Marilyn Monroe's life was very unstable. She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926 at 9:30 am in Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother was Gladys Baker and her father was either Charles Stanley Gifford or Martin Edward Mortenson. Mortenson was listed on her birth certificate. She was later Baptized as Norma Jeane Baker. Two weeks after she was born, she was put into foster care with the Bolender family. They were a very religious and strict family and cared for a lot of foster children. She lived with the Bolenders for the first seven years of her life. Later she would say she moved more than a dozen times to different foster homes before she was ten. On her seventh birthday, Norma's neighbor shot her dog, Tippy, because he was barking too much. This really upset her. The dog was wandering around when she found him and brought him home. They had become very close. When the dog was shot, it upset Norma Jeane. Mrs. Bolender called Norma Jeane's mother and told her to come get her. Her mother, Gladys, came to the house and helped her bury the dog. Then she paid the last month's fees to the foster parents, packed her daughter's clothes and they moved.
They lived in an apartment in Hollywood for the summer where her mother was working at a movie studio. Norma's mother qualified for a low cost mortgage that summer because she was a single parent and in August Gayle and Norma Jeane moved into their new house. Her childhood had gone from very strict religion to card games, beer and dancing. She was confused after spending her first seven years in a Pentecostal home. She was sure that she and her mother were going to hell. At the age of 32, her mother had a nervous breakdown and was sent to live in a rest home. Her mother's friend, Grace McKee started to raise Norma Jeane. Grace told Norma that she was going to be a movie star one day just like Jean Harlow. Grace spent a lot of money on her, dressed her in pretty dresses and curled her hair. In 1935, Grace filed for custody of Norma Jeane and later that year moved her into another orphanage where she stayed until she was eleven years old.
She spent Saturday's with Grace going shopping and to the movies. Grace took full custody in February 1936 and she moved in with Grace on June 7, 1937, the same day Jean Harlow died at the young age of twenty-six. Grace's husband tried to molest her while she was living with them. She told her "Aunt Grace" who then sent her away to live with her cousins. One of her cousins attacked her while she was living with them. At the age of 12, she moved back in with Grace and then with Grace's Aunt Ana. She grew quickly and by the end of her thirteenth year, she was a beautiful girl. She was an above average student in Junior High School, was on the newspaper staff and was class secretary. She started going to University High School in the tenth grade and her grades started to slip. She met a boy named Jim Dougherty who was twenty years old. When she was 15, she agreed to marry Jim to keep from going back to the orphanage because Grace was moving to West Virginia.
When she was sixteen, she married Jim, a 21-year-old aircraft plant worker. She did not make a very good wife. She couldn't cook or even make coffee. Jim joined the military in 1944 and was sent to Asia to fight in the war. She went to live with her mother-in-law and went to work at the Radio Plane Company factory; she had her picture taken by a visiting Army photographer. The pictures were an instant success so she applied to the Blue Book Modeling Agency to go to modeling school..
By the spring of 1946 Norma Jeane Dougherty had appeared on at least 33 magazine covers and her marriage to Jim Dougherty was over. She then began modeling bathing suits and, after bleaching her hair blonde, began posing for pinups and glamour photos. Howard Hughes saw some of her pictures and wanted to give her a screen test. But, Ben Lyon of 20th Century-Fox got to her first, signing Norma Jeane Baker to a contract and changing her name to Marilyn Monroe.