According to the family’s history, handed down a generation, on August 3 mother and daughter were
having a silent and contemplative meal at the kitchen table. Perhaps Gladys was trying to sort through
her emotions, maybe attempting to divine how she might proceed with her mother. Over the years,
Della had become Gladys’s most loyal confidante. After all, mother and daughter shared the same kinds
of mental problems, and often one would have to convince the other that the voices being “heard” were
not real, that the people “watching” were imaginary. How could Gladys say goodbye to Della now? In
her absence, who would be there for her? She had already lost her three children, and now her mother,
this woman sitting across from her with an empty look in her eyes? Gladys couldn’t accept it,
especially with the knowledge that when her father had been sent to a similar place, he never returned.
His fate had rarely left her thoughts, especially during the last couple of weeks.
Suddenly, in a moment of surprising lucidity, Della looked up from her plate and stared at her daughter
with sad eyes. “You must let me go, Gladys,” she said earnestly. “It’s time for me to go. I want to go.”
Mother and daughter looked intently at each other for a long, infinitely heartbreaking moment. Then, as
the tears began to roll down Gladys’s face, Della went back to her meal.
On August 4, 1927, Della Monroe was taken to the Norwalk State Hospital. Nineteen days later, on
August 23, she died. She was buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Whittier, California, next to her first
husband, Otis. She was just fifty-one.
Living with the Bolenders
By the time she was three, in 1929, Norma Jeane Mortensen was an extraordinarily pretty girl with
honey blonde curls and baby blue eyes. Hers was a face that somehow seemed perfect, as if carved
from pale, polished marble. It was difficult for anyone to just pass her by without taking notice.
Interestingly, despite all of the confusion around her during these early years, she seemed remarkably
well-adjusted to her life at the Bolenders’. She was not unhappy. “We treated her like our own child,”
Ida Bolender said in 1966, “because we loved her.” However, in years to come, writers would paint a
very bleak picture of this time in Marilyn’s life.
“I guess there was an effort to sensationalize things,” says Nancy Jeffrey, the only surviving member of
the foster Bolender siblings. “Because of the way things turned out for Norma Jeane, every one of her
biographers over the years has wanted to make it sound like it was awful at our home, but I’m the only
one of us still alive and I can tell you that it wasn’t. Norma Jeane was happy in our home. It was a
loving family, just a happy home full of children. Mother was very industrious, too. She made all of our
clothes for us. She loved us beyond words and she hung on to us. She didn’t want anything to happen
to us. Whenever we left the house, I don’t care where we were going, she would say, ‘Stop just for a
second,’ and she would then say a quick prayer for our safety.”
Of course, a big part of the problem was that Marilyn constantly referred to her impoverished
background when she became famous, and very often made the circumstances of her first seven years
seem much worse than they were. Jeffrey says that when Ida was alive, she was “very upset” by the
mischaracterizations of Norma Jeane’s time in the Bolender household.
On Ida and Wayne Bolender’s two-acre agricultural property in Hawthorne, they raised chickens and
goats and grew vegetables. “We grew up on fresh tomatoes, corn on the cob, watermelon, green beans,
and squash,” recalls Nancy Jeffrey. “We also had trees that were full of plums, apples, and lemons.
There was one huge fig tree that Norma Jeane and Lester—our foster brother who was the only one
Mother and Daddy actually adopted—loved to climb. They would drag blankets up there and make a
fort for themselves. We also had chickens and rabbits, and Daddy even bought a goat because a couple
of us were allergic to cow’s milk as little children. It wasn’t necessary to go to the store often, but on
those occasions when we did go Daddy would drive us in his Model T Ford and we would wait in the
car while Mother shopped. We played guessing games of the surrounding sights, sang favorite songs, or
Daddy would tell us stories. Another childhood memory was that on rainy days we had to stay in the
house, so we would make a fort under the dining room table, leaning the top of the chairs around it for
rooms. Then we would cover it all with blankets. Mother even let us eat lunch under there at times.
Norma Jeane loved that.”
The house itself, at 459 East Rhode Island Street, * was small and cramped, a ramshackle-looking
structure in the middle of what must have seemed to little children to be… nowhere. During the seven
years Norma Jeane would live there, quite a few children came and went, but there were five foster
children who were there most, if not all, of the time: the aforementioned Lester, plus Mumsy, Alvina,
Noel, and Nancy. “Around the time of the Depression, a lot of parents simply didn’t have the resources
to care for their own children,” recalls Nancy Jeffrey, “so they would drop them off in foster homes
until they were ready to take proper care of them. It was a common thing.” From all accounts, Norma
Jeane got along well with all of her foster siblings, especially with Lester, who was two months
younger.