Icon no 1: Marilyn Monroe

Part A

Warning: This post contains descriptions of abuse and trauma

In the 1930 census of the US, a small house in East Rhode Island Street, Hollywood, was listed as the home of two mothers: Ida Bolender (with her husband and four foster children) and Gladys Baker (and her four-year-old daughter). This census entry is unlikely to be true based on what had happened by this time between these two mothers.

On June 13^th, 1926, Gladys had arrived at Ida’s house with her two-week old baby daughter to do what others had urged her to do – to give the baby to this woman who, as a neighbour and foster mother, had offered to look after the infant named Norma Mortensen. There were a number of reasons that Ida had offered to take the child. Not least, when Glady’s colleague had babysat for a morning, Gladys had returned home and had become extremely paranoid – accusing Grace of trying to poison the baby. The incident escalated till Gladys stabbed Grace with a kitchen knife. Ida was concerned for the child’s safety as were a number of others including Gladys’s mother. The father was unidentified – partly because after her divorce, Gladys had slept with different men. Gladys had previously given up two children and, as biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli puts it, this new baby was, from the outset, “a burden, one that needed to be unloaded”¹.

The two-week old girl was accepted into the Bolender household. They were strictly religious, and Ida described cinema going as something that would lead children to “burn in hell with all the bad people” ¹. Ida, as a mother was described as “strict and controlling”. She appeared to focus, particularly with little Norma, more on physical safety, external behaviour and appearances and less on emotional wellbeing. As she grew older little Norma would be harshly treated for returning home with dirty clothes. Ida later explained, “I was hard on her for her own good…for all I know she may hate me now, but she will be strong” ¹.

Norma’s natural mother Gladys, with her mental health oscillating wildly, sometimes felt remorse for abandoning her daughter in a way similar to her own Mother, Della, abandoning her. In the Summer of 1927, Della, still a powerful influence in Gladys’s life, visited. Della was in a terrible state after contracting Malaria (she had also suffered with psychotic illness on and off prior to this). During the visit to Gladys, Della walked over to the house where one year old Norma Mortensen was living, wanting to see her. When Ida refused to answer the door, suspecting the woman was volatile, Della smashed the glass and opened the door herself, before claiming that the infant Norma, her granddaughter, was dead. In an apparent attempt to appease her, Ida showed Della the sleeping one year old. But when her back was turned Della took a pillow and began to smother the child, before saying when confronted that she was merely ‘adjusting’ the pillow’s position for the girl. Ida became distraught and her husband called the police.

The police arrived to find Norma crying alone in her bedroom and Ida barking accusations at the delusional grandmother. Not long after this incident Della died. However, two years later it was Gladys, Norma’s mother who arrived at the front door, again, in a state of paranoia, demanding to have her three-year-old back. Gladys pushed her way through to the back yard where Norma was playing with the dog. She said, “You’re coming with Mommy, sweetheart” and picked her up. The foster mother protested: “This is her home!”¹.

By this time, I suspect, the three-year-old Norma had a strong, perhaps very confusing set of associations with her natural mother, Gladys. There would have been no association of safety. And there had been no warning of this event. The two ‘mothers’ would clearly have been in conflict and agitated. This, on its own, would have been frightening.

What followed was a tug of war with a child. The dog was barking, the girl crying and the two women getting physical. Gladys having taken the child inside pushed Ida into the back garden and locked the back door. After failing to break in from outside, Ida ran around to the front but could hear or see nothing. There was a pause in which Ida felt despair. Then the front door flew open, and Gladys emerged with a large military duffle bag over her shoulder. To Ida’s horror, she heard muffled screams and realised that Norma was in the bag. She grabbed one of the straps as Gladys tried to cross the lawn and there was a struggle. The bag split, and the child fell to the ground. Norma’s weeping paused. She then cried out “Mommy!!” with arms stretched out – towards Ida her foster mother. Ida managed to grab Norma and lock herself in the house¹.

Things settled for a brief time. Till Norma’s adopted dog, Tippy, was killed by a car and almost cut in half whilst Norma was at school. Instead of preparing the girl for this heartbreak, Ida shifted the corpse from the road to the driveway where Norma would find it when she got home. On finding her dog, Norma drew her own conclusions about what terrible thing had happened based on events over preceding weeks. Norma’s confused and distraught reaction to this, set in motion events that would lead to her abandonment by the Bolenda household. Only days later, and apparently concerned that Norma had the same delusional disorder as her mother, Ida called Gladys – the woman who had tried to carry Norma off in a bag – and said that Norma was “upset. I think she needs her mother”¹.

Marilyn Monroe (born, Norma Jeanne Mortensen, actress, model, singer: 1/6/1926 – 5/8/1962)

Marilyn shooting ‘The Seven-Year Itch’

Marilyn Monroe “created and became a woman more fascinating than even she believed possible” ¹. She started modelling for magazines, still as Norma, at the age of 18 and went on to become a Hollywood film star – something that seems to have been her specific dream from around the age of ten. Completing 39 films, she ultimately became an icon outside of film and was married to or associated with other icons, including singer Frank Sinatra, baseball star Joe DiMaggio and US president JFK and his family. During performances in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ (1953), ‘How to Marry a Millionaire’ (1953) and ‘There’s No Business Like Showbusiness’ (1954), her “fame grew steadily and spread throughout the world, and she became the object of unprecedented popular adulation”². It seems that she had a quality apart from her physical beauty that set her apart – something that for some was mesmerising.

