"This sad bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine."

   

   

"No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl.
All little girls should be told they're pretty, even if they aren't."

"When I was a kid, the world often seemed a pretty grim place. I loved to escape through games and make-believe. You can do that even better as an actress, but sometimes it seems you escape altogether and people never let you come back."

"I had to learn to pretend in order to ~ I don't know ~ block the grimness. The whole world seemed kind of closed to me...I felt on the outside of everything, and all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend-game."

"Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house, and I'd sit all day and way into the night...I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened ~ and there was no popcorn either! I dreamed of myself walking proudly in beautiful clothes and being admired by everyone and overhearing words of praise."

"I don't like to talk about my own past, it's an unpleasant experience I'm trying to forget."

Norma Jeane's foster mother Grace Goddard (left) Grace & Doc Goddard on their wedding day (right)

   

"You could buy a sackful of old bread at the Holmes Bakery for twenty-five cents. Aunt Grace and I would stand in line for hours waiting to fill our sack. When I looked at her she would grin at me and say, "Don't worry Norma Jeane. Your going to be a beautiful girl when you grow up. I can feel it in my bones."

"The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see, hear, or touch.
I used to draw pictures, he looked a little like Aunt Grace and a little like clark Gable."

"One day she packed my clothes in my suitcase, and off we went in her car. She drove and drove for a long time without saying where she was taking me. She never said a word when I asked her. She just kept driving, looking straight ahead."

"We finally arrived at a three-story brick building. I began to panic. I cried. I couldn't catch my breath. The sign said LOS ANGELES ORPHANS HOME. I cried and protested as hard as I could; I can still remember, she had to drag me inside. I was only nine years old then, but something like this I'll never forget. My heart was broken."

"The promises she made to me to someday take me out of that place seemed then like only promises. I really didn't believe her."

Norma Jeane (left) with a friend at the orphange.

"As nice as they tried to be at the orphange, it never made up for the hurt that had been done by Aunt Grace. I wanted more then anything in the world to be loved. The world around me just crumbled. It seemed nobody wanted me, not even my mother's best friend. I was nine when I entered the orphange and eleven when Aunt Grace finally took me out."

"When a little girl feels lost and lonely and that nobody wants her, it's something she never can forget as long as she lives."

"I learned sometime later that the day Aunt Grace took me to the orphange she cried all morning."

"In the kitchen you could earn money there... I washed 100 plates, 100 cups, spoons and forks and you made five cents a month. And they took one penny for Sunday school."

"I sometimes told the other orphans I had really wonderful parents who were away on a long trip and would come for me any time, and once I wrote a postcard to myself and signed it from Mother and Daddy. Of course nobody believed it. But I didn't care. I wanted to think it was true. And maybe if I thought it was true it would come true."

"If she is not treated with much reassurance and patience... she appears frightened. I recommend her to be put with a good family." ~ Mrs. Dewey from the orphanage 1937

Ten years after Norma Jeane left the orphanage, Mrs. Dewey added a final entry in her file: "Norma Jeane Baker has great success in pictures and promises to be a star. She is a very beautiful woman and is now acting as Marilyn Monroe."

Arthur Miller wrote that Marilyn never got over the sense of abandonment she felt at being placed at the orphanage. Ever after she could "walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents as a child or have spent time in orphanages...There is a "do you like me?" in an orphan's eyes, an appeal out of a bottomless lonliness that no parented person can really know."

Grace Goddard's Aunt Ana, who also became Norma Jeane's "Auntie"

"She changed my whole life. I guess Auntie Ana Lower was the first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her...it was called 'I Love Her.' She never hurt me, not once. She couldn't. She was all kindness and all love. She was good to me."
~ MM to Maurice Zolotow

"Auntie Ana went and died on me. She actually liked my new name of Marilyn and called me that a couple of times when she could remember. Her love of me was unconditional and she had great faith in the fact that I could become a movie star."

"There's only one person in the world that I've ever really loved. That was Aunt Ana...Aunt Ana was sure - surer than I am now - that I was right in my ambition to be an actress and that I'd be a success. But she'll never know whether she was right or wrong. she died before my first bit part."
~ MM to Clarice Evans in the late 1940's

"She was the Auntie that helped me dream my dream. She also called me a "mental beachcomber" whatever she meant by that."

"Auntie Ana will be missed by Norma Jeane and whoever I become."

   

"I was never used to being happy, so that wasn't something I ever took for granted. I did sort of think, you know, marriage did that. You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy ~ that's it, successful, happy, and on time."

"I have a hole in my heart....and I don't know how to fill it...."
~ Norma Jeane

                   
~ Norma Jeane Age 12 to 17

"My arrival in school, with painted lips and darkened brows, started everybody buzzing. Why I was a siren, I hadn't the faintest idea. I didn't want to be kissed, and I didn't dream of being seduced by a duke or a movie star. The truth was that with all my lipstick and mascara and precocious curves, I was as unresponsive as a fossil. But I seemed to affect people quite otherwise."
~ MM to Ben Hechi on the student Norma Jeane

~ 1941 Freshman class, Norma Jeane was 15

"I stood in front of the mirror one morning and put lipstick on my lips. I darkened my blond eyebrows.
I had no money for clothes. The lipstick and the mascara were like clothes."

"Girls being jealous of me! Girls frightened of losing their boyfriends because I was more attractive!
These were no longer daydreams made up to hide lonely hours. They were truths!"

"I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people."

"My admirers all said...I gave off vibrations that floored them.
I always felt they were talking about somebody else, not me."

"I used to lie awake at night wondering why the boys came after me.
I didn't want them that way. I wanted to play games in the street, not in the bedroom."

"The boys continued to come after me as if I were a vampire with a rose in my teeth."

"The girls disliked me more and more as I grew older. Now, instead of being accused of stealing combs, nickels, or necklaces, I was accused of stealing young men."

All the images are thumbnailed, click on image for the full size.