It was what Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) longed for more than anything during her lifetime: she wanted to know her father’s true identity. According to the new documentary “Marilyn: Her Last Secret”, she hatched a perverse plan to get revenge on her “daddy” – she wanted to seduce him.
On Marilyn’s birth certificate, her mother, Gladys, had given her second husband, Martin Edward Mortensen (1897–1981), as her father. But the couple had already separated when the daughter was conceived.
Identity of the producer “clearly and irrevocably” established
In the documentary, which will premiere in June and will be broadcast on RTS in Switzerland, French filmmaker François Pomès claims to have “clearly and irrevocably” determined the true identity of the Hollywood icon’s producer using a DNA test.
It was a man Marilyn Monroe herself suspected to be her biological father: Charles Stanley Gifford (1898–1965). In 1925 he was the boss of a Hollywood film company that Marilyn’s mother worked for. When her daughter was a child, Gladys is said to have shown the little one a photo of Gifford with the words “This is your daddy”.
Perfider Racheplan
But Gifford vehemently denied paternity while he was alive and refused to even speak to Marilyn. He thus escaped Marilyn’s incestuous act of revenge.
In the documentary, Henry Rosenfeld, a longtime friend of the Monroes, reveals: “Marilyn once said to me that she would put on a black wig, pick up her unsuspecting father at a bar and then have sex with him. To say afterwards, ‘How do you feel now that you’ve slept with your daughter?’ Marilyn hated her biological father because he left a deep void in her life.”
Genetic relationship proven
Pomès managed to bid on a lock of Monroe’s hair and extract DNA from it. He then persuaded Gifford’s last surviving descendant, Francine Gifford Deir, 75, of Virginia, to provide her DNA. The result: Deir and Monroe were 100 percent genetically related. 60 years after Marilyn’s death it is now clear: she has known who her father was all her life. (Enterpress/grb)