Hospital records for her mom....

___Gladys was not the character in that libelous movie you mentioned, nor, and especially was that Marilyn Monroe. I keep waiting for what's left of Monroe's family to sue over it, it was almost completely made up. Gladys was most certainly mentally unstable, aggravated by religious fundamental fervor. This part of the 1958 film 'The Goddess' got right. And, no matter what you read Gladys did not spend her entire life hospitalized. She was out several times, at least once with Norma Jeane, she married a third time and in her old age she was out for good riding her bike around the neighborhood in Florida where she lived with Marilyn's half sister Bernice. And, there was press coverage of Gladys when she walked away from the hospital in 1963, and in her later years, though this mainly consisted of tabloid jornalism. She never spoke to the press directly.

I wonder why Monroe wasn't closer to her mom...in that she gravitated so much toward Arthur Miller's parents, the Strasberg family, etc. If Bernice could forge a lasting relationship with Gladys, I wonder why Monroe couldn't.

Maybe Monroe did have a more substantial relationship with her mom than she generally disclosed....because it served her public image (and some part of her own personality) to forever cast herself as an orphan.

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___Neither Marilyn or Bernice had close relationships with Gladys, even though Gladys ended up with Bernice. It was Marilyn who took care of Gladys financially. Of course they all corresponded, and those rambling letters usually upset Marilyn. One came in 1961 while Bernice was visiting Marilyn in NYC. There was an attempt to get closer in those last year's between the sisters and Marilyn wanted Bernice and family out to California in 62 to go to Disneyland among other things, but because of all the film turmoil it was postponed to 63. And Bernice helped DiMaggio with Marilyn's funeral. She much later wrote a lovely book on Marilyn co-authored by her daughter Mona, 'My Sister Marilyn'.

Yes, I've read the My Sister Marilyn book : )

IMAGINE if the mom wrote one.

Boy, I'd like to read THAT!!!

___Gladys could reveal a lot of mystery. We did learn a lot anyway via that book, like how Norma Jeane really got her name. Just a few days ago as I watched an old Marilyn bio, there it was again, "she was named after Norma Talmadge, and Jean Harlow" Not! The biggest reveal would be confirmation of something that is pretty much now taken as fact, who Marilyn's father was. Charles Stanley Gifford, even though he and his family have consistently denied it. Also, Marilyn's first husband James Dougherty had some things to say about Gladys, I suppose there really isn't a whole lot that could be added to her story. She did not approve of Marilyn in films, which only added to Marilyn's already enormous psychological impediments to having a happy life, and another reason, should she need one, not to visit her mother.