In 1946, Hollywood’s official biography for Marilyn Monroe declared her mother dead. It was a lie. The real woman was alive, working in a mental hospital. Her name was Gladys Pearl Baker, and her story was the dark foundation beneath the legend of the world’s most famous blonde.
Married at 14 to a man a decade older, beaten by her husband, stripped of her first two children, and committed to state institutions for much of her life, Gladys spent decades fighting to hold on to the daughter the world would one day worship. Born on May 27, 1902, in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Gladys was the daughter of Otis and Della Monroe. Her father died in 1909 at 43, officially from syphilis of the brain, though the family told the children he had died from sniffing paint fumes. The fear of hereditary madness would shadow the family for generations.
Gladys’s childhood was unstable. Her mother, Della, remarried and divorced quickly, then cycled through men. When Gladys was 14, Jasper Newton Baker, a 26-year-old former cavalry rider who owned the apartment building where Della worked, began courting her. By spring 1917, Gladys was pregnant.
On May 17, 1917, ten days before her 15th birthday, she married him. Della signed an affidavit swearing her daughter was 18. Seven months later, Gladys gave birth to a son, Robert Kermit, called Jack. A daughter, Bernice, followed in 1920.
Jasper was a drinker with a violent temper. He beat Gladys, struck her in the head hard enough to give her concussions, and once beat her publicly in the road in his Kentucky hometown while neighbors watched and approved. Gladys filed for divorce, won custody, but Jasper took the children to Kentucky during a visitation and never brought them back. Alone and broke at 20, Gladys returned to Los Angeles.
She found work at Consolidated Film Industries as a negative cutter, one of dozens of women splicing celluloid in cool, quiet rooms. She later married Martin Edward Mortensen, but the marriage lasted only four months. By the mid-1920s, those around her had noticed the mood swings and sudden withdrawals that echoed her mother’s condition. At Consolidated, she met Charles Stanley Gifford, a foreman from a wealthy shipbuilding family.
In late 1925, Gladys discovered she was pregnant. She told Gifford the child was his. He refused to accept it, citing her other relationships, and walked away. When Gladys went to her mother for help, Della told her she was going to Burma and wasn’t coming back.
Before she left, Della arranged for the baby to be cared for by neighbors, Wayne and Ida Bolender, for $25 a month. On June 1, 1926, Gladys gave birth to a girl at Los Angeles County General Hospital. She named her Norma Jean. On the birth certificate, she wrote Edward Mortensen as the father, the man she had divorced, rather than name Gifford.
Gladys kept the baby for two weeks, but after an episode in which she accused a friend, Grace McKee, of poisoning the child and attacked her with a knife, Gladys carried the infant to the Bolenders’ house and walked away. Norma Jean spent her childhood in the Bolender home, a strict evangelical household that took in foster children. Ida Bolender disciplined firmly, sewing clothes, washing Norma Jean’s hair in lemon juice, and refusing to coddle her. “She always knew that Norma Jean would have a very difficult life,” another foster sibling later recalled.
“She wasn’t going to coddle her. ”
Gladys’s mother, Della, returned from Burma with malaria and madness. In the summer of 1927, she forced her way into the Bolender home, screaming that the baby was dead. Ida found her pressing a pillow over Norma Jean’s face.
Police walked Della back to her own home. On August 4, 1927, Della was committed to Norwalk State Hospital. She died 19 days later at 51. Gladys’s own condition worsened.
She heard voices and saw figures that were not there. When Norma Jean was three, Gladys arrived in the grip of an episode, grabbed her daughter, and tried to leave with her. Ida fought her, and Gladys finally shoved the child into a military duffel bag. The bag split on the lawn, and Norma Jean tumbled out, screaming for Ida.
Ida later asked Gladys to let her adopt the child, telling her Norma Jean would have a better life. Gladys refused with a flat “Never. ”
By 1932, Gladys was visiting more often, sometimes taking Norma Jean to her small Hollywood apartment. There, the child learned the silence mental illness required.
