ICON Collection President and CEO Brian Johns reveals how Marilyn Monroe’s first husband, Jim Dougherty, learned about her profession.
For those unaware, Monroe was just 16 years old when she married Dougherty, who was her classmate at Van Nuys High School.
in conversation with People Magazine, Johns revealed that when Dougherty married her he did not know she was a model until he saw a photo of her on a Navy ship.
“She was 16 when she married him, and the reason she married him was so she had to go to another foster home,” he said.
Johns shared, “The foster home she was living in at the time was the family she was closest to. Her aunt, as she called her, had to move across the country. She would say, ‘Please don’t take me back to the orphanage.’
With the help of Grace McKee Goddard, her neighbor’s son, Dougherty, agreed to tie the knot with her in 1942, but their relationship began to fall apart when she began modeling while her husband joined the Merchant Navy.
Johns recalled, “He was deployed. He was in the Navy, and he looked at the people on his ship. They had pin-ups of his wife, and he didn’t know she was doing it.”
“She was working in an aircraft factory making parachutes and stuff. There was a famous photographer there, a guy named David Conover, who saw her at the time and picked her out of the parachute-making line, and said, ‘Oh, will you pose for me?’ And that’s where his career started,” he explained.
Despite achieving a position in the world of glitz and glam, Monroe was “just kind of slumming” because she was “messy” and “wouldn’t wash her hair for a week.”
Johns shared, “I mean, that’s just the place where she lived. That’s really how she was… I think a lot of people don’t know how generous she was or how humane she was. She loved to clean dishes. She was very proud of how many clean dishes she got. And our friend said she came to her house, and she would love to spray champagne on the stairs, and then she would spend two hours cleaning it.”
It is pertinent to mention that after her divorce from Dougherty in 1946, Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio in 1954, but they annulled their marriage in 1955. Her third husband was Arthur Miller, whom she was married to from 1956 to 1961.
