After a cursory search of the household, he determined that she must have quickly grabbed her coat and run out the front door. It was a balmy evening, but she had been wearing her nightgown and he assumed she wouldn’t have left wearing just that.
Jim stood at the front window in the darkened living room for the better part of an hour. Then, in the black and motionless streetscape, he saw a shock of white. It was his wife, wearing only the nightgown in which he had last seen her, and she was walking very quickly—almost running—toward the house. Jim quickly moved to the bedroom and pretended to be asleep. A minute later, Norma Jeane bolted through the front door and jumped into the bed next to her husband, clinging to him desperately.
“There’s a man after me,” she whispered urgently.
“What?”
Norma Jeane repeated that a man was after her. She explained that she needed to leave the house, and as she was walking away she noticed someone following her. Jim said it made sense that she was being followed, given that she was wearing a nightgown. “He probably thinks you’re out of your mind,” he opined.
Anxiously, Norma Jeane went on to explain that the man she had seen was especially quick. He was in a tree at one point, she recalled. Then she saw him sitting in a darkened house… a parked car. To Jim, either this man had superhuman abilities or was, he feared, a figment of his new wife’s imagination. She then asked Jim to search the house for her stalker. He disappeared for a moment and came back claiming he had done it. He hadn’t, though.
He turned to Norma Jeane, who was now visibly shaking. “See? I told you, there’s no one here,” he told her calmly. According to what Jim Dougherty recalled to friends, this was the first time he saw his young wife as a woman with more than simple insecurities. He began to wonder if her future might hold the same terrible fate as her mother’s.
“But he was following me,” she replied.
A deep sigh escaped his lips. “Come on, Norma Jeane,” Jim said. “This guy couldn’t have been everywhere. Don’t you see how that sounds crazy?”
Jim’s last word—“crazy”—hung in the air as the young woman’s anxious and alert eye contact faded. She silently lay down, her expression now blank and distant.
Gladys’s Clever Plan
Norma Jeane and Jim never again discussed her strange stalking incident. It was just pushed aside as if it hadn’t happened. In most other respects, their marriage seemed to be going fairly well into 1943. However, there were other troubling signs. For instance, Norma Jeane insisted on calling Jim “Daddy.” Martin Evans, one of Jim’s friends at the time, recalled, “He told me he didn’t like it. It worried him, considering that she didn’t know who her father was and it was an issue for her. He said, ‘I don’t want her to think of me as her father. I’m her husband.’ He also told me that she would threaten to do herself harm if anything happened to their union. ‘I’ll jump off a bridge, Daddy,’ she would say, and it didn’t seem like a figure of speech to him. He suspected that she might actually do it. She was intensely insecure but, yes, the Daddy business bothered him the most. He felt that if he corrected her or chastised her, she would melt into tears. He was always walking on eggshells around her, I think.”
During this period of time, Norma Jeane’s mother, Gladys Baker, was still institutionalized. Gladys’s life at the mental hospital in San Jose was, in many ways, one of fantasy. She was constantly in a state of delusion. * She desperately wanted to be released and had done everything she could think of to get out of the sanitarium, even contacting her long-lost daughter, Berniece. However, Gladys seemed to know the sad truth: No one wanted her. Rather than face this, she fantasized a scenario that included her being a part of the lives of her daughter Norma Jeane and even her daughter’s father. She was clever in the way she went about trying to manifest it as well. She decided that a man from her past might just provide the ticket she needed to obtain her freedom.
By this time, Grace Goddard had moved to Chicago. During a brief visit to California, she decided to visit Gladys Baker in the San Jose sanitarium, and then visit with her friend Ethel Dougherty in Los Angeles. On the morning Grace came to visit, Gladys told her that she had some stunning news. She revealed that Charles Stanley Gifford—the man with whom she’d begun having an affair before she was divorced from Edward Mortenson so long ago—was Norma Jeane’s father. Of course, as the story goes, Gladys had told Gifford that he was the baby’s father seventeen years earlier when she got pregnant, but he refused to believe her. Grace was not surprised by Gladys’s revelation. The two women had talked about Gifford in the past and Grace had her suspicions, but this was the first time Gladys actually confirmed them.
