Norma Jeane And The Women Who Raised Her

Norma Jean was born in 1926, and by the time she turned sixteen she had already lived with four different mother figures, spent two years in an orphanage, and been sexually assaulted twice. Before she became Marilyn Monroe, she was a lonely, dissociating child who learned that her body was the only thing that got her noticed. This episode of Right Answers Mostly traces her first sixteen years through the women who raised, failed, and shaped her—beginning with a mother whose own devastation set everything in motion.

Gladys: The Mother Who Couldn't Stay

Marilyn Monroe's mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe, was born in 1901 in Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles with a family history of severe mental illness. At fourteen, she married Jasper Newton Baker and had two children, Bernice and Jack. After the couple separated, Jasper simply disappeared with both kids to Kentucky, leaving Gladys to grieve the loss of her first children for the rest of her life. She remarried a man named Martin Mortenson, but while working as a film cutter in Hollywood—a technical job that was one of the few in the industry dominated by women—she began an affair with her supervisor, Charles Stanley Gifford. When she became pregnant late in 1925, Gifford's family intervened, and he vanished from her life entirely. Decades later, DNA testing confirmed that Gifford was Marilyn's biological father.