The Enigma of Marilyn Monroe
Hollywood will never have another star like Marilyn Monroe. Luscious, lonely, unfathomable, unreliable, totally alluring – nearly 65 years after her suspicious death and as we celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday, this enigmatic woman fascinates us as much as when she was a living screen goddess. From the illegitimate baby of a schizophrenic mother to the most beloved blonde bombshell ever, Marilyn Monroe continues to confound the millions who adore her films and puzzle over the mystery of her tragic death at just 36. Was it an accidental drug overdose? Suicide? Or murder, to cover up her involvement with US President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby?
A Troubled Childhood
Marilyn’s traumatic childhood left an indelible mark, accounting for what became her insecurities and chronic lifelong need for approval that left both her emotional state and career in tatters. “I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful,” Marilyn said, “but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.”
What is Marilyn Monroe’s real name? Gladys Baker named the baby born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, “Norma Jeane Mortenson”, but later baptised her as “Norma Jean Baker” (Baker being the surname of Gladys’ first husband). Norma Jeane never knew who her biological father was. (Her mother never knew, either.) Gladys, herself the daughter of a manic-depressive mother – Marilyn’s earliest memory was of this grandmother trying to smother her – did know that she could not take care of her child.
Norma Jeane was shunted between foster homes and orphanages, living with 12 different families as a child. When Norma Jeane was seven, her mother took charge until a family friend, Grace McKee, had the unstable Gladys committed to a mental asylum. For two years, Grace became the child’s surrogate mother. Yet, when she remarried, Grace sent Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphans Home, only to take her back two years later and then, for reasons that are unclear (some sources say her husband tried to molest Norma Jeane), Grace shunted her to another relative’s house, where a cousin allegedly raped her at age 12. They must have been horrendous years for Norma Jeane. She suffered night terrors throughout childhood, which persisted into adulthood and she was left with a legacy of mental illness that would torment her all her life with the fear that she, too, would go mad.
After another few years, back she went to Grace’s house. She began going out with a handsome 21-year-old neighbour named James Dougherty. After six months of dating, the barely 16-year-old Norma Jeane married him on June 19, 1942. It’s not hard to imagine her dreaming of stability and a home of her own.
The Rise of a Star
Who was Marilyn Monroe’s first husband? James Dougherty said they loved each other very much. “I imagine that I was kind of like a father and a brother as well as a husband to her,” he said. Their one bone of contention was parenthood. Norma Jeane wanted a baby right away. James, who realised she was still too young emotionally, insisted she wait until after the war. Had she had the baby she so desperately wanted, though, it’s hard to imagine that Norma Jeane Dougherty would ever have become Marilyn Monroe.
When James joined the marines in 1944 and was shipped to the South Pacific, she was distraught. War or no war, her fragile psyche couldn’t help but see it as another rejection. She had to move out of their little home and into her mother-in-law’s, and found a job at the Radioplane Company, which made drones for target practice, in Burbank, California. When the army sent a photographer to take snaps of women at work, he was so taken by Norma Jeane’s beauty that he sent her to the Blue Book agency for models. She was an immediate hit, appearing in dozens of magazines.
Marilyn started taking acting classes, then a screen test was arranged and James received the dreaded “Dear John” letter, asking for a divorce, when he was stationed in Shanghai. “She told me she was going to be an actress and said they wouldn’t even consider her until she was divorced, because they didn’t want her having babies,” he explained. Norma Jeane had to make a choice. She could remain as a housewife or she could be a star, worshipped in a manner inconceivable to the girl in the orphanage. She chose Hollywood.
The Birth of “Marilyn Monroe”
How “Marilyn Monroe” was born… In August 1946, she signed a $75-a-week contract with 20th Century Fox and was rechristened Marilyn, after the 1930s Broadway singer, Marilyn Miller, and Monroe, her mother’s maiden name. “I used to think, as I looked out on the Hollywood night, there must be thousands of girls like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star,” she said. “But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.”
Yet Marilyn’s early Hollywood years were hardly dreamy. Tiny parts in Dangerous Years (1947) and Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948) were cut to next to nothing, and her contract dropped. Columbia snapped her up, and she appeared in Ladies of the Chorus (1948), but was again dropped. After two small roles, one a cameo in the Marx Brothers movie Love Happy (1949), she was starving. There were rumours that she made a pornographic film and made herself available to casting agents. If she did, it didn’t bring any work. Which is why she accepted the paltry sum of $50 to pose in the nude, which good girls did not do in 1949, for photographer Tom Kelley.
Marilyn’s luck turned when she met Johnny Hyde, executive vice-president and Lothario at the William Morris talent agency. Through his connections and devotion – and the surgery he arranged to slim her nose and improve her chin – she became the It Girl of 1950. That year, John Huston directed her in The Asphalt Jungle. “Marilyn was one step from oblivion,” he said about her then. “She impressed me more off the screen than on … there was something touching and appealing about her.” And she nearly stole the screen from Bette Davis as the dumb blonde, Miss Caswell, in All About Eve (1950).
