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1933

 

Norma Jeane still attended the Vine Street School (2^nd grade) until June : ,;.

 

With the market crash in 1929, hardships had become the American common lot, and Gladys's grand-father, Tilford Hogan had been spared.

There were many suicide cases at the rate of families reverse of fortune.

At the time, there were more than 50 millions of unemployed men, an adult per a 4 people family.

Many banks closed, every week factories became bankrupt, many peasants changed into itinerant workers and many families, bourgeois or more wealthy, ended in poor residences, living with few food.

 
In February, the nation came close to the collective nervous breakdown. President  Franklin D.Roosevelt, in an official visit in Miami,  escaped a firearm attack.

Invested in his functions in March, he promised, with the help of her government, to get the country out of  the rut it  got stuck.
But everybody knew  that the exploit couldn't be achieved in a week.

In this period of  economic panic and pain, Tilford  was out of his depth.

 

In May, his physical condition (lungs and kidneys) deteriorated as fast as the one of the farm he was in charge of. He soon was unable to provide for him and his wife Emma.

On Monday, May 29, at the end of the afternoon, he said good bye to Emma from the window of their small house in Laclede Linn,  Missouri.

Driving their bone shaker, she went to the close village to bring back some food.

Two hours later, when she returned, she called her husband, without success. He didn't seeem to be neither in the house, nor in the surrounding area. Then she went to the barn and, entering in the ruined building, she saw him.

Hanged to a rope placed to the main beam, he was swaying on the darkness.

The investigation initiated by the Missouri State Board of Health led to the same conclusions than the one of the doctor called on emergency : Tilford, out of pride and hope, had committed suicide (), increasing the desperate statistics of the county of Linn, of the darkest year of the Great Depression.

Even if she hadn't known her grand-father, Gladys learned the news full shot. Then she sank in a depression which left her whitout any reaction.

Her father, it had been said, had died of dementia, and her mother, according to her, had died of a manic-depressive psychosis. So her grand-father's suicide finished to convince Gladys that a mental illness prowled over her family.

She was the kind of woman to believe the most strange things as irrefutable truths. Nobody could make her getting rid of this conviction which wasn't based on anything.

When the night came, she began to pace the house up and down, mumbling prayers and  chanting psalms and Bible verses. Disconsolate, she turned down the exhortations of her friend and former colleague at the Consolidated Film Industries,  Grace McKee () who encouraged her to take it easy.

During one of those visits, Norma Jeane was frightened by her mother's grief; she held her hand and begged her to rest and to stop crying.

 

JUNE 

An  irascible neighbor, annoyed by Tippy's barking ( ,), armed his gun and killed the dog.

Albert Bolender buried the little dog in his garden.

The grief which brought Norma Jeane down was such  that the Bolenders called Gladys.

She arrived at the end of June, accompanied with Grace McKee. At that time this one was more than her confidente : affective support and  advisor, she defined the difficult decisions and sorted out  the financial and personal dilemmas of her friend.

Gladys paid the pension of this last month to the Bolenders, packed up Norma Jeane's stuff and took her in the small apartment she had rented for the summer. 

 

It was located in a building at 6021 Afton Place (), Hollywood, next to the Consolidated Film Industries.

The decision Gladys had taken  to disrupt  the course of her life by taking her daughter in charge was, to her, a  desperate action, an order of her conscience but Gladys wasn't more ready than before for the education of a child.

That's how Norma Jeane left the quiet life in the Bolender family.

 

On Tuesay, June 13 :

A Roosevelt law to compensate the effects of the Great Depression was implemented.

Low-rate property loans were opened to thousand of American people and Gladys, as separated parent, obtained one whitout difficulty.
She obtained a 5 000$ loan ("to Gladys Baker, married woman") by the Mortgage Guarantee Company of California, which allowed her to access to home ownership.

She negotiated the purchase of a 6-rooms furnished house, including 3 bedrooms, located at  6812 Arbol Street not far from the Hollywood Bowl.

