children during such rages that she took them to a neighbor’s house until they passed. In 1909, when Otis was 43, he died in a mental institution of syphilis of the brain.

Otis’ death left the 33 year-old Della on her own with her 2 small children. Della now began exhibiting depression and unpredictable mood swings. In March 1912 she remarried, this time to a switchman supervisor named Lyle Graves, who was 6 years younger than her. The marriage ended shortly and Della, as Gladys had done after her separation, started playing the field. Finding out that Lyle had gone to India, Della now followed him there, presumably to attempt some sort of reconciliation. That apparently didn't happen, as she soon returned without him. Della did return, however, with a case of malaria, which sickened her for several weeks and severely weakened her constitution.

In 1923 Della was said to have been married for a 3rd time, to an oil field worker named Charles Grainger. They had met at a New Year’s dance at a waterfront dive. It seems, however, that the 2 were never actually married. Della now began exhibiting violent and unpredictable rages, much as her 1st husband Otis Monroe had. Grainger decided to pull the plug on the marriage, by arranging for his company to transfer him to an oilfield in Borneo. Again, Della chased after her husband and again returned without him. Upon her return from Borneo in 1926, Della turned to the bottle and baby Jesus for comfort.

Della’s physical and mental condition now rapidly deteriorated. Her skin became loose and off-color, her hair thinned and became unkempt, and her appearance became disheveled. She would frequently cry uncontrollably, then fly into violent rages for no apparent reason. Her family seemed to think it was some type of mental illness caused by postpartum depression following child birth.

Gladys now went to live with Della, bringing along her infant daughter Norma Jean (Marilyn). A few days after Gladys had moved in, Della claimed that Grainger, who was still in Borneo at the time, had broken into the house and raped her. A day or two after that, Della was claiming that the butcher was putting glass in her ground beef.

Now afraid to leave her daughter alone with Della and beginning to exhibit erratic behavior just after the birth of Norma Jean, Gladys made arrangements for Norma Jean, who was just 12 days old, to stay with the Boloenders (Wayne and Ida), almost complete strangers to Gladys, who lived across the street, in Hawthorne, California. This was done on June 13, 1926, and Gladys paid the Boloenders $25 a week to raise her daughter. The Boloenders would raise Norma Jean for the next 6 years.

The Bolenders lived on 2 acres, on which they raised chickens, goats, and vegetables. The pair were fundamentalists and teetotalers and appear to not have had much of a relationship with each other. Ida clearly wore the pants in the family and would usually only address Wayne when she needed him to do something or to reprimand him.

Quite naturally, Norma Jean considered the Boloenders to be her parents and would call Wayne and Ida her father and mother. Whenever she did, however, Ida would reprimand her, saying they were not her parents and she should not address them that way. Wayne was not allowed by Ida to get close to Norma Jean and each time he tried to, Ida would reprimand him for molly-coddling her. Finally, Wayne just decided to stop trying and largely kept his mouth shut on any issues relating to Norma Jean. Despite this, however, Norma Jean developed a genuine affection for Wayne and referred to him as her daddy throughout her life.

One day in the summer of 1927, Della began pounding on the front door of the Boloender house, demanding to see Norma Jean. When Ida Boloender refused to let the out-of-control Della in, thinking her to be drunk, Della broke the glass in the door and let herself in. A frightened Ida then took Della to Norma Jean, who was sleeping in her crib. When Della then requested a glass of water, Ida left to get it. Upon her return, Ida claimed that she saw Della attempting to smother Norma Jean with a pillow (Marilyn later claimed that she remembered the incident, although she was only 13 months old at the time). Della passed it off as just her rearranging the pillow, but Ida was not fooled and ordered Della from her house, while her husband Wayne called the police. When the police arrived, they found Della babbling away incoherently. Two policemen then subdued a resisting Della, but instead of taking her to a hospital for a mental and physical examination, they just took her home.

