The full account of Marilyn Monroe's early life — orphanages, foster homes, sexual abuse, a teenage marriage, and how she transformed survival into stardom.
Norma Jeane Mortenson was born on June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, was a film cutter at RKO Studios — a small, fragile woman with a history of mental illness in her family. Gladys had already had two children taken from her in a custody dispute with her first husband. Norma Jeane would be her third child, born outside of marriage to a man whose name Gladys either did not know or refused to share.
The birth certificate listed "father unknown." Some biographers believe the father was C. Stanley Gifford, a supervisor at the film lab where Gladys worked. Others are less certain. Marilyn herself spent decades wondering. She reportedly tried to call Gifford as an adult — he refused to speak with her.
Gladys could not care for her daughter. She placed the infant Norma Jeane with the Bolender family in Hawthorne, California — Albert and Ida Bolender, strict Christian foster parents who took in children for $5 a week. Norma Jeane would live with them for the first seven years of her life, calling them "Aunt Ida" and "Uncle Albert." They were not unkind, but they were severe. Ida Bolender reportedly once beat the child for singing and dancing — worldly pleasures, in her view, were sinful.
Gladys visited on weekends and occasionally took Norma Jeane to the cinema. The child was fascinated by the screen. Already, the movies were a world more real to her than her own life.
In 1935, Gladys Baker suffered a complete mental breakdown — diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was institutionalised at Norwalk State Hospital, where she would spend the majority of the rest of her life. Norma Jeane was eight years old. She would not live with her mother again in any meaningful sense.
For two years, Norma Jeane moved between family friends and temporary arrangements. When no arrangement could hold, she was placed in the Los Angeles Orphans Home on September 13, 1935. She was nine years old. She reportedly cried that she was not an orphan — her mother was alive. But alive in an institution is a particular kind of absence.
She lived at the orphanage for two years. Later she said: "I used to think, as I rocked myself to sleep, that there was a certain pride in this: nobody's girl. No one to say you are mine."
Marilyn Monroe spoke about being sexually abused as a child on multiple occasions, including in her unfinished autobiography. At approximately age eight, while living with one of the foster families (not the Bolenders), a lodger she called "Mr. Kimmel" molested her. When she told the foster mother, the woman told her she was lying and slapped her. The double betrayal — the abuse and the disbelief — shaped her relationship with vulnerability for the rest of her life.
She said in an interview late in her life: "I knew something was wrong. I didn't know what it was called. But I knew I was supposed to pretend it hadn't happened. I spent a lot of my life pretending things hadn't happened."
In 1942, with her guardian about to move away and no stable placement available, Norma Jeane's options were another orphanage stint or marriage. Jim Dougherty, twenty-one, a neighbour, was willing. She was sixteen. They married on June 19, 1942. She always said it was not a love marriage — it was an escape route. He always said he loved her. She later said she didn't know what she felt, only that she preferred marriage to the orphanage.
"I was never used to being happy, so that wasn't something I ever took for granted. You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy — that's it, success, in America. I was brought up differently."— Marilyn Monroe, in conversation with W.J. Weatherby