Gladys Mortensen’s escape from the Lakewood clinic is a night-time disappearance followed by a fragile reunion with Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn Monroe). The episode turns a search for a missing patient into a painful mother-daughter encounter: Norma Jeane arrives fearing the worst, finds Gladys physically exhausted but recovered, and spends the day caring for her. Gladys’s insistence that she knew where she was going—to go home—leaves the escape emotionally unresolved even after she has been returned to the clinic.

The Disappearance

An urgent call summoned Norma Jeane to Lakewood after Gladys was discovered missing. She had left her room during the night, then passed out of the clinic and its grounds. The staff searched widely but could not find her, and the possibility that she had gone beyond the clinic’s park became unavoidable. Norma Jeane agreed to come as soon as she could.

The news struck a private nerve. She chose not to tell her agent, Cass Chaplin, or Eddy G, partly to spare them worry and partly because she felt that her distress about her mother belonged to her alone. Earlier, Cass had brushed aside her attempts to speak about Gladys by pointing out that he, too, had a sick mother. His response had made Norma Jeane wary of raising the subject with her lovers. The urgent call therefore intensified an already solitary anxiety: she feared that something terrible might have happened, without expecting much understanding from those around her.

Norma Jeane dressed hurriedly, borrowing Eddy G’s straw hat and putting on sunglasses. She considered taking one of the benzedrine tablets Cass kept in the bathroom but decided against it. Pregnancy, she had recently been told by her doctor, had improved her sleep: she was averaging six hours a night, deeply and restfully. Now she drove through the morning traffic toward Lakewood, passing cinemas displaying the glamorous image of Marilyn Monroe from Niagara. The contrast sharpened her sense of divided identity. The woman on the posters was not, to her, simply herself; she regarded that image as a product of her own work and believed she deserved happiness and her baby. Her thought that Gladys might somehow have sensed the pregnancy and fled remained speculation, not an explanation for the disappearance.

The Search Ends at a Church

By the time Norma Jeane arrived, Gladys had been found asleep on a pew at St. Elizabeth’s Church on Bellflower Boulevard, less than five kilometres from the clinic. Parishioners discovered her when they entered for the seven o’clock Mass. Confused and disoriented, Gladys did not resist when the Lakewood police brought her back to the clinic. Her route had been remarkably difficult to account for: she had apparently opened several doors, crossed the clinic lawn unseen, and walked the remaining distance without attracting notice.

The physical details made the escape more than a breach of the clinic’s routine. Gladys had gone out in a beige cotton dress with nothing underneath. She had worn cloth slippers when she left, but lost them along the way; her bony feet were dotted with small cuts. She had also soiled herself while sleeping on the hard pew. Yet, after Norma Jeane arrived, Gladys showed no apparent embarrassment about it. The church offered a place to sleep, but the account does not establish that Gladys had reached it as part of a deliberate plan. Her later confidence about knowing where she was going sits beside her confusion and the bodily evidence of an arduous night.

Reunion and Caregiving

Norma Jeane wept when she saw her mother and held her in an embrace that seemed as though it might never end. The relief did not erase Gladys’s condition: she smelled of wet cloth and urine, and appeared fragile and uncertain in her movements. The clinic director apologized profusely and addressed Norma Jeane as Miss Baker, maintaining the confidentiality of Gladys’s relationship to a film actress. He said staff checked patients’ rooms at nine each evening, ensured that doors and windows were closed, and kept the clinic grounds under continuous observation. Norma Jeane hurried to reassure him that she was not angry; she was simply glad that her mother had not come to harm.

She remained at Lakewood for the rest of the day. Rather than treating Gladys as the capable parent from whom a daughter might expect reassurance, Norma Jeane took charge of the immediate care: she helped her mother wash, cleaned and combed her dirty, tangled hair, then washed her injured feet and disinfected the cuts with iodine. She spoke cheerfully and sometimes sang to Gladys in the soothing manner used with children. Her care reversed their expected roles. Gladys, who had once been the mother who knew everything, now looked at her daughter with a strangeness that made Norma Jeane wonder whether she even knew who she was.

Home and the Unresolved Meaning

Norma Jeane asked where Gladys had meant to go and suggested that, if she wanted to visit a church or somewhere else, she could have telephoned and been taken there. Gladys shrugged off the question. She said that she never got lost and knew where she was going. When pressed to say where, she answered that she had been going home.

That answer does not explain the route, the choice of church, or whether Gladys understood her circumstances during the night. Instead, it shifts the scene from institutional security to the meaning of home. For Norma Jeane, the word hangs in the air as something strange and wonderful; it unsettles her, and she cannot think how to respond. The escape thus ends in physical recovery without yielding a clear account of Gladys’s intention. The clinic can bring her back within its walls, but it cannot make the idea of home straightforward for either woman. The day’s intimacy rests on that contradiction: Norma Jeane tends her mother with tenderness, while Gladys’s brief answer preserves a private destination beyond the explanations available to her daughter.