The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

her death. At twenty-one, a man marries a girl who, after their divorce, goes on to become one of the greatest sex symbols of all time, a cultural icon. When asked if he was able to satisfy her sexually, is he likely to say he couldn’t?

Marilyn Monroe historian James Haspiel, who knew Marilyn from 1954 until her death in 1962, had an interesting take on this subject when he observed, “It could be argued that Jim Dougherty’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe was the most significant thing he ever did in his life. What I mean is that a man can live his entire life being terrific at whatever job he does, but how can anything ever top having been married to Marilyn Monroe? It’s also the very thing that took him all over the world, doing TV shows and talking about Marilyn. It propelled him into international, eternal fame as her first husband. But then again, anybody who was in her life—and it was known that they were in her life—becomes a great character in history. Doughtery had a role in a classic story, and he played on it, just as he probably should have. And for all we know those may be his actual memories of her.”

Here’s Marilyn’s view of the matter, from her memoir: “The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex.”

It makes sense that Norma Jeane would have had trepidation about her sex life with Jim. After all, the truth was that she was forced by circumstances to surrender her virginity to a man she barely knew just so that she could stay out of an orphanage. That hardly seems an ideal situation for a young girl who had already experienced such trauma. In fact, Norma Jeane began to find new and inventive ways of avoiding lovemaking with her husband. Jim would later say that he was aware that many, if not all, of her phantom headaches, cramps, and assorted ailments were an attempt at sidestepping her marital obligations. For the most part, as he recalled it, he was patient with her. On one particular night, however, he was insistent. He told her he was going to take a quick shower and that they would then retire to the bedroom and make love. After his shower, Jim came out of the bathroom, expecting to find Marilyn in bed, waiting for him. He didn’t. She was gone.

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