Mysterious phone taps. An alleged affair with a playboy president. Deadly pills.
Marilyn Monroe may be the most iconic actress ever to grace a movie screen,
but the truth of her life will shock you.
Marilyn Monroe was born
Norma Jeane Mortenson and christened Norma Jeane Baker in California in 1926. At two weeks old,
her mother Gladys Baker left her with foster parents Ida and Wayne Bolender, who were strict,
but mostly provided a loving and stable home. Her father was absent but Norma was close to
her foster brothers and sisters, and her mother would come to visit whenever she could, sometimes
having the young Norma over to stay for a few days at a time in her apartment in Hollywood.
However, the relationship fractured when Gladys tried to kidnap Norma in a duffle bag,
as well as when her later attempt to adopt the child was rejected. Attempts by Ida to
reunite mother and daughter later on were initially successful, but before long,
Gladys' mental instability led to her being diagnosed as a paranoid
schizophrenic and sent to a mental institution. Norma was 8 years old.
From this point, she only saw her mother occasionally, being sent to
live with family friend Grace Goddard, Gladys' sister-in-law, Goddard's friend Edith Ana Lower,
and in the Los Angeles Orphans' Home. When Goddard and her husband moved to West Virginia,
Norma was faced with the possibility of going back into state care. However,
according to the LA Times, she instead agreed to an arranged marriage at 16. Her husband,
James Dougherty, was five years older and had started dating her when she was only 15.
By the outbreak of World War II, young Norma Dougherty was spending her days as a solitary
housewife while her husband served abroad as a merchant seaman. He initially taught
sea safety on Catalina Island just off the coast of Los Angeles, where the couple had
an apartment. However, in his absence Norma decided to take a job in industry for the
war effort. She worked in an assembly line for the company Radioplane, inspecting and
spraying parachutes attached to remote-controlled aircraft in a factory in Burbank, California.
Her role involved working 10 hours a day for $20 per week, and Norma was warned
by her mother-in-law that it would cause major damage to her hair and her health. Yet in 1944,
Monroe was photographed as part of an army moving picture series on women in war production. It was
a life-changing moment, as the image led to her becoming an in-demand model in Los Angeles. By
coincidence, the man who set up the photoshoot was future actor and president Ronald Reagan.
Despite their youth and limited time together, Norma and James Dougherty were genuinely in love.
As stardom beckoned, the pressure on Norma to be unmarried increased. Despite her husband's
attempts to talk her out of it, she served him divorce papers and the marriage ended in September
1946. Norma, who had signed a contract with 20th Century Fox, went on to conquer Hollywood.
"Oh, do you feel the breeze from the subway? Isn't it delicious?"
Despite her talent, charm, and humor, Marilyn Monroe could be bewildering and
exasperating to work with. According to the LA Times, she would often arrive late on set,
particularly when working with stars she was intimidated by like Ethel Merman. She
worked with some of the most famous names of the day, including director Billy Wilder,
but would cause exasperation by sometimes not showing up at all or having to do the
same takes over and over again. This all meant she was eventually fired from the
production of the unfinished film from 1962, Something's Got to Give.
Monroe demonstrated other quirks such as referring to herself in the third person,
with photographer Sam Shaw recounting hearing her go over "Marilyn's" performances,
saying "she wouldn't do" this or that. According to Vogue, Monroe would try to
enhance her on-set glow by smearing herself all over with vaseline in an attempt to look more
"luminous." These quirks and insistence on her own schedule were often interpreted as a sign
of Monroe's drug-addled self-absorption. But it was a sign of something far deeper — and sadder.
"I think you're the saddest girl I ever met."
"You're the first man that ever said that."
Many of Marilyn Monroe's eccentricities were rooted in how uneasy she felt while in front of
the camera — so much so that she became notorious for forgetting her lines and often found it hard
to string sentences together. According to the Independent, director Billy Wilder took to hiding
snippets of the actor's lines within props on set so that she could read them furtively. Although
her performances still garnered praise, it was a phobia she never fully recovered from.
Beforehand she would often have to be coaxed out of her trailer, with even just the prospect of
being in front of the camera causing her to erupt into a full-body rash. On set,
her difficulties with remembering her lines would be coupled with her often missing the
director's cues. This resulted in Monroe being out of focus at the wrong moment or shot in the
wrong lighting, languishing in either too much or too little shadow. Despite being
the envy of so many in the industry, Monroe never truly felt good enough.
She even took secret acting classes with Lee Strasberg when she was famous, sauntering in
and hovering near the back at the Actors Studio in New York in the hopes of not being recognized.
"Miss Monroe worked in my classes, by the way, regular classes.
And she also worked at the Actors Studio."
And despite her reputation for great natural beauty, a medical file from
Dr. Michael Gurdin showed that she had plastic surgery on her chin and nose.
The 1950s was a fearful period for the entertainment industry. Screenwriters,
playwrights and actors lived in fear of "the black list," the notorious facsimile kept by
Senator Joseph McCarthy of anyone accused of communist sympathies. For those on the list,
it could mean the end of their careers.
"Are you now under the direction of the communist party?"
Playwright Arthur Miller narrowly escaped this fate in 1956 when he was called to
testify against suspected colleagues in front of the House Un-American
Activities Committee. When he refused to do so, Marilyn Monroe, who was engaged to him,
stayed loyal to her fiance — despite warnings by her peers that it could permanently damage her
career. Miller's announcement of his upcoming nuptials during the hearing was likely to have
played out in his favor. He avoided a jail sentence, being given a suspended sentence
that was overturned in 1958. Additionally, Miller and Monroe suffered no permanent public backlash.