So what was going on in Gladys’s head? What was her motivation behind confiding in Grace? It’s not far-fetched that she hoped Grace would tell Norma Jeane the news and that her daughter would then track down Gifford and inform him that he was her father. Then, in Gladys’s fantasy, Gifford’s response would be to acknowledge his beautiful daughter and decide to start a new life with her. Once father and daughter were at long last united, who would be missing in the equation? Gladys, of course—the mother. Indeed, it would seem that Gladys found a way of possibly enrolling someone entirely new, someone yet to be approached—Charles Stanley Gifford—to get her released from the sanitarium.
After leaving Gladys, Grace didn’t know how to proceed with the news. Should she tell Norma Jeane? The girl was finally happy. What would this news do to her? Should she keep it to herself? Truly, she was in a quandary. She decided to talk to her close friend Ethel—Jim Dougherty’s mother and Marilyn’s mother-in-law.
Ethel was certain that Norma Jeane needed the information. “She deserves to know the truth,” she said, according to one account. “But what if it’s not true?” Grace wondered. “Can we trust what Gladys says? And how will it affect Norma Jeane?” Ethel was certain that Norma Jeane needed to hear Gladys’s news, true or not. “It should come from you,” Grace told Ethel. “I think it really should come from a family member.”
Of course, Norma Jeane was surprised when Ethel told her that her father was a man named Charles Stanley Gifford. “She had mixed emotions, as I recall it,” Martin Evans said, according to what Jim Dougherty had told him. “She was afraid of contacting him, but she knew she had to do it.”
On February 1, 1943, Norma Jeane wrote to Grace Goddard and told her that she was looking forward to actually meeting with Gifford. She’d fantasized about her father her entire life, she wrote, and felt certain that he would want to know her as well. After conducting some research, she located two former employees at Consolidated Studios who had known Gifford and from them got his telephone number. Then one night, with Jim and his mother, Ethel, at her side, Norma Jeane nervously made the call.
“This is Norma Jeane,” she said, a tremulous quality in her voice. “I’m Gladys Baker’s daughter.” A few seconds later, she put down the receiver. “He hung up on me,” she said. She began to cry. Jim tried to console her, but, of course, it was difficult.
“That was a real blow, Jim told me,” said Martin Evans. “A real blow.”
Today, Charles Stanley Gifford Jr., who is eighty-five, refuses to believe that story. “It never happened,” he insists. “That sounds like fiction—something she [Marilyn Monroe] created. She made up all kinds of fanciful stories about her life. What I think is that she told people she was making that call, and she even dialed some number and called someone, but it wasn’t my father. My father would not have hung up on her. He would have wanted to know more about her, about Gladys. I think she made it up, stood there, dialed a phone… then made the whole thing up in front of witnesses.”
“She was disappointed,” Jim Dougherty said many years later—and he was actually present at the call. “Gifford missed a good chance to be a father. I didn’t have much respect for him, obviously. I just gave Norma Jeane some t.l.c. and she eventually came out of it alright. But it was sad.”
Trouble in Paradise
Always in the back of their minds was the reality that their marriage was not a love match, which was doubtless one of the primary reasons why Jim and Norma Jeane Dougherty decided early on not to have children. In fact, Norma Jeane was very much afraid of being a mother. She was just seventeen and, as she later put it, “terrified of the thought that I would become pregnant. Women in my family had always made such a mess of mothering.” Later she would say that she always had a certain amount of dread that the marriage would end, Jim would take off, and “there would be this little girl in a blue dress and white blouse living in her ‘aunt’s’ house, washing dishes, being last in the bath water on Saturday night.”
