Eleanor Goddard; Monroe Companion

Eleanor “Bebe” Goddard, a foster sister and teenage friend of Norma Jean Baker, better known as Marilyn Monroe, has died. Goddard was 73.

Frequently a spokeswoman at gatherings of Monroe fans, Goddard died Friday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica. Her friend Steve Campbell said the heavy smoker and activist for smokers’ rights, who attributed her health problems to air pollution surrounding her Burbank home, died of emphysema.

Six months her junior, Goddard long outlived Monroe, who died Aug. 5, 1962, at age 36 of a drug overdose that was ruled a suicide. Described in recent years as “a grandmotherly woman in a tight perm,” Goddard spoke at observances of the 25th, 30th, 35th and other anniversaries of Monroe’s death conducted at the star’s crypt in Westwood Village Memorial Park.

Goddard and Monroe met and became close friends when, after each had been in a series of foster homes, they spent several teenage years in the Van Nuys home of Goddard’s father, Ervin S. “Doc” Goddard and his new wife, Grace McGee Goddard, a close friend of Monroe’s institutionalized mother, Gladys Baker.

Campbell said this week that many of Monroe’s anecdotes about hardships growing up--beatings, hunger and the string of foster homes--were actually borrowed by the star from Goddard’s early experiences.

Goddard told fans about the happy days she and Norma Jean spent going to movie theaters and dreaming of becoming film stars. She said the two girls shared clothes and makeup and talked for hours about whether they would achieve fame.

In 1991, when Goddard revisited their old Van Nuys High School for presentation of a picture of Monroe, she described her famous foster sister: “She was just a really average girl, except she was so much more beautiful than average.”

Disputing an anecdote that the young Marilyn was so skinny she was nicknamed “Norma Jean the Human Bean,” Goddard told the students that Monroe at 15 already had a figure dangerous for any teenager.

“We were the same height, same weight, same everything--except the distribution,” Goddard said.

Goddard told The Times in 1991 that she had last shared a birthday celebration with Monroe in 1953, the year the actress starred in the hit film “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” She said Monroe invited her foster family to her Doheny Drive apartment for dinner and birthday cake.

“It was not-well-cooked liver and kind-of-tough baked potatoes,” Goddard related. “It was the first time I had seen her with a glass of wine and a cigarette, and I was having a fit laughing because she didn’t drink or smoke.”

The foster sister contributed a lock of Monroe’s hair and baby pictures to a time capsule buried at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and scheduled to be opened Aug. 5, 2062, the 100th anniversary of Monroe’s death. Goddard also sold personal items of Monroe to collectors and dealers in celebrity memorabilia.

Goddard relished the rise of Monroe’s stature as an actress in the decades after the star’s death.

“She was so put down by her studio and other people who really didn’t know her well when she was alive,” Goddard told The Times. “To me it is just a glorious experience that the interest in her keeps increasing and that she is up there thumbing her nose at them.”