Marilyn Monroe

• Born: June 1, 1926
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: August 5, 1962
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

American actor

Monroe rose from poverty to become one of the most famous film stars of the twentieth century. Despite the skepticism of studio executives, her Cinderella story touched filmgoers, and their reactions made her a cult figure rivaling Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, daughter of Gladys Monroe Baker Mortenson and an unknown father. Her mother had married Martin Edward Mortenson in October, 1924; he filed for divorce in May, 1925. Norma Jeane sometimes used the name Baker, since Gladys had been previously married to Jasper Baker and had borne two other children, Berniece and Jackie. Both lived in Kentucky with Jasper and a stepmother while Gladys, in California, worked as a film cutter. Lacking financial resources, Gladys boarded Norma Jeane with neighbors Albert and Ida Bolender until, in 1933, she could afford a house. Gladys and her friend Grace McKee, later Goddard, encouraged Norma Jeane to dream of a film career modeled on that of early blond star Jean Harlow.

The financial situation, lengthy work hours, motherhood, and other problems led to Gladys’s mental breakdown. She was institutionalized. Grace McKee took charge of Gladys and Norma Jeane; the child lived in the Los Angeles County Children’s Home from September 13, 1935, to June, 1937, when Grace’s petition for guardianship was granted. Perhaps because of sexual overtures from “Doc” Goddard, Grace’s new husband, Norma Jeane lived with relatives in Compton, California, from late 1937 until August, 1938, when she returned to Los Angeles to live first with Grace and then with Ana Lower, Grace’s aunt, a Christian Science practitioner for whom Monroe expressed lasting affection. She lived there until her marriage, on June 19, 1942, to James Dougherty.

Monroe herself, as well as publicists and some biographers, later exaggerated this already turbulent life into a saga of abusive foster parents and orphanage life. Without these exaggerations, however, the insecurities of Monroe’s childhood were enough to cause her lifelong problems. She began to draw attention with tight clothes and bright makeup and dropped out of high school during her second year. Her marriage, at sixteen, was a normal way for young working-class girls of her time to seek security. Such girls rarely attended college, and few careers were open to them.

With World War II raging, Dougherty joined the Merchant Marines. When he was sent overseas, Monroe moved in with his mother. The war created unprecedented job opportunities for women, and Monroe found work at the Radioplane Company in Burbank. In 1944, U.S. Army photographers arrived at the company to take pictures of women on the job. Monroe attracted the attention of photographer David Conover, who encouraged her to become a model. By 1945 she had been accepted by the Blue Book Agency for models, had begun attending the school’s training sessions, and had moved out from her mother-in-law’s house. By spring, 1946, she had appeared on thirty-three magazine covers. She was divorced from Dougherty later that year.

Life’s Work

With her hair lightened and her name changed to Marilyn Monroe, the young actor won her first screen test at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios on July 17, 1946. She received a contract. Her first role was as a high school girl barely visible in the background of Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948), a film about a farm family raising mules. In the same year, she made three brief appearances in Dangerous Years, a film concerning juvenile delinquency. After the two motion pictures were released, her contract was not renewed.

While unemployed, Monroe began studies at the Actors Laboratory, a showcase for playwrights, actors, and directors, where Monroe hoped to compensate for her limited training and education. She met actor John Carroll and his wife, Lucille Ryman, director of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) talent department, who became her sponsors, as did Fox’s executive producer Joseph Schenck and, later, powerful agent Johnny Hyde. Schenck’s friend Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios, offered her a six-month contract. At Columbia, she appeared briefly in Ladies of the Chorus (1948). After this contract expired, she played small roles in the Marx Brothers comedy Love Happy (1950) and in A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950). During this period, she posed nude for photographer Tom Kelley; his calendar shots, “New Wrinkle” and “Golden Dreams,” became famous three years later.

Public response to Monroe’s appearance and to a promotional tour for Love Happy was quick and positive, but, as Monroe realized, she appealed to a poor and working-class audience. With her sexy walk and overly tight clothes, she was joining the pre-1934 censorship tradition of seductive and sexy blonds such as Mae West and Jean Harlow. In the 1950’s, however, working under rigid censorship codes, major Hollywood studios tended to reinforce the religious and family values emphasized under that code with stars such as Betty Grable, who projected a more wholesome image than did West and Harlow. The seductive blond was now automatically cast as dumb, evil, or both. Even newspaper and magazine reports often ridiculed Monroe’s desire for serious dramatic roles.

In 1950, Monroe signed a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, but the contract did not immediately improve her roles. She portrayed one of several girls attracted to a roller-skating star in The Fireball and a dumb but aspiring actor in All About Eve, both released in 1950. She had small roles in Right Cross (1950), Hometown Story (1951), and As Young As You Feel (1951), and slightly more important roles in Love Nest (1951) and Let’s Make It Legal (1951). Her first major role was as part of the criminal underworld in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). She played light comedy in We’re Not Married (1952) and Monkey Business (1952), and dramatic roles in Clash by Night (1952) and Don’t Bother to Knock (1952). In the latter, she played a mentally disturbed babysitter. Other films of the period included O. Henry’s Full House (1952) and Niagara (1953).

Monroe’s fame grew, despite her limited roles. News that she had posed nude for Kelley’s photographs frightened studio employees but actually enhanced her reputation when she publicly explained that she had posed because she needed the money. With her combined sexiness and childlike vulnerability, she had come to embody the Cinderella myth for millions of Americans, especially when she began to be seen with baseball great Joe DiMaggio, whom she married in 1954. (She filed for divorce later that year.) In view of this popularity, Monroe began to refuse roles she considered demeaning.

