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Plaza, on the corner of Windward and Ocean Front Walk, where (then as decades later) residents and tourists shopped and gaily dressed crowds crossed to and from the beach. Gladys once bought a striped parasol her daughter kept for years, and at the plaza Norma Jeane loved to watch the mimes, jugglers and fire-eaters. Frequently, mother and daughter rode the Venice Miniature Railway down Windward and then walked along the inland lagoons, where Gladys pointed out the weekend rendezvous of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, of Harold Lloyd, of William S. Hart. But such happy Saturdays were increasingly rare, for Gladys visited less and less often. “Her mother paid her board all the time,” Ida recalled, adding that Norma Jeane “was never neglected and always nicely dressed.” But Gladys became for the most part an irregular, shadowy visitor at the edge of Norma Jeane’s life.
    Just when other children had those to call mother and father, therefore, Norma Jeane was hurtled into confusion. “One morning I called [Ida] ‘Mother,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me that—I’m not your mother. Call me ‘Aunt Ida.’ Then I pointed to her husband, and I said, ‘But he’s my Daddy!’ and she just said, ‘No.’ ” Later, “she discussed her father more than anyone in her past,” according to a close friend. “She remembered her mother, although without much feeling. But she missed a father terribly, although she was smart enough to be wary of anyone she took for a surrogate father.”
    Ida Bolender was correct to speak truthfully about the situation; her manner and tone, however, seem to have lacked the kind of comforting explanation that would have prevented the child’s bewilderment and the conviction that she was in some way markedly different from other children. At two and three, Norma Jeane could not have understood the sporadic arrivals and departures of the woman she was told to call mother. “She didn’t come very much,” she said later. “She was just the woman with the red hair.” Gladys, whose visits meant good times, made guest appearances, but the major players of NormaJeane’s early life were the Bolenders, and in matters of conduct, religion and morality they yielded center stage to none.
    “To go to a movie was a sin,” Norma Jeane remembered of one Bolender doctrine. “If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies,” Ida warned, “do you know what would happen? You’d burn along with all the bad people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers.” The sharp disjunction between Gladys’s attitudes and those of the Bolenders must have caused Norma Jeane considerable confusion about proper conduct and standards of right and wrong.
    Confusion or no, photographs from these first several years show Norma Jeane a winsome child with ash-blond hair, an engaging smile and bright blue-green eyes. But she always recalled that in the Bolender household “no one ever called me pretty.” The plainspoken, decent, humorless Ida did not believe in flattery; prettiness might even be dangerous. She and her family lived within bustling, modern Los Angeles County, but Ida and Albert could have been the models for Grant Wood’s American Gothic . Norma Jeane’s closest playmate was a stray dog she brought home and named Tippy. The Bolenders allowed her to keep the puppy so long as she cared for it, and Norma Jeane was usually seen followed two paces behind by the worshipful Tippy.
    The family had, in fact, no inclination for mere worldly amusements; they placed primary emphasis on morality and religious responsibilities. The church they all attended (literally shaken to its foundations by the 1933 earthquake) was the focus of Bolender life—and therefore, by extension, the lives of the children committed to their care. “We took her to Sunday school with us,” Ida said. “I had not only Norma Jeane and my own son, but other children, too, with me.” This pious little platoon marched off to