Actress Arlene Dahl recalled a party where, “Marilyn walked in with her agent and, I’ll never forget it, everything stopped. It was magical really. I’ve never seen anyone stop a room like that.”¹

One biography is titled: ‘Goddess’³. Marilyn became and remains a kind of architype for glamour itself.

The map of narcissism

Narcissism is complex. And Marilyn’s difficulties were more complex than narcissism alone. She was diagnosed by her long-time psychoanalyst, Dr Ralph Greenson, as having ‘borderline paranoid schizophrenia’ – later called ‘borderline personality disorder’, ‘emotionally unstable personality disorder’ or ‘complex emotional needs’. Narcissism can be thought of as a separate set of difficulties or as a kind of extension of ‘borderline‘ difficulties⁴. This post though, will focus on narcissism. I described in the theory post a map of narcissism. This contains six roles that can be identified in the nurturing and playing out of narcissism.

The map of narcissism⁵

The theory I have presented suggests that narcissistic strategies for dealing with life and relationships are nurtured in a melting pot of condemnation, shaming and/or emotional neglect. Idealisation, with a focus on performance or on external features is experienced in some way as a strategy for escaping painful feelings attached to vulnerability and judgment. And we would expect to see a preoccupation in the person with intellectual activity or other ways of distancing from the vulnerability of emotional connection to themselves. Anything but feeling…

So, how does the map of narcissism fit with the life of Marilyn Monroe? Did she suffer these specific types of childhood trauma to a marked degree? If so, did she actually develop narcissistic strategies for managing various aspects of her life? How inflexible were these? Is there evidence that these strategies existed specifically to distance her from these childhood experiences? Let’s take these questions in turn.

Childhood experiences of judgment and neglect

We hear about two mother figures. One, Gladys, is frequently psychotic, becoming unpredictable, frightening, abandoning or stealing Norma away by force from safety and security. Norma’s relationship with her natural mother was at times terrifying and generally a highly insecure and intense one. Did she fantasise that her father would appear to rescue or balance things out? He never appeared. Norma recalled lying in bed, shivering with fear, as someone dissuaded her mother’s colleague, Grace, from stepping in to care for the “mental case”¹. Little is recorded of the times when Gladys had the Norma to herself. But later in life she said that “I just don’t think she liked me very much, let alone loved me” ¹. Prior to later being given over to Los Angeles Orphans’ Home by her mother, she remembered, “I thought I was going to prison”. ¹ Although Marilyn was notoriously dishonest⁶, and although there are only a few of these snapshots, I suspect they reflect unmanageable and confusing experiences of judgment and condemnation for the child. She would later scribble in her diary,

“Why do I feel this torture? Why do I feel less of a human being than others…subhuman. Why?”⁶

The second mother figure, Ida, appears in some ways as a rescuing figure in the story - a source of safety and security. But Ida was distinguished by her lack of emotional empathy, her highly rational, judgmental view of people and a preoccupation with appearances¹. She could be at times highly critical of appearance, and at other times admiring based on the same. Despite being against ‘mollycoddling’ the child, Ida often washed Marilyn’s hair in lemon juice. Ida’s husband, Wayne, appears to have been a source of warmth and empathy for Norma (she called him ‘Daddy’) but this affection rarely went uncriticised by his wife¹.

Ida, appearing in Norma’s life as a source of safety, ultimately abandoned Norma back to the danger she had rescued her from. To compound this, it seems that this abandonment was in response to her expressing acute distress about losing her beloved dog. She was labelled as mad (like her mother).  A young girl’s raw distress and confusion was firstly not validated or made sense of, and secondly, it was punished and labelled as madness. What would such experiences do to the child’s ability to take her emotions seriously or even pay attention to them in order to manage them? Could they be trusted as signals of a need to approach others for comfort?

The biography by Taraborrelli¹ is one that sets out the beginning of Norma Jeanne’s life in these traumatic terms. Strangely though, whilst sparing no details of these early incidents, the biographer practically sidesteps the sexual abuse that Norma Jeanne probably suffered – which is largely accepted⁷. Although there are few and contradictory details of the sexual abuse (her own accounts often changed), we might wonder how these experiences arrived with a child, particularly as unmanageable experiences of vulnerability, powerlessness, failure to perform and shame.

It is not unusual for me in my work to hear about infant and childhood experiences like these. But of course, it’s usually confidential. I was affected for a few days emotionally reading the experiences this little girl Norma went through.

Returning to the map of narcissism, we can see how Norma Jeanne’s early life was characterised by unsafe experiences of vulnerability – her feelings were not taken care of and at times were punished (as when her dog died). There are suggestions of intense and confusing experiences of judgment or condemnation - with no comfort. That her mother tried to abduct her in a military kit bag is only the facts of the event. What is most important, is how this symbolised her emotional life - distressing, in the dark, alone.

These traumatic experiences would set up a huge need to find strategies to stay distanced from feelings of vulnerability, and of condemnation. If emotional vulnerability and being condemned were situations to stay away from, in any dose, the map of narcissism predicts that performance, idealisation and emotional distance might offer refuge and escape. Is there evidence of these strategies being introduced to or tried out by Norma? Part B will look at these questions.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.

References

1.     Taraborrelli, J.R. (2009). The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. Pan.

2.     Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2023

3.     Summers, A. (2007). Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

4.     Kernberg, O.F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson.

5.     Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.

6.     Buchthal, S. & Comment, B. (2010) Fragments. Harper Collins.

7.     Spotto, D. (1993) Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. Arrow Books.