Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (3 page)

Despite the hardships and very little education, Tilford apparently had an inquiring and sensitive mind: he taught himself to read and took a fancy to poetry and the classics—genteel pursuits to which he could devote little time. Earnest, practical Jennie, citing the family’s constant deprivations, offered him no encouragement in his literary interests. The marriage lasted twenty years and then, for reasons that remain unclear, they were divorced. Jennie took the children and returned to her mother’s home in Chariton County, and Tilford went to live with his sister in Linn County.

Whatever the marriage problems, Hogan was much liked and respected
by friends and neighbors, for he was a generous man who shared spontaneously from his own meager supplies of food and fuel. His empathetic nature was perhaps all the more remarkable since his entire adult life was blighted by severe rheumatoid arthritis and chronic respiratory infections, conditions exacerbated by hard labor, poor diet and a ceaseless rhythm of poverty. In addition, he was virtually ostracized after his divorce, which was no commonplace among the zealous Christian citizenry of late-nineteenth-century Missouri. After 1891 (when he turned forty), he worked harder than ever and seemed prematurely old and frail; he also suffered a terrible loneliness without his children, who visited but rarely.

The liveliest of these was Della May (who later sometimes signed herself Della Mae), the second of Tilford and Jennie’s three children. She was born July 1, 1876, while her parents were living briefly in Brunswick, Missouri. Not especially pretty but gay and mischievous, she was a precocious and energetic child who had no interest in her father’s intellectual inclinations; quite the contrary, she was a habitual truant. Parents and teachers were outraged when, at the age of ten, she led classmates to a local pond for fishing and swimming. There was even graver concern over the matter of Della’s conduct with those who often crept away into a family’s barn late afternoons for a game of “Kiss-Me-Quick.” By fifteen, she was long out of school, shuttling back and forth between her parents, enjoying the attentions of boys alert to her persuasive, unreserved charm.

Frisky young Della forestalled marriage until she was twenty-two, an advanced age for espousals at the time. In 1898, she met a house painter recently arrived in Missouri from Indiana named Otis Elmer Monroe, ten years her senior. Like Della’s father, Otis nurtured goals loftier than mere manual labor. He insisted that one day he would study art in Europe, and he spiced their conversations with talk of French painters and of
Belle Époque
Paris, of which he had seen gravures in magazines.

After a proper courtship, on which the groom-to-be insisted, Della May Hogan and Otis Elmer Monroe were married in late 1899. Photographs of her from that time show a woman of medium height with a strong, round face, dark eyes, an almost severe jaw and extraordinary poise: there is nothing demure in her stance. No portraits of Otis have survived, but Della later described him as fair-skinned, with reddish
hair and hazel eyes. He was, she later said, “neat as a pin, always turned out like a gentleman—or at least a gentleman’s gentleman.” After a bad fall, he had a permanent scar on his left cheek, and this gave him a somewhat dashing, romantic look. Della seemed to think of him as a roué, a robust man of the world who had known danger.

Not long after the wedding, Otis told Della to pack their clothes. Because he was guaranteed better wages than for occasional house painting, he had accepted an offer to work for the Mexican National Railway. They settled just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, in a town later known as Piedras Negras (then called Porfirio Díaz, named for Mexico’s incumbent president). Della, at first unhappy to have left America, often stood on her front porch, gazing at the bridge across the Rio Grande into Texas. But she was an adaptable soul and soon relaxed into her self-appointed role as a kind of unofficial teacher to the Indian and Mexican women, for whom she was also occasional midwife. By autumn 1901, Della was herself pregnant, and on the morning of May 27, 1902 she delivered a child she named Gladys Pearl; a Mexican civil judge certified the birth five days later.

In 1903, Otis and Della learned that there were better jobs to be had in Los Angeles, where trams, trolleys and railway cars were proliferating to connect the various sections of that swiftly growing city. The Monroes moved to California in the spring, leasing a small, one-bedroom bungalow on West Thirty-seventh Street, in the south-central sector of the city, whence Otis went out to work for the Pacific Electric Railway. With a wife and daughter to support, he found his dreams of painting watercolors aboard a Seine houseboat fading into oblivion.

