Gladys Pearl Baker
Gladys Pearl Monroe, also known as Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker Mortensen Eley, was the mother of American actress Marilyn Monroe. Born in Mexico, Baker grew up in the Los Angeles metro area. Her father died in 1909 after suffering from mental illness and alcoholism.
Gladys was married three times for three to four years each marriage. She was married for the first time at age 14 to Jasper Newton Baker. They had two children, including American author Berniece Baker Miracle and Robert Jasper “Kermit” Baker. At the end of the marriage, Jasper kidnapped their two children and returned to his native Kentucky without his wife's knowledge. Gladys moved to Kentucky to be near her children but left after four months. She had limited contact thereafter. She moved to Hollywood, where she became a film cutter in the growing movie industry. There, she met Martin Edward Mortensen, with whom she had a short marriage that ended in divorce. Afterwards, she had a relationship with Charles Stanley Gifford while he was separated from his wife. Gladys became pregnant with her third child, Norma Jeane Mortenson. Gladys struggled to take care of her daughter and placed her with a foster family weeks after her birth.
After already enduring so much, Gladys had a mental breakdown after the death of her son, the suicide of her father, and news that her studio was shutting down. From 1934 until the 1960s, Gladys was confined in psychiatric facilities. During that time, Gladys had a three-year marriage to John Stewart Eley which ended when he died. In her later years, she lived with her daughter Berniece before moving to a senior care facility.
Life
Gladys Pearl Monroe was born on May 27, 1902, in Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. Her mother, Della Mae Monroe, was born in Missouri and she was from Bentonville, Arkansas, and her father, Otis Elmer Monroe, was a house painter from Indianapolis. He also sold portraits and landscapes that he had painted and dreamed of living in Paris. Her family had Scottish and Irish ancestry. At the time of Baker's birth, Otis worked for the National Railroad of Mexico painting railway cars. Della was a midwife and an unofficial teacher. In the spring of 1903, the family moved to Los Angeles County, where Otis worked for the Pacific Electric Railway Company.Gladys and her brother, Marion Otis Elmer, had an unstable upbringing due to their father's alcoholism, frequent moves, and their parents' troubled marriage. Otis Sr. was prone to fits of rage and crying, migraines, dementia, and seizures. Her father was institutionalized at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County in November 1908. He had an advanced, untreatable case of neurosyphilis and was semi-paralyzed due to paresis. He was mentally ill at the time of his death on July 22, 1909. Della supported the children as a domestic worker and by renting out rooms in her house.
She married a second time to Lyle Arthur Graves, a railway switchman supervisor at Pacific Electric, on March 7, 1912. They lived in Los Angeles at Graves' house. Della divorced him on January 17, 1914, charging Graves with "failure to provide, dissipation and habitual intemperance." Della lived in Oregon by September 1914, and she married a man named Chitwood, or Charles E. Young on July 26, 1916, in Portland, Oregon. Gladys got along with this stepfather and had fond memories of living on a farm in Oregon. Della divorced again, this time citing alcoholism.
By 1916, Gladys lived in Venice, Los Angeles with her mother and brother. Gladys was a social teen at school who, like her mother, preferred older men. Marion went to live in San Diego with cousins in a household that was headed by a father. In 1917, Della began a tumultuous relationship with Charles Grainger, a widower with two sons. Della and Gladys lived off and on at his nearby two-room bungalow. The couple was never married, but Della went by Mrs. Grainger. Gladys was very unhappy living with Grainger, as she had been with Graves.
1916–1923: Marriage to Jasper Baker
At the age of 14, Gladys met John Newton Baker, a businessman from Kentucky who was a "violent drinker" that beat Gladys during their marriage. He owned the apartment building that Della managed. They were married on May 17, 1917, with her mother's permission and a signed affidavit that Gladys was 18. Gladys gave birth to a son, Robert Kermit "Jackie", followed by a daughter, Berniece Inez Gladys. As a child, Jackie fell out of the family car, suffering injuries that left him lame for the rest of his life. After abusive incidents, Gladys filed for divorce from Jasper in 1921, and was awarded custody of the children. Jasper kidnapped the children and returned with them to his native Kentucky, where his mother helped raise them.About one year later, when she was age 20, Gladys moved to Kentucky to live near her children. She worked cleaning houses and caring for children, one of whom was named Norma Jeane. According to biographer Donald Spoto, Gladys visited the children once in Kentucky and then had "infrequent attempts to contact" Jackie and Berniece during their childhood. She had not developed the emotional stability to properly care for the children. Four months later, she returned to California. Jasper had married a woman who was good to her children, and Gladys was afraid of Jasper who had bloodied her back while she was in Kentucky. No one would help her get her children back.
After Gladys lost her children, she became a heavy drinker, according to Della. Jackie reportedly died in his 20s, never seeing his mother again. Berniece did not see her mother for many years.
