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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
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