Once Della recovered, she told her daughter Gladys, It’s time for me to go. I want to go. On August 4, 1927, Della was taken to the Norwalk State Hospital. There, she was found to have a heart disease, which had significantly weakened her heart. She was put on medication, but this did nothing to control her violence. Della died at the hospital on August 4, 1927, 19 days after being admitted, from heart failure during one of her violent seizures. For all practical purposes, Della, Norma Jean’s grandmother, was believed to have died insane.

Gladys' Deteriorating Mental Illness

Gladys’ behavior now seemed to be following along similar lines of her mother. She also began to act erratically but was not yet under medical care. As time went on, however, Gladys’ mental situation clearly deteriorated. There are 3 reasons given for this. The 1st is that she inherited her insanity from her mother Della. The 2nd was that her former husband John (who was usually known as Jasper) was a violent alcoholic, who regularly beat her. It is known that on at least 2 occasions he had beat Gladys about the head violently enough to give her a concussion.

Then, there was Gladys’s job. At that time, very little was known about the physical and psychological damage of the chemicals used in film processing. It is now known many of those chemicals were poisonous, causing respiratory problems, headaches, depression, and sometimes even a coma. The film-splicing booths were 5’ by 7’ feet, with no windows, virtually no air-circulation, no air-conditioning during the height of summer, and poor lighting. Gladys worked anywhere from 8 to 16 hours in a closed environment, which forced her take into her system, with every breath she took, a concoction of toxic chemicals that stayed stationary in her work area. This likely was a contributing factor to her permanent brain damage.

Whatever the cause, Gladys was clearly affected with a serious mental illness, the beginning of which were already evident before she began working at Consolidated Studio. Just after Gladys’ return from seeing her children Jackie and Bernice in Kentucky, she was hired as a nanny for the Cohen’s child. One evening, after a dinner away from home, the Cohens found their child hysterically crying alone in the nursery. It was evident that the child had been unattended for some time, as the sheets of its crib were badly soiled. They found Gladys crouched in a fetal position, hiding behind the piano. She was mumbling incoherently, with eyes closed and tears streaming down her face. Becoming aware of the presence of the Cohens, Gladys began to tell them about her fear of a group of men prowling around the grounds. Gladys went on and on, embellishing the story to such a bizarre degree that the Cohens began to suspect that she had lost her mind. Although they kept Gladys on for a few more days, they made sure that she was never alone with their child. They then terminated Gladys’s employment, telling her that they no longer needed a nanny.

One day when she was lying on a couch at home, Gladys appeared to have some sort of seizure and started kicking and shouting for no good reason. It is also said that she grabbed a knife, in order to fight off some unseen attackers. Another time, she fell down the stairs, screaming and laughing. In January 1934 she was committed to Norwalk State Hospital, where her mother Della had been committed 6 years earlier. There, she was diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic, and it was believed that she had inherited the illness for her mother.

The last straw came one day when Grace McKee came over to babysit Norma Jean, while Gladys went grocery shopping. When Gladys returned, for no good reason she accused Grace of poisoning Norma Jean and went after her with a kitchen knife, stabbing her, although not seriously. As it was felt that Gladys was now a danger to her young daughter, Norma Jean was taken away from her and given back to the Bolenders to care for. They had raised Norma Jean for the first 6 years of her life, when Della, Gladys’s mother, had gone insane.

While Norma Jean was living with the Bolenders, Gladys came over one day and began incoherently babbling about taking her daughter back to live with her. When Ida's arguments to the contrary failed to make any impression, Gladys grabbed a large military-style duffle bag that Ida’s husband Wayne had used to store tools in, and put Norma Jean inside it. After zipping the bag completely shut, Gladys began walking across the Bolenders' lawn back to her house. Ida, however, ran across the lawn and grabbed one of the handles of the duffle bag, ripping the bag in half. When Norma Jean fell to the ground, Ida quickly picked her up, ran back inside