Has Marilyn Monroe been adopted? Was she an orphan?

The Netflix show Blonde is largely made up, but tells the story of Marilyn Monroe’s life.

It begins with Monroe’s childhood, where her difficult 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 leaves a hole in her life, which she tries to fill with other people, especially men.

Often it seems that Monroe’s life would 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 need to know about her.

Your life and work

Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926 at 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 Midwestern family that had moved to California in the early 1900s. Gladys married John Newton Baker, who was nine years her senior and abused her when she was 15. They had two children: Robert, who lived from 1917 to 1933, and Berniece (1919-2014). She got divorce and custody in 1923, but soon after, Baker took the children and moved with them to his home state of Kentucky.

Monroe didn’t know she had a sister until she was 12 years old, and they didn’t get to know each other 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 divorced in 1928. DNA testing in 2022 revealed that Monroe Gladys’s colleague’s father was Charles Stanley Gifford, with whom she had an affair in 1925. had.

Although Gladys was not mentally or financially ready for a child, Monroe’s early life was stable and happy. Gladys gave her daughter to Albert and Ida Bolender, who are Evangelical Christians living in the small town of Hawthorne. She also lived there for the first six months, until she had to move back to the city to look for a job. Then she started 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. Then she moved in with Monroe, who was only seven years old at the time.

Actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter Nellie lived in the house with them. Gladys went mad 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 admitted to the state and Grace Goddard, a friend of her mother, took care of her and her mother.

Monroe and James Dougherty, her first husband, around 1943 or 1944. They married when she was 16.

Monroe’s living situation has changed dramatically over the next four years. She continued to live with the Atkinson family for the first 16 months. During this time, she may have been sexually assaulted. She had always been shy, but now she started to stutter and became even quieter. In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Erwin “Doc” Goddard, Grace’s husband, and two other families. Grace put her in the Los Angeles orphanage in September 1935. Monroe’s friends said the orphanage was “a model institution,” but she felt she was alone there.

The orphanage staff thought Monroe would be happier with a family, so in 1936 Grace became her legal guardian. However, she didn’t get Monroe out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937.

Monroe’s second stay with the Goddards was short because Doc touched her inappropriately. She then spent a short time 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 a bit 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 sent me to the movies to get me out of the house, and I stayed there all day and well into the night. Up front, where the screen was so big, I was all alone as a 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 attended Emerson Junior High and attended Christian Science services with Lower once a week. She was generally not a great student, but she was great at writing and writing for the school paper. Because old Lower was ill, Monroe moved back to Van Nuys in early 1941 to live with the Goddards.

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In the same year she attended Van Nuys High School

Doc Goddard worked for a company that moved him to West Virginia in 1942. The Goddards couldn’t get Monroe out of California because of child protection laws, so she had to go back to the orphanage. As a solution, on June 19, 1942, just after she turned 16, she married James Dougherty, their neighbors’ 21-year-old factory worker son.

Monroe dropped out of high school after that and became a housewife. She thought she and Dougherty were a bad match, and she later said she “died of boredom” during their marriage. Dougherty joined the merchant navy in 1943 and was sent to Santa Catalina Island. Monroe moved with him.

1944-1948: Modeling and first film roles

At the Radioplane Munitions Factory, a photo was taken of Monroe when she was 20 years old.

David Conover took this photo of Monroe at the Radioplane Company in mid-1944.

Dougherty was sent to the Pacific in April 1944, where he would remain for most of the next two years.

Monroe moved in with her husband’s parents and started working at a Van Nuys weapons factory, the Radioplane Company. In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover. The US Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit had sent him to the factory to take pictures of the female workers to cheer them up. Although none of her photos were used, she quit her job at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends. In August 1945, she moved away from her husband, who was at war, and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency.

The agency thought Monroe’s body was better for pin-ups than for high fashion, so she was mostly featured in ads and men’s magazines. She straightened her hair and dyed it blonde so she had a better chance of getting a job. Emmeline Snively, the owner of the modeling agency, said Monroe quickly became one of the most ambitious and hard-working models. In early 1946, she was on the covers of 33 magazines, including Pageant, US 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 is wearing a bikini and wedge sandals.

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Monroe as a pin-up model on a 1940s postcard

In June 1946, Monroe got a job at 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. Director 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 began in August 1946. She and Lyon chose the name “Marilyn Monroe” for her stage name. Lyon chose the first name because it reminded him of Broadway star Marilyn Miller. The surname was Monroe’s mother’s maiden name. In September 1946 she broke up with Dougherty, who did not want her to become an actress.

Monroe’s first six months at Fox were spent learning to act, sing and dance, and watch movies being made. In February 1947, her contract was renewed and she landed her first small roles in the films Dangerous Years (1947) and Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948). The studio also placed her in the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, an acting school that taught Group Theater techniques. She later said it was “my first taste of how real acting in a real drama could be, and I was hooked.” Although she was very interested in acting, her teachers thought she was too shy and insecure to have a career in it. In August 1947, Fox did not renew her contract. She returned to modeling and also did odd jobs in film studios, such as working as a ‘pacer’ behind the scenes on music sets to keep the leads on track.

A publicity photo of Monroe was taken in 1948

Monroe really wanted to be an actress, so she kept going to the Actors’ Lab. She had a small part in the play Glamor Preferred at the Bliss-Hayden Theater but after a few shows it was over. She went to producers’ offices, befriended gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, and hosted powerful men at studio events, which she had started at Fox. She also befriended and had sex with Fox director Joseph M. Schenck, who persuaded his friend Harry Cohn, the director of Columbia Pictures, to sign her in March 1948.

Monroe’s look at Columbia was based on Rita Hayworth’s and her hair was bleached to be platinum blonde. She started working with Natasha Lytess, who was the lead drama coach in the studio. Lytess would be her teacher until 1955. Her only film in 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 for the first time by a rich man in a lead role. She also attempted the lead role in Born Yesterday (1950), but her contract was not renewed in September 1948. The following month, Ladies of the Chorus came out, but it didn’t do well.

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