She was a beauty, lived a long happy life: what was the fate of Bernice, the mysterious sister of Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jean Baker – this name was given during baptism to the one who called herself the “goddess of the 20th century”. At the same time, Baker is not the surname of Norma Jean’s father, but the first husband of her mother Gladys. Later, the surname Mortensen appeared in Norma Jean’s documents, it was borne by Gladys’ second husband, Edward. However, he never saw the girl and, as confirmed in 2022, was not her relative – it turned out to be a man named Charles Gifford.

By the time the future Marilyn Monroe was born, Gladys had marriage experience. She divorced her husband John Baker with a huge scandal. He attributed all the difficulties to the difficult disposition of his wife, but, apparently, the woman could not cope with the first manifestations of mental disorders.

In this marriage, Robert and Bernice were born. The little girl was only 4 years old (she was born in 1919) when her mother left her children with her father and went to California to seek a new beautiful life by the ocean. True, everything turned out completely different from what was drawn in dreams. The acquaintance of a man who did not want to marry or stay with her left Gladys in 1926 with newborn Norma Jean in her arms and with no means of support. These difficulties caused an aggravation: the mother was in psychiatric clinics, the daughter was traveling with foster families…

Norma Jean didn’t even know she had a brother and a sister. In her metric, Gladys listed the youngest daughter as her third child, but noted “the sole survivor.”

The girl was 12 years old when she learned about the existence of the first family from her mother. At that time, his older brother Robert was really gone: he died in hospital at the age of 15. The reason was called the extremely weakened state of his health – Robert was constantly injured and in trouble, and also suffered from severe pain from a paralyzed leg. He damaged it by falling out of the car while his parents were arguing and didn’t even notice the boy wasn’t in the cabin…

All of this Bernice told Norma Jean in letters. The older sister contacted the younger one first. Bernice was now fully grown – she married Paris Miracles, the son of a college professor, and led a wonderful, successful life as a suburban housewife. She was 19 when her father gave her a letter from Gladys: the woman said she had a younger daughter, and gave her current address, in case the older children wanted to meet Norma Jean. The woman was unaware of Robert’s death. She wrote to her ex-husband in the desperate hope that he would help her out of the psychiatric clinic.

Bernice was completely in shock: she didn’t remember her mother and didn’t know anything about her, she had been brought up by her stepmother. But later she admitted that she felt no pain or resentment – only great inspiration and happiness. She thought she could make up for lost time with her mother and sister.

Her mother’s letters were hopeless: paranoid schizophrenia had completely taken hold of Gladys. She sent Bernice endless plans for her discharge from the clinic, outlined in detail. Some even implicated the President and Congress…

But with Norma Jean, the eldest easily found a common language. The girls literally shared all the details of everyday life with each other, exchanged photos. However, their first meeting took place only in 1944 due to the fact that the Miracles and the budding actress were constantly on the move. Norma Jean came to her sister’s family in Detroit and met her niece Mona Ray, with whom she remained on good terms until her death in August 1962.

In 1946, the girls had the chance to feel like a real family: Gladys Baker was released from the hospital. Bernice took over all the worries about her, Norma Jean, who had already become a famous model and was actively going to auditions, visited them.

Her relationship with her mother was strained, and in the end they completely had a falling out: Gladys was unhappy that her youngest daughter was becoming an actress, and considered these ambitions to be complete nonsense, Norma Jean was accumulating a whole lot of resentment against her mother from early childhood. None of Bernice’s peacekeeping efforts helped.

Discord with her mother did not affect Norma Jean’s attitude towards her older sister. They continued to communicate as natives, kept in touch by correspondence and saw each other systematically. The growing popularity of Marilyn Monroe did not contribute to frequent communication, but the connection did not break. In 1961, Norma Jean asked Bernice to come to Brentwood to help her after a complicated gallbladder operation. It was the last meeting of Gladys’ daughters.

Bernice died in 2014 at the age of 95. She lived in seclusion and did not appear on talk shows with stories about her legendary relative: in fact, what she could share only became public in 2004, when she co -wrote the book “My Sister Marilyn” with her daughter Mona Ray.

Under her blanket, Bernice Miracle has collected personal photos, postcards and other memorabilia of Norma Jean, in which she does not appear at all as a blond beast, but as a warm and loving woman, who is looking for roots. and sustains all his short life.

Photo: Legion Media, Getty Images, Social Media