Read Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love for Free Online

Hogan, committed suicide in 1933, and her mother and father both spent time in mental institutions. Gladys,red haired, fair skinned, and attractive, married businessman Jack Baker in 1917, when she was only fifteen. They had two children, Hermitt and Berniece, but Jack terminated the marriage after several years and took the children with him when he moved to Kentucky. Gladys never saw her son again. He contracted tuberculosis and died at age fifteen. Meanwhile, a succession of men followed Jack in Gladys’s bed, including an unemployed merchant named Edward Mortensen. Gladys and Mortensen were wed on October 11, 1924, and were divorced seven months later. Despite the irrefutable fact that Gladys and Mortensen never spoke again following their divorce, he is identified as Marilyn’s father on her birth certificate, a designation that is biologically not feasible considering the date of their last meeting. The same certificate listed Marilyn’s baptismal name as Norma Jeane Mortenson, a misspelling of Edward’s last name, which her mother later changed (though not legally) to Norma Jeane Baker.
    At the time of Norma Jeane’s birth, her mother was employed as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood, where she’d worked since 1923. In the early fall of 1925, she had an affair with C. Stanley Gifford, a salesman in the same firm. Gladys became pregnant, and Gifford, unwilling to assume responsibility, cut off the relationship. He offered her money, which she proudly refused to accept. According to Dr. Fromm, Marilyn, or Norma Jeane, “never doubted the true identity of her birth father. Nor did Gladys Baker, for that matter. It was Stanley Gifford. Why Gladys wrote “Mortenson” on her daughter’s birth certificate is anybody’s guess. My guess is that she was in love with Gifford and felt terribly hurt that he’d abandoned her. And at least she and Mortensen had been married, which conferred the newborn infant with some vague sense of legitimacy.”
    Gladys Baker had turned twenty-four when she gave birth to Norma Jeane. Gladys’s mother, Della Monroe Granger, urged her to retain her full-time position at Consolidated and to place the infant with a foster family. Norma Jeane was turned over to Wayne and Ida Bolender, Christian Science adherents, who lived on East Rhode Island Street inHawthorne, California, the same street as Della, an overzealous follower of the same religious ideology. Gladys paid the couple $5 a week to look after her daughter. “Aunt Ida,” as Norma Jeane knew her, served as her foster guardian and substitute mother. Although Ida objected to being called “Mommy” by the child, Wayne didn’t mind being referred to as “Daddy.” He thus became the first in a long line of elusive father figures that Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe would look to for protection and guidance in years to come.
    “With the exception of Joe DiMaggio and perhaps one or two others, the pivotal truth is that few of these so-called father figures offered her anything even close to guidance,” said Dr. Fromm. “And the surrogate mothers even less so. There’s that horrific anecdote she related to me involving her grandmother, who frequently visited her at the Bolender house when she was a baby and sometimes took her across the street to her own home. The story has it that one day Della tried to smother the infant with a pillow because she wouldn’t stop crying. They committed the woman to Norwalk State Hospital, in Norwalk, LA County. It wasn’t her first stay in a mental institution. After several weeks at Norwalk, she suffered a manic seizure and died the following day.”
    Even the most mundane of Norma Jeane’s childhood activities had a phantasmagoric edge to them. On weekends her mother sometimes took her on outings, mostly by trolley, to the beach at Santa Monica. But on those occasions Gladys seemed nervous and preoccupied, barely capable of relating to her daughter. Wayne and Ida Bolender