A new 100-year photographic retrospective exhibit of sex goddess Marilyn Monroe reveals a secret about her first husband, who would go on to become a Maine police officer.
Jim Dougherty, who later lived in Maine with his third wife, married ex-high-school classmate Monroe in 1942 when she was just 16 and he was 21.
Her name at the time was Norma Jeane Mortenson, baptized as Norma Jeanne Baker, later to become the iconic Marilyn Monroe, a name change she made in 1956.
Two years after they married, Dougherty shipped off with the Merchant Marines and while at sea saw a pinup of his wife above a fellow mariner’s bunk.
Dougherty was shocked. He never realized the bombshell he married was modeling for a Los Angeles photographer.
The story of how Jim Dougherty learned he married a woman who would become America’s darling sex kitten and slinky actress is part of “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon,” a centennial exhibit marking what this June 1 would be her 100th birthday.
The Academy Museum of Motion pictures exhibit in Los Angeles includes a 1946 modeling book featuring Monroe as Norma Jean Dougherty.
It was through that very shoot that Dougherty learned his wife had taken to modeling, People.com reports.
They divorced in 1946. Monroe later said she had been bored in the marriage.
In 1947, Dougherty married Patricia Scoman and they had three daughters. In 1949, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department.
They divorced in 1972, allegedly due to Scoman’s jealousy of her husband’s connection to his first wife.
Dougherty retired as an LA cop in 1974, the same year he married his final wife, artist Rita Lambert.
They lived out their years her hometown of Sabattus, Maine.
Veteran cop Dougherty taught at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy and worked as an Androscoggin County commissioner.
He also worked for the Maine Boxing Commission.In 1976, he released a memoir called “The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe.”
He told a United Press International reporter from Maine in 1990, “I never knew Marilyn Monroe, and I don’t claim to have any insights to her to this day. I knew and loved Norma Jeane.”
In 1995, Dougherty showed up at the Skowhegan, Maine post office for a party celebrating a new stamp bearing Monroe’s picture.
He autographed books of stamps as his current wife looked on from a nearby seat.
“It seemed like a nice, positive program, so I said I’d come out,” he told the Lewiston Sun Journal.
Dougherty, who died August 15, 2005 at the age of 84, is buried at Saint Peter’s Cemetery in Lewiston with his third and final wife.
