Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto

abused; she was, after all, only eleven years old. As Ida Mae recalled, Norma Jeane bathed obsessively for days after.
    As if on cue in her role as fairy godmother, Grace returned to celebrate Norma Jeane’s twelfth birthday. After spending eleven dollars and seventy-four cents for Norma Jeane’s new dress and the then outrageous sum of six dollars for a hair treatment, Grace meticulously prepared the girl’s makeup and whisked her off for a professional photographic session. This was, she explained, the first step toward fame—toward growing up to become the new Jean Harlow. She also gave Norma Jeane a scrapbook in which to paste the photos.
    But Grace’s constant fussing over Norma Jeane’s appearance, her obsession with the girl’s future and even the gifts were more endured than enthusiastically received by Norma Jeane—who had (especially after her experiences with Doc and Jack) good reason to regard herself as a mere object for someone’s pleasure. But she was legally subject to Grace’s decisions about where she would live, and she was as well dependent on Grace’s subsidies.
    Another decision by Grace was soon announced. At summer’s end, she decided Norma Jeane should quit the Martin household and return to Los Angeles—not only to have her ward closer and thus keep an alert eye on her adolescent development and forthcoming career, but also to enroll her in a junior high school of which she approved. Norma Jeane would not, however, be returning to the Goddard household. Instead, she was to board with Grace’s aunt.
    Edith Ana Atchinson Lower, always called Ana, was sister to Grace’s father. Born January 17, 1880, she was fifty-eight years old when Norma Jeane came to live with her. During the 1920s, she and her husband, Edmund H. (“Will”) Lower, had acquired a number of modest bungalows and cottages in various parts of Los Angeles County. They were then divorced about 1933, and so while Ana was by no means a rich divorcée, her settlement provided some rental income. (Will Lower died in 1935.) But Ana’s circumstances were imperiled during the depression, when a number of her lessees simply abandoned their residences.
    By 1938, the Goddards were living virtually rent-free in one of Ana’s houses on Odessa Street in Van Nuys, while Ana lived in a two-family duplex she owned at 11348 Nebraska Avenue, West Los Angeles, whose ground floor she rented out. She would have the income of thirty dollars a month from the State of California for boarding Norma Jeane Baker. (After the unhappy business of the Mortensen telephone calls, Grace everywhere registered Norma Jeane under Gladys’s first married name, which Gladys herself had used most frequently.)
    “Aunt Ana,” as Norma Jeane called her, was a plump, white-haired, grandmotherly soul. She was also a very devout Christian Scientist, having advanced to the level of healing practitioner.
    “She was very religious,” recalled Eleanor Goddard,
but not at all a fanatic. In fact she was very sensible, compassionate and accepting of others. She looked severe and stern and had an imposing carriage, but she was putty inside, not the dominating matron she was often made out to be.
    Ana was generous and outgoing; her good works and devotion to her religion took her to the Lincoln Heights jail once weekly, where she spent time reading the Bible to inmates.
    Alone in the life of Norma Jeane, Ana Lower warranted undiluted loving praise.
She changed my whole life. She was the first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her [long since lost] and I showed it to somebody and they cried. . . . It was called “I Love Her.” She was the only one who loved and understood me. . . . She never hurt me, not once. She couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love.
    Yet Ana Lower was, howsoever kindly, the latest in an ongoing variety of mother figures. She could enfold Norma Jeane in a