The Netflix show Blonde is about Marilyn Monroe’s life and career. Despite earning a lot of fame and money throughout her life, one of the main themes of the film is how lonely she is.
From the beginning of her story to the sad ending, she is always on her own, trying to find her place in the world. People come and go in their lives, and their 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 have no one to turn to? What about her brothers and sisters? Does she have 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 as a child. Her parents, Gladys Baker and Charles Stanley Gifford, had no other children. Her mother was imprisoned and her father was never really a part of her life. Her parents were married to others and had different families, so they never lived together. That meant Monroe had a few step-siblings, but she didn’t get to know all of them.
Also Read: Who Is Maria Keegan, Wife of Dermot Murnaghan? How many children does the Sky News presenter have?
Step-siblings alongside Marilyn Monroe’s father
Charles Stanley Gifford was married to Lillian Gifford and had two children, Doris and Charles Jr. Doris died when she was 12, but Charles lived a long and happy life thereafter. Born in 1922, he served in the US Navy during World War II. He met his wife Joan while 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 this.
According to his obituary, Charles worked as a sales manager for Union 76 after the war and then worked in real estate development. He was also a deacon and treasurer of the Bayview United Church of Christ, a Freemason, a member of the Board of Directors of the Navy League, and a member of the Norfolk Civic Facilities Commission. In 2008, after Joan died, Charles married Betty Chiappa. He died peacefully in his sleep in 2015 at the age of 92.
Daily Mail says Charles thought he might be Monroe’s half brother. He didn’t tell anyone what he thought, but before he died he asked his family to take a sample of his hair and do a DNA test to see if the rumors about Monroe’s parents were true. Charles had already died by that time.
The step-siblings that Marilyn Monroe had on her mother’s side
Gladys was married to Jasper Newton Baker before having Monroe. Their children were Robert Kermit and Berniece, born in 1918 and 1919 respectively. After Gladys and Jasper divorced in 1921, he took the children away from their mother and raised them in Kentucky. Robert Kermit died of kidney failure in 1933 at the age of 15. He didn’t know anything about Monroe, but Berniece was able to get in touch with her half-sister, and they stayed in touch to 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 received a letter from Gladys telling her about her half-sister. Norma Jean was only 12 at the time, but she had already moved between orphanages and foster homes a lot. The sisters wrote to each other but did not meet until 1944 when Monroe moved to Detroit where Berniece lived. “At the time she was married to Jim Dougherty and came to Detroit by train to join us. After that we stayed in touch. “When she was married to Arthur Miller and she was struggling, she called me,” Berniece said.
Berniece remained close to Monroe until she died. She called Monroe “a wonderful sister.” In 1961 she visited the film star at her home in New York. When Monroe died a year later, Berniece helped her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio prepare for her funeral. She said, “I picked her coffin and the pale green dress she wore.” Monroe left her sister $10,000 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 spoke about her relationship with Monroe. Berniece died that same year at the age of 94.
Also Read: Who Is Harold Ford Jr.’s Wife Emily Threlkeld? Meet the children and parents of Fox News’ political staff
her 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 who had moved to California around the turn of the century. Gladys married John Newton Baker, who was nine years her senior and who abused her when she was 15. They had two children: Robert, who lived from 1917 to 1933, and Berniece (1919–2014). [10] She divorced in 1923 and was given sole custody, but Baker soon took the children and moved with them to his native state of Kentucky.
Monroe didn’t know she had a sister until she was 12 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 separated within months and divorced in 1928. [13] [b] DNA testing done in 2022 showed Monroe’s father was Gladys’ colleague Charles Stanley Gifford, with whom she had an affair in 1925.
Although Gladys was neither mentally nor financially ready for a child, Monroe’s early life was stable and happy.
Gladys gave birth to her daughter Albert and Ida Bolender, who are evangelical Christians and live in the small town of Hawthorne. She also lived there for the first six months until she had to move back to the city for a job. She then started visiting her daughter on the 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 in with her with Monroe, who was only seven at the time.
Actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter Nellie lived in the house with them.
Gladys went insane in January 1934. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After living in a retirement home for some time, she was admitted 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, about 1943 or 1944. They married when she was 16.
Monroe’s life situation has changed significantly in the following four years. She lived 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 stuttered and became even quieter. In the summer of 1935, she lived briefly with Erwin “Doc” Goddard, Grace’s husband, and two other families. Grace placed her in the Los Angeles Orphanage in September 1935. Monroe’s friends said the orphanage was “a model institution,” but she felt alone there.
The orphanage staff thought Monroe would be happier with a family, so Grace became her legal guardian in 1936. However, she did not bring Monroe out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937.
Monroe’s second life with the Goddards was brief 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 initially wanted to be an actress because of the 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, “I want to do this!” 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. In front where the screen was so big, I was all alone as a little kid and I loved it.”
In September 1938, Monroe moved in with Grace’s aunt, Ana Lower, in the Sawtelle neighborhood of west Los Angeles.
She attended Emerson Junior High and attended 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. With old Lower being ill, in early 1941 Monroe moved back to Van Nuys to live with the Goddards.
That same year, she began attending 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, shortly after turning 16, she married James Dougherty, the 21-year-old factory worker son of her next-door neighbors.
Monroe then dropped out of high school and became a housewife. She thought she and Dougherty were a bad match, and she later said that she was “dying of boredom” during their marriage. Dougherty joined the Merchant Navy in 1943 and was sent to Santa Catalina Island. Monroe moved there with him.
READ ALSO: Sheldon Bream, Shannon Bream’s Husband, Is Who? Where did she, the Fox News journalist, go?