Gladys Mortensen's schizophrenia and Lakewood hospitalization

Gladys Mortensen's schizophrenia and hospitalization are presented not as a single medical fact but as a condition that governs her daily life, separates her from Norma Jeane Baker, and makes each reunion precarious. The narrative places official diagnoses and institutional treatment beside Gladys's own frightening perceptions, refusing to let the clinical record fully explain either her experience or the damage illness does to their relationship.

Illness and Early Signs

At the time of a frightening phone call at work, Gladys was employed in a photographic negatives laboratory, where she handled virulent chemicals that made her eyes water. The cord of the telephone seemed alive to her, and a jumble of voices sounded as if it were coming from films. She had lived with voices in her head since the birth of her youngest daughter, and usually managed them by ignoring and filtering them because she knew they were not real. Exhaustion sometimes weakened that control, however, and the voices broke through. Her fear that the urgent call concerned Norma Jeane gives the scene a painful double edge: illness intrudes into ordinary work, while a mother's anxiety remains directed toward her child.

Gladys's history also includes losses that the narrative does not reduce to her diagnosis. Two other daughters had been taken by their father and disappeared from her life; he had called Gladys unbalanced. The story places that accusation alongside her illness, but does not treat it as a sufficient account of her life. At the laboratory, she continued working in a department she believed was beneath her status rather than complain to her employer. Her efforts to conceal distress and maintain her position show how much of her daily struggle consists of managing what others might see.

Diagnosis and Institutional Treatment

By the time Norma Jeane was eleven, Gladys had been hospitalized at Norwalk State Hospital for Gladys for a decade. The official diagnosis supplied to prospective adoptive parents was chronic paranoid schizophrenia, with probable neurological damage from alcohol and medication abuse. That information shaped Norma Jeane's chances of being adopted: she had been wanted by three couples, but her mother's continued existence and psychiatric hospitalization were facts the authorities disclosed. Gladys's illness thus affected her daughter's life even in her absence, turning a private family history into part of an institutional assessment of Norma Jeane.

A decade later, a physician told the adult Norma Jeane that Gladys was near the highest level of recovery considered possible in her case. Several courses of electroshock treatment had substantially reduced her crises, and an intensive medication regimen was intended to prevent depressive and manic attacks. Hospital records stated that she had not tried to harm herself or anyone else for years. These details establish a managed condition rather than a simple recovery: Gladys remained hospitalized and dependent on treatment, even as the records described a reduction in dangerous crises. When Norma Jeane asked whether a visit might cause problems, the psychiatrist turned the uncertainty back on her, asking whether the concern was for herself or her mother.

Visits and the Mother-Daughter Bond

Norma Jeane had not seen Gladys for ten years when she visited Norwalk. She recognized the thin woman in a faded green hospital gown immediately and approached her as her mother. Gladys did not return the awkward embrace, though she did not pull away. Norma Jeane later remembered them both crying; in fact, only Norma Jeane wept. The difference between memory and what occurred makes the reunion a measure of her longing as much as of Gladys's response. She smiled at her mother repeatedly, and the intense emotion of the visit later helped her learn to cry on cue in acting lessons.

At a later visit to Lakewood Home, Norma Jeane arrived alone in a plum-colored Studebaker convertible because the Studio had suspended her after she refused a film. Her husband, the Ex-Athlete, had offered to accompany her, but she declined, warning that Gladys was ill and might not appeal to him. At Lakewood, Norma Jeane presented herself as Norma Jeane Baker rather than Marilyn Monroe, dressed soberly and carrying gifts for the staff and her mother. Gladys had not been eagerly anticipating the visit and may not have known it was coming. The scene distinguishes the dutiful visit Norma Jeane prepared from the recognition and welcome she could not secure.

Paranoia, Loss, and Consequences

During a walk in the grounds, Gladys spoke of earthquakes and said that people entered her room at night, filmed her, and assaulted her with a surgical instrument. She also believed other patients stole from her and described herself as a celebrity among them because nurses asked when Marilyn would visit. Her fears combine recognizable surroundings with persecutory explanations: there had been minor seismic activity in the Los Angeles area, but no major earthquake. When Gladys reached the iron fence, three meters high and partly hidden by privet, she seized its wire mesh and shook it violently. Norma Jeane suddenly feared that she too had been lured into the clinic and could not leave. She then reminded herself that California law required her husband's consent for her own commitment. Her relief was complicated by the thought that the Ex-Athlete might kill her, though she did not believe he would have her hospitalized.

Gladys also raised the child Norma Jeane had lost. She had dreamed the baby was dead; when Norma Jeane confirmed the miscarriage, Gladys called it a wise decision, despite Norma Jeane's insistence that it had been spontaneous. Gladys connected the loss to her own mother, Della, who had become a grandmother, and described her inability to become one herself as a sentence for having given away her daughters and left them to die. Norma Jeane recoiled, recognizing that she could not treat the conversation as a shared, reliable account of events. Instead, she resolved to create a new scene through movement and will. Gladys's hospitalization therefore does not close the distance between mother and daughter: it makes their contact possible, but leaves love entangled with mistrust, grief, and perceptions they cannot reconcile.