In 1905, Della gave birth to a boy named Marion Otis Elmer, and the family required larger quarters. Family notebooks record that theirs was a peripatetic life over the next several years, and that they lived in at least eleven rented and furnished houses or apartments between 1903 and 1909. With such instability and few possessions to call their own, Gladys and Marion, although not obviously deprived of necessities, had uprooted and insecure early lives; constantly on the move, as young Della herself had once been, there were also few opportunities to form sustained friendships. In addition, Otis often failed to return from work at night; just as often, when Della confronted him, he insisted he could not recall where he had been. Because he occasionally drank heavily, Della was not surprised by these memory lapses.
The Monroe marriage was thus sorely tested throughout 1907.

Then, early the following year, at forty-one, Otis Monroe’s behavior and health deteriorated with alarming rapidity. His memory was erratic, his responses often inappropriate, he suffered severe headaches and became uncharacteristically slovenly. His fits of rage, frightening to Della and the children, alternated with fits of weeping, and the poor man soon developed violent tremors in his hands and feet, sometimes followed by seizures that, at least once, sent six-year-old Gladys in a panic to stay with neighbors for two days.

During the summer of 1908, Otis became semiparalyzed. Admitted in November to the Southern California State Hospital at Patton in San Bernardino County, he was diagnosed as suffering from general paresis, the final stage of neurosyphilis, or syphilis of the brain. The disease had been known and diagnosed in Western civilization for at least two centuries; the first successful drug treatment, by the German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich, was being developed that very same year, too late to benefit Otis.

After three months, Della could no longer endure visits to her husband: he was completely demented and virtually beyond recognition; in addition, she found full-time domestic work to support her children. Nine months later, without having ever left his hospital bed, Otis died at the age of forty-three, on July 22, 1909.

His harrowingly swift mental deterioration had terrified Della, and she told her children that he had gone mad and died a lunatic—perhaps from drink, perhaps from bad conduct. But the medical file released to her after his death and preserved for decades in family records clearly reveals that Otis Elmer Monroe died of an organogenic (not a psychogenic) illness. The dementia was the result of a systemic disease, not a genetic predisposition. More important, at least one physician believed the form of syphilis was of the so-called endemic type—that is, the deadly spirochete had been contracted not through sexual activity but through the dangerously unsanitary, virus-infested conditions in which he had worked in Mexico. (The incidence of syphilis in Mexico during the period 1880–1910, although not always clearly demarcated in its types, was virtually epidemic.) Della, Gladys and Marion Monroe wrongly believed their husband and father had died of insanity, when in fact he was killed by an infection that destroyed his brain tissue.

*    *    *

How acutely this information affected Gladys and Marion at the ages of seven and four is difficult to know, but they must have taken their cue from Della. At first she affected a stoic, matronly melancholy, working earnestly and taking the children to one or another nearby Protestant church “to pray for the health of their own spirit.” Despite this transient fit of piety, Della still had the restlessness and exuberance that had characterized her youth—she was, after all, only thirty-three years old. By 1910 she was entertaining eligible bachelors and widowers in her home at 2440 Boulder Street. Gladys, by all accounts an extroverted, active girl, thought she would soon have a new father: “Mama liked men,” she said later, “and we all wanted a papa.”

For that they waited two years, during which Della was engaged (or acted so) several times before she finally settled on a new husband. On March 7, 1912, at the age of thirty-five, she married Lyle Arthur Graves, a shy, earnest man of twenty-nine who had come from Green Bay, Wisconsin, worked with Otis at Pacific Electric and was that year a railway switchman supervisor. The new family moved to Graves’s house at 324½ South Hill Street, later part of the central Los Angeles business district.

Not much time passed before Della realized she had made a mistake, for Lyle, too, was inclined to excessive drinking—or so she claimed when she took the children after only eight months and moved to a residential hotel. A month later, at Christmas 1912, she went back to Graves, apparently because she needed the support. But the reconciliation did not last long, despite Lyle’s generous gifts for the children during the holidays, and his ceding to Della the management of his salary. Five months later, on Gladys’s eleventh birthday, Della left Graves; on January 17, 1914, she was divorced, charging him with “failure to provide, dissipation and habitual intemperance.”

