Who Was Marilyn Monroe's First Husband, James Dougherty?

From the early 1950s until her death in 1962, Marilyn Monroe — born Norma Jeane Mortenson — was more than just an actor. She quickly became a cultural icon, recognizable across the world for her signature blonde hair, sultry public image, and sex appeal. In fact, her career even launched in part because of revelations that she had posed nude for Playboy several years prior. 

Naturally, upon her unprecedented and astronomical rise to fame, her personal life immediately became of great interest to the public. Her marriages, for instance, to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller in the '50s were highly publicized in the media, although both famously ended in divorce. 

What many fans may have forgotten, however, is that Monroe actually had another, much less-publicized marriage before her rise to fame — to a man named James Dougherty, whom she married at 16. And although it, like the others, ended in divorce, it certainly began much differently. 

The little-known first husband of Marilyn Monroe — then known as Norma Jeane Baker — was a factory worker in her native Los Angeles, five years her senior, named James Dougherty. As many fans of Monroe may know, she did not grow up with her parents; her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, was not prepared to raise a child — both financially and emotionally (she was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia) — and as a result had to give up her baby to foster parents. Monroe was raised in numerous foster homes and orphanages, culminating with the home her mother's friend, Grace Goddard and her husband Erwin "Doc" Goddard during high school, per Netflix Life.

However, in mid-1942, right as Monroe was turning 16, Doc Goddard's job relocated him out-of-state, and, due to California's child protection laws, he wouldn't have been able to bring Monroe along. This would have forced her to go back to the orphanage. As a result, Monroe settled by marrying her neighbor, 21-year-old Dougherty. 

As Schani Krug, producer of "Marilyn's Man" — a documentary about Dougherty, told NPR in 2005, Monroe — who would eventually become famous for her femininity — was initially a "tomboy" when they first met, and Dougherty helped to "feminize her." "He was a bon vivant," Krug said, "great sense of humor, and he brought that out in her, really refined her, even kind of showed her how to walk and be sexy."

Although James Dougherty provided a young Marilyn Monroe with an effective escape from her troubled childhood, that was about it. The emotional connection was almost nonexistent — Monroe later said of her ex-husband, per the New York Daily News, that "My marriage didn't make me sad, but it didn't make me happy either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn't because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom."

While Dougherty was deployed to the Pacific to fight in World War II in early 1945, Monroe met a photographer named David Conover, who convinced her to model for him. By August, she had signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945, and Dougherty returned to the States to discover that Norma Jeane had embarked on a hopeful modeling career, with her eyes on acting. They had divorced by September 1946, in part because the studio which Monroe had signed up for stipulated in their contract that she be unmarried. Dougherty later became a police officer in the LAPD, and died in 2005. 

Nonetheless, despite their divorce and eventual estrangement, Dougherty had nothing but fond memories of the woman who would eventually become Marilyn Monroe. "She was a very kind, gentle person," Dougherty recalled of his late ex-wife in 1992. "I get so upset with some of these things that are said about her, because she was a good person."