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James
Dougherty, a retired Los Angeles police detective who earned
a niche in Hollywood history when he married a pretty
teenager named Norma Jean Baker in the early 1940s, years
before she became the iconic sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, has
died. He was 84.
• • Over the decades, Dougherty was repeatedly asked --by reporters, biographers and the curious -- about his four-year marriage to the legendary star. • • "I never knew Marilyn Monroe, and I don't claim to have any insights to her to this day," he told United Press International in 1990. "I knew and loved Norma Jean." • • A former Van Nuys High School football captain and class president, Dougherty was 20 and working the night shift at Lockheed Aircraft when he began dating 15-year-old Norma Jean Baker in January 1942. • • Dougherty's family had lived next door to Grace Goddard, a friend of Norma Jean's mother, Gladys, who was in and out of psychiatric facilities. Norma Jean, who had lived in a succession of foster homes, was then living with Goddard and her husband. • • "They wanted to move back to [West] Virginia, and they couldn't take Norma Jean," Dougherty said in the 1990 interview. "She would have gone back to an orphanage or another foster home, so her foster mother suggested I marry her. • • "I thought she was awful young, but I took her to a dance. She was a pretty mature girl and physically she was mature, of course. We talked and we got on pretty good." • • On June 19, 1942 -- after dating only a few months and just 18 days after Norma Jean's 16th birthday -- they were married. • • A wedding photo of the beaming couple taken in front of a fireplace shows Dougherty in a white tuxedo and his fresh-faced, brunet bride in a white wedding gown and veil and holding a large bouquet of flowers. • • "We decided to get married to prevent her from going back to a foster home," Dougherty later said, "but we were in love." • • After a honeymoon to a lake in Ventura County, the newlyweds moved into a studio apartment with a pull-down Murphy bed in Sherman Oaks. • • In 1944, Dougherty joined the merchant marine and was initially assigned to teach sea safety on Catalina Island, where the young couple moved into an apartment. • • "She was just a housewife," Dougherty told UPI. "We would go down to the beach on weekends, and have luaus on Saturday night. She loved it over there. It was like being on a honeymoon for a year." • • In a 2004 Boston Globe story, in which he was characterized as a "feisty, blunt and sometimes bawdy raconteur," Dougherty said his young bride was loving and funny and that she adored him, calling him "Jimmie." • • "We loved each other madly," he said. "I felt like the luckiest guy in the world." • • After Dougherty received an overseas assignment, his wife moved back to Van Nuys. She landed a job at Radioplane Co., where she initially packed and inspected the parachutes that attached to miniature, remote-controlled target planes. • • After a photographer assigned to take pictures of women working as part of the war effort used her as a subject, the young Mrs. Dougherty became a sought-after model in the Los Angeles area. • • Hollywood soon beckoned. And, when her marriage to her absent husband crumbled as her career ambitions rose, she sought a quickie divorce in Las Vegas; the marriage was officially over in September 1946. • • "I was on a ship in the Yangtze River getting ready to go into Shanghai when I was served with divorce papers," Dougherty told Associated Press in 2002. /// _________ More
Articles Respectfully
Submitted
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