The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

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.”