The Birth of the Hollywood Blonde
Marilyn worked like mad, making 17 movies in only three years. Although many were B-grade, she was becoming more and more famous, receiving thousands of fan letters every week. These fans stood by her when news of her infamous nude photo shoot came out in 1952. When asked if she had anything on for the photos, she replied, “Oh yes, I had the radio on.” Marilyn’s gift was her transparent vulnerability and fragility. She was not sexually threatening, but erotically sweet. Women adored her. Men worshipped her. She was by now the most alluring sex symbol in Hollywood. She was also one of the most terrified, as Judy Garland explained.
“I knew Marilyn and loved her deeply. She asked me to help her. Me! I didn’t know what to tell her,” Judy said. “One night at a party, Marilyn followed me from room to room. ‘I don’t want to get too far away from you,’ she said. ‘I’m scared’. ‘We’re all scared,’ I replied. ‘I’m scared, too’.”
A New Chapter: Marriage to Joe DiMaggio
When did Marilyn Monroe marry Joe DiMaggio? Marilyn’s fears were temporarily lessened in 1952 when she met retired baseball star and all-American icon Joe DiMaggio. The chemistry between them was sizzling, although they were temperamentally opposites: Joe was sombre and Marilyn effervescent. “I don’t know if I’m in love with him yet,” Marilyn said when word got out, “but I know I like him more than any man I’ve ever met.” She also made three hits in a row, showing a complex, dramatic range as a woman who wants to kill her husband in Niagara (1953), and impeccable, delightful comic timing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). She was also given Photoplay magazine’s Best Actress award in 1954.
When Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn married on January 14, 1954, they were dubbed “Mr and Mrs America”. They flew to Tokyo for a honeymoon, then Marilyn went to South Korea to entertain US troops still stationed there after the Korean War. The soldiers went berserk. “Joe, you never heard such cheering,” Marilyn said to him afterwards. “Yes, I have,” the baseball star replied.
A Bitter End
The marriage began to be over before it had hardly begun. Joe was pathologically jealous. Marilyn needed to be adored. “Gee, I never thought I had an effect on people until I was in Korea,” she said. He was a homebody. She had to be seen, acknowledged. He was responsible. She was always late. After the evening spent shooting the infamous scene in The Seven Year Itch, in which her voluminous white skirt flew up as she stood over a subway grate – which nice married ladies did not do in 1954 – the marriage was irrevocably kaput. Joe, who could hit a baseball out of the ballpark, was so enraged by this spectacle that he hit Marilyn. The bruises remained when she filed her separation papers a few days later.
In October 1954, Marilyn and Joe divorced, but they stayed in touch, and their friendship deepened over the years. Depressed by her divorce and by the dumb-blonde scripts she was being offered, Marilyn left for New York, where she hoped she could be taken seriously as an actress. “I don’t want to play sex roles anymore. I’m tired of being known as the girl with the shape,” she said.
A Third Chapter: Marriage to Arthur Miller
A third chapter… and husband Even as critics scoffed at her ambition, she began studying at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio and, in 1956, she formed a company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, to produce Bus Stop, arguably her best role. “Marilyn is as near a genius as any actress I ever knew. She is the most completely authentic film actress since Garbo,” Bus Stop director Joshua Logan said. “(Marilyn) has that same unfathomable mysteriousness. She is pure cinema.” Marilyn also formed an intense relationship with the playwright Arthur Miller, whom she’d first met casually in 1951. “It was like running into a tree!” she gushed. “You know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.”
Many fans were aghast, calling the couple Beauty and the Beast or The Brain and the Body. “I think he saw in her a vulnerable woman whom he could protect, and she saw in him a father, a man with knowledge, a creative person, and that’s what she wanted,” said their friend, actor Eli Wallach.
Riddled with Self-Doubt
After the wedding in June 1956, Marilyn and Arthur flew to London to begin The Prince and the Showgirl. Always self-doubting when it came to her acting, Marilyn was intimidated by her co-star and director, legendary British actor Laurence Olivier. She dealt with her anxieties by popping pills and spending time with Paula Strasberg, the acting coach on whom she was dependent. Olivier was furious, and Marilyn retreated even further, becoming more and more depressed after an operation for a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. Marilyn’s desire to be a mother was palpable. Despite millions of fans loving her every womanly move, she saw herself as a failure as a woman.
Marilyn and Miller retreated to a New York apartment, where she could begin to regain her spirits. In 1958, she took the role of Sugar in one of the greatest comedies ever made, Some Like It Hot, with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Yet the shoot was a nightmare, as Marilyn’s lateness became pathological. Marilyn wouldn’t shoot a scene unless Paula gave her the go-ahead. She couldn’t remember her lines. Famously, she botched the line, “It’s me, Sugar. Where’s the whiskey?” more than 40 times.
Did Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis Date?
