Nonna Della

Nonna Della is Norma Jeane Baker’s deceased grandmother, present in the novel less through a continuous biography than through the memories and imagined conversations Norma Jeane carries with her. A baptism, a remembered judgment about marriage and money, and advice recalled at moments of crisis give her influence a double edge: she is a source of affection and counsel, but also a voice through which the pressures placed on women become part of Norma Jeane’s inner life.

Family Background and the Baptism

The clearest concrete act associated with Nonna Della reaches back to Norma Jeane’s infancy. She took the newborn to be baptized at the Los Angeles temple of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson. Years later, at the Radio Plane Aircraft factory, Norma Jeane learns from a newspaper that McPherson has been declared dead from a lethal drug dose. The woman in the photograph is not simply a public figure: she is the preacher who baptized Norma Jeane, brought into intimate family memory by Nonna Della’s decision to take the baby to the temple.

The news unsettles Norma Jeane’s sense of religious certainty. She struggles to take in that the famous preacher has died by suicide and wonders whether Christian faith might be as easy to put on or discard as clothing. The episode does not establish Nonna Della’s own beliefs or make her responsible for Norma Jeane’s conclusions. Instead, it reveals how an act of care from infancy connects the grandmother to a religious memory that later becomes doubtful and difficult for her granddaughter. Nonna Della’s importance lies partly in this intimate link between family history and a faith Norma Jeane can no longer accept without question.

Counsel Remembered in Moments of Crisis

At Venice Beach, after fleeing a man who has torn the front of her dress, Norma Jeane runs barefoot toward the water. The scene turns the shore into both refuge and danger: it is near the place where Nonna Della lived, and near her grave. In Norma Jeane’s inward recollection, the two of them walk along the beach together, shielding their eyes from the glare on the waves. She imagines that her grandmother would be proud of her, but also that she would tell her to make her own decision if she hated her life.

That counsel does not resolve the crisis. Norma Jeane rushes into the surf after a small, vulnerable creature she sees in the water, wondering whether it is Baby or the child of another mother. The sequence makes Nonna Della’s remembered advice a point of orientation within an episode where grief and perception blur: it directs Norma Jeane back toward the question of what she chooses, even as she acts on an urgent vision she cannot set aside. Later, when she disappears from Hollywood, withdraws her savings from three Los Angeles banks, and sends word that she does not want to be found, she recalls the advice again. She clarifies to herself that it is not life itself she hates. The counsel therefore accompanies a separation from Hollywood, not a simple rejection of existence.

Affection, Memory, and the Hummingbirds

Nonna Della also appears as a recipient of Norma Jeane’s thoughts. Reflecting on hummingbirds near the Studio Club, Norma Jeane wonders whether her grandmother has forgiven her and still loves her. The birds’ smallness, strength, and courage hold her attention: they must feed constantly to survive, and their wings beat too fast to see as they dart in different directions. Norma Jeane remembers telling Nonna Della that thoughts, too, fly in every direction.

The hummingbird memory gives their bond a form that is both tender and unsettled. Norma Jeane does not report a response from her grandmother; she tentatively imagines forgiveness and love. The remembered comparison between flight and thought also suits the way Nonna Della persists in the narrative: not as a figure continuously present in the action, but as a person Norma Jeane can summon amid rapidly shifting associations. The birds’ vulnerability and tenacity echo qualities Norma Jeane admires, while the thought of her grandmother supplies a momentary sense of being loved without requiring certainty that forgiveness has been granted.

Marriage, Security, and a Complicated Inheritance

In another inward passage, Nonna Della’s remembered speech carries a harsher social lesson. Norma Jeane recalls her grandmother speaking contemptuously of Gladys, who had failed to find a decent husband or even a wealthy suitor to support her. The recollection is linked to Norma Jeane’s fear that losing the Playwright would amount to failing as a woman and might leave her condemned to die alone. As she approaches thirty, she imagines making him proud both as an actress and, even more, as a wife, and hopes they will have children.

Nonna Della’s presence thus gathers affection and pressure into the same inheritance. Her advice at the beach urges a decision rooted in Norma Jeane’s own life; the judgment remembered about Gladys instead exposes a world in which a woman’s security and worth are measured through a husband and money. The narrative does not make these memories identical or settle them into a single doctrine. It lets Norma Jeane carry both: the grandmother whose love she hopes still reaches her, and the voice whose standards intensify her fear of romantic and financial failure. In that tension, Nonna Della remains consequential after death—not as a fully narrated authority, but as a remembered presence through which Norma Jeane tests what she has been taught against what she can endure.