Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto Page A

blanket of loving commitment and take her for the daughter she never had. But there was no way to alter the fact that she was also another woman whose attitude toward men and marriage was undeniably tinted (likeGladys, Grace and Ida Martin) by her own divorce. “Talk about marriage and sex was certainly never on the agenda,” Marilyn Monroe said frankly years later.
    There were, then, oddly ambivalent circumstances at this time, for Ana’s broken marriage, her appearance of refined widowhood and the fact that she was the oldest of Norma Jeane’s custodians denied the girl an effective female confidante. And this set of particulars was doubtless made more complex by Ana’s earnest Christian Science faith and its impact on Norma Jeane—a sincere example, to be sure, but one set before the girl with considerable zeal. That August of 1938, Norma Jeane found herself at local Christian Science services, twice on Sunday and once during the week.
    Ana Lower gently but somewhat simplistically guided Norma Jeane to see that only what was in the mind was real, and the mind could be uplifted. But the girl had already long sought refuge from insecurity in unreal movie images, a program of transformation into Jean Harlow enjoined by Grace and a cultivation of her own fantasy life. Ana’s brand of religion, in other words, complemented by a Victorian-Puritan sensibility and her seniority (with its implicit image, to youngsters, of sexlessness), was not altogether appropriate given Norma Jeane’s past experience and her present adolescent needs.
    In 1938, there were in America about 270,000 members in about two thousand congregations of Christian Science. 3 Founded in 1879 in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy, the religion is a system of therapeutic metaphysics. The vast majority of its adherents have always been middle-aged and elderly American women from the middle and upper classes, although the denomination is found in all countries with large Protestant populations. Central to its doctrine is a variation of subjective idealism: matter is unreal, there is only God (or Mind). The goal of Mrs. Eddy’s teachings (codified in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , 1891) is to bring the unreal material body into a condition of perfect harmony with our real spiritual condition: made in the Divine likeness, we are geared for spiritual perfection.
    In a kind of intense Gnosticism linked to traditional American transcendentalism (which originated and flourished in Mrs. Eddy’s home territory, New England), there is an optimistic attitude toward the perceived world, which may ever be brought closer to its fulfillment by effort as well as by spiritual healing. (It should be stressed, however, that Christian Scientists have never been encouraged to withdraw from the world: responsibility in public and social life was exemplified by its foundation and long maintenance of one of America’s great journals, the Christian Science Monitor , a newspaper commanding worldwide respect.)
    The godly human being, for this denomination, constantly strives for a spiritual condition in which the counterfeit flesh and the mortal, fallible mind can be overcome. Taken in its purest form, Christian Science denies the reality of the senses, although allowance is made for a human level at which improvement is sought and achieved by right thinking. We do not sin, suffer or die: we are victims of unhealthy delusions. Linked to this doctrine is that of “malicious animal magnetism,” evil thought that appears real and powerful only because people wrongly assert its actuality. Advanced Scientists—especially the accredited, elite cadre of teachers known as practitioners trained to read, pray and invoke therapeutic healing—learn how to counter the impact of this “animal magnetism.”
    Furthermore, the disharmony of sin, sickness and death may be overcome by right prayerful thinking and a dutiful attentiveness to Mrs. Eddy’s commentaries on the Scriptures.