On the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, her niece recalls the bubbly teenage visitor she came to adore Little Mona stood to ¬attention, ready to have her first picture taken by the fun-loving young aunt she had only just met. Then the five-year-old bit her lip nervously as the teenage beauty with tumbling chestnut locks lowered her camera, sighed and walked towards her smiling. “Don’t stand straight,” 18-year-old Norma Jean Dougherty gently told her. “Tilt your head to the side, make a silly smile. Bend one knee so you look a little curvy… there you go honey – that’s cute.” And as the camera clicked it ¬captured the outline of a pose her 18-year-old aunt would go on to make famous years later – as a Hollywood legend with a new hair color and a new name.
Now, 50 years to the day since Marilyn Monroe’s death, 73-year-old Mona Rae Miracle lifts the lid on her memories of her famous relative.
She tells of her own theory on the glamorous star’s mystery death at 36, found naked on her bed, and how Marilyn had been planning to remarry just before she died. Mona even reveals the real reason why the aunt who loved dressing her up and painting her nails changed her hair to become the world-famous Blonde Bombshell. Icon: But Mona knew a different side of Marilyn But her earliest recollections of the fragile, bubbly Norma Jean are the ones she cherishes most. “I was just five when we met,” says Mona, who now lives in North Carolina in the US. “I remember she smelled good and gave me lots of hugs when we went to the station in Detroit to meet her.” Her mum Bernice , then 24, was herself only meeting her sister for the first time – they had been raised separately by foster parents because their mother Gladys suffered from mental illness. “Mother knew her right away,” recalls Mona. “Norma Jean told me she was very pleased to meet me and I could tell she really was. She loved children. She would tumble about on the grass with us and the dogs and just loved it.” It was the start of a warm bond between Mona and her aunt, just 14 years her senior. “She was tons of fun,” says Mona. “She could really appreciate a good joke – she was a prankster.” And the fun-loving pair ¬enjoyed playing dress up. “One time she came to visit and I said to her: ‘I want to be pretty like you’. So she painted my fingernails with her scarlet nail polish. “She certainly wasn’t the dumb blonde she made out to be. She was intelligent and loved reading.”
And when the young woman Mona idolized became a starlet with movie studio Twentieth Century Fox, that desire only intensified, even though her aunt’s new hairdo puzzled her at first when she and Bernice went to visit her in California. “I said to her: ‘Aunt Norma Jean, your hair is blonde now’,” says Mona. “She told me the head of her ¬modeling agency had told her she should do it because blonde hair looked good in any light.’ Marilyn even sent young Mona the dress she wore for her first ¬wedding to sweetheart Jimmy ¬Dougherty when she was just 16. As Mona grew up, she turned to her aunt for advice about boys. “She would tell me: ‘Just be yourself. Don’t pretend,” she said
But Marilyn’s own love life was a disaster. After her divorce from Jimmy, came failed marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. When she was found dead of an overdose of barbiturates at her home in August 1962, her niece was devastated. “I was 22 and in my first year of teaching. I went straight to the chapel and fell to my knees,” recalls Mona.. “But I do not subscribe to any of these murder or suicide theories or even her supposed affair with President Kennedy. None of it is true. It was an accident.” “And I know she was planning on remarrying Joe. He really was the love of her life. They knew what they wanted out of life at that point and they could have made it work. “It’s so sad she never became a mother. She would have been -wonderful.” Ironically, while rich and famous Marilyn’s life was cut short, her sister hard-up housewife Bernice is still alive at 93. “Mother was just as beautiful as Marilyn – and she is still very beautiful,” says Mona Rae. Mona Rae is still proud, 50 years on, that her famous aunt is remembered with such affection.