“I spent most of those visits in the closet of her bedroom hiding among her clothes,” Marilyn would later recall. “She seldom spoke to me except to say, ‘Don’t make so much noise, Norma. ’”
In 1933, Gladys bought a small white bungalow with a view of the Hollywood Hills, using a $5,000 down payment saved from cutting-room wages. She bought a second-hand piano and brought her daughter home.
Norma Jean was seven. But the reunion was not happy. The child was unhappy, and Gladys retreated into silence. It was Grace McKee who suggested filling the spare rooms.
George and Maud Atkinson, two English transplants, moved in. During this time, Gladys received word that her firstborn son, Jack, had died of tuberculosis of the kidneys. Her mother and father were already dead. Her grandfather, Tilford Hogan, had died by suicide.
Gladys looked at Norma Jean in the kitchen and said, “Why wasn’t it you? ”
Soon after, Norma Jean was assaulted in her own home by George Atkinson. When she ran to her mother, Gladys slapped her across the face and said, “Shame on you. Mr.
Atkinson is my star boarder. ”
Gladys’s breakdown accelerated. In January 1934, her delusions increased. She heard her dead son calling from the yard, saw her mother and grandfather in empty rooms.
One night, she collapsed in the front room, screaming that they were coming for her. Doctors arrived the next day. The diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia. “I’ll be back, darling,” Gladys told Norma Jean as she was led out.
“It’ll only be a little while. ”
Norma Jean was sent to Grace’s apartment, where she overheard adults discussing her family. “She’s a mental case. ” The names fell like stones: Otis, Della, Tilford.
“She’s one of them. ”
Grace married Ervin “Doc” Goddard, and Norma Jean moved into their household. The arrangement failed. Grace decided to place Norma Jean in the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society.
In September 1935, Norma Jean screamed as attendants pried her fingers from the car door. “I’m not an orphan,” she cried. “I’m not an orphan. ”
During her time in the orphanage, Grace took Norma Jean to visit Gladys at Norwalk.
The hospital was full of shadows, patients wandering in circles. Gladys lay in bed, unresponsive, staring past her daughter. Ida Bolender, who had raised Norma Jean for seven years, wrote to Grace offering to take the child back rather than see her in an orphanage. Grace replied coldly: “Thank you for your kind offer, but we have already made suitable arrangements for Norma Jean.
” Grace later banned Ida from ever seeing the child again. Norma Jean left the orphanage in June 1937, but her instability continued. Doc Goddard, who had seemed steady, began drinking heavily. One night, he came into Norma Jean’s room and put his hands on her body.
When she ran to Grace, Grace did not confront him. She packed Norma Jean’s bags. Norma Jean was sent to relatives, then to the home of Grace’s aunt, Anna Lower. Anna was 58, a Christian Science practitioner who gave Norma Jean the first genuine stability she had known since the Bolender house.
“You are a beautiful young girl, inside and out,” Anna told her. “You have no reason to feel like anything less. ”
During this period, Norma Jean began writing to her half-sister, Bernice, in Kentucky. The two sisters were finally in contact.
Anna’s health failed, and in February 1940, Norma Jean returned to the Goddards. When the family prepared to move to Virginia, Grace made a practical arrangement. She asked her former neighbor if her son, Jim Dougherty, would marry Norma Jean. Jim was 21.
Norma Jean, nearly 16, was frightened of men and intimacy, but Grace told her, “You’ll learn in time. ”
On June 19, 1942, Norma Jean married Jim Dougherty. She insisted that Ida Bolender attend, threatening to return to the orphanage otherwise. Ida cried through the ceremony.
Norma Jean turned to Wayne Bolender and asked, “Do you promise to always love me, Daddy? ” Wayne’s voice broke as he answered, “I do promise. I really do. ”
The marriage lasted on paper for four years.
Jim enlisted in the Merchant Marine and shipped out. Norma Jean moved in with her mother-in-law, then took a job at Radioplane Company in Burbank, spraying varnish onto wooden drone frames. In late 1944, an army photographer named David Conover came to the plant to shoot morale photos. He saw Norma Jean and asked her to pose.
He told her she belonged on magazine covers. By spring 1946, she had appeared on dozens of covers and signed with the Blue Book Modeling Agency. Gladys, released from Agnews State Hospital in 1945, moved in with Norma Jean and Anna. She wore her white nurse’s uniform and watched her daughter closely.
