Jess Flynn

Jess Flynn is a friend of Gladys Mortensen whose kindness to Norma Jeane Baker is real but bounded by work, money, and the crisis of Gladys’s illness. The novel makes her neither a simple rescuer nor a betrayer: she feeds and shelters the family, keeps a difficult promise for ten days, and ultimately helps deliver Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphanage. To the child, that departure is abandonment; to Jess, it follows from a promise she cannot keep under the circumstances.