Drug dependence and abuse

Drug dependence and abuse forms a recurring crisis in the lives of Gladys Mortensen and her daughter, Norma Jeane Baker. The novel sets institutional treatment and medication intended to manage illness beside Norma Jeane’s concealed supplies, scattered prescriptions, and reliance on drugs to escape panic and sleeplessness. Relief is real, but so is the danger: medication can quiet distress while narrowing the distance between sleep, confusion, and a potentially fatal overdose.

Gladys Mortensen: illness and treatment

Gladys’s history brings medication into the family story before Norma Jeane’s own dependence becomes prominent. At work in a photographic negatives laboratory, Gladys endures virulent chemicals that make her eyes water. She also hears intrusive voices, which she has tried to ignore since the birth of her last daughter at twenty-six. The narrative distinguishes those voices from the chemical exposure, but places both within the exhausting circumstances of her life and illness. Her former supervisor, Mr. X, has her escorted to the telephone when news arrives about her mother, Della Monroe; Gladys fears the call concerns Norma Jeane instead.

By the time Norma Jeane seeks permission to visit her mother at Norwalk State Hospital, Gladys has been hospitalized for ten years. According to the hospital’s account, several courses of electroshock have substantially reduced her crises, and an intensive drug regimen is being used to prevent depressive and manic episodes. The doctor describes Gladys as close to the highest level of recovery possible in her case and says she has not tried to harm herself or others for years. These institutional measures are presented as part of her care, not as proof that the illness has disappeared. Norma Jeane has not seen her mother in a decade; when they meet, she recognizes the gaunt woman immediately and weeps during an embrace Gladys neither returns nor rejects.

Gladys’s treatment does not remove her vulnerability. Later, when Norma Jeane reaches the Lakewood Clinic, Gladys has been found confused and disoriented, asleep in a pew at a Catholic church on Bellflower Boulevard less than five kilometres away. Police return her to the clinic without resistance. Norma Jeane embraces her, crying, while the clinic’s director apologizes. The episode shows the limits of institutional supervision and the continuing instability that medication and hospitalization have not resolved.

Norma Jeane’s medication and concealed reserves

As an adult, Norma Jeane experiences medication as an immediate easing of anxiety. In England, the new medicine leaves her deeply asleep and seems to penetrate her bones, quieting her fear for an extended period. But the apparent respite exists alongside a hidden supply: The Playwright searches through the compartments of her luggage and finds her reserve pills, which she has brought secretly to England. He is ashamed to be looking, and she struggles against him, furious and in tears. The scene makes secrecy part of the danger: the person closest to her does not know what she has carried, and discovering it turns care into a physical conflict.

The seriousness of what happened in England is withheld from Norma Jeane. She has undergone gastric lavage after a lethal quantity of chemicals entered her bloodstream, and an English doctor asked The Playwright whether his wife had tried to kill herself. He does not tell her what the doctor suspected, fearing that the truth will interrupt her renewed happiness. The account therefore separates Norma Jeane’s understanding of the episode from the reader’s: she treats the English adventure lightly, while the concealed medical crisis makes clear how near it came to catastrophe.

Sleep, panic, and the damaged self

At The Studio, Norma Jeane sometimes sleeps in her locked dressing room, with a do-not-disturb notice on the door and an admirer—usually Whitey—keeping watch outside. She takes liquid Nembutal and vomits until exhausted; the drug gradually carries her into a warm, dreamless sleep. The duration is unpredictable: sometimes she sleeps for fifteen hours, sometimes only two or three. When she wakes after the shorter intervals, she is confused and terrified, unable to identify where she is. She may feel that she has awakened in the room prepared for Baby at the summer house, though she has not returned there since the tragedy, or in an unfamiliar room in someone else’s house or a hotel.

The episodes are followed by scenes of destruction that Norma Jeane tries to hide. Creams, makeup, powder, and clothing lie scattered across the floor; favourite books have been torn apart, and a mirror is broken where her fist struck it. She has injured that hand, and once a streak of red lipstick on the mirror makes the wreckage resemble a scream. When she comes to herself, she feels responsible for restoring the room before anyone sees it. The account links drugged sleep not to simple rest but to interrupted awareness, fear, physical harm, and shame—especially the shame she associates with being the daughter of a mother confined at Norwalk State Hospital.

Fragmented prescriptions and medical control

Norma Jeane obtains prescriptions from several drugstores in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, using different doctors who are unaware of one another—or, as the narrative notes, at least later claim to have been. The list includes Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Miltown, Dexamyl, Seconal, and Nembutal. This scattered system gives her access to a range of drugs without a single prescriber having the full picture. Her public account of a favourite drugstore turns the start of her career into a joke about Richard Widmark looking at her body, a sharp contrast with the hidden medical risks running beneath the star image.

At a difficult point on the set of Some Like It Hot, Whitey tries to help Norma Jeane prepare to leave home. She is frightened and unable to face going out, so he comes to her house for preliminary makeup and leads her through breathing exercises. She says, in effect, that Sugar Kane wants to go more than she wants to live. Whitey’s reassurance and practical care bring her back toward work, but the scene does not portray the transformation as effortless: the initial makeup fails, she cries, and he has to begin again. At The Studio, the process of making Marilyn Monroe presentable also involves Doc Fell, who treats her in private with injections. She arrives shortly after eleven in a semi-conscious state, and the preparation takes six hours and forty minutes. The novel places this invasive treatment beside her dependence on prescriptions, showing a body managed both by drugs and by the machinery of the star’s public image.

Relief and its cost

The state of dependence is defined by a repeated contradiction: medication can make fear recede, yet the means of obtaining and using it are concealed, divided among doctors, or entangled with medical emergencies. Gladys’s institutional regimen is directed at severe psychiatric symptoms, while Norma Jeane’s use ranges from prescribed drugs to secret reserves and a potentially lethal crisis. The narrative does not collapse these distinct circumstances into one diagnosis. Instead, it traces how treatment, self-medication, secrecy, and the pressure to resume performance overlap, leaving relief inseparable from risk. Norma Jeane’s return to the set may look like a victory of will, but the hours of preparation and the injections required to bring Marilyn Monroe back into view expose the cost of that apparent recovery.