Marilyn: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

walk, Gladys will occasionally take her
to the film lab and let her sit there quietly while she works.
Workers congratulate the mother for her good child. But it is as
likely a first sign of the spiritual orphan who does not expect
attention, and in later years the comments on such calm behavior
will be less adulatory. Natasha Lytess, once her dramatic coach,
later ignominiously dismissed, was to say, “I often felt like she
was a somnambulist walking around,” and Nunnally Johnson, the
scriptwriter, described her as “ten feet under water . . . a wall
of thick cotton . . . she reminds me of a sloth. You stick a pin in
her and eight days later it says ‘Ouch.’” Already in infancy it is
possible her thoughts are turning circular and bear the same
relation to purposeful inquiry that the steps of a prisoner pacing
a cell offer to a journey.
    On most Sundays, however, the well-behaved
baby did not see the inside of church with her mother. The mother
was in Hollywood awakening after a Saturday night without her. Is
it safe to assume Gladys never felt closer to the baby than when
she was without her? But the emotional impost of going to Hawthorne
was steadily on the increase. Della was each week less stable. If
she were always capable of shrieking at delivery boys one day, then
being gracious the next, one newsboy was now so terrified of her
that he asked his supervisor to send the weekly bill by mail; and
Ida Bolender, caught in the act of spanking Norma Jean for
upsetting a bowl of food, heard Della scream, “Don’t ever let me
catch you doing that again!” Her voice must have had that
recognizable tone which speaks of the blood-of-my-blood, for Ida
Bolender, never a bold woman, was thereafter in fear of Della, and
forever worried when Della, rising at last to a grandmotherly
function, would take Norma Jean across the street for a visit. Ida
dares not interfere, and yet is resentful, one might as well
assume, since Della, if just turned fifty, is still sufficiently
beautiful to play the dilettante even as a grandmother.
    It is the classic American small town comedy.
People are going mad on quiet shabby end-of-town streets while envy
is generated, proprieties are abused, and proprieties are
maintained. Yet the fundamental sense of the American madness, that
violence which lives like an electronic hum behind the silence of
even the sleepiest Sunday afternoon, is incubating in the balmy
smog-free subtropical evenings of Hollywood: the vision of the
American frontier has gone into a light-box and come out as
ten-foot ghosts upon a screen.
    If a void in one’s sense of identity is equal
to a mental swamp where insane growths begin, then America is an
insane swamp more than other lands. With the exception of the
Indians, we are a nation of rejects already once transplanted by
the measure of every immigration of the last three hundred and
fifty years. And the Indians, having originally possessed a
relation to land and sky more sensitive than the telepathies of the
TV set, have been driven mad by our disruption of their balance, so
we are, yes, twice an insane land, Indians and others — it is, at
the least, a working hypothesis. Los Angeles had to be the focus
within such focus, the deepest swamp of the national swamp, the
weed of weeds, for in the period which began after World War I some
of that same intimation of oncoming insanity if one failed to move
(which had already moved tens of millions over here from Europe)
now picked up many a soul who felt himself a weed in his
surroundings and transplanted him still again to the West Coast.
And there in Hawthorne in 1927, the weed Della Hogan Monroe
Grainger, festering in the psychic swamp life of quiet Hawthorne,
is believed to have crossed the street one afternoon, picked up the
baby, taken her to her home, and there begun to suffocate her with
a pillow. No witnesses are present and no evidence is with us other
than Marilyn Monroe’s own recollection. She would prove more