Word: norma
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...soon as Norma Jeane could understand what was meant, she was forced by the woman of the house to promise that she would never drink or smoke or swear. At every childish annoyance, she was told that she was headed straight for hell; on every possible occasion, she was made to say her prayers, and on every Sunday morning, noon and night, and sometimes once or twice in the middle of the week, the little girl was marched away to church. At home she had to scrub the floors before she was five years old, and do the family dishes...
...Friend of the Family." Playacting, she remembers, was frowned on in that house. When Norma Jeane danced and sang and acted out her childish fantasies, she was sternly informed that such things were evil. She learned to hide in the woodshed when she wanted to pretend "a life more interesting than the one I had." But among her memories of this period is the recollection that at the age of six, she was raped by a grown man-"a friend," she recalls, "of the family...
...obsessive. She began to hear a noise in her head at night-and she began to brood about killing herself. The family noticed the change in her, and the whispers went around: "We have to watch her very carefully. It's in the family, you know." Norma Jeane knew what they were saying, and sank deeper into her troubles...
Then there was relief; she was sent to live with another family. But the change in atmospheric pressure was so sudden that she got the moral bends. Everybody in the house was a movie extra, and the first day Norma Jeane was there they gave her whisky bottles to play with, taught her a card game and put her up to a hula dance. "They drank, they smoked, they swore," says Marilyn. "It used to keep me busy praying for them...
...When Norma Jeane was about eight years old, her mother collapsed for the second time and was taken away to a state hospital, where she was kept until her daughter could afford the private care she has today. "I was sorry she was sick," says Marilyn. "But we never had any kind of relationship. I didn't see her very often. To me she was just the woman with the red hair...