This article originally appeared in the April 1994 issue of Architectural Digest.
She was the most photographed woman in America, and very likely the most peripatetic. There was something of the pilgrim about her, for she was a ceaseless wanderer in search of herself. And even after 20th Century-Fox had rechristened her Marilyn Monroe, she briefly took the name Journey Evers, as if to signify the continuous motion of her life.
The official certificate of her birth in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, records her name as Norma Jeane Mortenson, but no one was quite certain of her father's identity. "I was probably a mistake," she said years later. "My mother didn't want me. I probably got in her way, and I must have been a disgrace to her." This was an accurate assessment, for Gladys Baker, a nomadic flapper terrified of responsibility, gave her two-week-old baby over to the care of a foster family. For seven years the child lived with her grandmother's neighbors, Albert and Ida Bolender, a sober and devout couple, in a four-room bungalow in Hawthorne, near what is now Los Angeles International Airport.