Marilyn Monroe would no doubt have jumped into the arms of François Pomès if she was still alive when she heard the news. Because the producer of French documentaries has succeeded in the mission that she has long wanted to accomplish without ever succeeding: to lift the veil on the identity of her father. In the pages of Paris Match, François Pomès confided in this long quest on the sidelines of the 60th anniversary of the disappearance of Marilyn Monroe. Wanting to mark the occasion of this tragic anniversary, he took up the challenge that no one had taken up until then. Marilyn Monroe’s father was called Charles Stanley Gifford, one of the many conquests of her mother Gladys in 1925.
The road was long, strewn with pitfalls, shenanigans and scams for the producer. Eager to achieve his ends for the 60th anniversary of the death of the icon of cinema, François Pomès has never let go. Since 2018, he has been working, investigating, contacting and collecting all possible information to obtain an ounce of DNA from Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962: “I thought and imagined solving the riddle of his father, the ultimate black hole in his biography“he indicates to the weekly. To draw the DNA of the mother or the actress herself is impossible.
Strands of hair at the heart of the plot
François Pomès turns to early fans, in possession of locks of Marilyn Monroe’s hair. At least that’s what he thought because in reality, there are many scams: “We got taken around by bogus collectors“This difficulty adds to that of the star’s peroxidized hair,”ammonia disintegrating DNA.“He ends up getting real hair from Marilyn Monroe, which he has analyzed by Ludovic Orlando, a doctor in paleogenetics at the CNRS.
The researcher’s ultra-precise and in-depth research combined with the DNA harvests of Charles Stanley Gifford’s descendants finally bear fruit. The man, of whom Gladys, mother of Marilyn Monroe, kept a portrait in her room, is indeed the father of the heroine of the cult film Men prefer blondes. A denouement that the main interested party will unfortunately never have known.