The Netflix show Blonde is about Marilyn Monroe’s life and career. Even though she gets a lot of fame and money during her life, one of the main things the movie is about is how lonely she is.
From the beginning of her story to the sad end, she is always on her own, trying to find her place in the world. People come and go in her life, and her relationships usually don’t last more than a few years. This makes us wonder if her life was really that bad in real life. Did Monroe really not have anyone to turn to? What about her brothers and sisters? Has she got any? What was wrong with them? Let’s find out.
Who Was Marilyn Monroe’s Brother or Sister?
Marilyn Monroe was alone most of the time when she was a child. Her parents, Gladys Baker and Charles Stanley Gifford, didn’t have any other children. Her mother was locked up, and her father was never really a part of her life. Her parents were married to other people and had different families, so they never lived together. This meant that Monroe had a few step-siblings, but she didn’t get to know all of them.
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Step-siblings on Marilyn Monroe’s dad’s side
Charles Stanley Gifford was married to Lillian Gifford and had two kids, Doris and Charles Jr. Doris died when she was 12, but Charles lived a long and happy life after that. He was born in 1922, and he was in the US Navy during World War II. He met his wife, Joan, while he was stationed in England. They had three children together: Diann Jordan, Tim, and Francine Dier. Charles Stanley Gifford was Monroe’s biological father, and Francine Dier’s DNA was used to prove it.
According to his obituary, Charles worked as a sales manager for Union 76 after the war and then went on to work in real estate development. He was also a deacon and Treasurer of the Bayview United Church of Christ, a Freemason, a member of the Navy League’s Board of Directors, and a member of Norfolk’s Civic Facilities Commission. In 2008, after Joan died, Charles got married to Betty Chiappa. At the age of 92, he died peacefully in his sleep in 2015.
Daily Mail says that Charles thought he might be Monroe’s half-brother. He never told anyone what he was thinking, but before he died, he asked his family to take a sample of his hair and run a DNA test to see if the rumors about Monroe’s parents were true. Charles had already died by the time that happened.
The step-siblings Marilyn Monroe had on her mother’s side
Gladys was married to Jasper Newton Baker before she had Monroe. Robert Kermit and Berniece, who were born in 1918 and 1919, were their children. After Gladys and Jasper got a divorce in 1921, he took the kids away from their mother and raised them in Kentucky. Robert Kermit died at age 15 in 1933 from kidney failure. He didn’t know about Monroe, but Berniece was able to get in touch with their half-sister, and they stayed close until the end.
Berniece married Paris Miracle in 1938, when she was 19 years old. Mona Rae, their child, was born in 1939. During her pregnancy, Berniece got a letter from Gladys in which she told her about her half-sister. Norma Jean was only 12 years old at this time, but she had already moved around a lot between orphanages and foster homes. The sisters wrote to each other, but they didn’t meet until 1944, when Monroe moved to Detroit, where Berniece lived. “By that time, she was married to Jim Dougherty and came to visit us in Detroit by train. After that, we kept in touch. “When she was married to Arthur Miller and having trouble, she would call me,” Berniece said.
Berniece stayed close to Monroe until she died. She called Monroe “a wonderful sister.” In 1961, she went to see the movie star at her home in New York. When Monroe died a year later, Berniece helped her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio set up her funeral. She said, “I chose her casket and the pale green dress she wore.” Monroe left $10,000 to her sister in her will, but her sister stayed away from the press. In 1994, Berniece wrote a book with her daughter called “My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir of Marilyn Monroe.” This was the only time she talked about her relationship with Monroe. Berniece died at the age of 94 the same year.
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). [10] 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. [13] [b] 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.
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.
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