Beverly Hills is part of the star-studded residential landscape that Gladys Mortensen introduces to her daughter, Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn Monroe), on Sunday drives. More than a backdrop of celebrity homes, it becomes a child’s map of Hollywood glamour: a place where movie fame seems close enough to approach by car, yet remains screened behind gates and wrapped in uncertainty about the family life Norma Jeane longs to understand.

Setting among the stars

The novel groups Beverly Hills with Bel Air, Los Feliz, and the Hollywood Hills as prestigious, exclusive districts where film stars live. Gladys and Norma Jeane pass the houses on excursions that depend on having money for gasoline—or a man willing to pay for it. The neighborhood is therefore encountered from the road: through gates, lawns, and glimpses of residences, rather than through entry into the private lives those properties conceal.

That perspective makes Beverly Hills both a real part of Los Angeles and a threshold into an imagined world. In the child’s view, the stars’ homes resemble fairy-tale castles. Their scale and cultivated appearance give celebrity a visible geography, distinct from the ordinary city beyond the affluent districts. The tours are not formal sightseeing; they are an intimate family habit that lets Gladys narrate the world of cinema as the two travel through it.

Sunday drives and the star-house ritual

When she could afford the fuel, Gladys took Norma Jeane to look at the stars’ houses. The drives recur across the Sundays of spring and summer 1934 and into an autumn marked by drought. Gladys supplies a running commentary, naming actors and recounting fragments of their lives. The houses become landmarks in a shared performance of recognition: Gladys speaks with pride, and Norma Jeane listens, looking at residences that make the world of movie stardom seem immediate.

The tour ranges beyond Beverly Hills to Bel Air, Los Feliz, and the Hollywood Hills. Gladys points out the homes of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Tom Mix, and Theda Bara, then identifies houses associated with Barbara La Marr, W. C. Fields, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, Buster Keaton, Helen Chandler, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Jean Harlow. At Norma Talmadge’s elegant Los Feliz villa, eight matching granite lions guard the entrance. Such details turn the drive into a child’s catalogue of celebrity, with each gate and façade attached to a name and a story.

For Norma Jeane, the tours also offer relief from anxiety. Gladys talks almost continuously, so the child does not risk stammering and making her mother angry. The pleasure of looking at houses is thus bound to the particular ease of being together: the excursions become their alternative Sunday religion, a repeated ritual in which the daughter can listen, admire, and belong beside her mother.

Landscapes of privilege

The stars’ neighborhoods look especially unreal against the drought-stricken county around them. Although rain has been absent for weeks and grass elsewhere is scorched and withered, the lawns in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Los Feliz, and the Hollywood Hills remain uniformly green. Crimson and purple bougainvillea flower, and Gladys points out Italian cypress trees, tall and slender beside the houses. The landscape’s careful abundance makes the districts seem insulated from the conditions beyond them.

This contrast sharpens the fairy-tale quality of the tour without making it wholly imaginary. Norma Jeane sees a material world of lawns, flowers, trees, and guarded estates, but those visible signs also stand for wealth and access. The houses are real enough to admire from a parked car; the lives inside them remain out of reach. Beverly Hills therefore belongs to the child’s education in how Hollywood displays privilege: glamour can be seen, named, and desired, even when it cannot be entered.

Family longing and uncertain proximity

As Gladys points out the homes of people in the movie world, she sometimes hints that Norma Jeane’s father might live nearby, or might have recently attended a party at one of the villas. The suggestions are never confirmed. They are offered lightly, like the prophecies and advice associated with Nonna Della, and leave the child to wonder whether there is a definite truth behind them at all. Beverly Hills becomes part of a landscape in which the absent father seems almost locatable, but never actually appears.

That unresolved possibility gains force from the contrast between a landscape that seems perfectly arranged and a life that does not. Norma Jeane understands that, unlike a completed puzzle, life may offer no scene in which all the pieces finally fit. The star houses give her a vivid picture of the world her mother describes, but not the answer to the question of where her father is or whether he will come. The neighborhood’s significance lies in that double vision: it is at once a treasured setting for mother-daughter closeness and a map of glamour that cannot repair what is missing.