She had been seduced by the house and by the presence of a white Franklin baby grand piano  which would have belonged to  Frederic March.

Norma Jeane, had taken piano lessons (paid by Gladys) with Miss Marion Miller, when she lived with the Bolenders.

To Gladys, this piano became the symbol of the life she wanted to have with her daughter.

 

Norma Jeane and her mother settled there at the end of August    

 

During weeks, this summer,, Grace and Gladys went to work in the studios laboratories.

They gave some money to Norma Jeane, and this one waited where she would be safe, i.e, in a movie theater.

To repay her loan more easily,  Gladys had make a long-term lease to an English couple, the Atkinsons, who rented the entire house, leaving 2 bedrooms upstairs for Gladys and her daughter, and shared the bathroom, the kitchen and the sitting-room.

In Gladys bedroom was hung a single frame, Clark Gable's one (or maybe the one of  Charles Stanley Gifford   , the physical resemblance between the 2 men was striking).

 

The Atkinsons were English actors. George Atkinson had got small parts in some movies of  George Arliss, his wife was an extra and their daughter, occasionally, was the actress Madeleine Carroll's stand-in. 

So it wasn't surprising that the household rustled of conversations about movies.

The dinners were spiced with news and gossips about movie stars and studios programs.

This year, the States cancelled, one by one, the laws about alcohol prohibition.
Gladys, Grace and their friends often settled under the porch after dinner, to smoke cigarettes and drink some beers. Norma Jeane got the empty bottles back and put into either some flowers she picked in the garden or some lavender drops she pinched to her mother.

Movies, cigarettes, beers, perfumes, nothing could be more distant from the years spent with the Bolenders.

Nothing of the 7 years old girl experience matched the behavior of those adults, their precarious way of life, more disturbing than original. With all her clumsiness, Norma Jeane tried to get used to her new mother.

The lady who didn't hesitate to shuffle a card game for her friends, to roll her own carpets up to dance on the parquet was the woman to who she had to please from then on. A woman completely different from Ida Bolender, someone she hardly knew.

Among the most remarkable novelties there were, of course, the cinema.

On week-ends, Gladys and Grace took Norma Jeane for a walk in Hollywood ; they stopped in front of the cinema huge palaces, the entertainment cathedrals  which tried to compete with the Parthenon, Versailles and the Far East temples, the Gothic churches and the most famous European operas.

Those houses, they said, were the places where "their movies" could be seen.

The architects, regardless of cost, filled the huge spaces with paintings and art items, sculptures and fountains.

At the East of  Vine Street, on Hollywood Boulevard, stood up the fabulous Pantages Theater, with the’Egyptian Theater and mostly, more on the West but still on  Hollywood Boulevard, the Chinese Theater ( ,).

 

Norma Jeane, this year and the following year, spent there almost each of her week-ends.

She saw "Little Women" with Katharine Hepburn and " Grand Hotel" with Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.

More than everything else, Norma Jeane was stricken by the way Grace and Gladys idolized an incandescent blond named Jean Harlow ( ). Grace's passion was increased by the admiration of thousands of American, and since this time, Norma Jeane had also to repeat that "Jean Harlow was her favourite actress".

 

SEPTEMBER

Norma Jeane attended the Selma Avenue school (), where she was registered under the name of Norma Jean.

It was a simple  administrative mistake, but it happened so often that it's not diffcult  to imagine Grace and Gladys comparing the girl  to "her 2 godmothers", the actresses  Norma Talmadge ( ) and Jean Harlow.

 

After some time, Gladys, still very affected by her grand-father's death and its consequences on her own mental health, took things in hand and  consulted a neurologist , who prescribed her some psychoactive drugs.

At that time, the story of this kind of drugs was brand new and their effects not known.

What's more, Gladys had adopted a behavior which would have been more suitable in a temple : she often wandered, piously reading the Holy Writ.

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