Again, Nancy Jeffrey disagrees with that piece of history. “The truth is that we were only not allowed
to go to the movies on Sundays. However, we really didn’t go to movies that much anyway. We were
little kids. How many movies were we going to see between the ages of one and seven? I just don’t
think Mother would have frightened Norma Jeane like that. She may have said something like, ‘We are
churchgoers not moviegoers.’ That sounds like her. But the rest of it, burning with bad people? That
doesn’t sound like Mother to me.”
Whether or not she went to the movies—and of course she wasn’t going without an adult anyway—it
sometimes seemed that there wasn’t much Norma Jeane could ever do to please Ida. No matter how
hard she tried, she could never measure up to the Bolender matriarch’s standards of cleanliness or
behavior. “Poor Norma Jeane always seemed to be in some kind of trouble,” said Mary Thomas-Strong.
“She loved to play in dirt, like a lot of kids. Ida would be unhappy about that. Ida would dress her in
pretty clothes and Norma Jeane would go and play and come back thirty minutes later, dirty again. It
drove Ida crazy. She wanted Norma Jeane to toe the line. She was strict, at times.”
Yes, Ida Bolender could be difficult—there seems to be no argument there from any quarter. She was
tough and resilient, an indomitable woman. “But I believe to this day that she was one of the major
stabilizing influences in Norma Jeane’s young life, and truly the first powerful woman she’d been
exposed to,” says her foster daughter Nancy Jeffrey. Maybe Ida sensed there might be a shortage of
stable and decisive adults in Norma Jeane’s world, and she was determined to be one of them—no
matter what her foster daughter or anyone else thought of her. “I was hard on her for her own good,”
she once explained to Jeffrey. Then, with great positiveness, she added, “But I know I raised her the
right way. I know it in my heart.”
Many of Ida Bolender’s best character traits were impressed upon Norma Jeane Mortensen during her
seven years at the Bolender home. Because she was born to a mother who was in emotional disarray,
perhaps it served the young girl well to be molded by a foster mother who was firm and controlled.
Indeed, it was Ida’s strength and determination that Norma Jeane would one day need to draw upon in
order to make it in show business. However, Gladys’s traits of extreme vulnerability and emotional
instability were also an undeniable part of Norma Jeane’s biology. For instance, she would be well
equipped to handle rejection in her professional life, just as Ida would have in her place. However, to
handle it in her personal life would prove to be very difficult—just as it would have been for Gladys.
“All she ever wanted for Norma Jeane was for her to be strong, like she was,” said Nancy Jeffrey of her
foster mother. “She always knew that [Norma Jeane] would have a very difficult life. She could see that
her family background was not going to be helpful to her and, in fact, could possibly be the downfall of
her. So she wasn’t going to coddle her. She would say, ‘The girl will face stronger foes than me, I can
tell you that much. She has to be able to stand on her own. For all I know, she may hate me now, but
she will be strong. She will have a good life.’ ”