What happened to Marilyn Monroe’s father?

The only known letter to Marilyn Monroe from her estranged father is going up for auction less than a year after his identity was finally confirmed.

The handwritten get-well card from Charles Stanley Gifford will be “one of the most appealing” of a total 170 items formerly owned by Monroe that are going under the hammer next month, said The Independent’s culture reporter Peony Hirwani.

The card, which is expected to sell for around $3,000 (£2,400), was discovered “purely by chance” by historian and collector Scott Fortner, who co-hosts the All Things Marilyn podcast. “This is the only known documented evidence of a relationship between Monroe and Gifford, which solves the mystery of whether or not she knew or had contact with her biological father,” Fortner told People magazine.

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‘This is your father’

Monroe was born on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, to an unmarried mother, Gladys Baker. The future Hollywood star was named Norma Jeane Mortenson at birth (though she was later baptised as Norma Jeane Baker) and her father was listed as Martin Edward Mortensen – the man to whom Gladys was previously married.

However, said Radio Times’s Patrick Cremona, “it seems that he was not actually her real father and had in fact separated from Gladys long before Norma Jeane was born”. The true identity of her father remained uncertain until earlier this year.

Six decades after Monroe’s death at the age of 36, a DNA test confirmed that she had been fathered by Gifford, with whom Gladys had an affair while working as a film negative cutter.

RKO Studios supervisor Gifford “left a pregnant Gladys soon after their dalliance”, said the i news site, and played “no role in Monroe’s upbringing, keeping his distance for the duration of her life”.

How much the “blonde bombshell knew about her dad” is unclear, said The Sun, “as Gladys never openly revealed his identity”.

But Monroe “said her mother had shown her a photo of a man in a golden frame and would say, ‘this is your father’”, the paper reported.

Monroe tried to contact Gifford several times over the years, but was rebuffed. In 1996 documentary Marilyn Monroe: The Mortal Goddess, the late actor’s former husband, police officer James Dougherty, said: “He wouldn’t recognise her. He said, ‘No, I don’t know who you are. See my attorney.’”

However, Gifford did send a get-well card to Monroe while she was in hospital, according to Julien’s Auctions, which is putting the letter under the hammer during an online sale on 17 and 18 December.

The card shows a girl standing on a musical note and the message inside spells Monroe’s first name incorrectly, starting “Dear Marylyn”. Pre-printed text follows, saying: “This cheery little get-well note comes specially to say that lots of thoughts and wishes, too, are with you every day.”

Gifford then wrote “a little prayer too”, followed by his full name and address at a dairy farm in California that he had established after remarrying.

Gifford, who fathered two other children, died of a heart attack at the age of 66 in 1965 – three years after Monroe died of an apparent overdose.

Fact or fiction?

Monroe’s family relationships are explored in a critically panned movie titled Blonde that was released on Netflix in September.

“Rather than being a traditional biopic,” said Radio Times’s Cremona, “the film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's fictionalised novel of the same name – mixing fact with fiction to paint a portrait of a deeply troubled life.”

Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, is shown reacting “to her lack of a father figure in a number of ways”, including “referring to several of her lovers as ‘Daddy’”.

In one scene, Monroe “is told that there is a surprise waiting for her in her hotel room” and is “convinced that she’s about to be reunited with her long-lost father”, Cremona continued. But the “specifics” of some of these incidents in the film “don’t match up to reality”.

A documentary released in June, Marilyn, Her Final Secret, helped to set the record straight about her father’s identity. Directed by Francois Pomès, the film features DNA tests by scientists who used a hair sample from Monroe and cheek swab samples from Gifford’s granddaughter, Francine, and great-granddaughter, Lisa.

“The hair that we used from Monroe was collected by the person who embalmed her body the day she died and we were able to draw up 22% of her genetic profile from that thanks to a DNA fragment found in the keratin,” Pomès told Variety.

The director-producer said he had “spent years and sleepless nights” trying to confirm who Monroe’s father was and break a “family secret”.

“The thing that touched me the most was seeing the reaction of Gifford’s family, who were overwhelmed by this irrefutable evidence,” Pomès added.