She marched into the modeling agency’s office and declared, “It’s wrong for young girls to ruin their lives with picture taking. ” Norma Jean told her mother, “Never interfere with my career again. ”
That summer, Ben Lyon at 20th Century Fox arranged a screen test. Norma Jean was given a new name: Marilyn Monroe.
The publicity department built a clean origin story, telling the press she was an orphan whose parents were dead. The lie erased Gladys from Marilyn’s official biography. The truth emerged in 1952, when a reporter found Gladys working at a rest home in Eagle Rock, where she had been telling colleagues for years that she was Marilyn Monroe’s mother. No one believed her until she brought out photographs.
“The cat’s out of the bag now,” Marilyn said from her hospital bed. “The secret is no more. ” She gave an exclusive interview, explaining her mother had spent years in a state hospital and that she had been raised in foster homes. Marilyn sent money, but Gladys wanted more.
She wrote letters, strange and erratic, alternating between tenderness and paranoia. “Please, dear child,” she wrote. “I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here.
” Marilyn read the letters and did not reply. In 1953, Gladys was signed into Rockhaven, a private sanitarium in La Crescenta. Marilyn paid the bill. That same evening, she received Photoplay’s award for best newcomer, wearing the gold lamé dress sewn onto her body.
Grace Goddard, who had guided and betrayed Norma Jean throughout her childhood, was dying of uterine cancer. Marilyn spent her 27th birthday with her. That night, they called Gladys. When Marilyn told her mother whose birthday it was, Gladys said, “I don’t remember giving birth to you.
”
Grace died by suicide in September 1953. When Marilyn called Gladys to tell her, Gladys replied, “It’s for the best. Grace was being followed. If she hadn’t died, someone would have killed her.
”
By summer 1962, Marilyn’s life was unraveling. She drove to Rockhaven with a young doctor, hoping to persuade her mother to take her medication. Gladys refused. “Prayer is more powerful than pills,” she said.
“Norma Jeane knows that. ”
“Take the pills for a week,” Marilyn begged. “I have never asked you for anything before. I’m asking now.
”
Gladys asked what would happen after that. Marilyn told her she could leave, get her life back. Gladys leaned forward. “What life?
” she asked. “What room? What house? What version of myself is waiting out there?
”
Marilyn slipped a small flask into her mother’s bag. Gladys smiled. “You’re a good girl,” she said. “A very good girl.
” Then she walked away without looking back. “I don’t say goodbye,” she called over her shoulder. Six weeks later, Marilyn Monroe was dead at 36. The funeral was held on August 8, 1962.
Joe DiMaggio controlled the guest list. Fewer than three dozen people were admitted. Gladys was not there. A few days later, Bernice drove to Rockhaven.
Gladys was watching television, dressed all in white. When a visitor offered condolences, Gladys’s first response was judgment: Marilyn shouldn’t have been taking sleeping pills. Prayer would have helped. Then she said, “Marilyn didn’t love me.
Norma Jean loved me. And I loved her. She was a good girl. ”
Six weeks after Marilyn’s death, Gladys tore sheets from her bed, tied them together, and climbed out a third-floor window at Rockhaven.
She was 63, wearing her white nurse’s uniform. Police found her two days later in the basement of a church 15 miles away, asleep on a wooden pew. She was transferred to Camarillo State Hospital. It took Bernice five years to get her out.
In 1967, Bernice became Gladys’s conservator and brought her to Florida. Gladys rode a small tricycle through the streets, a red flag on the handlebars reading “Danger. ”
In April 1971, a historian found Gladys’s name in a phone book and called her. He found Marilyn’s face, older, altered, but unmistakably related.
“I never told her one way or the other,” Gladys said, looking down at her hands. “I never told her a word. ”
Gladys Pearl Baker died of heart failure in 1984 at 81. She was buried near Marilyn, but not beside her.
Marilyn lay in a marble crypt. Gladys went into the ground. Behind both women remained the piano a mother bought and a daughter transformed. The world remembered Marilyn Monroe.
Gladys remembered Norma Jean, a very good girl.
