My journey ends here...
1938
MARCH :
Grace visited Norma Jeane at Ida Martin's home. She learned her that her mother, Gladys, after having tried to escape from the Norwalk
hospital, had been transferred in a safer place, the Agnew State
Asylum, an institution specialized in mental disorders, near San
Francisco.
Gladys would have received a call from Martin Edward Mortenson, her second husband; this call had completely confused and worried her. Gladys thought he was dead since 1929, because a man with the same name and with a much same past, but native to Middle West had died in a motocycle accident in Ohio.
Always concerned by Gladys well-being, desirous to provide for her potential needs, Mortenson had been looking for her to the Norwalk hospital, where he had called several times.
Both puzzled and literally entranced with relief to see that someone remembered her and was looking for her, Gladys tried to leave the Norwalk hospital to join her husband.
But the medical staff had noted that Martin Edward Mortenson had died in 1929; Gladys story about the phone calls and the escape attempt which followed, were taken for a serious schizophrenia fit.
A more adapted treatment had to be given to her, that only the Agnew asylum could gave her.
She was transferred there right away. Martin Edward Mortenson and Gladys didn't contact again ever.
Norma
Jeane took the news of her mother's condition as the announcement of
her death; besides, she didn't see her a lot since this moment. Grace
tried to ease this moment with gifts (a bathsuit to sunbathe on the
beach, a new hat and 3 pairs of shoes).
Norma Jeane's cousin, Jack, aged 13, molested her.
Ida Mae, Norma Jeane's cousin and sister of Jack, told in the following days, that Norma Jeane was obsessed with baths.
This incident seemed to have been more traumatic than Doc Goddard's advances in 1937 and strengthened within herself the feeling of only be desired as an object.
Grace appeared again to celebrate Norma Jeane's 12th birthday; after having spent 11$ and 74 cents for the purchase of Norma Jeane's dress, and the extravagant sum of 60$ for her hair, Grace neatly put make-up on her and took her for a session to a professional photographer :
She also gave her an album to stick her pictures.
The unceasing furor of Grace about Norma Jeane's physical appearance, her obsession about her future and even her gifts, all those things were more suffered than welcomed with enthusiasm.
Especially when, after her experiences with Doc Goddard and Jack, Norma Jeane had all the reasons to consider herself as the only object of others desire.
But she was subjected to Grace's decisions. This one decided about the place she was going to live, and Norma Jeane completely depended on her, financially.
Grace
announced her that soon she would leave the Martins to go back to live
in Los Angeles; not only she wanted to have an eye on the teenager
development, and her future career, but also made her enter the high
school she had chosen on her own.
AUGUST:
Grace McKee took Norma Jeane from Ida Martin's home and placed her at her own Aunt's home, Ana Lower, 11348 Nebraska Avenue, West Los Angeles. She stayed there until the beginning of the 40's.
Her income came from the renting out of modest bungalows and cottages she had bought with her husband, Edmund H.Lower, during the 20's, in several places of the Los Angeles County.
Besides, the Goddards occupied for free one of Ana's houses, on Odessa
Street, in Van Nuys.
Ana Lower lived in a duplex apartment she owned. She shared it with another family to who she rented out the upper floor.
The State of California paid her 30$ a month for Norma Jeane Baker's care (after the pitiful episode of Mortenson's calls, Grace registered Norma Jeane everywhere under Gladys's first husband name)."Aunt" Ana was a chubby woman, with white hair and a grand-mother's heart ( 
,
).
She was also a fervent scientist, a church within which she had reached the "practitioner healer" level.
Generous and tolerant, she attended once a week the Lincoln Heights prison; inclined to charity and devotion, she read the Holy Bible to the prisoners.
Alone in Norma Jeane's life, Ana Lower gave a complete purity love.
Despite all her kindness, Ana Lower was the last one of a big variety of mother figures. She could wrapped Norma Jeane up in the cozy folds of her love and treat her as the daughter she never had, but there was a fact nothing could change : like Gladys, Grace and Ida Martin, her behavior towards men and marriage had been changed by a divorce.
