Gladys and Norma Jeane attend Irving Thalberg’s funeral

Gladys Mortensen and Norma Jeane Baker attend Irving G. Thalberg’s funeral amid a vast crowd gathered to glimpse Hollywood’s famous mourners. The day joins public spectacle to a private, uncertain hope: Gladys expects a man she believes to be Norma Jeane’s father to see the child, but the encounter she imagines brings no acknowledgment, and the journey ends in humiliation and violence. In the contrast between celebrity worship and a mother’s failed expectation, the funeral becomes a scene of longing that cannot be satisfied by simply being seen.

Preparation and expectation

Gladys and Norma Jeane dress carefully for the funeral, though their place is not inside the service but among more than seven thousand spectators assembled near Wilshire Temple on Wilshire Boulevard. Before they reach the crowd, Gladys has prepared her daughter with painful thoroughness. After another difficult night, during which an unspecified medication has made Gladys sick and her thoughts have felt like a spiraling ticker tape, she washes Norma Jeane’s tangled hair before dawn. She pulls a comb through it, brushes it until it shines, and, with help from Jess Flynn, braids it into a crown. Norma Jeane’s eyes are wet with tears and her lips red from biting them, yet Gladys has made her look like a fairy-tale princess. The polished appearance is not incidental: Gladys wants them ready for a meeting she believes might happen.

Gladys tells Norma Jeane that the man she expects to see at the funeral may be carrying the coffin. He will not speak to them in public, she believes, but he will see the child, his daughter. The man is not identified in this expectation, and the account does not confirm that he is present or that he recognizes her. Gladys nevertheless makes the possibility the purpose of their vigil. Her certainty turns an immense public funeral into a private test: whether the person she has in mind will look at Norma Jeane and understand who she is.

The funeral and the crowd

The crowd has gathered well before the service begins. By half past seven, although the ceremony is not scheduled until nine, mounted and foot police are managing the spectators, photographers are seeking vantage points, and wooden sawhorse barriers mark the procession route. People wait for the film stars and other celebrities to emerge after the service. The crowd is physically excluded from the ritual and from direct contact with its famous participants, but its attention fixes on the temple doors.

At last, eight solemnly dressed men carry out a polished black coffin. Among the pallbearers are Ronald Colman, Adolphe Menjou, Nelson Eddy, Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Al Jolson, John Barrymore, and Basil Rathbone. Norma Shearer follows, veiled and dressed in elaborate black, bearing the visible weight of her grief as Thalberg’s widow. A stream of other celebrities follows her: Leslie Howard, Erich von Stroheim, Greta Garbo, Joel McCrea, Wallace Beery, Clara Bow, Helen Twelvetrees, and Spencer Tracy, among many others. Gladys repeats the names for Norma Jeane, who is both excited and frightened, clinging to the barrier and fearing that the crowd will crush her.

The spectators’ patience breaks when photographers and autograph hunters surge through the barriers. Police on horseback try to force them back, shouting and swinging their batons. In the commotion there are cries of anger and fear; someone may have fallen, been trampled, or been struck. Police loudspeakers bark, engines roar, and then the disorder subsides as the hearse and limousines drive away. Norma Jeane’s tartan hat is crooked over one temple. She reaches for Gladys’s outstretched arm, and, for once, Gladys allows her to hold on. The brief acceptance offers the child a small point of safety in a crowd that has turned its hunger for proximity into a physical crush.

After the procession

Once the funeral party has gone, the spectators are left in a cleared street with no obvious reason to remain. Some women wipe their eyes; others seem disoriented, as if they have suffered a loss without knowing precisely what they have lost. Gladys is among them, her face smeared beneath her damp veil and her eyes red and unfocused. The public event has ended, but for her the hoped-for private encounter has not been resolved.

Gladys drives along Wilshire Boulevard trying to find the Jewish cemetery, stopping to ask directions without success. She has taken off her cloche hat and thrown it onto a back seat already cluttered with newspapers, movie magazines, paperbacks, soiled handkerchiefs, and clothes. A cigarette hangs from her lips as she reflects on the differences she imagines between Jewish and Christian ways of seeing the world. She connects the barrier between herself and the man she has in mind to his Jewish blood, then tells Norma Jeane that he saw them that day, though he could not speak. Her conviction that his eyes acknowledged the child remains hers; the narrative offers no independent confirmation of that recognition.

The failed hope and its consequence

The private hope gives way to an immediate bodily crisis. Norma Jeane has been trying to hold in her urine during the long wait and drive. Less than two kilometers from Highland Avenue, she wets herself. Gladys notices the smell and, while continuing to drive, slaps her twice and punches her in fury, blaming the child for ruining a beautiful dress that does not even belong to them and accusing her of doing it deliberately. The scene reverses the image of the princess Gladys had painstakingly created before dawn: the carefully dressed child is now treated as a source of shame, and the mother who had let her cling to her arm becomes violent.

The funeral therefore leaves two forms of exposure side by side. In public, the crowd presses against barriers to glimpse stars whose names Gladys recites; in the car, Norma Jeane remains unseen in the way she most needs, as a child whose distress should be cared for. Gladys’s belief that an unnamed man has seen his daughter does not secure recognition or protection. Four days later, the first breath of the Santa Ana winds arrives, marking the transition beyond the funeral scene without repairing its unresolved longing.