Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

coincidence that she will run across
the white piano again when she is a star and buy it and keep it in
her apartment in New York with Arthur Miller — at every step of her
life, coincidences spring underfoot like toadstools.)
    Since there are not too many other objects to
sell, and work for the English couple has become insecure — the
Depression is heavy over Hollywood in 1934 — they decide at last to
go back to England. Norma Jean is taken in by some neighbors, the
Giffens, who are fond enough of her to think of adoption when they
learn that Mr. Giffen’s job will oblige him to move to Mississippi.
Even from the asylum, however, Gladys says no.
    The child goes instead to an orphanage. Her
only connection to the past will be in the weekly visits of Grace
McKee, her mother’s best friend, a film librarian at Columbia, who
is now her legal guardian. There is a moment when Norma Jean goes
through the portals for the first time which tolls a bell as loudly
as any sentimental event since Charles Dickens wrote, “Please, sir,
can I have some more?” For a clue to how legions of publicity
writers have gilded this historic moment, we can pick up a hint
from Guiles’ usually restrained account:
     
    Norma Jean could read the sign [Los Angeles
Orphans’ Home] on one of the columns clearly, and she knew she was
not an orphan. Her mother was alive. Someone was making a terrible
mistake.
    She refused to walk in and they had to
drag her all the way into the central hall. “I’m
not an orphan!” she screamed. Her cries could be heard by
several of the children nearest the tall arched doorway at the rear
. . .
     
    The clue to the quieter reality of the
situation is in the next few sentences: “. . . it was their dinner
hour. Some children’s faces turned; Norma Jean became embarrassed
and fell silent.” She would undergo her horrors while in the orphan
asylum, but they would not be the dramatic exploitations of Fagin
and Scrooge; rather the monotonous erosion of her ego. The Los
Angeles Orphans’ Home, to which she was taken by Grace McKee, was
not a factory to sweat child labor — an impression she was to give
in publicity stories — but rather an organized and flat
environment. Her hatred at what that boredom did to her was cause
enough to lie in later years about the experience. Besides, it is
almost impossible for people who live in institutions not to tell
lies, since an institution works best if none of the inmates tells
the truth. Honesty creates bureaucratic snarls and opens questions
— the end of a chain of open questions is the revolutionary
question, “By what right does this institution stand and govern?”
Lies, on the other hand, reflect the bureaucratic need for certain
answers. “How do you feel today, Inmate? — I feel fine, sir.” The
interrogator is hearing the reply as he speaks; the bureaucratic
need is to move on to the next question. Or to the next inmate and
his lies. Besides, the inmate population feels a false happiness
that they are successfully cheating the institution; in fact, their
lies keep the population in a state of uneasiness where they are
more vulnerable to discipline. So if one is going to blame the
orphanage for anything, it is probably for confirming her into a
liar, and reinforcing everything in her character that was
secretive. Let us assume it was even worse. If she was bound to be
somewhat unstable considering the concentrated insanity of her
inheritance, and had possibly been given a future of insomnia by
Della, and certainly known trauma in the murder of her dog, it was
probably her future capacity for happiness that was most injured by
the twenty-one months she spent in the orphanage. But this was not
because she had to “wash 100 plates, 100 cups, 100 knives, forks
and spoons, three times a day, seven days a week . . . scrub
toilets and clean bathtubs,” and for this receive ten cents a month
for working in the kitchen. Zolotow quotes the superintendent,