Marilyn Monroe

James Dougherty
Monroe married James Dougherty on June 19, 1942, at the home of Chester Howell in Los Angeles. In The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe and To Norma Jeane with Love, Jimmie, he claimed they were in love, but dreams of stardom lured her away. In 1953, he wrote a piece called "Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife" for Photoplay, in which he claimed that she threatened to jump off the Santa Monica Pier if he left her. In the 2004 documentary Marilyn's Man, Dougherty made three new claims: that he invented the "Marilyn Monroe" persona; studio executives forced her to divorce him; and that he was her true love and her "dedicated friend for life".
Dougherty's actions seem to contradict these claims: he remarried months after Monroe divorced him; his sister told the December 1952 Modern Screen magazine that he left Monroe because she wanted to pursue modeling, after he initially gave her permission to do so; he confirmed Monroe's version of the beginning of their relationship in an A&E Network Monroe documentary that his mother had asked him to marry her so that she would not be returned to an orphanage. On Monroe's death, August 5, 1962, one of the responding officers who knew Jim Dougherty phoned him at 4:00 a.m. with the news. Dougherty turned to his wife and said, "Say a prayer for Norma Jean. She's dead." Most telling, on August 6, The New York Times reported that, on being informed of her death, Dougherty replied "I'm sorry" and continued his LAPD patrol. He did not attend Monroe's funeral.