A Frightening Encounter with Gladys
By the fall of 1929, with Della Monroe dead for two years, Gladys had become accustomed to not
having anyone in her life upon whom she could totally depend. She hadn’t been able to make any of
her romantic relationships last, and her children had either been taken from her or given away by her.
Her job at Consolidated Studios offered her little opportunity to build friendships. In fact, as a film
cutter, her role was menial. She was told where and how to cut and splice together pieces of film so
they could be viewed as a whole. The irony of that vocation most likely never occurred to Gladys, but
it could be considered an interesting metaphor representing the major challenge of her mental state:
putting the pieces of her life together. It’s true, she had made a good friend in Grace McKee. However,
since Della’s death, Grace hadn’t been able to reach Gladys. It was as if something in Gladys had been
switched off and she simply didn’t care that much about connecting with other people. Perhaps it was
because Gladys was simply not able to quiet the increasingly loud voices in her head. After all, only her
mother had possessed the key to settling her back into a more reasonable thought process. On her own,
she lacked the ability to view her circumstances from a distance. Without that perspective, each
moment became about exactly what was happening right then and there. Goals were impossible to set,
consequences impossible to calculate. She was in a mental tailspin, and everyone in her life knew it but
didn’t know what to do about it.
While her moment-to-moment experiences may have been torturous, Gladys was still able to complete
tasks. For instance, she could show up for work on time, go grocery shopping, and remember to water
the plants. Therefore, if someone’s life could be judged solely by her daily agenda, Gladys Baker
would have appeared quite unspectacular. Yet it was how she experienced and reacted to the string of
events that made her different.
Even toward the end of Della’s life, she had been a somewhat stabilizing factor for her daughter. In
part, it may have been because Gladys was responsible for managing her mother’s health and state of
mind. This duty helped keep her focus off her own paranoid delusions. That paranoia, however, was
now building—and during Gladys’s time alone she began to find it more difficult to remain rational.
Naturally, her first plan of action was to find a man, which she would do often at one of the nearby
speak easies. Of course, these unions rarely lasted more than an evening or two. Also, it was getting
harder for her to lure the opposite sex, not so much because of her reputation as a woman of loose
morals, but because something just seemed a little “off” about her. Through it all, though, Gladys felt
she had a reasonable expectation of having at least one person with her all the time: Norma Jeane. She
was her daughter, after all. When she gave her to Ida, it was in the hope that she would one day be
capable of caring for the baby herself.