It was a confuse and ambiguous era. Ana's broken wedding, her respectable widow attitude and the fact she was the oldest of Norma Jeane's guardians, prevented her from being the confidente the girl needed.
This
situation was complicated with Ana's faith and its impact on Norma
Jeane. Ana was one of the most honest devotee but also a too
etnhusiastic example.
In this month of August, Norma Jeane attended the Scientist chucrhc services twice on Sundays and once a week.
Founded in Boston in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, the Christian Science religion was based on a metaphysical therapeutic system. The main part of the members was made up of middle age women, if not elderly, from middle and upper class.
The linchpin of this doctrine was based on the fact that the material wasn't real and that there were no God (or Spirit).
The "religious human being" was in constant search of a spiritual well-being, a condition where its mortal flesh and spirit could be controlled. In its most absolute forms, the Christian Science denied the reality of senses while admitting a degree of weakness and humanity likely to amelioration or improvement through an appropriate thinking. We don't sin, neither suffer nor die : we are the victims of unhealthy illusions which could be overcome by pious thinking and a devoted attention to Mary Eddy comments about the Scriptures.
To replace drugs and medicines, the spiritual truth had to be asserted, the mistakes dismissed and the distinction between the absolute being and the fragile mortal life had to be done.
Because she had gave up every other way to earn money, Ana Lower had became one the official "practitioners" of the Church and in this regard, could receive paying clients.
Ana
Lower took Norma Jeane, without mischief but without asking
questions, to consider that only the mind was real and that it could be
magnified. But Norma Jeane, since a long time, had already found safety
towards her insecurity feeling : both in the unreal world of cinema and
in the changing program into Jean
Harlow that Grace had concocted to her.
Ana's kind of religion, her sensitivity both Victorian and puritanical, her age which implied to a young person a lack of sexuality, all of this wasn't really adapted to Norma Jean's needs, to her teenager present, her past experiences.
SEPTEMBEE :
Norma
Jeane attended the Sawtelle Boulevard School
(7th grade) (until June 1939).
It was a huge single-stage building, north to Santa Monica Boulevard.
The pupils were native to the west of Los Angeles.
Some
arrived, driven by their chauffeur from their residence of the enclave
of Bel Air, above Sunset Boulevard. Others came from bourgeois
buildings of Los Angeles, and some others, including Norma Jeane,
walked from one of the poor arear of the west part of the town, Sawtelle.
It was a real melting-pot which included Japanese immigrants, the pioneers of the first time of California, peasants came, during the Crisis of 1929, looking for job and shelter under the California sun, Hispanics, Indians from Mexico and old residents of Los Angeles, like Ana Lower.
To the Los Angeles residents, Sawtelle foremost evoked the many beer bars where the workers used to meet. The area was synonym of poverty and illiteracy.
Norma Jeane, average pupil, followed the lessons for girls only, which didn't prepare to enter the University.
" She was really an average pupil, told Mabel Ella Campbell, natural science teacher, but most of all she seems a little bit neglected. Her clothes made her different from the others. In 1938 she wasn't very physically developped. She was a kind girl, but introverted, not really radiant".
20 years later, Marilyn told : "I was quiet and some kids called me the Mouse. During my first year in Sawtelle, I only had the 2 clear dresses of the orphanage. Aunt Ana had extended them because I had grown a little, but they didn't fit me. I mostly wore sneakers because they only cost 98 cents and Mexican sandals which cost less. I was certainly not among the most elegant girls and it can be said that I wasn't very popular".
Cowed
by her new environment, bothered by the uniform she dragged day after
day, with no experience of the others except the one of the orphanage,
Norma Jeane found it difficult to have friends.
She became member of the school security and a certificate was awarded to her , "thanking her for the personal duties given as a member of the saving committee".
In this year, Hollywood produced many period movies to help people to forget the curse of Nazism which spread over Europe.
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