The Photo That Launched a Legend: How a Chance Meeting in a Factory Turned Norma Jeane Into Marilyn Monroe

In 1944, Marilyn Monroe was still just Norma Jeane Dougherty—an 18-year-old newlywed working the assembly line at a munitions plant while her husband served in the Merchant Marines. Fame was a distant dream, one she pursued quietly, with little more than ambition and a yearning to “learn, to change, to improve,” as she would later write in her memoirs.

That dream began to take shape in the unlikeliest of places: the Radioplane Company, where she was tasked with assembling propellers for the war effort. It was here that David Conover, a photographer for the U.S. Army Air Forces’ First Motion Picture Unit, was sent to document the women keeping production moving on the home front. His assignment was straightforward—capture morale-boosting images for soldiers overseas.

Conover remembered moving down the line, photographing one worker after another, until he spotted a young woman with curly ash-blond hair and a smudge of dirt across her cheek. “I snapped her picture and walked on. Then I stopped, stunned,” he recalled. “She was beautiful. Half child, half woman, her eyes held something that touched and intrigued me.”

For Norma Jeane, the encounter was life-changing. Encouraged by Conover’s interest—he called her “a real morale booster”—she left the factory floor and began modeling for him and other photographers. Defying her husband’s wishes, she signed with the Blue Book Model Agency in 1945. Her dedication was relentless: she bleached her hair to a striking platinum, studied photographs of herself, and practiced poses in front of a mirror to refine her presence.

Her marriage dissolved under the strain, but her career gained momentum. By 1946, her persistence paid off. She caught the attention of 20th Century Fox and earned a coveted screen test. Though her first contract with the studio didn’t stick, it was the crucial opening she needed to reinvent herself—transforming from Norma Jeane Dougherty into Marilyn Monroe.

That single photograph in a war factory didn’t just alter the trajectory of one young woman’s life—it marked the first step in the making of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons.