BettmannĪs for her father, who was identified in 2022 through DNA testing to be Charles Stanley Gifford, in her book Monroe recalled first seeing a lone photo of him when she was a child. She is shown with fellow studio worker Roy Metzler’s twin boys, Eric and Dick, while the Metzler's have stepped out. One look at the Los Angeles beauty resulted in Marilyn’s landing a seven-year-contract with that studio. One evening on a routine call, she found herself caring for the child of a 20th Century Fox casting director. Original Caption: Marilyn was saving the money she earned as a baby sitter to take a dramatic course. I did this at sixteen by getting married.” (Monroe’s only guardian in the film is a neighbor who appears briefly, played by Sara Paxton.) When McKee Goddard and her husband announced their move to West Virginia they offered a then 15-year-old Monroe the choice between marrying James Dougherty, the 21-year-old son of a former neighbor, or returning to the orphanage. I was placed in nine different families before I was able to quit being a legal orphan. Most of the time I was placed with a family, who were given five dollars a week for keeping me. I lived in the orphanage only off and on. “If not for Grace I would have been sent to a state or country institution where there are fewer privileges, such as being allowed to have a Christmas tree or seeing a movie sometimes. “It wasn’t till later that I realized how much she had done for me,” Monroe wrote of her “Aunt Grace” in her posthumously published memoir, My Story. Moving in with family friend Grace McKee Goddard at age 11 changed her fate. Monroe spent her childhood in various orphanages and foster homes, where she allegedly faced sexual abuse and emotional distress. By age seven, Monroe was back in her birth mother’s care, although as shown in Blonde, her mother would be institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia shortly thereafter. When her daughter was three years old, Gladys would allegedly make a thwarted attempt to break into Monroe’s foster home, placing her daughter in a duffel bag and briefly locking out the foster mother. She would make frequent visits to Monroe’s foster home, and even keep her for occasional sleepovers. As the mother of two children-Jackie and Berniece-who had already been taken from her by an ex-husband, Gladys was eager to keep her youngest in her life in some form, according to Biography. The real Monroe was only two weeks old when Gladys first dropped her off at a foster home in Hawthorne, California.
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