The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

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.