Gladys Mortensen’s mental illness and hospitalization

Gladys Mortensen’s mental illness shapes the separation at the center of her relationship with Norma Jeane Baker, but the novel presents more than a diagnosis: it shows a woman working, enduring intrusive voices, and being treated within institutions whose decisions affect her daughter as well as herself. Years of hospitalization diminish Gladys’s crises without restoring the life from which illness and institutional care have removed her.

Illness and Life Before Hospitalization

At the time of a telephone call at the photographic negative laboratory where she worked, Gladys Mortensen was so frightened that others had to guide her to the phone. The coiled telephone cord seemed alive to her, and voices crowded her hearing. She had learned to disregard voices she knew were unreal, a practice she had developed since the birth of her last daughter at twenty-six, though exhaustion sometimes made that control fail. The call, which she feared concerned Norma Jeane Baker, instead reported that her mother, Della Monroe, had suffered an incident.

Gladys’s working life was not without its own history of loss. Mr. X had once loved her and asked her to marry him, even offering to leave his wife and children; at that time, in 1929, she was his assistant. After illness, she was demoted. At the laboratory she continued to work among chemicals that made her eyes water, reluctant to complain to her former suitor and employer. The scene places her symptoms alongside the conditions and diminished status of her employment, rather than presenting her only through a hospital record.

Hospitalization and Treatment

By the time Norma Jeane Baker considered visiting, Gladys Mortensen had been hospitalized at Norwalk State Hospital for ten years. According to the hospital’s account, several courses of electroshock had substantially reduced her episodes. She was also receiving an intensive medication regimen intended to prevent depressive and manic attacks. Hospital records stated that she had not attempted to harm herself or others for years, and described her condition as chronic paranoid schizophrenia with probable neurological damage associated with alcohol and medication abuse. The account thus distinguishes the institution’s clinical description from the daughter’s experience of meeting her mother after a decade apart.

The limits and consequences of institutional authority become especially clear in the question of lobotomy. As Gladys’s nearest—and effectively only—relative, Norma Jeane Baker was asked to authorize the operation. She refused. A physician had explained that lobotomy could sometimes produce dramatic results for patients experiencing hallucinations, but Norma Jeane regarded her mother as an intelligent, complicated woman, not a brain to be altered for the sake of a possible cure. Electroshock continued instead. She associated that treatment with the years at Norwalk, contrasting them with what she understood as the more humane Lakewood Clinic, where Gladys was later staying.

Mother and Daughter

When Norma Jeane Baker visited Norwalk, she recognized Gladys Mortensen immediately: a thin woman in a faded green gown, poorly fastened. Norma Jeane approached her as her mother and embraced her. Gladys neither returned the embrace nor pulled away. Norma Jeane later remembered them both crying, but the scene had been more one-sided: she alone wept, surprised by the force of her own emotion. The encounter also altered her relation to performance. She recalled that she had once struggled to cry on cue in acting lessons, whereas after seeing Gladys she could do so. In the visiting room, among strangers, she kept smiling at her mother.

Years later, Norma Jeane brought Gladys news from a letter by the father who had remained absent from their lives: he wanted to see them and would forgive and love them both. The promise reaches Gladys through her daughter; the passage does not establish that a reunion followed. It nevertheless makes the mother-daughter bond a conduit for Norma Jeane’s hope that the family might be restored.

Lakewood and the Continuing Separation

Gladys Mortensen later disappeared from the Lakewood Clinic. She was found asleep on a pew in a Catholic church on Bellflower Boulevard, less than five kilometers away. Confused and disoriented, she did not resist when Lakewood police returned her to the clinic. When Norma Jeane arrived and saw her, she broke down and held her for what seemed an unending embrace. Gladys smelled of wet fabric and urine, details that make the reunion intimate and painful rather than a simple recovery.

The novel also links Gladys’s treatment to Norma Jeane’s own moments of mental and emotional strain. While traveling from Bel Air to Santa Monica, Norma Jeane wonders whether Gladys might be receiving electroshock at that very hour; her thoughts, she says, often drift, unlike those of the character she plays. This is not evidence of a simultaneous procedure, but a narrative echo: her mother’s institutional experience has become one of the images through which Norma Jeane understands her own vulnerability. Gladys remains physically and emotionally difficult to reach, even as her daughter repeatedly tries to protect, visit, and hold her.