The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Jim Gets a Surprise: Gladys

The first four months of 1946 were busy. Norma Jeane, now almost twenty, had never worked so hard. All of the photographers who took her picture were amazed at how well they came out, and it was clear that she was no longer a novice. She’d known what she wanted in terms of results from the very beginning. Now she was getting those results. She was working nonstop—so much so that one friend, Jacquelyn Cooper, wondered if perhaps she was sleeping with the photographers. “I said she could tell me because I won’t breathe a word of it if you’re having affairs with these fellows,” she recalled. “She said, ‘Absolutely not!’ And what did I think she was? Very bothered, like that, like I’d hurt her feelings even wondering if she was sleeping with these fellows. In fact, she was so bothered she didn’t pay attention to me for days.”

“Men who tried to buy me with money made me sick,” Marilyn recalled years later. “There were plenty of them. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up.”

She was working a great deal. But she confided in one photographer that she would sometimes, as she put it, “get down in the dumps.” She said that she would have “dark moods that came from nowhere.” In those times, she said, it was as if she “didn’t have the answers to anything.” These particular comments from her are interesting because they call to mind what her grandmother, Della, and mother, Gladys, used to call “the doldrums.” But perhaps the following terribly prophetic statement says it best about Marilyn’s dark mood swings during this time in her life: “Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.”

During this time, while Jim was away and she was working with a series of different photographers, something else happened that would change things for Norma Jeane and, in a lot of ways, for future generations of admirers. It occurred in February 1946. At the suggestion of her agent, Emmeline Snively, Norma Jeane had her hair first straightened and then stripped of its chestnut brown color and changed to a shade of golden blonde. It was all in preparation for a shampoo print advertisement. Now, more than ever, Norma Jeane Baker Mortensen Dougherty was starting to look very much like Jean Harlow. But more important, she began to look like another great screen star, one of the greatest, in fact, of all time. She began to look like Marilyn Monroe. The transformation was almost complete. Norma Jeane Mortensen was almost a woman of the past, certainly as far as her husband was concerned.

In April, Jim returned from duty—as he had promised. However, Norma Jeane did not meet him at San Pedro Bay—as she had promised. Upset, he jumped into a taxi and went straight to the small house that the couple shared in Van Nuys. After paying the cabbie, he walked toward the home and noticed the drapes open. He peeked in. All of the furniture seemed to be in place. He caught a glimpse of Norma Jeane walking by. Apparently, she had done what he had demanded. She was there, at least. Now he might have a chance to talk some sense into her, and perhaps save his marriage. He must have been relieved. However, any sense of relief was to be short-lived. Jim Dougherty put his key into the lock and opened the door. And there she stood.

Not Norma Jeane.

Gladys.