Gladys Mortensen's mental illness and long-term hospitalization

Gladys Mortensen’s mental illness and long-term hospitalization shape both her own life and Norma Jeane Baker’s efforts to understand and reach her mother. The novel places the language of diagnosis and institutional care beside scenes of fear, disorientation, and imperfect recognition, making Gladys more than a medical record while showing how hospitalization governs the terms of their relationship.

Illness and Institutional Care

At work in a film-negative laboratory, Gladys Mortensen is so frightened by a telephone call that she has to be helped to the receiver. Her eyes are watering from the harsh chemicals in the department, and the coiled cord seems alive to her. She hears a jumble of voices urging her to act, though she has spent years trying to filter out voices she knows are not real. Sometimes exhaustion overwhelms that effort and the voices break through. Her first fear is that the call concerns Norma Jeane Baker; instead, she learns that her own mother, Della Monroe, has suffered an accident. The episode connects Gladys’s illness to an ongoing, strenuous attempt to distinguish intrusive perceptions from events around her, rather than presenting her symptoms only through a diagnosis.

The novel also shows the family consequences of her illness. Gladys’s two other daughters live in Kentucky with their father and have disappeared from her life; he has called her unbalanced. Norma Jeane, by contrast, remains the daughter whose possible misfortune can still dominate Gladys’s fear. Later, the institutional record supplied to prospective adoptive parents describes Gladys as having chronic paranoid schizophrenia, with probable neurological damage attributed to alcohol and medication abuse. That record helps explain why Norma Jeane’s mother is treated as a decisive condition in decisions about the child’s future, even though the diagnosis is not the whole of Gladys’s experience.

By the time Norma Jeane visits Norwalk State Hospital after a decade apart, a doctor describes Gladys as near the highest level of recovery possible in her case. She has undergone several courses of electroshock treatment, which the hospital reports reduced her episodes, and now receives intensive medication intended to prevent depressive and manic attacks. According to hospital records, she has not tried to harm herself or anyone else for years. These measures establish a history of severe illness and ongoing institutional management, but they do not restore an ordinary mother-daughter relationship: Norma Jeane recognizes Gladys immediately, while the reunion leaves her mother’s response uncertain and unreturned.

The Visit and the Borrowed Gesture

On a later visit to Norwalk State Hospital, Norma Jeane Baker arrives as both Gladys Mortensen’s daughter and a young actress already recognized by the institution’s staff. She knows the receptionists and nurses are watching, and the doctors appear quickly to escort her through the corridors toward the remote C ward. Some staff members know her from photographs or newspapers as Marilyn Monroe; others have only heard of her. The attention that gathers around the visit makes a private reunion into a public-looking scene, with Norma Jeane expected to appear perfectly dressed and groomed even inside the hospital.

The meeting does not deliver the recognition she longs for. Gladys, sunk into a broken sofa in a dim room, seems barely to recognize her daughter. Her hair is uncombed and greasy, and the gray cotton dress recalls an earlier occasion when Gladys had insisted on wearing it despite Norma Jeane’s plans to take her out. Norma Jeane kisses her, holding her breath against the smell of yeast, while Gladys responds by saying that she smells. The remark is not a reliable description of Norma Jeane: Gladys is reacting to the chemical odor of her daughter’s hair dye, mixed with the Chanel perfume V gave her. Norma Jeane apologizes softly; Gladys shrugs, leaving her daughter unsure whether the gesture means forgiveness or indifference. A book of poetry and a basket of fruit serve as gifts, and as practical objects to occupy their hands during an awkward visit.

What Norma Jeane notices most is not the apparent blankness in her mother’s face but the restless movement in her hands. Gladys’s fingers rub against each other; her nails are broken, bitten, and crusted with blood, and at times her hands seem to struggle against one another in her lap. The visible agitation complicates her air of indifference: even when she appears not to attend to the conversation, her hands register distress. The scene makes that physical detail a form of evidence, an outward sign that the institution’s routines and the daughter’s attention cannot wholly conceal Gladys’s inner turmoil.

When Norma Jeane leaves, she accompanies Gladys back to the C ward and gives her the black scarf she has been wearing, wrapping it around her mother’s shoulders before saying goodbye with a kiss. She weeps and asks forgiveness, insisting on her love. The visit also becomes entangled with her work: in La tua bocca brucia, she plays Nell, whose hands repeatedly search for one another. The novel links that gesture to Gladys’s hands and to the magnetism of her gaze, suggesting that Norma Jeane’s performance draws upon what she has witnessed in her mother. It does not present this borrowing as a deliberate plan; the resemblance emerges as an unplanned crossing between a daughter’s observation, a mother’s illness, and an actor’s work.

Escape, Return, and the Limits of Recovery

Gladys Mortensen’s apparent stability proves fragile. When Norma Jeane Baker arrives at the Lakewood Clinic, she learns that Gladys has reappeared after leaving the facility: police found her asleep in a pew at a Catholic church on Bellflower Boulevard, less than five kilometers away. Confused and disoriented, Gladys offered no resistance when they returned her to the clinic. The short distance between the church and the institution makes the episode feel less like an escape into a new life than a bewildered passage through familiar surroundings, though the novel does not explain why she went there.

Seeing her mother, Norma Jeane breaks down crying and holds her in an embrace that seems unable to end. Gladys smells of wet fabric and urine, details that keep the reunion grounded in the bodily realities of her illness and institutional care. Someone remarks that Gladys is not even Catholic and wonders why she went to the church; the clinic director apologizes profusely to Norma Jeane. The episode offers no cure or resolution. Instead, Gladys’s unexplained departure and return renew the daughter’s immediate distress, showing how years of treatment and periods of relative stability coexist with vulnerability, disorientation, and dependence on institutional custody.

The Diagnosis Beyond the Hospital

Gladys Mortensen’s hospitalization also reaches into Norma Jeane Baker’s childhood, shaping whether other adults can imagine taking her in. When Norma Jeane is eleven, three couples have already asked to adopt her, despite her age and the fact that her mother is alive and confined at Norwalk State Hospital. Prospective parents who request the records are told of Gladys’s diagnosis and the suspected neurological damage attributed to alcohol and medication abuse. The information makes Gladys’s condition part of the case surrounding her daughter, carried beyond the ward and into decisions about Norma Jeane’s future.

At the orphanage, the contrast between Norma Jeane’s sadness and her manner with visitors is striking: when an important couple arrives, she brightens, becoming charming and gracious, as if a light has switched on. Her welcome can make her seem angelic to adults considering adoption, but the scene also reveals how much of that hope depends on being able to win their affection. Gladys’s illness is therefore present in the relationship even when mother and daughter are apart: it contributes to the circumstances of Norma Jeane’s placement, while Norma Jeane’s longing to be loved becomes visible in the attention she gives to prospective parents.