The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story Read Free Page A

years old, after learning of the child’s placement with the Bolenders, the concerned father actually came forward and tried to adopt her. However, Gladys now despised the man; still smarting at how he had absconded during her pregnancy, she was having none of it and his request was denied.
    With the Bolenders ably watching over her child, Gladys returned to work at the Consolidated Film Industries. Each Saturday she would take herchild on an outing, usually a walking tour to the streets outside the movie stars’ homes in the Hollywood hills. Another of Gladys’s favourite journeys was to the recently opened Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, famous for its red-carpet movie premieres. Norma Jeane and her mother would stare down adoringly at the world-famous foot and hand prints captured in cement outside the building. Norma Jeane would intently place her small hands and feet over the imprints.
    Despite her mother’s warmest intentions to display love and affection to her daughter, however, Norma Jeane would forlornly recall Gladys only as ‘the woman with red hair’ or ‘the pretty woman who never smiled’. She did not regard her as her real mother. In her primary years, she looked upon Ida and Albert as her true parents and would call them ‘Mama’ and ‘Daddy’.
    It is intriguing to see how often Monroe’s childhood has been portrayed in despondent, dull, quite depressing tones, insisting that she was, for the better part of her young life, unloved, unpopular and poor. The truth is that, from birth until she was eight years old, Norma Jeane lived in only one place, the cosy yet austere, old-fashioned six-room home in the middle-class city of Inglewood belonging to the devoutly Catholic Albert and Ida Bolender. Even as far back as 1952, Hollywood spokespeople were dramatising Marilyn’s upbringing at the Bolenders’ by saying that she was pounded with religious precepts that dictated damnation for her slightest transgression, brainwashed into thinking that ‘drinking, smoking and dancing was the works of the devil’, made to promise she’d never drink or swear, ordered to scrub and polish the house’s floors and forced to attend church several times a week. True, the young girl did attend church with the Bolenders, but quite happily.
    However, some truly disturbing incidents did happen to her in that time. First, in July 1927, her grandmother Della attempted to smother her with a pillow. For no perceptible reason, she walked over to the Bolenders’ home in a state of complete undress, smashed her way in through the glass in the front door and made an unprovoked attack on the young child. The ramifications from the incident were immense. A few weeks later, on Thursday 4 August, she was committed to Norwalk’s Metropolitan State Hospital where, just 19 days afterwards, she died of a heart attack. She was found to be suffering from manic-depressive psychosis.
    The second incident came when Gladys attempted to murder her. ‘Her mother tried to kill her three times,’ Marilyn’s third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, shockingly revealed in an April 1968 interview for the BBC. ‘Her mother was quite mad.’ Throughout most of her life, Marilyn often remarked how she could still vividly recall these horrific encounters.
    Due to the highly dependable statements of both Miller and the Bolenders, I believe these events did happen; most of the other accusationsabout Norma Jeane’s time with the family were, however, untrue. ‘People like to make things sensational,’ Nancy, the youngest Bolender sibling and by then the only surviving family member, admitted in 1996. ‘Because she [Norma Jeane] was moved around later, they want to make it sound like it was all awful, but it wasn’t. She was happy in our home.’ Over the ensuing years, Nancy naturally became resentful and angry about the way Monroe’s time in Inglewood was inaccurately portrayed. In a 1966 interview for the Daily Breeze