The Netflix show Blonde is mostly made up, but it tells the story of Marilyn Monroe’s life.
It starts with Monroe’s childhood, where her troubled upbringing is shown. This helps readers understand why Monroe has had problems all her life. Her complicated relationship with her mother and the fact that her father is never around leave a hole in her life, which she tries to fill with other people, especially men.
Often, it seems like Monroe’s life might have been different if he had grown up in a good, caring environment. If this makes you wonder how Monroe spent her childhood and if she was an orphan, here’s what you should know about her.
Your life and work
Monroe was born on June 1, 1926, as Norma Jeane Mortenson at the Los Angeles County Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Gladys Pearl Baker’s mother, whose maiden name was Monroe, was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, to a poor family from the Midwest that had moved to California at the turn of the 20th century. Gladys married John Newton Baker, who was nine years older than her and abused her, when she was 15. They had two kids: Robert, who lived from 1917 to 1933, and Berniece (1919–2014). She got a divorce and sole custody in 1923, but soon after, Baker took the kids and moved to his home state of Kentucky with them.
Monroe didn’t know she had a sister until she was 12 years old, and they didn’t meet until she was 17 or 18. After her divorce, Gladys worked at Consolidated Film Industries as a film negative cutter. She married Martin Edward Mortensen in 1924, but they broke up within a few months and got a divorce in 1928. DNA tests done in 2022 showed that Monroe’s father was Gladys’s coworker Charles Stanley Gifford, with whom she had an affair in 1925.
Even though Gladys was not ready for a child mentally or financially, Monroe’s early life was stable and happy. Gladys gave her daughter to Albert and Ida Bolender, who are evangelical Christians and live in the small town of Hawthorne. She lived there for the first six months as well, until she had to move back to the city to get a job. She then began visiting her daughter on weekends. Gladys used a loan from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to buy a small house in Hollywood in the summer of 1933. She then moved Monroe, who was only seven years old at the time, in with her.
The actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter Nellie lived in the house with them. Gladys went crazy in January 1934. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After living in a retirement home for a while, she was sent to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She was in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life, and she rarely saw Monroe. Monroe was taken in by the state, and Grace Goddard, a friend of her mother’s, took care of her and her mother.
Monroe and James Dougherty, her first husband, around 1943 or 1944. When she was 16, they got married.
Monroe’s living situation changed a lot over the next four years. She kept living with the Atkinson family for the first 16 months. During this time, she may have been sexually abused. She had always been shy, but now she had a stutter and became even more quiet. In the summer of 1935, she stayed for a short time with Erwin “Doc” Goddard, Grace’s husband, and two other families. Grace put her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home in September 1935. Monroe’s friends said the orphanage was “a model institution,” but she felt like she was alone there.
The orphanage staff thought Monroe would be happier living with a family, so in 1936, Grace became her legal guardian. She didn’t take Monroe out of the orphanage, though, until the summer of 1937.
Monroe’s second time living with the Goddards was short because Doc touched her inappropriately. She then spent short times in Los Angeles and Compton with her family and Grace’s friends and family.
Monroe first wanted to be an actor because of things that happened to her as a child: “The world around me was kind of sad, so I didn’t like it. When I found out this was acting, I thought, “That’s what I want to do!” Some of my foster families would send me to the movies to get me out of the house, and I would stay there all day and well into the night. Up front, where the screen was so big, I was all by myself as a little kid, and I loved it.”
In September 1938, Monroe moved in with Grace’s aunt, Ana Lower, in the Sawtelle neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles. She went to Emerson Junior High and went to Christian Science services with Lower once a week. She wasn’t a great student overall, but she was great at writing and wrote for the school newspaper. Because the old Lower was sick, Monroe moved back to Van Nuys to live with the Goddards around the beginning of 1941.
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She began going to Van Nuys High School the same year
Doc Goddard worked for a company that moved him to West Virginia in 1942. The Goddards couldn’t take Monroe out of California because of laws that protect children, so she would have to go back to the orphanage. As a solution, she married James Dougherty, the 21-year-old factory worker son of their next-door neighbors, on June 19, 1942, just after she turned 16.
