How Norma Jeane Became Marilyn Monroe

After a year of marriage, with the war in full swing, Jim enlisted in the merchant marines. He was sent to Catalina Island for training, and for a while Norma Jeane joined him there. He was shipped out to the Pacific in the spring of 1944 and would be gone for long periods of time. With her husband away, seventeen-year-old Norma Jeane went to live with Jim’s mother. Her mother-in-law was working at Radio Plane, an aircraft plant, and she was able to get Norma Jeane a job there folding and inspecting parachutes.

One day that fall—and it was one of the most fateful days in the life of Marilyn Monroe—while she was working, an army photographer named David Conover came to take publicity pictures of attractive young women working in the American factories—to boost the soldiers’ morale.