The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Crazy?

After they were married, Jim and Norma Jeane Dougherty eventually settled into a small four-room house in Van Nuys, California. Skipping the traditional honeymoon, Jim went back to work at Lockheed and Marilyn began her new life as a wife. She seemed to enjoy setting up the household, getting great pleasure out of deciding which meager furnishings the couple would purchase. Jim left most of these decisions in her hands. Each article was chosen with care: the drinking glasses, the cutlery, even the front doormat. She got a tremendous thrill out of establishing, for the first time, a home that included her as a primary resident. She also always made sure she was showered and dressed when her husband arrived home for supper. She wanted him to feel special, and wanted him to think of her in that way as well.

Jim has said that he felt certain that Norma Jeane was a virgin when he married her. Of course, that makes sense. Probably stating the obvious, he also said that she was extremely inexperienced—he even had to teach her how to use a diaphragm—but that once she caught on, she enjoyed having sex. “It was as natural to her as breakfast in the morning,” he noted. “There were never any problems.” Over the years, he was fairly indiscreet about private times shared by the couple. “Never had I encountered a girl who so thoroughly enjoyed a sexual union,” he recalled. “It made our lovemaking pure joy.” He even remembered having sex with her outdoors, in public places when others weren’t looking. These remembrances have to be taken with a grain of salt, because Jim apparently also claimed just the opposite about Norma Jeane.

“Jim told me privately that Norma Jeane spent most of their early marriage locked in the bathroom,” said Martin Evans, who was a friend of Jim’s at the time of his marriage to Norma Jeane. “She had sex books and manuals that were given to her by Grace Goddard, he said, and none of them made a difference. She was scared. From my information, she even asked Grace if it were possible for her to never have sex with Jim. Could they just be friends, she wondered. She was very skittish about having sex with him and, to be honest, I don’t think they had a good sex life, ever—despite what Jim later claimed.”

In retrospect, we should keep in mind that Jim Dougherty’s comments about his sex life with Norma Jeane were made many years after she had become famous as Marilyn Monroe. In fact, they were made many years after 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.