ONE
MAMA
Perhaps her darkness began the very moment she was conceived, back in the days when illegitimacy was viewed as being born damaged and undesirable. “I am alone,” she wrote mournfully. “I am always alone no matter what.” Marilyn Monroe would never know her father, and throughout her lifetime her erratic mother would remain a disturbing, enigmatic figure.
Gladys Pearl Monroe—who would become the mother of Marilyn Monroe—did not have a stable or happy life. She was born in 1902 to Otis and Della Monroe. Della was a tempestuous woman, considered a beauty in her day, with a round face, dark curly hair, and almond-shaped eyes. Otis was ten years her senior, a dreamy man with reddish hair and a deep scar on his cheek, which he acquired in a fall. Otis had an artistic nature and dreamed of going to Paris to study painting. His actual career, however, was much less creative. He was a house painter who eventually landed a job at the Pacific Electric Railway painting trolley cars in Los Angeles. Their son, Marion Otis Elmer, was born in 1905.
The family was constantly uprooted; they had no lasting friends and few possessions. They moved a dozen times in six years, living in rented houses or furnished rooms. Otis had always been unpredictable; he would go on drinking binges and disappear for days. When a furious Della would demand to know where he had been, he would mumble vaguely, “I don’t remember.”
Della wasn’t sure if his behavior was a result of drinking or deteriorating mental health. He suffered from terrible migraines and blackouts, and by 1908 he started showing signs of serious mental illness. His symptoms, along with his headaches and memory loss, were extreme mood swings and violent fits. He was committed to Southern California State Hospital, where he died nine months later, in July, at the age of forty-three. The cause of death was given as general paresis—the doctors diagnosed his swift decline as nonsexually transmitted syphilis.
Della bluntly told her children that Otis “went nuts and then went to God.” Always quick to judge, she did have a strong attachment to religion; at the time she would take Gladys and Marion to a nearby Protestant church to “pray for the wealth of their own spirit.” But she was often tempted by things of the flesh, with the flesh frequently winning out.
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At thirty-three Della was a young widow, more interested in her own love life than in the lives of her two children. “Mama liked men,” Gladys observed. In 1912, after breaking engagements with several different suitors, Della married twenty-nine-year-old Lyle Graves, who had been a coworker of Otis’s. The marriage lasted a mere eight months.
By the time she was forty-four, Della’s once-striking looks were beginning to coarsen, and she was eager to find a new man. At a New Year’s Eve dance, she met and became enamored of a distinguished-looking widower, Charles Grainger—an oil driller. After a whirlwind romance she desperately wanted to move in with him. Grainger, however, had reservations about taking on a woman with children.
Della had already farmed out eleven-year-old Marion to live with relatives in San Diego. Gladys would also be in the way of the new romance. At the time Della and her teenage daughter were living in a rented room in a hotel in Venice, California. The owner of the hotel was Jack Baker (called Jasper), who also ran a concession stand on the nearby beach. Della eagerly encouraged a relationship between twenty-six-year-old Jasper and her fourteen-year-old daughter so she could begin a life with Grainger.
Gladys was a petite and lovely girl, with delicate features and long, wavy chestnut hair that in good light had a reddish hue. She was barely five feet tall but of regal bearing, and her figure was well proportioned and rounded.
In 1917, ten days before her fifteenth birthday, Gladys married Jasper. She was legally able to marry him because Della declared on the marriage license that her daughter was eighteen. Seven months after they married, Jasper and Gladys’s son, Robert Kermit (nicknamed Jack), was born. Two years later the couple had a daughter they named Berniece.
The marriage, however, was not a happy one. Jasper was a drinker and had a volatile temper. He felt that his child bride was more interested in going out and having a good time than in being a wife and mother. Gladys was erratic and hard to know. As a result there are varying accounts of what she was really like. She could be vague and distant or angry and full of fire. Sometimes she was effervescent and outgoing and flirtatious with other men. Her moods were constantly shifting.
When they traveled to Kentucky to visit his family, Gladys went off on a hike with Jasper’s younger brother. Already fed up with his wife’s dubious fidelity, when they returned, Jasper beat her with a horse bridle.
