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room. Gladys addressed her as if in a trance.
    “I saw God this morning,” she said. “He’s a little old man, lives in a cabin in the woods. Seems like a nice guy. He’s a vegetarian. Grandpa Til and Mama Della were with him. Mama had flowers in her hair and seemed happy to see me. ‘It’s not so bad here,’ she said. ‘It really isn’t. You ought to stay for a while. You’d like it. And next time bring Norma Jeane. I want to see her again.’ ”
    “There’s something almost comical about the situation, but it isn’t difficult to imagine how frightening all this must have been for a young child,” remarked Rose Fromm. “It made her realize just how alone she was in the world. Nobody, not even Gladys, ever treated her like a real daughter. Nobody had ever held her. No one kissed her. Nobody.”
    In January 1934 Gladys Baker was carted off to a rest home in Santa Monica. From there she went to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital, where Norma Jeane was born, before being transferred to the Norwalk State Asylum, where Della had perished in1927. At Norwalk, Gladys was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia—the same mental illness that had led to the deaths of her parents and grandfather. Marilyn Monroe feared, not without cause, that the dreaded disease would one day invade her own mind and destroy her life as surely as it had wrecked the lives of so many others in her family.
    The baby grand that her mother had bought for her—a token of what Gladys had hoped would be a prolonged period of familial bliss—was sold following Gladys’s institutionalization. Years later, Marilyn tracked down the piano, purchased it, and had it installed first in an apartment she leased in 1953 in Beverly Hills and then in her New York apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street, a sentimental reminder of the woman who had originally given it to her.
    Another item in the Arbol Drive house that didn’t go unnoticed by Norma Jeane was a small framed photograph of a man with dark hair, even features, and a mustache, which had been mounted on the wall over Gladys’s dresser. “When I asked her who he was,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “she said, ‘He’s just an old friend.’ I later learned it was a picture of my father, Charles Stanley Gifford. He resembled Clark Gable. One day I came across an eight-by-ten-inch photo of Mr. Gable in a memorabilia shop and bought it. I’d look at it now and then and say, ‘That’s my father—that’s him!’ ”
    So that she could complete the year without having to switch schools, it was decided Norma Jeane would continue living with the Atkinsons at the same address. Gladys’s boarders undertook the task of looking after the child, which they did for several months until a death in the family forced the Atkinsons to return to England. Once again Norma Jeane found herself in transition, going from one foster home to another until finally she was taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Giffen, former friends of Gladys Baker. Harvey, a sound engineer with the Radio Corporation of America, gave her tennis and sketching lessons. The living arrangement appeared to suit everyone until Harvey’s employer reassigned him to a new position in Mississippi. Preparingto leave, the Giffens offered to adopt Norma Jeane and take her along. The prospect of staying with a family she had quickly grown to like appealed to the child, but Gladys, presently undergoing electroshock therapy, wouldn’t allow it.
    The Arbol Drive bungalow was repossessed and put up for sale, and, in a sense, so too was Norma Jeane. Grace McKee, a film librarian at Columbia Pictures when Gladys Baker worked there, had become friendly with both Gladys and her daughter. Not that Gladys and Grace had always gotten along. Allegedly, Gladys once accused Grace of trying to poison her. In retaliation for this imagined misdeed, Gladys attacked Grace with a butcher knife. The police were called, and Gladys was led