James Dougherty, first man to marry Marilyn Monroe

James E. Dougherty may have been the first husband of screen siren Marilyn Monroe, but folks in the Maine county where he lived a quiet life for more than two decades said he never bragged about it.

''Unless someone asked him about Marilyn, Jim never talked about her," said Captain John Lebel of the Androscoggin County sheriff's department, with whom Mr. Dougherty worked as a certified firearms instructor.

''Jim was also being kind and sensitive to his [third] wife, Rita, though I think Rita became more comfortable about him talking about Marilyn when questioned as time went by," Lebel said yesterday.

Mr. Dougherty, who was featured in the film titled ''Marilyn's Man," a documentary through his eyes about the early years of the star, born Norma Jeane Baker, died Monday in San Rafael, Calif., of complications from leukemia. He was 84.

Mr. Dougherty married Monroe in Los Angeles in 1942 when she was 16 and he was 21.

''He told me she had been in foster care," Emile Jacques of Lewiston, Maine, said yesterday. A onetime mayor of Lewiston, Jacques formerly served on the board of the Androscoggin county commissioners with Mr. Dougherty.

Mr. Dougherty's family had lived next door to a friend of Monroe's mother who had taken the teenager in. Monroe's mother had psychiatric problems and the girl had lived in a succession of foster homes.

''They wanted to move back to [West] Virginia, and they couldn't take Norma Jeane," Mr. Dougherty said in a 1990 interview with United Press International. ''She would have gone back to an orphanage or another foster home, so her foster mother suggested I marry her.

''I thought she was awful young, but I took her to a dance. She was a pretty mature girl, and physically she was mature, of course. We talked and we got on pretty good."

After Mr. Dougherty went off to serve with the merchant marine, Monroe was discovered and went to Hollywood. The couple divorced in 1946. Shortly afterward, he married his second wife, Pat, and they divorced in 1972. He married his third wife, Rita, in 1973. The couple moved to her hometown of Sabattus, Maine, so they could take care of her parents, friends said.

''Jim always referred to Rita as 'my bride,' " Patricia Fournier, Androscoggin county clerk, said yesterday.

Rita Dougherty died in 2003.

''Jim was a wonderful man who gave of himself to the community on many levels," Fournier said.

Mr. Dougherty served as county commissioner from 1985 to 1988, she said. In 1986, he lost a congressional bid to the incumbent Republican, Representative Albert G. Stevens.

He also served on the commission's jail construction committee, which formed to build the Androscoggin County Jail in Auburn, Maine, according to Fournier. When the jail was opened in 1990, Mr. Dougherty's name was put on the plaque. He also worked on the county's charter commission.

''Jim was a very knowledgeable man," Lebel said.

Much of that knowledge, Jacques said, came from Mr. Dougherty's 25 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, where he worked as a detective. In the 1960s, when civil rights protests rocked the Watts section of Los Angeles, the area was Mr. Dougherty's beat, Jacques said. ''Jim learned to speak Spanish then," Jacques said.

''He was a fantastic sharpshooter. He would hold a diamond ring in front of him to use as a mirror, shoot backward over his shoulder, and hit a target."

For a time, Mr. Dougherty taught at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro.

On Mr. Dougherty's website, one segment titled ''Norma Jeane Remembered" talks about the book he wrote in 1997, ''To Norma Jeane, With Love, Jimmie." (Although her given name has appeared in print for years as Norma Jean, she spelled it Norma Jeane.) Another segment reminisces about his life with Rita. ''We always felt like newlyweds," Mr. Dougherty says of Rita. Inside a heart-shaped border, he sends her the message, ''I love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow."

Mr. Dougherty wrote his first book on his relationship with Monroe, ''The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe," in 1976. ''She should have stayed married to this Irishman," Mr. Dougherty said onscreen in ''Marilyn's Man," according to a Globe article last year. ''She would have been a grandma and happy at this point, and still alive."

Annie Woods of Sabattus, Maine, Mr. Dougherty's stepdaughter, said the family plans to fly his body back to Maine for burial, the Associated Press reported.

Material from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.