J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

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

A lways 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.