Marilyn: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

exercise of the skill with
which she would later invent particular histories to attract pity.
On the other hand, if there is nothing to the story, then there is
also no dramatic explanation for her acute insomnia. Let us leave
it there. Easier evidence on the shaping of her character can be
found in the atmosphere of the first year of her life, spent living
in the Bolenders’ house of piety. Certainly when Norma Jean would
call Ida “Mama,” she was rebuked. “The lady with the red hair is
your mama,” would be the answer. One of Norma Jean’s first
sentences on seeing a woman walk by holding a child’s hand was,
“There goes a mama.” It is a touching tale, told by Ida Bolender,
but one can sense her fear of Gladys’ wrath if the baby should
think to call the wrong woman mama in front of the actual
red-headed mother. But it is of Della, however, that Ida is truly
afraid, Della who does not go to church any longer, Della who
scorches the most casual conversation with a flare of anger hot as
burning gasoline, Della building to a riot of the cataclysmic for a
Hawthorne street.
    But we may as well give the description to
Fred Guiles to tell, since it is his biography we have been using
up to here.
     
    Early that critical Saturday, Albert Wayne
Bolender heard a commotion in his front yard. (He could remember
the details vividly even forty years later.) Della, in a rage, was
hurrying up the walk toward their porch. Seeing her approach he
slammed the front door and bolted it.
    No one could make out a word she was saying.
It was clear, however, that the subject was Norma Jean; she had no
other reason to be there. Ida came into the living room from the
kitchen and peered out at the woman, who was now pounding on their
door. “Call the police, Wayne,” she said. “Hurry!”
    Within minutes, a black patrol car pulled up
in front of the Bolender home. By this time, Della had succeeded in
breaking a panel of the door, injuring her hand. Two policemen
subdued her and dragged her to the car. Her head was thrown back as
though seeking God’s help.
    A few weeks after her entrance into the
asylum at Norwalk, mercifully Della died of a heart attack during
her last seizure on August 23, 1927.
     
    Of course, we do not know if the heart attack
was merciful. It could have been created by still another excess of
rage at having failed in her mission to extinguish Norma Jean.
     
    * * *
     
    Della’s death takes place in the summer of
1927, and in Whittier on the other side of Los Angeles, out past
Pasadena, maybe twenty miles away, another American, Richard
Milhous Nixon, is fourteen years old and growing up to form his
ideas of the Silent Majority. If we are certain of anything in the
childhood of Marilyn Monroe it is that she spent her first seven
years in a home which was hymn and fundament, flesh and spine,
thesis and axis of the world-view of the Silent Majority. For
“Aunt” Ida and “Uncle” Wayne Bolender were poor, pious, stern,
kindly, decent, hard-working, and absolutely terrified of the
lividity of the American air in the street outside. Indeed we do
not require much more than the description of their rush to bolt
the door to understand how much the Silent Majority lives in dread
of the danger which lies beneath appearances. It is the home in
which Norma Jean grew up, and most certainly it must have helped to
establish that pleasant middle of her personality — at least as it
appeared on screen — that clean scrubbed girl who lived next door.
There is ice cream on her tongue, and the Church Visible in the
bland expression of the spaced-out eyes. If that is a fair and
cruel description of many a good American cheerleader, and will yet
fit Marilyn on occasion, it is not accurate to speak of her as
spaced-out so early. She is a vigorous-looking baby with keen eyes
and good tough little features; nothing of her future beauty is
particularly indicated — rather it is her good health. In later
years on those occasions