Norma Jeane and Fleece’s friendship

Norma Jeane Baker and Fleece’s friendship is formed in the orphanage under the pressure of loss and uncertainty: Fleece protects the younger girl, but her care arrives in the same rough, unpredictable gestures as her teasing and anger. Norma Jeane remembers her with particular intensity, and later scenes make that attachment persist as both a real childhood bond and a presence she can no longer confidently locate in the world around her.

The First Protector

Fleece notices Norma Jeane when the smaller, younger girl joins the orphanage group. She tells the others to wait for her and urges her along with a teasing, mouse-like nickname. The detail establishes their difference in size and temperament: Norma Jeane is the timid child who lags behind; Fleece is long-legged, sharp-tongued, and forceful enough to set the group’s pace. Her attention makes room for Norma Jeane among the girls, even when it takes the form of mockery.

The account suggests that Fleece’s attachment may come from pity, or from a need to give someone the brusque affection of an older sister. Norma Jeane reminds her of a younger sister who died violently, a loss Fleece describes in grotesquely blunt terms. That history helps explain the protective impulse without making Fleece’s care gentle or dependable. She becomes Norma Jeane’s first protector in the orphanage, but the bond is marked from the start by grief as well as companionship.

Fleece is among the friends Norma Jeane would remember most emotionally, alongside Debra Mae. The feeling attached to Fleece is especially anxious because Norma Jeane cannot predict how she will respond. Her coarse words and quick hands might end in a caress or a slap. The friendship offers protection, but not the security of knowing exactly what protection will look like. Its tenderness is inseparable from its risk.

Confidences and the Rooftop

Fleece’s roughness becomes unmistakable when she draws a confidence from Norma Jeane. The child stammers that she is not an orphan: her mother is in hospital, she has a father, and he lives in a large house in Beverly Hills. Fleece laughs at her and pinches her arm hard enough to leave a red mark for hours. The gesture humiliates and hurts Norma Jeane, while also exposing the fragile hope she has just entrusted to her friend. Fleece answers the claim with a bleak insistence that everyone is dead; her bluntness offers no comfort, and her affection cannot be separated from her capacity to wound.

Years later, when Norma Jeane is ten, she escapes to the orphanage roof after another disappointment involving her mother. She hides behind a soot-blackened chimney, where the intermittent light of the RKO neon sign falls across her hands and closed eyelids. Fleece climbs up after her, breathless, and gathers her into strong arms. Norma Jeane breaks down and says that she wishes her mother dead and hates her. Fleece rubs her face against Norma Jeane’s and agrees that she hates her too. Where the earlier pinch answered a vulnerable disclosure with ridicule, the rooftop scene answers rage with physical closeness and shared feeling. Fleece does not correct or soften the outburst; she joins Norma Jeane inside it.

The memory then becomes unstable. Norma Jeane wonders whether the two girls planned to hitchhike to Norwalk and set the hospital on fire, or whether the episode was a vivid dream of flames, screams, and a naked woman running. This uncertainty is important to the remembered friendship: Fleece is present as the companion who might have shared the plan, but the narrative does not confirm that it happened. Later, during a visit to Gladys Mortensen, Norma Jeane learns that her mother attempted suicide in the hospital’s boiler room in the spring of 1936. The discovery gives the remembered terror a concrete historical counterpart without resolving whether the girls’ imagined escape was real.

Searching for Fleece

The friendship reappears when Norma Jeane, now known as Marilyn Monroe, visits the orphanage to distribute gifts. In the refectory she searches the children’s faces for people she remembers, asking herself where Debra Mae and Norma Jeane are. A thin, sullen child catches her attention as a possible Fleece, but the child is a boy. The scene turns the visit into more than a public act of generosity: amid the children gathered to see the star, Norma Jeane looks for the companions who knew her before that identity existed.

She asks an older assistant what became of Fleece. The answer is that Fleece had enlisted in the army’s auxiliary corps; the assistant guesses that by then she must have become at least a sergeant. The information gives Norma Jeane a possible life for her former protector beyond the orphanage, though it offers no reunion. Fleece is neither confirmed dead nor brought back into the present as a known, settled presence.

A separate late-night scene makes that uncertainty more pronounced. Watching a small crowd outside the Wilshire, the Blonde Actress notices a tall, thin girl in jeans and cowboy boots and wonders whether she could be Fleece, immediately recalling that Fleece was dead. The figure is not identified as her. The moment leaves the possibility suspended between recognition, projection, and loss, as the childhood friend seems to reappear among strangers who have gathered to watch Marilyn Monroe.

A Bond Between Protection and Loss

Fleece’s importance lies not in a consistently comforting version of friendship, but in the intensity of her presence in Norma Jeane’s memories. She waits for the smallest girl, draws out a confidence, hurts her, climbs to the roof after her, and embraces her when she is overwhelmed. The sequence holds care and danger together without making either disappear. For Norma Jeane, whose claims to having parents and a home are repeatedly vulnerable, Fleece is a companion who sometimes challenges those hopes cruelly and sometimes stands beside her in anger.

The later searches preserve the friendship as an unresolved attachment. At the orphanage, a boy briefly resembles the absent girl; among the late-night watchers, another stranger may be Fleece, though the thought is immediately shadowed by the belief that she is dead. The assistant’s report of Fleece’s enlistment supplies one concrete account of what happened after childhood, but no final meeting confirms it. Across these scenes, Fleece remains at once the orphanage’s first protector, a friend remembered with anguish, and a person Norma Jeane cannot securely recover from memory.