Crypt 33 Read Free Page B

he encouraged her. Screams were heard throughout the bare delivery room. “It’s a girl,” the doctor announced. Gladys decided to name her baby Norma Jeane, after the captivating and successful actress Norma Talmadge. How proud she would be to be the mother of such a famous woman. Little did Gladys know that her favorite silent film star was once married to Joseph Schenck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, and that during her lean years her grown daughter would have an affair with this same man in his seventies. He would be kind and probably the instigator of her acting contract with Fox.
    When Gladys was sent home, she enlisted her mother’s neighbors, Ida and Albert Wayne Bolender, who boarded children, to look after the newborn so she could return to her job as head film cutter for Consolidated Film Industries. By keeping her child at a distance, Gladys wouldn’t feel so devastated if her baby died or were separated from her, as her first two children had been when, after a bitter dispute, husband Jim Baker had kidnapped them.
    Fortunately for Norma Jeane, her mother’s friend Grace McKee, a film librarian at CFI, was a warmhearted woman who kept a watchful eye over her. The illegitimate child had a mother who still happened to be legally married, so Norma Jeane’s surname was that of her mother’s long-gone husband, Martin Mortensen. The baptism for the baby was held at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles at the request of Gladys’s mother Della, who worshipped with its minister, Aimee Semple McPherson. The fiery female healer christened the newborn child Norma Jeane Mortensen. Afterward, the broken family of grandmother and mother, with the child, strolled around Echo Park admiring the picturesque man-made lake lined by palm trees.
    Â 
    Black Thursday hit in October 1929, and Wall Street sustained a loss of $26 million. The Depression officially set in. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre rocked the nation as two of Al Capone’s hit men, disguised as policemen, gunned down seven lieutenants of the Bugs Moran gang in an illegal liquor warehouse. Writer Ben Hecht established himself as a playwright with The Front Page on Broadway Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Prohibition and the Depression raged on as Al Capone and Vito Genovese’s partnership with Joseph P. Kennedy moved illegal shipments of liquor from Canada and the Bahamas into the United States.
    The Bolender household was located in suburban Los Angeles near the Los Angeles International Airport on a street lined with California-style bungalows. The Bolenders believed in the Bible and the belt. Young Norma Jeane’s devout foster father attended church twice a week, believed in capital punishment, and yet he still provided some gentle guidance. Her foster brother, Lester, was a delight. They played and fought with each other over the few toys given them. Norma Jeane would defend her right to use the toys like any able-bodied young girl, but was punished by the Bolenders with the strap. She never hesitated to tattle on her foster parents to her mother on Saturdays, Gladys’s regular visiting day. Norma Jeane was schooled by the Bolenders on the Bible’s teachings of honesty and she remembered them the rest of her life. She liked knowing and telling the truth.
    Although the Depression left an indelible scar on American life, Albert Bolender’s position as mail carrier was never in jeopardy. His small salary remained constant. Though the house was neglected, not so the appearance of Norma Jeane and Lester. Both were dressed immaculately, and Gladys made sure that her daughter had the most fashionable garments by providing Ida Bolender with the best fabric to create a dazzling wardrobe for this otherwise materially and emotionally impoverished child.
    Not until Norma Jeane’s seventh year did she finally receive a steady flow of her mother’s love, affection,