Knife-wielding breakdowns, abusive relationships at sixteen, and kidnappings with a duffle bag – Marilyn Monroe's mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, had her fair share of tragedy.
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00:00Knife-wielding breakdowns, abusive relationships at 16, and kidnappings with a duffel bag,
00:05Marilyn Monroe's mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, had her fair share of tragedy.
00:10While we don't know much about Gladys Pearl Baker's childhood, we do know that she was
00:14born on May 27, 1902, and suffered from near-poverty and undiagnosed schizophrenia.
00:19At age 16, she was married to 24-year-old John Newton Baker, who turned out to be abusive.
00:24Considering all this, it's not hard to understand why she chose to give away
00:28her daughter Norma Jean to foster care, only two weeks after she was born in 1926.
00:33Baker and her husband had two other children, Jackie and Bernice, before they got divorced
00:37in 1923. She received custody of the kids, but he kidnapped them and fled to Kentucky.
00:42It's unclear if Gladys then stayed behind in California or moved there.
00:45At one point, she briefly remarried to Martin Edward Mortensen,
00:48from whom Marilyn Monroe gets her legal last name. But Gladys claimed that Monroe's father
00:52was actually a co-worker at Consolidated Studios named Charles Stanley Gifford.
00:57Gladys and Mortensen separated after less than a year, and Norma Jean's
01:00paternity remained unclear her entire life. Her early years were spent in a stable,
01:04very religious home in Hawthorne, California, with her foster parents, Ida and Wayne Bolander.
01:09Meanwhile, her mother barely made ends meet as a film cutter at RKO Radio Studios in Hollywood.
01:15Gladys Pearl Baker wanted to play an active role in her daughter's life.
01:18But visits to the Bolander household and sleepovers at her apartment quickly turned dangerous.
01:22On one occasion, she showed up when Norma Jean was three and stuffed her in a duffel bag,
01:27though Ida Bolander managed to stop her. Over the years, Gladys continued to request
01:31the Bolanders return her daughter to her. But they refused, and Gladys tried to get herself together.
01:35By the time Norma Jean was seven in 1933, her mother had gotten a loan for a house and taken
01:40in actors George and Maud Atkinson to help cover costs. Alas, this brief upturn in fortune came
01:46to an end later that year. Gladys received news that her son Jackie had died. Almost the same
01:51time, she learned that her grandfather had hanged himself and her entire studio was going on strike.
01:55Then, in 1934, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Reports described her wielding a knife in public
02:00and claiming that someone was trying to kill her. She was then institutionalized at a state
02:04hospital in Norwalk, California.
02:06"...to learn that she was my mother was quite a shock. It was the red hair."
02:14This is where things get truly horrific for both mother and daughter. Norma Jean's foster care
02:19passed to Gladys' friend Grace McKee. Around this time, the future movie star's aspirations
02:23started to take off. McKee was a busy lady, though, and she asked a judge to grant Norma Jean
02:28half-orphan status, which allowed her to live intermittently with other caregivers.
02:32While Norma Jean passed between 10 homes and one orphanage from 1935 to 1942,
02:37her mother passed between hospitals, and they saw each other only sporadically.
02:41In 1942, a 16-year-old Norma Jean married a police officer named James Doherty.
02:46But that marriage ended in 1946, the same year that Gladys was released from San Jose's Agnews
02:51State Hospital. She said that she was going to move to Oregon to live with her aunt,
02:55but instead she married John Stuart Ely, who already had a wife back in Idaho.
02:59The mother and daughter were seeing each other a bit at this point,
03:02and when Norma Jean tried to warn Gladys about her new husband's other marriage,
03:05Gladys reportedly said,
03:07"...that's how much Norma Jean hates me. She'll do anything to ruin my life because
03:11she still believes I ruined hers."
03:13Gladys also disapproved of her daughter's career choice. Meanwhile,
03:16the studio wanted to bury any information about their new star's mother.
03:20As Marilyn Monroe began to star in movies in the late 40s and early 50s,
03:24she went along with the story that 20th Century Fox urged her to tell.
03:27Her parents had died, and she was an orphan, and she had no idea who they were.
03:31This led to no less than five women falsely claiming to be her mother.
03:35Gladys Baker, meanwhile, was going around saying the same thing, but nobody believed her.
03:39In 1952, a columnist found Gladys working at a nursing home in Eagle Rock outside of Los Angeles.
03:44The story blew open, and Monroe confessed the truth. When this revelation hit the news,
03:48Gladys suffered another mental breakdown. This time,
03:51she was institutionalized in Rockhaven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, California.
03:55The following year, Monroe's career exploded, thanks to the release of Gentlemen Prefer Blogs.
04:00Gladys then wrote letter after letter to her daughter, begging to be released from Rockhaven.
04:04Monroe reportedly visited the sanitarium before her mother was admitted,
04:08and found it to be highly disturbing. But instead of establishing direct contact,
04:12she sent her mother a monthly allowance. She also left her $5,000 a year in her will from
04:16a $100,000 trust. Gladys lived in Rockhaven all the way through her daughter's death in 1962.
04:23"'Please, mother, what do you think I should do?'
04:26"'I think that you should stop coming to see me because you never ask me how I'm doing.'"
04:31The year before Marilyn Monroe's death in 1961, she confessed to having suicidal ideations.
04:36The press caught wind, the story aired on TV, and Gladys was found in her room with her left
04:40wrist slit. A year after her daughter died, Gladys climbed out of a window at Rockhaven.
04:45She then climbed a wire mesh fence and walked 15 miles to a church on Foothill Boulevard.
04:50She huddled near a water heater for warmth in the church's utility room.
04:53When the police found her, she said she'd run away to practice
04:56Christian science teaching. She was then taken back to Rockhaven.
04:59She was eventually released and moved to Florida, where she died of heart failure in 1984.
05:04There's been speculation that Monroe inherited an unspecified mental illness from her mother,
05:09though she was never diagnosed. There is indeed a genetic component to mental illness,
05:13although shared environmental factors between parents and their kids can make the part pinpoint.
05:18If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
05:20please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988,
05:25or by calling 1-800-273-TALK 8255.
05:34you