“Marilyn was fun when we were dating in the early ’50s, but by the time we worked together in Some Like It Hot, something had happened to her,” Tony Curtis told our journalist when we interviewed him. “She was very troubled. There were problems with Miller; she was pregnant; she was sick. Something had changed in her, making her at times awkward. I could see a huge difference in her 10 years after we’d gone together. It was a real tragedy, especially how used she was. When we were shooting, I never thought she would make another picture, and she was only 32. She couldn’t survive it. And what was so hard for me was that I felt very protective of her, even though she drove us crazy.”
When filming ended, Marilyn suffered another miscarriage. She was inconsolable. Winning a Golden Globe for her performance as Sugar meant little. During the filming of her next movie, Let’s Make Love (1960), she had one love scene that was so provocative and raunchy that a censor was called to the set. “What’s wrong?” Marilyn asked him. “Well – it’s horizontal,” replied the flustered censor, “as though you were getting ready for the sex act.” “Oh, that,” Marilyn replied with a laugh. “You can do that standing up. So what?” The scene stayed in.
A Fateful Affair…
Her marriage suffered another blow during filming, though. Marilyn and co-star Yves Montand had a torrid affair, but he had no intention of leaving his wife, French actress Simone Signoret. Nor did things improve when Marilyn and Arthur Miller moved onto the set of the 1961 film The Misfits, a movie he had written for her. Her co-stars Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift were in awe. “Marilyn is a kind of ultimate,” Gable said. “Uniquely feminine. Everything she does is different, strange, exciting. She makes a man proud to be a man.” But no one was proud when her lateness, insecurities and uppers and downers mixed with alcohol made her behaviour worse than ever. Yet she could transform her inner demons into an astonishing screen intimacy.
When Clark Gable died of a heart attack shortly after filming was complete, Marilyn blamed herself, thinking that her chronic lateness had caused him undue stress. Her marriage was now over, and she flew to Mexico on January 20, 1961, and got a divorce. The Misfits opened a week later, but Marilyn collapsed. Suffering from clinical depression, she was taken to a psychiatric institute so dire (she was restrained in a straitjacket) that she begged Joe DiMaggio to get her out. He took her to a better hospital, where she stayed for three weeks.
A Meeting with Power
When did Marilyn and JFK meet? Still depressed, Marilyn stayed out of the spotlight for months. It was then that she met US President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, and it is believed to have started an affair with JFK and perhaps his brother, too. Despite being off-screen, Marilyn was named Female World Film Favourite at the 1962 Golden Globe Awards. She slimmed down and started filming Something’s Got To Give in April 1962, but problems resurfaced almost immediately. Still addicted to sleeping pills, Marilyn often didn’t show up on shooting days, or if she did, it was hours late. She was also plagued by a sinus infection. Producers warned her that she’d be in breach of her contract if she continued to call in sick. Despite this, or perhaps to spite them, she flew to New York, where she sang a breathy Happy Birthday to JFK at a gala, clad in a flesh-coloured dress that left little to the imagination. The Kennedys, no doubt aghast, refused to take her calls after that – and Marilyn was fired from the film.
Three months later, on August 5, 1962, she was found dead on her bed, nude, clutching the phone, bottles of pills on a nightstand filled with the barbiturates that killed her. Or did they?
The Mystery of Her Death
She was barely cold before harsh questions emerged. Who was she talking to on the phone? Bobby Kennedy? Was it suicide, as she had attempted before? Or was it an accidental overdose of the sleeping pills to which she was addicted? Was it murder by the Kennedys, to keep their relationships quiet, or by the Mob, or someone else? Why did tissue samples from the autopsy disappear? Why had her room been cleaned before the police arrived? The mystery of Marilyn’s death will never be solved. After all these years, no one wants to believe that the beautiful, vibrant, beloved movie star who died at the too-young age of 36 could have chosen to end that life.
Joe DiMaggio, devastated, came to the rescue. (Rumours persist that he and Marilyn planned to remarry.) He claimed her body, paid all expenses and arranged for roses to be sent to her crypt every week for 20 years. In her coffin, a wig hiding the autopsy scars, Marilyn looked lovely, a posy of pink roses in her hands. She was clad in a green Pucci dress, her make-up impeccable, done by her long-time make-up man Whitey Snyder. After Judy Garland’s Over the Rainbow was heard, at Marilyn’s request, Lee Strasberg delivered a eulogy. “Marilyn Monroe was a legend … ” Strasberg said. “She created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world, she became a symbol of the eternal feminine … she had a luminous quality, a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning, to set her apart and yet make everyone wish to be a part of it, to share in the childish naiveté which was so shy and yet so vibrant.”
A Legacy Beyond Death
Where is Marilyn buried? Marilyn was interred in Westwood Memorial Park in LA. The crypt next to hers was bought by Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, which had published her nude photographs taken in 1949, when she was broke yet determined to make it in the business that she said would “pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul”. “She had flesh which photographed like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it. There will never be another one like her,” director Billy Wilder said. “She has an indefinable magic no other actress has.” Marilyn died nearly broke, but her estate is now worth countless millions, thanks to the licensing of her image. And she remains more popular, beloved and revered in death than she was in life.
