Gladys's mental illness and hospitalization

Gladys Mortensen’s illness is both a private struggle and a force that governs her family’s choices. The narrative first shows her working in a negatives laboratory, where chemical exposure makes her eyes water while voices crowd her hearing; later, her diagnosis and long hospitalization become decisive facts in Norma Jeane Baker’s repeated attempts to find an adoptive home.

Illness and Institutionalization

At the laboratory, Gladys is called to the telephone so frightened that she has to be helped to it. The rubber cord seems alive to her, and the voices she hears resemble scraps of whispered film dialogue breaking through a radio’s tuning. She has learned to ignore such intrusions since the birth of her youngest daughter, though exhaustion sometimes makes them harder to control. The call turns out to concern her mother, Della Monroe, rather than Norma Jeane Baker—the possibility Gladys had feared.

By the time Norma Jeane Baker is eleven, Gladys has been hospitalized at Norwalk State Hospital for Gladys for years. The official diagnosis supplied to prospective adoptive parents is chronic paranoid schizophrenia, with probable neurological damage attributed to alcohol and drug abuse. That clinical description accompanies a condition whose consequences extend beyond Gladys herself: her continued hospitalization and capacity to consent repeatedly determine whether her daughter may be adopted.

Motherhood, Adoption, and Treatment

Gladys’s illness reaches into Norma Jeane Baker’s life through decisions made in her name. In the spring of 1936, when Norma Jeane was ten, Gladys blocked another adoption—not by appearing herself, but through a Norwalk hospital official who told Edith Mittelstadt that she was too ill to relinquish her identity as Norma Jeane’s mother. Gladys’s delusions included fears that Martians would abduct the children of the world and that Norma Jeane’s father would take the girl away to a secret place. The explanation made the refusal intelligible as an expression of illness, but it could not soften its effect: Norma Jeane lost a prospective adoptive mother who had showered her with affection and small gifts, and fled to cry, furious at the woman who had once again kept her from a home.

Gladys’s hospitalization also concealed episodes of danger that Norma Jeane learned about only later. During a visit to Norwalk years afterward, the head nurse told her that in the spring of 1936 Gladys had tried to kill herself with hairpins, slashing her wrists and throat in the hospital boiler room. An nurse found her after she had lost a great deal of blood. The disclosure recast the years of separation: the mother whose decisions had repeatedly thwarted adoption had herself been in acute crisis, out of her daughter’s sight.

A decade into Gladys’s hospitalization, doctors described her as near the greatest recovery 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 episodes. Hospital records indicated that for years she had not tried to harm herself or anyone else. When Norma Jeane, now earning money as a model and beginning work as an actress, asked whether a visit might cause trouble, the psychiatrist’s question turned the concern back toward both mother and daughter: the separation had lasted ten years, but it had not erased their bond.

Norma Jeane recognized Gladys at once in the visiting room, thin and dressed in a faded, badly fastened green hospital gown. She began to cry and embraced her mother; Gladys neither returned the embrace nor pulled away. Norma Jeane later remembered them both crying, though in fact she alone wept. The encounter gave her an unexpectedly powerful route into performance: she recalled that she had been unable to cry on command in her first acting lessons, but after Norwalk she could. Later, at Lakewood, Gladys disappeared from the clinic and was found asleep in a Catholic church pew on Bellflower Boulevard, confused but not resisting when Lakewood police brought her back. Norma Jeane met her with tears and a long embrace, while the clinic director apologized. Gladys’s illness thus repeatedly turned maternal attachment into separation, institutional control, and reunion—none of which could restore the ordinary security Norma Jeane had sought.

The Family History Behind the Diagnosis

Gladys’s illness developed within a history of family rupture: after her youngest daughter was born, she became practiced at filtering the voices she heard, while her two other daughters lived with their father in Kentucky and disappeared from her life. Their father called Gladys unbalanced. Against that separation, her fear that the urgent telephone call concerned Norma Jeane Baker reveals how the possibility of losing another daughter remained present even before her later delusions and hospital decisions made that fear consequential.

A Conditional Prospect of Adoption

By the third time Norma Jeane Baker was proposed for adoption, there seemed to be a narrow opening: Edith Mittelstadt had spoken with the chief physician at Norwalk State Hospital for Gladys, who reported that Gladys Mortensen was no longer as consumed by a desire for revenge as before. The hope was that she might now consent. Mittelstadt presented the possibility confidently, urging Norma Jeane to believe that her mother loved her and wanted her happiness, then invited the girl to pray with her. The optimism could not settle what the earlier refusals had made precarious: Norma Jeane’s future still depended on an institutional judgment of Gladys’s condition and on a decision Gladys might or might not be able to make.