Highland Elementary School marks a brief, unsettled period in Norma Jeane Baker’s childhood: a place where she longed to belong, but where school life did not provide the welcome she sought. Her eleven months there stand in contrast to the private consolations she found in small treats and trips to the movies, and to the abrupt end of her schooling after the wildfires and Gladys Mortensen’s hospitalization.

School Days and Small Privileges

Norma Jeane Baker was the only child at Highland Elementary School who carried money for food in a small red satin purse. She used it at the corner store for fruit tarts and orange sodas, and sometimes peanut-butter crackers, whose taste remained vivid in her memory years later. These purchases gave her a modest independence within the school day: she had something of her own to spend, even as she felt herself to be an outsider among the other children.

Sometimes, after school, she was allowed to walk alone to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. It was less than five kilometres from the school, and for ten cents she could see a double feature. In the films, the good princess and the mysterious prince were always there to welcome and comfort her. The walk from school to the theatre thus connected an ordinary childhood routine with a private refuge, where imagined figures seemed more reliably present than companionship at school.

Isolation and Gladys Mortensen’s Involvement

The other children frightened Norma Jeane Baker. She felt she had to win over the leaders quickly, had no siblings to help her, and wanted intensely to be accepted and liked. They called her names referring to her eyes and head; she did not understand why. Her recollection of Highland is therefore not only a memory of treats and movie-going, but also of trying to find a place among children who marked her as strange.

Gladys Mortensen told her friends that she was preoccupied with her daughter’s limited schooling. Yet during Norma Jeane’s eleven months at Highland, Gladys went to speak with the teachers only once, and then because the school had summoned her. The contrast between Gladys’s stated concern and this single visit gives the school a second significance: it is where maternal concern is described as present, but practical involvement appears limited.

The Interrupted Schooling

Ten days after Gladys Mortensen was taken to Norwalk State Hospital for Gladys, the fires in the canyons were beginning to subside. Sirens were growing less frequent, families evacuated from areas north of Los Angeles were returning home, and most schools had reopened. Highland Elementary School was open again, but Norma Jeane Baker did not go back. She would not attend fourth grade there.

The reopening makes her absence especially clear: the wider emergency was easing, yet her own schooling did not resume at Highland. The school’s place in the story is consequently brief but consequential. It holds both the ordinary details of her childhood—money in a satin purse, snacks from a corner shop, a walk to the movies—and the point at which that routine breaks, leaving her outside the school year that would otherwise have followed.