Read Marilyn: A Biography for Free Online Page B

she
either did not have the literary instinct to present the quieter
facts with their own pain, or, on the contrary, had everything to
teach us about the American addiction to factoids. In actuality,
the horrors of her childhood were not so much apocalyptic – “naked
for God and everyone else to see” – or Chaplinesque – “someone in
an orphan’s uniform” – as they would be, on occasion, deadening.
Whatever her fear of the world, and we can hear the last echo of
that dear in the tininess of her voice, we can recognize her dear
was justified. The end of the love affair with Tippy proved
traumatic. In 1932, when Norma Jean was almost six, Tippy began to
get out of the house on spring evenings and make his run in the
dark. One night a blast rolled down the street, and the milkman
found the dog’s body in the dawn and told the postman Bolender. A
neighbor, sitting on his porch, had waited for Tippy with a
shotgun. For three nights running Tippy had rolled in the
neighbor’s garden. On the third night, the neighbor shot him. We
can sense that man. There is dog heat and dog body, dog funk
leaving its odor on his new greens, rolling dog lusts on the garden
crop. That’s one night for you, dog, he counts to himself; two
nights for you, dog; on the third night – with what backed-up
intensity of the frontier jammed at last into a suburban veranda we
can only hear in the big blast – the dog is dead. The fears of the
Bolenders have stood on real ground. And their timidity also stands
revealed. For there is no record of confronting the neighbor and
his shotgun. So to the child, a catastrophic view of history must
have begun. It is the view which assumes that at the end of every
sweet and quiet passage of love, amputation or absurdity is
waiting. Whole washes of the apathy that would sit upon her in
later years, that intolerable dull and dead round she passed
through in the year after her marriage to Miller was over, is
probably sealed in the reflex of sorrowing for Tippy, as well as
her descent in school from a bright child to an average child. We
know that she was ordinary in class, and timid. It was only in the
Bolender house that she was bold. But the institution of school
must have seemed part of the other world outside the
Bolender house, a reflection of powerful men with shotguns who sat
on porches. Did her stammer begin then as well? If the first joy of
speaking in her fifth year must have been to whistle for her dog,
now the dog was obliterated, and the joy of speech was jammed.
     
    * * *
     
    Gladys put together the money for a down
payment on a bungalow off Highland Avenue in Hollywood, bought some
furniture at auction, and rented all but two rooms of the house to
an English couple who worked in pictures, the husband as a stand-in
for George Arliss and the wife as a “dress” extra, which is to say
an extra who could look convincing in chic party gowns. (Since
their daughter was a stand-in for Madeleine Carroll, the moral has
been pointed — when it comes to work, the British know how to
locate a niche!)
    Her economics thus assured, Gladys moved into
the two rooms with her child. Life with Ida was over. For Norma
Jean, up from Hawthorne and now in Hollywood thirteen years before
she would begin her career, the shift must have been equal to
moving from gravity into weightlessness. Or is it the other way?
The English couple was either wild nor cruel — they merely drank
and smoked, talked shop and played records, and were bored, and, of
course, appalled, when Norma Jean sang “Jesus Loves Me.” Their
daughter gave parties, that was all, but it must have been not
without oppression to the child, for in addition to the shock of
moving from the Bolenders’ home, where prohibition liquor was the
essence of sin, into a house of polite and elegant people who
showed no concern at being damned and probably asked her upon
occasion to fetch them the bottle, she entered as well into the
environs of an English