The series of major films for which she is best known began with the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes(1953) and the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). In both, she played a vulnerable girl who seeks security through a wealthy marriage. An intelligent and likeable mind is visible behind the dumb blond facade. These were followed by major roles in the Western River of No Return (1954) and in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), and, more important, lead roles in The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Bus Stop (1956), in which she played perhaps her finest role as a pathetic saloon singer who dreams of Hollywood stardom.

By this time, she had broken with Twentieth Century-Fox, formed her own production company called Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP), established a base in New York, and begun studying with Lee Strasberg, famed head of the Actors Studio, which fostered serious acting talent. She began psychotherapy, which she would continue to the end of her life, sometimes facing manipulative therapists. Her difficulties in appearing on film sets on time, sometimes caused by serious illness and sometimes by insecurity, increased, and she also became addicted to prescription drugs, sometimes in combination with alcohol. Her problems were not solved by her 1956 marriage to Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright best known for Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953). They were divorced in 1961.

Monroe made only four films between 1957 and 1961. Of these, the most important was the comedy Some Like It Hot (1959). The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and Let’s Make Love (1960) were critical and popular failures. Monroe’s last film, The Misfits (1961), has gained lasting fame for its all-star cast. It was the final completed film of legendary star Clark Gable; the script was written by Miller. Footage from the unfinished Something’s Got to Give, filmed in 1962, has been praised by Monroe fans, but Monroe was fired from the film after problems variously attributed to illness, behavior, and addiction.

Monroe’s death on the morning of August 5, 1962, was officially listed as suicide but has since become the material of various legends, some fostered by the deliberate fictionalizations of novelist Norman Mailer and some by numerous books and media programs. Donald Spoto, in the afterword to his 1993 Marilyn Monroe, discusses the growth of these myths and their sources. While Spoto presents a reasonable theory of her death, the facts are now obscured by myths, lies, and even forged letters. Even the facts of Monroe’s life were further clouded by the posthumous publication, in 1974, of her “autobiography,” My Story (actually ghostwritten), which reemphasized the Cinderella legend that continues to appeal to the public.

Significance

While Monroe was capable of great acting, her role in American culture transcends her importance as an actor. The events of her life are important for an understanding of the role of women in the post-World War II world, as women who had learned independence and experienced freedom were urged back to the home after the war. The response to Monroe illuminates the contradictory attitudes of Americans toward female sexuality; while she was publicly condemned for her walk, her revealingly tight clothes, and her blatant sexuality, the condemnations served only to increase the audiences for her films. Despite the criticism, she gained a measure of social importance denied to the earlier West and Harlow. In 1962, for example, wearing a particularly revealing form-fitting gown, she sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy before fifteen thousand people in New York’s Madison Square Garden. She possibly had a brief affair with the president.

In addition, reactions illuminate the attitudes of middle-class media and corporate executives toward the working class and its values and toward women of that class. Like Elvis Presley and the Beatles, Monroe attracted enormous media and corporate attention, but, during her lifetime and for many years afterward, that attention was often tinged with condescension and contempt. Finally, the mythologizing of Monroe’s life reveals the lasting importance of the Cinderella story, while the various conspiracy theories surrounding her death show the vague fears of corporate, criminal, and governmental manipulation that haunt the American popular consciousness.

In 2022, her life became the topic of the biographical drama film Blonde, which was based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates and starred Ana de Armas as Monroe. The film received reletively poor reviews, with critics stating that the film exploited Monroe's tragic life and focused on a reimagined tumultuous private life rather than Monroe's many successes. Monroe has also inspired other works of fiction, including the musical television show Smash (2012–13), which revoles around a Broadway staging of a musical based on Monroe's life.

Bibliography

Buskin, Richard. Blonde Heat: The Sizzling Screen Career of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Billboard Books, 2001. Focuses on Monroe’s films, including plot summaries, reviews, and behind-the-scenes information about each motion picture and interviews with actors who worked with her.

Churchwell, Sarah. The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005. Cultural critic Churchwell examines why so much has been written about Monroe and what this fixation with the actor says about contemporary culture.

McDonough, Yona Zeldis, ed. All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Collection of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, and other writers who analyze Monroe’s impact on contemporary culture.

Mailer, Norman. Marilyn: A Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973. This fictionalized biography by well-known novelist Mailer became the source of many stories surrounding Monroe and her death. Includes many photographs.

Miracle, Berniece Baker, and Mona Rae Miracle. My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Boulevard Books, 1995. Monroe’s half sister and niece offer a poignant account of a poor and dysfunctional family struggling during Monroe’s early years.

Monroe, Marilyn. My Story. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. First published (1974) after the deaths of both Monroe and ghostwriter Ben Hecht, this autobiography may have been compiled by several writers, although it does contain some genuine autobiographical material. This new edition includes an introduction by feminist critic Andrea Dworkin.

Rollyson, Carl. Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993. While repeating many biographical myths, Rollyson’s book is the most readable of the serious studies of Monroe’s acting and films.

Spoto, Donald. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. New ed. Lanham, Md.: Cooper Square Press, 2001. This is essential reading. Spoto provides information based on thousands of new documents including government documents and two hundred new interviews. The book traces sources of myths surrounding Monroe’s life and death.

Wagenknecht, Edward, ed. Marilyn Monroe: A Composite View. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1969. This book contains two 1962 interviews with Monroe and important essays by photographer Cecil Beaton, Lee Strasberg (Monroe’s acting mentor), critic Diana Trilling, British poet Edith Sitwell, and others.

Zolotow, Maurice. Marilyn Monroe. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Many facts are questionable, but Zolotow presents a vivid picture of social and film culture by a Hollywood insider of Monroe’s time.

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