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Blonde Rebellion
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I post things but you won't like them. Let's kill them... with kindness.
1949. 07.: Photographed by Andre de Dienes on Tobey Beach, Long Island, NY.
Norma Jeane on a beach at Catalina Island.
Cast (sans Natalie Wood) and crew of Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!
Photographed by Richard C. Miller, 1946
Miss Norma Jean modeling, 1940s
Footage by Leo Cailoa
Miss Press Club 1948: Los Angeles Press Club chose a Miss Press Club annually, Marilyn was the first recipient of the award. Photographed by R.O. Ritchie [L.A. Times Staff Photographer], June 11th, 1947.
Ricketts’ Nightclub during a publicity date with Roddy McDowall July 1949 in Chicago IL
Della Mae with Norma Jeane in 1926.
In 1921, Della Mae briefly took in her daughter after her marriage to Baker collapse. Gladys remarried in 1924, but that marriage quickly turned sour too. A year later, Norma Jeane was born. Della Mae was a mixed presence in the life of her young granddaughter. Della Mae, was by then living in Hawthorne, California, not far from Ida and Wayne Bolender, the couple who looked after Norma Jeane for the first seven years of her life. She had become a devout follower of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, and insisted that Norma Jeane be baptized at Sister Aimee’s Angelus Temple.
Perhaps the most horrific incident of Norma Jeane’s infancy involved her grandmother. In July 1927 Della Mae reportedly attempted to smother Norma Jeane with a pillow. On August 4, 1927 she was committed to the Norwalk State Hospital. She died nineteen days later from heart failure during a maniac seizure, a victim of what Marilyn’s mother Gladys, and Marilyn herself, came to regard as the curse of mental illness in their family.
According to another version of events espoused by biographer Donald Spoto, Della’s wild behaviour was not caused by mental illness, but by degenerative heart disease which caused acute depressions. This was compounded by a stroke just before the summer of 1927. Spoto concedes that Della Mae broke into the Bolender house, where baby Norma Jeane was living with foster parents, but did not do anything to the child.
-Part 2; “The Marilyn Encyclopedia” by Adam Victor
Marilyn Monroe photographed in 1949.
A very young Marilyn, photographed in 1946 by Richard C. Miller. The dress was Norma Jeane’s own, from her wedding to Jim Dougherty. The prayer book belonged to the photographer’s wife.
