Marilyn Monroe

• 1. Introduction

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  Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on the 1st of June 1926, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, at a city hospital. She died thirty-six years later in that same city, in her own home, with empty medicine bottles beside her bed and a telephone receiver clamped in her hand. In between those two dates came one of the most startling careers in Hollywood history: a decade of top billing, films that grossed $200 million by her death, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA nomination, and a photograph on the cover of the very first issue of Playboy.

  But the story of how Norma Jeane Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe is stranger and more deliberate than the myth lets on. She spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage, married a factory worker at sixteen to stay out of an institution, and then, by her own ambition and strategy, navigated a studio system designed to keep women like her useful and underpaid. The questions worth sitting with are these: How much of Marilyn Monroe was invented, and by whom? What did the woman behind the persona actually want? And what does it mean that she may have been, as one scholar put it, so good an actress that no one believed she was anything but what she played on screen?

• 2. A Childhood Without Ground

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  Gladys Pearl Baker, Monroe's mother, had already survived a great deal before her daughter arrived. Gladys had married at fourteen, been left by a husband who kidnapped their two older children to Kentucky, and then built a working life as a film negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles. In 1925, she had an affair with her superior at RKO Studios, Charles Stanley Gifford, and biographers Fred Guiles and Lois Banner have concluded that Gifford was most likely Monroe's father. A DNA comparison conducted in 2022 between Monroe's genetic material and that of one of Gifford's descendants supported this view.

  Gladys placed her infant daughter with evangelical Christian foster parents, Albert and Ida Bolender, in the suburban town of Hawthorne, visiting on weekends after returning to the city for work. In the summer of 1933, when Monroe was seven, Gladys bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved Monroe in with her. The arrangement lasted only months. In January 1934, Gladys suffered a mental breakdown, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She would spend the rest of her life cycling in and out of institutions.

  Grace Goddard, Gladys's friend, became Monroe's legal guardian in 1936, but Monroe did not leave the Los Angeles Orphans Home until the summer of 1937, when she was eleven. Her time with the Goddards was also cut short when Doc Goddard allegedly molested her. Monroe later described her relationship to the movies during these years in her own words: "I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim... When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be... Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night."

  By September 1938, at age twelve, Monroe had found something closer to stability in the Sawtelle home of Grace's aunt Ana Lower. She enrolled at Emerson Junior High School and excelled in writing. But Lower's health deteriorated, and Monroe was returned to the Goddards in Van Nuys around early 1941. When Doc Goddard's company relocated him to West Virginia and California child protection laws prevented Monroe from crossing state lines with them, the solution chosen by the adults around her was marriage.

• 3. From Factory Floor to Film Contract

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  Monroe married factory worker James Dougherty on the 19th of June 1942, just after her sixteenth birthday. She later described the marriage plainly: she was "dying of boredom." In April 1944, Dougherty shipped out to the Pacific, and Monroe took a job at the Radioplane Company, a munitions factory in Van Nuys, to help the war effort.

  In late 1944, photographer David Conover arrived at the factory. He was working for the U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, assigned to shoot morale-boosting images of female workers. None of Monroe's photographs were used, but she quit the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his circle. By August 1945, defying both her deployed husband and his disapproving mother, she had signed with the Blue Book Model Agency.

  The agency's owner, Emmeline Snively, directed Monroe toward pin-up work over high fashion. Monroe straightened her naturally curly brown hair and dyed it platinum blonde. Snively later said Monroe quickly became one of the agency's most ambitious and hard-working models. By early 1946, Monroe had appeared on thirty-three magazine covers for publications including Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek. She occasionally modeled under the name Jean Norman.

  Through Snively, Monroe signed with an acting agency in June 1946. After an unsuccessful interview at Paramount Pictures, she was given a screen test by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive. The studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck, was unimpressed, but he signed her to a standard six-month contract specifically to keep her away from rival studio RKO Pictures. It was Lyon who picked the first name Marilyn, reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller; Monroe supplied the surname from her mother's maiden name. In September 1946, she divorced Dougherty, who had opposed her career, and Marilyn Monroe began.

• 4. Building a Star, Fighting a Stereotype

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  Monroe's first years at Fox produced only bit parts. Her contract was not renewed in August 1947. She returned to modeling, did odd jobs at film studios, and worked to build connections. She befriended gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky and became a friend and occasional sex partner of Fox executive Joseph M. Schenck, who persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to sign her in March 1948.

  At Columbia, Monroe's look was deliberately modeled after Rita Hayworth's, and she began working with the studio's head drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would remain her mentor until 1955. Columbia did not renew her contract either. After returning to modeling, she posed for nude photographs by Tom Kelley for John Baumgarth calendars, working under the name Mona Monroe.

  Through talent agent Johnny Hyde, who became both her mentor and her lover, Monroe landed small roles in two critically admired films in 1950: Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, which received fourteen Academy Award nominations, and John Huston's noir The Asphalt Jungle. Bette Davis later praised Monroe's work in All About Eve, saying she "knew she was going to make it." Despite her screen time running only a few minutes in The Asphalt Jungle, biographer Donald Spoto wrote that Monroe had "moved effectively from movie model to serious actress."