Della herself had known a rootless and restless childhood (her parents having separated when she was thirteen), and although she may have expected more from adulthood, she knew not how to find or nurture the proper components for herself or her children: there was, quite literally, no place like home.

Gladys was the most affected: her father had died mysteriously after a terrible sickness; men were welcomed and then dismissed by their mother; gentlemen callers arrived and departed; Graves was a
new father for only a few months, then he was not, then he was again, then he was not. For Gladys, on the edge of young womanhood, men were impermanent, unreliable transients; at the same time, her mother’s conduct implied that men were also in some way necessary to a woman’s life. Della continued to enjoy—indeed required—male companionship. Her daughter was, then, receiving mixed signals about marriage, family and parenthood.

By the end of 1916, Della and her children were living in one room of a boardinghouse at 26 Westminster Avenue, just a short walk from the Pacific Ocean in an area south of Santa Monica known as Venice, on the shore of Santa Monica Bay, twelve miles from downtown Los Angeles. Planned by a man named Abbot Kinney (who made his fortune in the manufacture of Sweet Caporal cigarettes), Venice, California, was planned to resemble its Italian namesake.

Kinney envisioned romantic canals connecting the streets, and beaches and shops linking homes on flower-banked shores via charming arched bridges across the canals. Construction of lagoons and cottages was begun in 1904, and in 1905 the canals were filled with water. Kinney persuaded merchants, hoteliers and restaurant owners to build in the architectural style of the Venetian Renaissance, and to complete the effect he imported two dozen gondoliers from Italy, who arrived with an appropriate repertory of their native airs and lyrics. Throughout the first two decades of the century, Venice was the so-called Play-land of the Pacific, and in 1925 it was incorporated into the City of Los Angeles. Della had visited the place once before; now she chose it as home for herself and her children.

When they arrived, Gladys was fourteen years old. Bright and flirtatious, she made her presence known at every school and social gathering. Her light brown hair sparkled with red highlights, she had a high, vivacious voice and was quick to laugh, and like Della she craved attention, especially from older men—not surprisingly, since she had had so little from her own father. Her eleven-year-old brother Marion, meanwhile, was soon dispatched to live with cousins in San Diego, for Della believed a boy should be raised in a household headed by a man. Already tall and strong like his grandfather Hogan, Marion was a champion high-school swimmer; at nineteen he falsified his age and married a
younger classmate named Olive Brunings. Marion Monroe was neither the first nor the last of his family to contract a teenage marriage.

On New Year’s Eve of 1917, dancing at a waterfront parlor, Della slipped on an overwaxed patch of floor. Before falling, she was literally swept off her feet by a handsome, six-foot widower named Charles Grainger. Within days, he was visiting her almost every evening at Westminster Avenue.

To Della, Grainger’s life was more impressively exotic than anything ever planned by Otis Monroe. Grainger had first worked as a rigger in the Los Angeles oil boom of the 1890s. Then, in 1915, he shipped out to India, and from there he went on to Southeast Asia, where he was a drilling supervisor for the Burma Oil Company. Since his return to Southern California, Grainger had been employed only sporadically by the Shell Company. He lived not far from Della, at 410 Carroll Canal Court, Venice, a modest two-room bungalow along one of the many channels of inland Venice. That address was more appealing than 26 Westminster, and when she saw it Della was charmed.

That year, cohabitation was no more socially acceptable than abortion or divorce, but Charles and Della discussed living together at Carroll Canal Court without marrying; she simply began to call herself Mrs. Grainger, and no one was the wiser. This decision not to marry was probably his, for Grainger’s job prospects were frequently uncertain while he hoped for a new overseas assignment. Della’s relationships with Otis Monroe and Lyle Graves had been deeply troubled, and now she and Charles Grainger often lived apart for days or weeks at a time. In addition, he was helping to support two teenage sons in northern California and could not have rejoiced at the prospect of being legally required to provide for Della and her daughter. Wary of adjusting to yet another father and displeased that her mother was again living in an irregular situation providing her with no sure emotional support, Gladys was unhappy and let Grainger know it by surly moods or silence. As a result, Della found her daughter something of a nuisance, for Charles’s offer for them to live with him was not forthcoming.