Inside Marilyn Monroe's Relationship History
Due to her mother's psychiatric health issues, Marilyn Monroe (then Norma Jean Baker) spent much of her early childhood in a foster home, and as a teenager was living with a family friend, Grace Goddard, according to Biography. When Goddard was looking to move away, she suggested that her neighbor, 20-year-old James Dougherty, who had been casually dating 15-year-old Monroe, marry the future starlet. "We decided to get married to prevent her from going back to a foster home ... but we were in love," Dougherty explained, via the Los Angeles Times. Monroe was 16 when they got married in 1942.
The relationship began to fall apart when Dougherty went overseas on a merchant marine assignment. Back home, Norma Jean was well on her way to transforming into Marilyn Monroe after beginning a modeling career. When she was offered a contract with 20th Century Fox, there was only one thing standing in her way: her marriage with Dougherty. Many Hollywood contracts at the time required women to be unmarried, so Monroe sought a divorce from her long-distance husband. Unwilling to continue in the relationship without the security of marriage, he signed the divorce papers and separated himself from the woman who would someday become a legend. "I never knew Marilyn Monroe, and I don't claim to have any insights to her to this day ... I knew and loved Norma Jean," Dougherty told United Press International (via Los Angeles Times).
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