The Genius and the Goddess Read Online Free Page B

orphanages became increasingly overcrowded
(as prisons are today), the food, facilities and adult
supervision deteriorated, while neglect, punishment and abuse
increased. The reputation of orphanages was so forbidding that many
of them took names with pleasant connotations. The Jewish Orphan
Asylum became Bellefaire, St. Mary's Female Asylum became
Parmadale, the Protestant Orphan Asylum became Beech Brook. The
orphans were eager to be adopted or taken into foster homes, where
they would at least have the semblance of family life. When promising
parents appeared, the children were exhibited like slaves on an
auction block. In 1925, pedestrians looked up to see an institution
with "barred windows, tiny hands clutching the bars, against which
were placed listless white faces." One girl, lamenting the lack of affection,
"felt so lonely and forlorn." Many children, not surprisingly, had
chronic physical illnesses and severe psychological problems.
    But foster parents, especially during hard times, could be quite
mercenary; and officials, desperate to place the children, often ignored
the minimal standards required for proper care. Another authority
noted that "in 1933 an estimated 120,000 children stretched the foster
care system to its limits." The journalist Art Buchwald, who spent
most of his youth in foster homes, observed that "the foster parents
were more interested in the money they received than in the children."
In Tennessee, two-year-old twins were placed "in the care of
a seventy-nine-year-old blind woman who was losing her mind. . . .
Sixteen children were living in the attic of a home that failed to pass
a fire inspection." 4
    In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest Lady Bracknell's
memorably witty remark shows the absurdity of blaming the victim:
"To lose one parent . . . may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both
looks like carelessness." Yet children usually react to their loss by
blaming themselves. BothCharles Dickens andRudyard Kipling
described traumatic experiences of abandonment in childhood that
left them, like Norma Jeane, permanently angry and hurt. Dickens
wrote that "my whole nature was so penetrated with grief and humiliation
. . . that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I . . . wander
desolately back to that time of my life." Kipling agreed that "when
young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion,
and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that
knowledge." 5 Norma Jeane had been suddenly separated from her
mother, her guardian and several foster families. Grace now told her
they were going for a pleasant car ride, but she soon arrived at a
strange, hostile and frightening place.
    TheLos Angeles Orphans Home Society – now called Hollygrove
and still standing at 815 North El Centro in Hollywood – was not
as forbidding as it first seemed to a small child. The privately
endowed, nonsectarian home was founded in 1880, and its colonial-style,
two-story red-brick building was set back on a wide lawn.
The dormitories, dining room and play areas were clean and neat.
Inside, there was a large recreation room with toys and games, radio
and phonograph, auditorium and stage. Outside, on five acres, were
swings, seesaws, exercise bars, sandboxes and even a swimming pool.
The Home housed fifty to sixty children, a third of them street
urchins or runaways, the rest actual orphans. Norma Jeane lived
with twenty-five other girls, aged six to fourteen, in a high-ceilinged
dorm, with large windows, behind the main building. The boys
slept in a separate dorm, but all the meals, sports, games, activities
and schooling were coeducational.
    According to her over-optimistic file, which reads as if she were
on holiday and trying to please her keepers, Norma Jeane seems to
have adjusted remarkably well. Her dossier states that her "behavior
is normal. . . . She is bright and sun-shiny. . . . The school reports on
her are good. . . . She is quiet. . . . She sleeps