In the spring of 1943, Jim Dougherty joined the Merchant Marine. He was soon assigned to Catalina Island, just a short cruise ship ride away from Los Angeles. Therefore, he and Norma Jeane were able to take an apartment on the island. The Dougherty marriage was in trouble by the time the couple got to Catalina, though. Norma Jeane was popular there with her little bathing suits and big smile—and he didn’t like it. Also, she began to drink alcohol—though not to excess—and that bothered him too, mostly because he was afraid that it might cloud her judgment and cause her to be unfaithful. He needn’t have worried, though. “My fidelity was due to my lack of interest in sex,” she would later explain.
It’s interesting that Norma Jeane referred to a trip she and Gladys took to Catalina in a three-page letter to her half sister, Berniece. (The trip obviously occurred sometime before Gladys was institutionalized.) Responding to the first letter Berniece had sent her, she wrote from Catalina Island. In part, she wrote:
“I just can’t tell you how much you look like mother.… Aunt Ana [Lower] said that she could see a slight resemblance between you and I and that you looked more like my mother than I did. I have my mother [sic] eyes and forehead and hairline but the rest of me is like my dad. I don’t know if you have ever heard of Catalina Island… my mother brought me over for the summer when I was about seven yr. old. I remember going to the Casino to a dance with her, of course I didn’t dance, but she let me sit on the side and watch her, and I remember it was way after my bedtime too… the Maritime Services held a big dance at the same Casino and Jimmie and I went. It was the funniest feeling to be dancing on that same floor ten years later.”
She continued, asking Berniece if she and her husband, Paris, would come out to California, and proceeded to give advice on what type of military service Paris should apply for: “the Maritime Service… so a person can disenroll honorably on his own accord and can go about and do pretty much the way he pleases.”
She ended the letter with, “I do hope you will write to me and tell me all about yourself.… With much love, Norma Jeane. P.S. Thank you again for the picture… everyone… asks, ‘Who’s that nice looking couple?’ and of course I explain proudly that that is my sister and her husband.”
After a year, Jim was transferred to the western Pacific. Despite any problems in the union, saying goodbye to him was still difficult on the day he set sail from San Pedro, California. Norma Jeane tried to be strong in the face of what must have seemed like yet another abandonment in her life, and for the most part she put up a brave front. She moved in with Jim’s parents again and waited for word from her husband.
During this time, Norma Jeane Dougherty got her first job, at a place called Radioplane. Located in Burbank, the company manufactured drones, small planes that flew by remote control and were used as targets for war training. Her job was to spray varnish on the pieces that constituted each plane’s assembly. “It wasn’t an easy job,” said Anna DeCarlo, whose mother also worked at Radioplane at the same time. “The hours were long, sometimes up to twelve hours a day. The varnish was smelly. It got in her hair and all over her hands and was impossible to wash away. She was late for work a lot. In fact, she started getting a reputation of being late for everything, all the time. However, she was very popular with the other employees. She was known as being very empathetic, someone you could go to with your problems.”
With Jim gone so much of the time, Norma Jeane couldn’t help but feel lonely. Therefore, at the end of October 1944 she decided to take all of the money she had earned at Radioplane and go on a trip by rail, first to meet her sister, Berniece, now twenty-five, who had moved to Detroit by this time, and then to see Grace Goddard in Chicago. For Norma Jeane to finally be able to meet her sibling was almost unbelievable to her. She had anticipated it for so long, and the time had finally come. When she got to Detroit she was met at the train station by Berniece, her daughter Mona Rae, and husband, Paris. Paris’s sister, Niobe, was also there to meet Norma Jeane.
“Norma Jeane had written to tell me what kind of outfit she would be wearing and what color it would be,” Berniece recalled. “Paris and Niobe and I walked out to the tracks and stood waiting while the train screeched to a stop. I wondered which one of us would recognize her first, or if we might possibly miss her. Well, there was no chance of missing her! All the passengers stepping off looked so ordinary, and then all of a sudden, there was this tall gorgeous girl. * All of us shouted at once. None of the other passengers looked anything like that: tall, so pretty and fresh, and wearing what she had described, a cobalt blue wool suit and a hat with a heart shaped dip in the brim.”