  In December 1950, Hyde negotiated a seven-year contract for Monroe with Fox. Days later, he died of a heart attack, and Monroe was devastated. Fox placed her in a series of comedies where she functioned, in Spoto's phrase, as "a sexy ornament." But her fan mail reached several thousand letters a week, and in February 1952 the Hollywood Foreign Press Association named her the "best young box office personality."

  The nude calendar photographs resurfaced as a scandal in March 1952. Monroe and the studio chose to acknowledge them rather than deny, stressing that she had been broke at the time. The strategy produced public sympathy and drove audiences to her films. The cover of Life magazine followed, naming her the "Talk of Hollywood." The same year, she studied acting with Michael Chekhov and mime Lotte Goslar, and appeared in Clash by Night, directed by Fritz Lang. To prepare for her role as a fish cannery worker in that film, she spent time at an actual fish cannery in Monterey.

• 5. Taking Control

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  By 1953, Monroe was one of 20th Century-Fox's greatest assets, but her contract, unchanged since 1950, paid her far less than her commercial value. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck had a strong personal dislike of her and blocked her from roles outside the pin-up type. In January 1954, he suspended Monroe when she refused to make another musical comedy, a project called The Girl in Pink Tights.

  Monroe responded immediately. Fourteen days after the suspension began, she and Joe DiMaggio, a retired New York Yankees star she had been dating for two years, were married at San Francisco City Hall on the 14th of January 1954. Days later they flew to Japan, combining a honeymoon with his business trip. She traveled from Tokyo to South Korea, where she performed in a USO show, singing for over sixty thousand U.S. Marines over four days.

  She settled with Fox in March 1954, extracting the promise of a new contract, a $100,000 bonus, and a starring role in The Seven Year Itch. That film, directed by Billy Wilder and released in June 1955, became one of the biggest commercial successes of the year. Its most famous scene was filmed on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan: Monroe standing over a subway grate in a white dress as air blew her skirt upward. The shoot lasted several hours and drew nearly two thousand spectators. The stunt placed Monroe on international front pages. It also marked the end of her marriage; DiMaggio was present that night, was enraged, and Monroe filed for divorce in October 1954 after nine months of marriage.

  After filming on The Seven Year Itch wrapped in November 1954, Monroe moved to New York and, with photographer Milton Greene, founded Marilyn Monroe Productions. She stated she was "tired of the same old sex roles" and asserted Fox had voided her contract by failing to pay the promised bonus. The press largely ridiculed her, and she was parodied in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, in which her lookalike Jayne Mansfield played a dumb actress who starts her own production company.

  Monroe spent 1955 studying acting with Constance Collier and attending method acting workshops at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. She grew so close to the Strasberg family that she received private lessons at their home and was treated as a member of the household. She also began psychoanalysis. By the end of the year, Fox had offered her a new seven-year deal: $400,000 for four films, the right to choose her own projects, directors and cinematographers, and the freedom to make one film with MMP for every film she completed for Fox.

• 6. Acclaim and Its Costs

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  On the 23rd of February 1956, Monroe legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. That same year she filmed Bus Stop, directed by Joshua Logan, playing a saloon singer with an Ozark accent, deliberately unglamorous costumes, and intentionally mediocre singing and dancing. Logan had initially doubted her, but after working with her he compared her to Charlie Chaplin in her ability to blend comedy and tragedy. The Saturday Review of Literature wrote that her performance "effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality," and critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Monroe had "finally proved herself an actress."

  On the 29th of June 1956, Monroe married playwright Arthur Miller in a four-minute civil ceremony at Westchester County Court in White Plains, New York. Two days later they held a Jewish ceremony at the home of Miller's literary agent, Kay Brown, in Waccabuc, New York. Monroe's conversion to Judaism prompted Egypt to ban all of her films. The media, noting the contrast between Monroe's sex symbol image and Miller's reputation as an intellectual, produced Variety's headline: "Egghead Weds Hourglass."

  That August, she began filming The Prince and the Showgirl at Pinewood Studios in England, opposite and directed by Laurence Olivier. Olivier angered her from the start with the patronizing instruction "All you have to do is be sexy" and by demanding she replicate Vivien Leigh's stage interpretation of the role. Monroe's dependence on pharmaceuticals escalated during the production. Biographer Donald Spoto has written that she also had a miscarriage. Despite the conflicts, filming finished on schedule. The film received better reviews in Europe than in America, and Monroe won the Italian David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress and the French Crystal Star, and received a BAFTA nomination.

  After returning from England, she took an eighteen-month hiatus. She had an ectopic pregnancy in mid-1957 and a miscarriage the following year, both likely linked to her endometriosis. She bought out Milton Greene's share of Marilyn Monroe Productions after they could not resolve disagreements about how the company should be run.

