Norma Jeane Mortenson arrived in the world at 9.30 am on 1 June 1926, at Los Angeles County Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker, had already walked out on Norma’s father (well, according to the birth certificate at least), ostensibly because he had become ‘boring’. Gladys was later diagnosed with hereditary paranoid schizophrenia, a mental condition that also afflicted her mother and father and which had contributed to the deaths of two of her grandparents.
When Norma Jeane was only seven years old, her mother was committed to a ‘rest home’ and the little girl was then moved around various foster parents and institutions. With nowhere to live – her latest foster parents were moving to the East Coast and couldn’t take her with them – she got married, to James Dougherty, just tw
