Norma Jeane:The         Early Years

Norma Jeane Mortensen was born at Los Angeles General Hospital on June 1st, 1926. Her mother, Gladys, was a Hollywood film cutter, she named her daughter after movie actress Norma Talmadge. Her second husband at the time left her when she told him about the pregnancy.
  Gladys Baker had a history of mental illness in the family, and the bad luck with men and the burden of Norma Jeane proved to be to much strain for her. Gladys sufferedwith bouts of hysteria and was committed to a mental institution in 1934. The eight year old Norma Jeane was trated as though she had no living family.
  Norma Jeane from then in was shuffled from orphanages to foster families. She had eleven sets of foster families and people who only took her in for the money from the government, it was after all a time of depression in America.
  Before long puberty hit the pretty Norma Jeane and she began to notice that boys gave her the attention she always craved. She began to work at making sure the boys would continue to notice too!
  In June of 1942, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, she was married to James Daughtery on Catalina Island. It was really just a marriage of convience for her a way to keep out of the orphanages . "But there were other considerations," she said," just being in love with love or sex or whatever you want to call it." Of course James thought that Norma was head over heels in love with him that she even threatened suicide if he left her!
  Well with Jim mostly away with the navy Norma Jeane grew restless. In 1944, with the US at war, she got a job in a plane parts factory spraying fuselages. Jim did not care for his wife to wear such things like sweaters because of their effect on the men around ehr. but when he was away she did and wore what she wanted.
  In 1945 an army photographer  was taking picture of the girls in the factory to show how women supported the war effort. Upon seeing Norma Jeane he said " Where have you been all my life? Have you got a sweater?" Her pictures got the attention from Eastman Kodak to ask, "Who's your model, for goodness' sake?"