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Despite the way a fact about Marilyn Monroe's toes is usually worded, the real issue is not whether she had six toes on each foot — she didn't. The claim, which is traceable to a specific source, is that she was born polydactyl, but with only one extra digit: a sixth toe on her left foot, which was supposedly surgically removed early on in her Hollywood career. This claim originated with photographer Joseph Jasgur, who in March 1946 (as a favor to a friend who ran a modeling agency) took some test shots of a nineteen-year-old model named Norma Jean Dougherty. Young Norma Jean, of course, would later become one of the twentieth century's most famous women under the name Marilyn Monroe. Most of Jasgur's pictures of a teenaged Marilyn Monroe remained unpublished for over forty years, until he finally assembled them for a book entitled The Birth of Marilyn: The Lost Photographs of Norma Jean. It was only then, four decades after the fact, that Jasgur noticed his photographic work revealed a supposedly previously undisclosed physical feature of the young Marilyn -- she had an extra toe on her left foot, as the text of his book explained: Despite Jasgur's It's none of my business disclaimer, his publisher made the most of the situation, using the picture in a What's wrong with this picture? publicity campaign to promote his book. The photograph was also published in the British tabloid Daily Mirror and was denounced as a hoax by many Marilyn devotees. So, did she or didn't she? Here is the relevant portion of the photograph upon which this rumor was based, and a second (less clear) photograph from the same session: It does look a bit like Marilyn has more than the usual five toes in these pictures, but later photographs clearly show her left foot with only five toes: The notion that Marilyn was born with an extra digit which was later surgically removed is bunk, and the appearance of a sixth toe that Jasgur's photos show is merely an artifact of the blending of shadows and light and the natural bulge that appears at the base of one's small toe (where the digit joins the outer edge of the foot) to create something that looked like an extra toe. Nothing other than those few questionable photographs supported the claim: In short, the one and only piece of supporting evidence for the sixth toe claim was Jasgur's photograph, which was far from clear. And even Jasgur himself didn't notice the extra digit, either at the time he took the photographs or after he developed them — he spotted it only (somewhat conveniently) when he had a book coming out. Moreover, other photographs taken by Jasgur at the same time revealed a left foot that looked decidedly normal: Marilyn Monroe may indeed have been the girl with something extra, but the extra something in this case doesn't appear to have been a toe.
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