Norma Jeane Baker receives a letter from a man claiming to be her father at a moment when public adoration and private longing arrive in the same dressing room. The letter appears to answer a hope she has carried through her rise to fame: that her absent father has been following her career. Its power comes not from proof—the sender leaves no name or return address—but from the story Norma Jeane makes of its arrival. She takes the man’s claim as confirmation that she has been watched over all along, while the silence that follows leaves that certainty without verification.

The letter amid the fan mail

In the weeks around the approaching premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Norma Jeane Baker’s dressing room is crowded with flowers, telegrams, letters, and brightly wrapped gifts from admirers. At first she reads the fans’ declarations with real feeling, sometimes weeping over them; she recognizes in their ardent, anonymous words something like the letters she herself might have written as a girl infatuated with movie stars. Some correspondents are disabled, terminally ill, hospitalized veterans, or elderly people. With help from her assistants, she personally answers some of them, treating a reply as a small duty owed to people who write to Marilyn Monroe as though to a sacred figure. The attention excites her, but it also carries an unsettling weight of responsibility.

Against this flood of messages, Norma Jeane Baker repeatedly imagines that one envelope might come from her father. She believes he follows her career, though the narrative makes clear that neither the basis for this belief nor her confidence in it is explained. The contrast matters: an anonymous public can reach the star in abundance, while the father she longs for has not written. Even the absence of a letter from Mrs. Glazer hurts her, but the hoped-for message from her father remains the one she keeps searching for.

A claim received as recognition

About a week before the premiere, Dee-Dee hands Norma Jeane Baker a typed letter and warns her that it seems personal. Norma Jeane guesses who may have sent it, seizes the pages, and reads an account of a man who says he is retired, content with his work and family, and not seeking to exploit the success of Marilyn Monroe. He states that he is her father and proposes that he explain their connection in person. He also says that his wife, now ill, does not know he is writing and would be deeply hurt if she found out.

The writer offers a version of the past that makes Gladys Mortensen responsible for their separation: he claims she drove him out of Norma Jeane’s life and persuaded the girl that he had abandoned them. He asks forgiveness, says that he has recovered from a serious illness, and hopes to meet Norma Jeane in person at a special occasion when father and daughter might celebrate their long-denied love. These are claims in a letter, not facts independently established by the narrative. The envelope has no return address; its Los Angeles postmark is the only concrete indication of where it came from.

Norma Jeane Baker nevertheless receives the letter as revelation. She lays the poorly typed pages on the dressing-room table and carefully smooths them. Dee-Dee watches her repeat the gesture for several minutes before she reads the letter again and murmurs that she knew he was nearby, following and protecting her. Dee-Dee later recalls that Norma Jeane’s happiness made her almost unrecognizable. The scene turns an uncertain assertion into an emotionally certain reunion, at least in Norma Jeane’s imagination.

Silence after the premiere

The timing gives the letter an almost ceremonial promise: its writer hopes for a meeting at a special occasion, and the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is only days away. At the Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, Norma Jeane returns to the cinema she had visited as a lonely child, now surrounded by the prosperous postwar spectacle of her own stardom. The film is expected to be a major commercial success, and the public image of Marilyn Monroe is becoming difficult to miss. Yet the appearance of the father’s letter does not lead to a reunion at the premiere.

From the night of the premiere—which is also the night Norma Jeane decides to marry Ex-Atleta—she receives no further news from the man who said he was her father. She tells no one about the letter and waits. Her private certainty and the public record of his silence therefore coexist: the letter seems to satisfy her longing, but it gives her no confirmed meeting, continuing contact, or independent proof of the relationship.

A later letter renews the promise

A later communication, dated June 10, 1955, reopens the correspondence. It arrives as a Hallmark birthday card with a raised red rose, and Norma Jeane holds the trembling envelope for a long time before opening it. The typed message again addresses her as a lost daughter and promises that the writer will soon come to see her. He says that illness has taught him to forgive Gladys Mortensen, whom he now remembers less as an evil person than as a sick woman, and he invokes an approaching long sea voyage as a reason the meeting should take place soon.

This second letter also reveals a sharp contrast between the affectionate fatherly role the writer claims and the politics he presses upon his daughter. He warns her about rumors of communist sympathies, condemns her defense of freedom of speech, invokes the Rosenbergs, and attacks Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson. The letter thus adds no confirmation of his identity; instead, it presents another self-interested account of family history alongside political admonition and another promise of a personal visit. Across the two letters, the hoped-for father is both an intimate figure imagined as a lifelong protector and an absent correspondent whose claims remain untested. The episode makes the asymmetry plain: Norma Jeane’s fame allows strangers to address her as if they know her, but the letter she most wants to trust cannot establish who its writer is or whether he will appear.