Casillo Charles - Marilyn Monroe: the private life of a public icon

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For Kelvin

She was the most famous woman in the world. Millions of people would have been thrilled to have her phone number, have lunch with her, talk to her, kiss her. Yet she felt alone.

She was alone.

Nestled in her bed in Los Angeles, fighting the effects of the drugs in her bloodstream, Marilyn Monroe made numerous phone calls. At one point she called her longtime friend Henry Rosenfeld, a fashion mogul, in New York. They talked about her upcoming trip to the East Coast. She was trying to make plans, to create a future she could look forward to. Then the dark feelings took over again.

Marilyns delicate frame of mindher crushing loneliness, her fear of fading and losing her beauty, power, and ability to be lovedmade her more fragile and needy than ever. She likely made a few more callsexactly to whom is not known. There was no one to whom she could really talk honestly because the person she felt they wanted was a dazzling creation based on being spectacular and sexual, and she feared that person was disappearing.

She probably tried the White House at least once.

Early the next morning, Sunday, August 5, the FBI showed up at the telephone company in Santa Monica to confiscate Marilyns phone records for that night. A telephone company executive told the publisher of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook , Dean Funk, that he knew the FBI had been in the general telephone offices and had taken the record of her calls that night. They have never surfaced.

After talking to Rosenfeld, Marilyn started to go under. The womby-tomby feeling she liked began to take over.

At about eight that evening Peter Lawford called her, suggesting that she come to his dinner party.

Marilyns voice was very slurred, her tone downbeat. Peter, youre really a wonderful guy, and Pat is wonderful, she murmured. And Jack and Bobby are just great. I want to tell you how much

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 Monroewho would become the mother of Marilyn Monroedid 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 dont remember.

Della wasnt 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 paresisthe 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.

* * *

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 Otiss. The marriage lasted a mere eight months.

By the time she was forty-four, Dellas once-striking looks were beginning to coarsen, and she was eager to find a new man. At a New Years Eve dance, she met and became enamored of a distinguished-looking widower, Charles Graingeran 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 Gladyss 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 Jaspers younger brother. Already fed up with his wifes 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.