Norma Jeane and Gladys's adoption letters

Norma Jeane and Gladys's adoption letters record a request for a different home and the answer that closes that possibility. Dated October 11, 1937, Norma Jeane Baker’s appeal describes the Mounts’ kindness and her hope of becoming their daughter; twelve days later, Gladys Mortensen responds that she will not consent to the adoption. The exchange is significant not only for its outcome, but for the unequal hopes it holds: a child imagines a safe, welcoming household, while her mother answers by asserting a living bond and anticipating reunion.

The appeal and its setting

The surviving account places Norma Jeane’s letter in the orphanage, where adoption by the Mounts is presented as a possible change in her circumstances. She has met the couple, whom she describes as kind. Mr. and Mrs. Mount live in Pasadena: he is a lawyer, and she has a large garden, especially full of roses. Their home is spacious and includes a pond. The description gives the proposed adoption a concrete setting, not merely the abstract promise of a new family.

Norma Jeane also recalls a connection with Gladys that is mediated by poetry. She identifies a poem in Gladys’s book as her favorite, remembers that Aunt Jesse brought her the book, and associates it with Gladys reading poems to her. The detail sets a remembered form of maternal closeness beside the separation of the present. The child is writing from the orphanage, but the poem supplies a shared past she can address to her mother.

The Mounts take Norma Jeane on outings on some Sundays, and she has visited their house. She reports that they have applied to adopt her and hopes Gladys will give permission; she says that she hopes for it too. The appeal therefore turns on a decision that belongs to Gladys. Norma Jeane describes the prospective home and the couple’s application, but cannot make the change herself. Her letter is both a report of an available possibility and a request for her mother to authorize it.

A child’s request

The letter’s emotional movement runs from remembered intimacy to hope for adoption, then to a direct appeal for consent. Norma Jeane invokes the poems Gladys once read to her before explaining the Mounts’ circumstances. That ordering makes the request more than a description of a desirable household: it is addressed to someone whose past care still matters to her. The remembered reading gives her a way to approach Gladys as her mother even while asking to be received into another family.

Her account emphasizes ordinary features of the Mounts’ life: Sunday trips, a garden, a large house, and a pond. These details make the possibility of living with them legible through experiences she has already had. She does not present adoption as an accomplished fact; it remains dependent on Gladys’s permission. The letter’s hope is consequently cautious in its circumstances even as its appeal is earnest.

Norma Jeane closes by saying that she prays for both of them and hopes Gladys will allow the adoption. She promises gratitude and asks for God’s blessing on her mother. The religious language frames consent as something for which she is asking with humility, while also expressing how much the decision matters to her. The letter offers no indication that Gladys has already agreed; its central action is the request itself.

Gladys’s answer

Twelve days pass before a reply arrives. The narrative identifies it as the first and last letter Gladys would write to Norma Jeane in the orphanage, giving this response a particular weight within their correspondence. It is not the beginning of an exchange in which the two negotiate the proposal: the account presents one appeal, one answer, and no further letter from Gladys to her daughter in the orphanage.

Gladys rejects the adoption and describes it as an insult she will resist for as long as she remains alive and able to fight. She argues that Norma Jeane already has a mother, and presents herself as someone who will soon be well and strong enough to take her daughter home. The reply therefore answers the practical question of permission with a refusal, while offering recovery and reunion as the alternative future. It records Gladys’s stated expectation, not a subsequent recovery or return.

The contrast between the two letters is marked. Norma Jeane makes her case through memories, descriptions of the Mounts, hope, and prayer; Gladys answers with emphatic opposition and her claim to the maternal relationship. The response does not address the details Norma Jeane gives about the garden, house, or outings. Instead, it rests on Gladys’s position as the living mother and on her belief that she will be able to bring her daughter home.

What the correspondence preserves

The exchange documents a narrow but consequential decision: the Mounts have applied to adopt Norma Jeane, and Gladys refuses to permit it. It does not establish what later happened to the application beyond that refusal, nor does it show the Mounts’ response. Its evidence is limited to the request, the mother’s answer, and the hopes each expresses about where Norma Jeane might belong.

The letters also preserve different uses of the mother-daughter bond. Norma Jeane invokes their shared past as a point of connection while asking to join another household; Gladys invokes the same relationship as the reason adoption must not occur. In the daughter’s letter, the remembered poetry helps make an appeal for a possible new home. In the mother’s reply, the fact of being a mother becomes the basis for refusing that home and anticipating a return.

Gladys signs the reply as Norma Jeane’s affectionate mother and adds that her daughter knows who is writing. That closing reasserts recognition and intimacy after the refusal, though it cannot resolve the difference between their positions. Taken together, the letters leave the reader with two incompatible expectations: Norma Jeane hopes permission will open a future with the Mounts, while Gladys insists that she will recover and reclaim her daughter. The correspondence ends on Gladys’s refusal, with the reunion she predicts still only an expectation.