Back in Los Angeles, Gladys filed for divorce citing “extreme cruelty by abusing [and] calling her vile names and using profane language at and in her presence, by striking and kicking.” Though such charges were not unusual in divorce papers of the day, Jasper countered by accusing his wife of lewd and lascivious conduct. The court sided with Gladys and awarded her custody of the children, but her victory was short lived.
Thinking her an unfit mother, Jasper ignored the court order, gathered up Jack and Berniece, and took them back to live with him permanently in Kentucky. Gladys followed Jasper and the children to Kentucky to be near them, hoping she could eventually persuade Jasper to let them live with her. She worked for a while as a housekeeper and a babysitter, but after a few months she grew weary of the work.
The hopelessness of her situation set in—a single mother at twenty-one—troubled by drastic mood swings followed by periods of debilitating depression. It was uncertain how she’d take care of herself, let alone a five- and a two-year-old. At first she wasn’t concerned about how she would provide for the children. Her first order of business was to take physical possession. But eventually she was forced back to reality by practical questions. How could she work all day and leave the children without supervision? Would it be possible for her to earn enough to support them? She decided the best thing to do was return to Los Angeles. Partly because she felt the children would have a better life there, partly because she felt restless and unfulfilled.
On her return to Los Angeles, Gladys found work in a movie studio, Consolidated Film Industries, as a film negative cutter. There she met a high-spirited woman named Grace McKee, who would have a huge impact on her life. Twice divorced, Grace represented the more flamboyant side of Gladys’s personality—without fear of repercussions. Grace was a vivacious, fun-loving woman who patterned her life on the movies she saw regularly and the movie magazines she read religiously. Her unadorned appearance was plain; she was short and plump with puffy cheeks and thin lips, but she livened up her appearance with flashy clothes and makeup. She often changed her hair color, sometimes to platinum blonde, a bold color in the era.
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Seven years older than Gladys, Grace McKee had moved to Los Angeles in the previous decade in hopes of becoming an actress. Silent film stars, like Mary Pickford and Theda Bara, were just beginning to become the major female celebrities of the day. Grace was like thousands of other girls who flocked to Hollywood to get aboard the new trend.
By 1923 Grace’s dreams of becoming a star had not materialized, but she was working in the industry in a film lab, and within a few months of meeting she and Gladys formed a sisterly bond and moved into an apartment together in East Hollywood. Described as a woman of “loose morals,” Grace swept Gladys into a seductive fantasy lifestyle based on the movie stars she avidly read about.
Together the two became what was known as “modern women.” The flapper era was coming into full bloom—women were bobbing their hair, wearing heavy makeup, smoking, dancing, and drinking. They raised the hemline of their skirts above the knees for the first time.
Grace persuaded Gladys to dye her brown-auburn hair a fiery red—like the exciting rising star Clara Bow, who would become Hollywood’s very first “It Girl.” Bow’s fun-loving, promiscuous on-screen reputation was becoming the rage. Grace and Gladys followed suit and tried to model their own behavior on that of screen sirens like her. Sometimes when Gladys felt herself falling into a depression, as she often did, she could put on lipstick and go out—carrying herself like a lady—to have some drinks and find a man to spend some time with who might momentarily relieve her melancholy.
At other times Gladys found herself looking for the stability of a man to take care of her. In 1924 such a man presented himself. Martin Edward Mortensen was a meter reader for the Southern California Gas Company. Mortensen was passably attractive, smitten with Gladys, and exceedingly dull. Grace begged her friend not to get involved with him; Mortensen personified the type of life—the moralistic societal norms—they were rebelling against.
Gladys, however, never really seemed to know who she was or what she wanted. She remained a dichotomy. At times she followed the formal religious beliefs of the Christian Science Church—and her reserved, ladylike demeanor would take the forefront. But when she wasn’t in the mood for her religion, she’d return to a manic phase, a wild party girl with flaming hair and painted lips who chased after men.
A devout Lutheran, Mortensen was more attracted to Gladys’s religious side than to her flamboyant exterior. She decided to play it safe, however, and married him on October 11, 1924. But Grace’s intuition had been right: Gladys found life with her new husband insufferably boring, and seven months later the honeymoon was over. She fled the marital bed to move back in with Grace.
Copyright © 2018 by Charles Casillo