1923–1928: Hollywood and second marriage
In 1923, Gladys moved to Hollywood and worked for Consolidated Film Industries as a negative film cutter. She worked six days a week cutting out portions of the film that studio editors marked for removal. Another group of people assembled the strips to create the final release negative. Baker also worked as a film cutter at Columbia Pictures and RKO.She met Grace McKee, a supervisor at Consolidates, and they became good friends. In the summer of 1923, they moved into an apartment in an area that came to be known as Silver Lake in Los Angeles and east of Hollywood. The two women embraced the freedom of the Roaring Twenties, becoming flappers "who chose to extend the recent women's suffrage amendment to include the various social and sexual autonomies long claimed by men." Grace transformed Gladys from a brown-haired "plain jane" to an attractive red-headed woman who wore stylish clothing. In 1925, McKee married actor Ervin Silliman "Doc" Goddard.
During the time that Gladys worked at RKO, she was described as having a flat affect and seemed closed off. She was also described by coworkers, though, as beautiful, having twinkling green eyes and a lively spirit, delightful, and funny.
In the summer of 1924, Gladys met Martin Edward Mortensen, the son of a Norwegian immigrant and a 27-year-old meterman for the Southern California Gas Company. They both had been married once before. They married on October 11, 1924. Gladys was initially attracted, among other things, to Mortensen's stability, but after they were married she became bored with him. She left him around early 1925 and moved in with Grace. Mortensen filed a divorce petition on May 26, 1925, citing desertion. He tried to win his wife back, but they were divorced on August 15, 1928.
1925–1926: Relationship with Charles Stanley Gifford and birth of Norma Jeane
Gladys worked as a negative film cutter under Charles Stanley Gifford, her superior at RKO Pictures. Gifford had separated from his wife, Lillian Priester, in October 1923. They were divorced in May 1925. That same year, Gladys and Gifford, a self-proclaimed womanizer, began an affair. Beside Gifford, Gladys had relationships with other men in 1925.In late 1925, 10 months after Gladys left Mortensen, she found out that she was pregnant. In the winter of 1925, Gifford took Gladys to meet his family. They did not approve of him marrying a pregnant woman who was not raising her existing children.
Gladys gave birth to her third and final child, Norma Jeane, on June 1, 1926, in the Los Angeles County Hospital. She did not allow Gifford to visit her in the hospital. He later remarried and kept his illegitimate daughter a secret from his wife. Because Gladys was still married to Mortensen, he was legally Norma Jeane's father. When the child was older, Gladys reportedly told her that her father, whom she refused to name, was a movie star. In 2022, DNA testing confirmed Gifford was the father.
Baker registered the surname Mortenson on Norma Jeane's birth certificate, using the name of her estranged husband and specifying his address as unknown. She also stated that she had previously had two children, but incorrectly stated that they were no longer living. Norma Jeane was baptized with the name Baker when her grandmother Della tried to hide the illegitimacy.
1926-33: Norma Jeane's early years
Gladys lacked parenting skills and had a lifestyle that did not suit motherhood. She did not have viable daycare options and needed her job to earn a living. She also experienced severe postpartum depression and was unable to take care of Norma Jeane. On one occasion, Grace prevented Gladys from stabbing her daughter. Taraborrelli stated that Gladys accused Grace of trying to poison the baby and then stabbed her with a knife.Within two weeks of Norma Jeane's birth, Gladys placed her baby with a foster family who lived from her, Evangelical Christians Albert and Ida Bolender in the rural town of Hawthorne, California. The Bolenders lived across the street from Della, Baker's mother. Gladys initially moved in with the Bolenders and shared a room with Norma Jeane until she was six months old. She then returned to Hollywood to manage an increase in her workload. Gladys visited Norma Jeane and took her on trolley cars to the beach, picnics, restaurants, and other outings on the weekends, sometimes spending the night, but the frequency waned over time. Although she regularly paid $25 for Norma Jeane's care, Gladys became "for the most part an irregular, shadowy visitor at the edge of Norma Jeane's life."
The Bolenders gave Norma Jeane a stable childhood and taught her proper conduct, morality, and religion. At some point, Norma Jeane visited her mother on the weekends and enjoyed her mother's carefree lifestyle and her friends. Their time was spent on walks, meals with friends, movie-watching, and attending church. Although Baker could be carefree, "the problem for Norma Jeane was that she saw Gladys in too many negative moods and situations not to be troubled by her." She often called Baker "the woman with the red hair."In early 1927, Baker moved into Della's house, as Della had developed a weak heart, respiratory problems, degenerative heart disease, and acute depression. In the spring, she had a stroke, which led to "unpredictable shifts of mood and temper," along with hallucinations. According to biographer Keith Badman, Della tried to smother Norma Jeane with a pillow in July 1927 for no reason. On August 4, Della was diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis. She died on August 23, 1927, of a heart attack during a manic seizure while committed to the Norwalk State Hospital. Baker's brother Marion disappeared in October 1929 and was pronounced dead in 1939. On October 24, 1929, a fire broke out at the Consolidated Film Industry, gutting the building and destroying millions of films. Baker is credited with saving a number of lives when she escorted women from the editing studio to outside of the building. Even though her mother had died and her brother was missing, Baker was relatively stable in 1930.
In the summer of 1933, Baker bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved her daughter in with her. They shared the house with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie. In the summer, while Baker worked at a film lab, Norma Jeane spent the days at theaters watching films.