A short article exploring Marilyn’s troubled family background is featured in the January 14 issue (#3) of German women’s weekly magazine, Freizeit Woche, currently available in some UK stores (including Newsstand.)
I’ve provided a rough translation below (via Google.)
Why she couldn’t escape her greatest fear: Marilyn Monroe – A shocking family curse!
“She was the most photographed woman of the 20th century, an international superstar and the epitome of a male fantasy. But behind the radiant facade was Norma Jeane Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe, a deeply troubled and lonely woman who spent her life trying to escape a devastating family curse.
From 1955 onward, she regularly sought out a psychiatrist, driven by the fear of the psychological and neurological illnesses that ran like a dark thread through her family … Her grandmother [Della Mae Hogan], who suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, died of myocarditis at the age of only 51.
Shortly afterward, another tragedy struck. The suicide of her grandfather, Tilford Hogan, marked by the effects of the Great Depression, plunged Gladys Pearl Baker into a deep crisis. The single mother of the future Hollywood star suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1934, she was finally admitted to Los Angeles General Hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. For her eight-year-old daughter, this meant a radical change. From that moment on, she lived with constantly changing foster parents or in an orphanage.
Despite fame, admiration, and adoration, Marilyn never managed to leave her traumatic childhood behind as an adult. She, too, struggled with mental health issues from an early age. Anxiety, sleep disorders, and addictions plagued her for years.
Whether her death in 1962 was a suicide remains unclear to this day. What is certain is that until the very end, she desperately searched for love, for support, for inner peace—and it was precisely this longing that ultimately broke her.”
As German readers may notice, I’ve omitted two factual errors from the original article. Firstly, Marilyn’s father didn’t die aged 27, but the story behind this mistake is worth repeating.
Martin Edward Mortensen, second husband to Marilyn’s mother Gladys, was named as the father on Norma Jeane’s birth certificate. However, the couple had already parted when the baby was conceived.
A few years later, Gladys read a newspaper report that a man of the same name had died in a car accident. She wrongly believed the man was her ex-husband, telling friends and family that he was dead. In fact, Edward Mortensen remained in California until his death in 1981.
As she had long suspected, Marilyn’s biological father was Charles Stanley Gifford, a married co-worker of Gladys. His identity was belatedly confirmed in 2022, by DNA testing of Marilyn’s hair sample (see here.)
While Gifford died in 1965, Gladys lived on until 1984 – not 1981, as stated elsewhere in the article. Perhaps the author has confused the year of her death with Mortensen’s?
The Marilyn Report 