The orphanage’s Christmas gift-giving event

The orphanage’s Christmas gift-giving event brings a dazzling holiday spectacle to the Los Angeles Orphanage, but for nine-year-old Norma Jeane Baker its central gift is also a lesson in how quickly attention can turn into exposure and abandonment. She is lifted from the line by the visiting Principe Misterioso, displayed before cameras, and given a soft cloth tiger. The public moment lasts only briefly; afterward she is returned to the ranks of the orphans, and even the toy she treasures vanishes within days.

A lavish arrival

The visitors arrive two nights before Christmas, bringing two dozen stuffed turkeys for the holiday meal and a five-metre Christmas tree for the parlour. The tree is made to seem almost fantastical: tall, luminous, decorated with coloured glass and topped by a blond angel with raised eyes and hands joined in prayer. Red gift parcels are piled beneath it. A van in the driveway broadcasts Christmas carols, including Silent Night, We Three Kings, and Deck the Halls, at a volume that makes the children’s hearts beat faster.

The children have been kept in the dining room for more than an hour after supper without explanation. Then staff hurry them out in pairs and tell them to stay in line. For the younger children and newcomers, the sudden movement and noise are bewildering; Norma Jeane is pushed along by those behind her without knowing what is happening. At the far end of the parlour, on a platform prepared for the occasion, she sees a handsome dark-haired Prince and a beautiful blond Princess. Her first interpretation is intensely personal: she believes they have come for her alone.

Charity staged for an audience

The celebration is not simply a private distribution of presents. A television crew records the royal couple handing out gifts, while photographers jostle for the best positions and flashes sweep through the crowded room. Edith Mittelstadt, the orphanage’s director, accepts a Christmas certificate from the visitors. Her face is flushed with emotion and tightened into an awkward smile; beside her, the Prince and Princess wear bright, practiced smiles. The contrast makes the ceremony’s public character visible: the director’s response appears unrehearsed, while the visitors are already performing for the cameras.

Their amplified greetings and declarations of affection for the children bring an answering burst of happiness. Around them, however, the parlour is febrile rather than serene. The microphone crackles, candy canes and candied apples are running short, and an old rumour that the previous year’s presents did not reach every child gives the older orphans reason to press forward. Assistants pull unruly children out of line, sometimes striking or kicking them as they send them upstairs. The visiting couple and the cameras either do not see this or behave as though it does not matter outside the spotlight. The scene’s bright display of benevolence thus coexists with the institution’s rough discipline, much of it kept beyond the frame.

Norma Jeane on the platform

When Norma Jeane reaches the Prince, the excitement around her has become physical: noise fills her ears, someone’s elbow presses into her back, and she has little time to study the man before he takes her hands and lifts her onto the platform. Up close, the Principe Misterioso looks older than he did from a distance. His ruddy, poreless skin recalls her doll in its former splendour; his lips seem painted red and his eyes heavily made up. But the lights and commotion leave her too overwhelmed to concentrate on his appearance.

He gives her a candy cane, a candied apple, and one of the red parcels, then turns her toward the cameras. The photographers are all men. They laugh at the startled expression on the nine-year-old’s face, and one calls for her to hold it while the flashes go off. Photographs are being made for Variety, the Los Angeles Times, Screen World, Photoplay, Parade, Pageant, Pix, and the Associated Press. Norma Jeane cannot offer the smile she knows from looking at the Amica Magica in the mirror, where she can make many private, carefully varied expressions. In this instant the friend in the mirror has left her to be caught by surprise. She resolves not to be taken by surprise again.

The ceremony gives her a short, dazzling passage into the centre of attention, but that attention belongs to the cameras and the staged occasion. Once the photographs have been taken, she is brought down from the platform. An assistant brusquely directs her toward the line of orphans going upstairs, and she is once again one of the smallest children in the institution. The abrupt return makes the platform’s apparent honour feel less like a lasting recognition than a momentary role assigned for the spectacle.

The tiger and its disappearance

The parcel contains a small cloth Bengal tiger, about the size of a kitten and plainly intended for a much younger child. Norma Jeane is nine, but she loves its soft material, yellow eyes, flattened nose, ticklish elastic whiskers, black-and-yellow stripes, and wire-stiffened tail that can be bent into different shapes. She calls it her tiger and remembers it as the Christmas gift given to her by the Prince. The candy cane and candied apple are stolen by another girl in the dormitory and devoured; Norma Jeane does not mind, because the toy is what matters to her.

She hides the tiger beneath her mattress, near the middle of the bed frame. A few days later, after returning from cleaning with the other girls, she finds the mattress lifted and the tiger gone. Her doll has not been touched. Many toys have been given to the orphanage, including tigers, pandas, rabbits, dogs, and dolls; the older children have received items such as pens, pencil cases, and notebooks. Norma Jeane cannot identify which tiger was hers, and even if she could, she would not take it from its new owner. She would not steal it back as it was stolen from her. Her response turns the missing toy into more than a second loss: she refuses to pass her own suffering on to another child.

Narrative significance

The event moves from abundance to scarcity, from a child’s belief that the visitors have come for her to the impersonal return to institutional life. Its most vivid objects—the blazing tree, the red parcel, the camera flashes, and the carefully hidden tiger—carry that reversal. The photographers preserve a public image of the gift ceremony, but the child’s remembered experience is defined by surprise, brief exposure, and disappearance. The tiger’s loss also brings the scene to its quiet moral conclusion: Norma Jeane knows what it is to have something taken from her, yet will not make another child suffer in order to reclaim it.