Monroe stopped going to high school after that and became a housewife. She thought she and Dougherty were a bad match, and she said later that she was “dying of boredom” during their marriage. Dougherty joined the Merchant Marine in 1943, and he was sent to Santa Catalina Island. Monroe moved there with him.
1944–1948: Modeling and first film roles
At the Radioplane Munitions Factory, a picture was taken of Monroe when she was 20 years old.
David Conover took this picture of Monroe at the Radioplane Company in the middle of 1944.
Dougherty was sent to the Pacific in April 1944, where he would stay for most of the next two years.
Monroe moved in with her husband’s parents and started working at a weapons factory in Van Nuys called the Radioplane Company. At the end of 1944, she met photographer David Conover. The First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Forces had sent him to the factory to take pictures of the women workers to boost their spirits. Even though none of her pictures were used, she quit her job at the factory in January 1945 and started modeling for Conover and his friends. In August 1945, she moved away from her husband, who was away at war, and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency.
The modeling agency thought Monroe’s body was better for pin-ups than for high fashion, so she was mostly in ads and men’s magazines. She straightened her hair and dyed it blonde so she would be more likely to get a job. Emmeline Snively, the owner of the modeling agency, said that Monroe quickly became one of its most ambitious and hard-working models. By the beginning of 1946, she had been on the covers of 33 magazines, including Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek. Monroe sometimes worked as a model under the name Jean Norman.
Monroe sitting on the beach with a smile and her arms behind her back. She has a bikini on and wedge sandals on.
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Monroe as a pin-up model on a postcard from the 1940s
In June 1946, Monroe got a job with an acting agency through Snively. After her interview at Paramount Pictures didn’t go well, Ben Lyon, an executive at 20th Century-Fox, gave her a screen test. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck didn’t like the idea, but he gave her a standard six-month contract so that rival studio RKO Pictures wouldn’t sign her. Monroe’s contract started in August 1946. She and Lyon chose the name “Marilyn Monroe” for her stage name. Lyon chose the first name because it made him think of Broadway star Marilyn Miller. The last name was the maiden name of Monroe’s mother. In September 1946, she split up with Dougherty, who didn’t want her to be an actress.
Monroe’s first six months at Fox were spent learning how to act, sing, and dance, and watching how movies are made. In February 1947, her contract was renewed, and she got her first small parts in the movies Dangerous Years (1947) and Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948). The studio also put her in the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, an acting school that taught the techniques of the Group Theatre. She later said that it was “my first taste of what real acting in a real drama could be like, and I was hooked.” Even though she was very interested in acting, her teachers thought she was too shy and uncertain to have a career in it. In August 1947, Fox did not renew her contract. She went back to modeling and also did odd jobs at film studios, like working as a “pacer” behind the scenes on musical sets to keep the leads on track.
In 1948, a publicity photo of Monroe was taken
Monroe really wanted to be an actress, so she kept going to the Actors’ Lab. She had a small part in the play Glamour Preferred at the Bliss-Hayden Theater, but after a couple of shows, it was over. She went to the offices of producers, made friends with gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, and hosted powerful men at studio events, which she had started doing at Fox. She also became friends with and had sex with Fox executive Joseph M. Schenck, who persuaded his friend Harry Cohn, the head executive of Columbia Pictures, to sign her in March 1948.
Monroe’s look at Columbia was based on that of Rita Hayworth, and her hair was bleached to be platinum blonde. She started working with Natasha Lytess, who was the head drama coach at the studio. Lytess would be her teacher until 1955. Her only movie at the studio was the low-budget musical Ladies of the Chorus, which came out in 1948. In it, she played a chorus girl who is courted by a rich man for the first time in a leading role. She also tried out for the main role in Born Yesterday (1950), but in September 1948, her contract was not renewed. The next month, Ladies of the Chorus came out, but it did not do well.
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