SABATTUS, Maine -- Marilyn Monroe's first husband, who married her before she became a movie sex symbol, said Sunday his marriage to 'Norma Jean'never came up when he announced he was running for county commissioner.
'No, my marriage to Norma Jean never came up at all,' said James Dougherty, 63, who was married for four years ending in 1946 to Norma Jean Mortenson -- later known as Marilyn Monroe.
'When I first came here, some people mentioned it but now that's kind of passe. The people in Maine are polite -- they take you for what you are not what you have been.'
Dougherty, a retired Los Angeles police officer and current court officer with the Androscoggin County Sheriff's Department, has since remarried twice. He moved to the tiny south-central Maine town of 4,000 people in 1978.
The Democrat said he announced his candidacy for one of three Androscoggin County Commission seats on the November ballot, running on a platform to boost 'law enforcement and other services.
'I'm unopposed and that means I'll be sitting on the commission,' he said, of his entrance into politics. 'I want to use tax money for the benefit of the people and be responsive to them.'
Dougherty said he now rarely thinks about his marriage to Miss Monroe, and 'I'm very happy now.'
She divorced him for the lure of Hollywood stardom because 'she wanted to sign a contract with (20th Century) Fox and it said she couldn't be married -- they didn't want a pregnant starlet,' he said.
She subsequently changed her name, became the world's most famous sex symbol, and was married to baseball star Joe Dimaggio and playwright Arthur Miller before she died of a sleeping pill overdose in 1962 at the age of 36.
'It was a long time ago,' he said. 'I don't think you really ever get over them but I was writing her out of my life within a couple of months of the separation.'
Dougherty, who re-married shortly after the divorce and subsequently divorced his second wife in 1972, married a Maine native in 1973.
'My marriage to Norma Jean really doesn't bother her -- perhaps maybe once in a while,' said Dougherty of his wife, Rita. 'She knows it was part of my life. It was so long ago -- she passes it off.'
But, he said, his first wife felt 'she had to compete with Norma Jean' so he destroyed her letters to him and other mementos.
Dougherty said he met Norma Jean in Van Nuys, Calif., when she was a 'kid' of 15 and he -- then 20 years old -- gave her rides home from school because his parents were friends with her foster family.
In 1944 he joined the Merchant Marines. She began modeling and was offered a Hollywood contract with a no-marriage clause. She notified him when he was in China that she wanted a divorce.
'When I went back to see her I tried to talk her out of it,' he said. 'She wanted me to be there -- she just wanted us to keep on and not be married for the contract. I couldn't do that.
'She was kind of a lost soul,' he said. 'I knew Norma Jean not Marilyn. Norma Jean was reserved, religious and devout. The soft part carried over to Marilyn and that's what hurt her. She was too young and wasn't ready for being a star and was eaten up by the system.'
