Read Marilyn: A Biography for Free Online Page A

asked if Ida minded.
    “It’s not a thing I would do,” said Mrs.
Bolender, “but this is your house when you are here.”
    Of course, Norma Jean can hardly be too
afraid of Ida if she dares to protest so visibly to Gladys, but on
the other hand, Gladys has accepted Ida’s version of the accident.
It must reach the child with shock — is the guard of forces being
altered? Norma Jean comes down with whooping cough. She has caught
it from Lester — a sibling transaction. His twin can knock him off
his bike, but he will infect her back — the relations between
strong and weak nations are in capsule here!
    Gladys now gets some days off from work to
take care of her child and before the illness is over has spent
three weeks in Ida’s guest room with Norma Jean, the longest period
she has been with the child since the birth. Since she is now a
film cutter at Columbia, and making better money, the desire to
afford a place for her daughter and herself begins to assert itself
again. Glimpses of Gladys are few indeed, and Marilyn will speak
coldly of her later, but the mother’s motivation remains something
of a moral enigma. It may be worth assuming once more that she has
some premonition of the value of the child she is bearing. While
little in Gladys’ life suggests anything other than egocentric
preoccupations, and she does not seem superstitious if she can list
her first two children as dead — one wonders if they expressed a
clear enough preference for the father to leave her vindictive —
still, she chooses to have Norma Jean, does not give her up
for adoption, and works seven long years to scrape together a
situation where she can bring her child to live with her. That is a
project of the sort to hold a mind together.
    Let us dare the argument that Gladys had
early intimations of an exceptional baby who would carry out the
balked ambitions of her own career. If it is said of a child who
looks exactly like the father that there is no need for wonder
since the woman never took her eyes off the man while carrying,
what has to be said of Marilyn, whose working mother never took her
eyes off movie film?
    At the time of the whooping cough, however,
Gladys is still several years away from taking Norma Jean to live
with her, and a new event is about to occur at the Bolenders’ that
will yet create caverns of fright in the child, although it first
produces real happiness. Since it comes at the end of the whooping
cough, it may even seem a species of compensation for her illness –
a black and white dog follows Mr. Bolender home from the trolley
one evening, and the child plays with this pet through her
convalescence. When kindergarten begins in the fall, Lester and
Norma Jean walk the four blocks to school together; the dog, Tippy,
will follow and wait around the school yard until recess. Norma
Jean is in cotton dresses, starched and changed every day, a big
bow in her hair – she and Lester are given roller skates and race
together; the dog chases them. Contrast with the picture given to
Zolotow:
     
    She dreamed of becoming “so beautiful that
people would turn to look at me as I passed.” When she was six she
imagined herself going naked in the world. This fantasy often
possessed her in church. As the organ thundered out hymns, she
quivered with a desire to throw off her clothes and stand naked
“for God and everyone else to see. My impulses to appear naked had
no shame or sense of sin in them. I think I wanted people to see me
naked because I was ashamed of the clothes I wore. Naked, I was
like other girls and not someone in an orphan’s uniform.”
     
    We have just been bombarded with factoids –
whether Marilyn’s or Ben Hect’s is hard to say – but we know she
was in no orphan’s uniform at the age of six. The passage is all
the more worth quoting as an example of the kind of systematic
misrepresentation of her childhood Marilyn would usually
collaborate upon with any near reporter and suggests that