  In 1958, Monroe returned to Hollywood to make Some Like It Hot with Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis, accepting the role partly because of Miller's encouragement and an offer of ten percent of the film's profits. The production was famously difficult. Monroe demanded dozens of retakes, could not remember her lines, and Curtis described kissing her as "like kissing Hitler" given the number of attempts required. Monroe's own private commentary on her co-stars was sharper. She privately compared the production to a sinking ship and said of Wilder and the others, "why should I worry, I have no phallic symbol to lose."

  Wilder ultimately said of her performance: "Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!" The film was a major critical and commercial success when it was released in March 1959. Monroe won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, and Variety called her "a comedienne with that combination of sex appeal and timing that just can't be beat." The film has since appeared on best-film lists compiled by the BBC, the American Film Institute, and Sight and Sound.

• 7. The Final Years

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  Let's Make Love, a musical comedy released in September 1960, was Monroe's next completed film. Monroe chose George Cukor to direct and Miller rewrote parts of a script she considered weak. During production, Monroe had an affair with co-star Yves Montand that was widely reported and then used in the film's publicity campaign. The film was unsuccessful. Truman Capote had lobbied for Monroe to play Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the producers feared the complications she would bring to a production, and gave the role to Audrey Hepburn.

  Miller had written The Misfits specifically to give Monroe a dramatic vehicle. Filming took place in the Nevada desert between July and November 1960, directed by John Huston and co-starring Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, and Montgomery Clift. By then Monroe and Miller's marriage had effectively ended; Miller had begun a relationship with on-set photographer Inge Morath. Monroe resented that Miller had based her character, Roslyn, partly on herself. Her drug addiction had become so severe that her makeup often had to be applied while she was still asleep under the influence of barbiturates. In August, filming halted for a week so she could complete a hospital detox. Huston said that when Monroe was acting, "she was not pretending to an emotion. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness."

  The Misfits was released in February 1961 to mixed reviews and failed at the box office. Monroe obtained a Mexican divorce from Miller in January 1961. After the film, she was admitted to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where she was erroneously placed on a ward for psychosis patients, locked in a padded cell, and denied transfer to a more appropriate ward. After three days, her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio intervened and helped move her to the Columbia University Medical Center.

  In the spring of 1962, Monroe received a "World Film Favorite" award at the 19th Golden Globe Awards and began filming Something's Got to Give for Fox. On May 19, she paused production to appear at Madison Square Garden and sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" at a celebration for President John F. Kennedy, wearing a beige, skintight rhinestone dress that made her appear nude. Fox executives were furious about the trip. The following month she filmed a nude swimming pool scene for the same production and allowed press photographers on set; Life magazine published the images.

  On June 7, Fox fired Monroe and sued her for $750,000. Dean Martin refused to continue the film with a replacement, and Fox shut down the production entirely. Fox soon regretted the decision and had reopened negotiations with Monroe by late June, reaching a settlement that included recommencing Something's Got to Give and a starring role in What a Way to Go! Monroe was also planning a biopic about Jean Harlow. She was working with photographer Bert Stern on photographs for Vogue, the first a fashion editorial and the second a nude series. Both were published posthumously under the title The Last Sitting.

• 8. Death and Enduring Questions

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  On the evening of the 4th of August 1962, Monroe was at her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her housekeeper Eunice Murray was staying overnight. Murray woke at 3:00 a.m. on August 5 and saw light under Monroe's bedroom door but could not get a response. She called Monroe's psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, who broke into the bedroom through a window. He found Monroe dead in her bed, covered by a sheet, with her hand clamped around a telephone receiver. Monroe's physician, Hyman Engelberg, arrived at around 3:50 a.m. and pronounced her dead. The Los Angeles Police Department was notified at 4:25 a.m.

  The toxicology report established that Monroe died from acute barbiturate poisoning. She had 8 mg% of chloral hydrate and 4.5 mg% of pentobarbital in her blood, and 13 mg% of pentobarbital in her liver. The dosages were several times the lethal limit, ruling out accidental overdose. Deputy coroner Thomas Noguchi classified the death as a probable suicide. Monroe was thirty-six years old.

  Her funeral at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on August 8 was private. DiMaggio arranged the service, barred most of Hollywood from attending, and was the only ex-husband present. He believed the entertainment industry bore responsibility for her death. French artist Jean Cocteau said her death "should serve as a terrible lesson to all those whose chief occupation consists of spying on and tormenting film stars." Laurence Olivier called her "the complete victim of ballyhoo and sensation."

  Conspiracy theories about Monroe's death gained mainstream attention in 1973 with the publication of Norman Mailer's Marilyn: A Biography, and by 1982 had become widespread enough that Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp conducted a formal threshold investigation into whether a criminal case should be opened. No evidence of foul play was found.

  The American Film Institute has ranked Monroe the sixth greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood. The Smithsonian Institution placed her on its list of the one hundred most significant Americans of all time. In 2024, the Los Angeles City Council approved Monroe's house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive as a Historic Cultural Monument. In the decades since her death, scholars including Gloria Steinem, Molly Haskell, Sarah Churchwell, and Lois Banner have argued about whether Monroe was a victim of the studio system or an active architect of her own persona; in some respects the disagreement simply mirrors the one Monroe herself spent her whole career navigating.