The visit was a good one, not surprisingly. The two sisters got to know one another and spent a great deal of time talking about family history, trying to put together the pieces of stories they’d heard, and looking at photos of relatives. While studying pictures of Gladys—so beautiful in her youth—Berniece wondered what she looked like now. Norma Jeane said she was “still fairly pretty,” but also told her that Gladys never smiled. She also allowed that Gladys was “a stranger” to her. “Part of me wants to be with her,” she said, “and part of me is afraid of her.”
They also talked about Berniece’s father, Jasper, the man who had taken her and her brother from Gladys so long ago and raised them with a new wife. As it turned out, Berniece confessed, she and her father weren’t close either. She cited his drinking problem as an issue. She also said that she loved her stepmother very much—the woman who had raised her in Gladys’s stead.
The pleasant visit was abruptly ended when Norma Jeane learned that her husband had an unexpected leave. So she raced off to see Grace in Chicago before returning to Van Nuys. It’s interesting to note that Norma Jeane was at this time sending money to her “Aunt” Grace because apparently Grace and Doc had run into financial difficulties. Norma Jeane certainly wasn’t making much at her job, but somehow she found a way to be generous with her salary to someone who had loved her very much over the years. It’s also noteworthy that she seemed to forgive Grace for abandoning her when she and her family moved to Virginia without her. By this time, Norma Jeane probably knew that life has its complex twists and turns and people don’t always get what they want—and that forgiveness is key to getting on with the business of living.
It was when Norma Jeane returned to California from this trip that her entire world was changed by a fluke moment, in a dramatic way that neither she nor anyone in her life could ever have imagined.
Overnight Success
At the end of 1944, when Norma Jeane Dougherty returned to work after her vacation, she and a few other women who worked with her were asked to pose for photographs by a military unit that was making a film for army training purposes. The pictures would also appear in a government magazine called Yank. She wasn’t at all sure that she could do it, but she knew she wanted to try. For many years, Grace Goddard had told her that she was pretty, that she was special, and that one day she would be in show business. Of course, this wasn’t exactly show business. However, it was definitely exciting. On the day that the photographers, including one named David Conover, came to take her picture in her work clothes—drab gray slacks and a green blouse—she couldn’t have been more thrilled. It came easy to her. She wasn’t at all nervous. A single moment can alter a person’s en
tire future, and just such a moment occurred when Conover took his first frame of footage of the voluptuous yet somehow chaste-seeming Norma Jeane. Her life changed in that second. “My own future with Norma Jeane was in jeopardy the moment that army photographer clicked his shutter,” Jim Dougherty once observed. “Only I didn’t know it.”
The phrase “overnight success story” is often used when describing the rapid ascent of certain celebrities to the upper echelons of show business. Often it’s just hyperbole. In the case of Norma Jeane Mortensen—soon to be Marilyn Monroe—it happens to be the truth. The story has been told so many times, it can be easily explained by saying that she became popular with photographers and very quickly became an in-demand model. Of course, over the years it has been speculated and even reported as fact that she had sex with these photographers in order to get ahead in the business. But the motivation of the photographers who later claimed to have had romantic relationships with Marilyn has always been suspect. None ever said anything about having sex with her until she became very famous and it was considered quite the conquest to have had this great sex symbol in bed. One by one, though, stories—and even books!—by these photographers have fallen apart over the years when it comes to detail and specificity. For her part, Marilyn always gave the impression that she was not interested in sex during those years. Maybe that was just public relations malarkey on her part—but she was consistent about it just the same. It would be very surprising, say those who knew her well, to find that she actually slept with photographers in order to advance in the business. After all, it’s not as if she wasn’t beautiful enough to make it on her appearance alone. In fact, she became successful enough to soon be signed by a modeling agency, which sent her out on even more interviews for work. By the spring of 1946, she had appeared on more than thirty magazine covers.
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 10