Yet the FBI continued to nurse suspicions of Monroe. It also didn't help that she
had requested to visit the Soviet Union in 1955. She never did make that trip,
but the FBI opened a file on her. The real estate listing of her former home describes
the discovery in the 1970s of an advanced "telephone tapping system" that reached into
every room of her home. Its origins were never confirmed, although some believe it
to have been done by the mafia, as described by biographer Anthony Summers in Vanity Fair.
Marilyn Monroe's turbulent upbringing made her long for a more stable home life. One
of the brief times she achieved this was when she embraced Judaism as a way to be closer to
husband Arthur Miller. Although Miller was not devout, Monroe was keen to play a part
in his family's traditions, while also finding harmony and solace in the spirituality of Judaism.
During her conversion period she studied under Rabbi Robert Goldburg, who had given
her Jewish texts to absorb, and kept a prayer book scribbled with personal notes. The book was
found among Monroe's possessions when she died. She was open about her identification with the
history of persecution endured by many Jews, saying, according to the Atlanta Jewish Times:
"Everybody's out to get them, no matter what they do, like me."
Many of her friends and colleagues in New York as well as in Hollywood were Jewish. According to
the Jewish Museum, her conversion was a sign of a profound transformation that was kept private from
her more lightweight public persona. It was a sign of Monroe's rich, albeit troubled, inner world.
Marilyn Monroe had a huge private library of around 430 books, nursing a habit as a
voracious reader and ardent consumer of novels and poetry. As highlighted by Open Culture,
the actor could be pictured hunched over copies of celebrated literary tomes such as Ulysses by
James Joyce and iconic books of verse such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Far from wanting to be
portrayed as the flighty and empty-headed starlet that her public persona implied,
she was most keen on being photographed while immersed in a book. It was part
of a mostly doomed attempt to be taken more seriously as an artist as well as a person.
Her taste in men reflected this. Arthur Miller, her second husband,
was a highly successful playwright and literary heavy-weight, but before him Monroe's private
fantasies had skewed towards older and even more intellectually formidable men. Actress
Shelley Winters, her former roommate, said in an interview with the LA Times
that during discussions about which men they would sleep with, Monroe's had put forward
the venerated scientist Albert Einstein as one of her ideal pin-ups — so much so that
after her death a silver-framed photograph of him was found propped up on her piano.
Singer Frank Sinatra, one of Marilyn Monroe's friends and admirers,
gifted a dog to her in 1960 named "Mafia Honey," who was looked after
by his secretary when she died. The Maltese terrier's moniker was
apparently a nod to the rumors that circled Sinatra about his links to organized crime.
"Maf" lived with Monroe for the final two years of her life, during the period when she had separated
from Arthur Miller and was regularly mingling with celebrity friends and peers in New York.
The novelist Andrew O'Hagan later penned a work of fiction in 2010 that was told from the point
of view of the orphaned "Maf." The book, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His
Friend Marilyn Monroe, imagines Monroe's pet as someone who was as well-read, thoughtful, and
complicated as his mistress, occupying a front-row seat as a spectator in the final years of an icon.
In an interview with Granta,
O'Hagan said that he still felt there was still much to say about Monroe, adding,
"[T]he human being, the woman, is too often obscured by the legend."
"I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it."
He further said that he wanted to give short shrift to any of the conspiracy
theories around Monroe's life and death, wanting to do some "gentle debunking" and
saying that he considers Maf, despite being a dog, to be, quote, "saner than most of us."
To say that Marilyn Monroe had a deeply troubled personal life would
be an understatement. Having had a disrupted,
often lonely upbringing where both her parents were either physically or emotionally absent,
it was tragic that a stable home life was often far from her adult experience, too.
Monroe often fell for men who did not have her best interests at heart. Her previous marriage
to baseball player Joe DiMaggio had ended in 1954 after eight months due to his "mental
cruelty." It was a troubled union from the outset. History describes how Monroe cut short
their honeymoon in Japan to perform for American soldiers stationed in Korea. As for DiMaggio,
the hall of famer had been upset by his wife's overly sexualised image, to the point where
he even hired a private investigator to try and prove that she was seeing someone else,
despite the marriage already being in its death throes. Her third husband,
Arthur Miller, spoke of how embarrassed he was by her when they were out in public,
sending Monroe into a tailspin over the thought that she had let him down.
Yet Monroe and DiMaggio remained on good terms, with DiMaggio securing Monroe's
release from a traumatic psychiatric clinic in New York seven years after their divorce.
Monroe's ex-husband was also the one to arrange her funeral when she died,
and for 20 years afterwards he sent flowers to her grave every week.
Even in death, Marilyn Monroe can't seem to escape the public gaze. Decades on from
her tragic demise, she remains legendary to the point that ardent fans, former lovers,
and old associates have tried to buy the crypts above or near Monroe to be close to
her for all of eternity. As the LA Times highlights, Joe DiMaggio had owned the
crypt directly above the one earmarked for her in Westwood Cemetery in Los Angeles,
but sold it after the couple's eight-month union came to an end.
An acquaintance of DiMaggio, businessman Richard Poncher, took things to a ghoulish level when he
brought the plot off him in 1954. Poncher's wife felt it unlikely that it was due to his being an
ardent fan of Monroe, given that the actor's death was eight years away. However, when Poncher died,
he reportedly threatened to haunt his wife relentlessly if she did not turn him over
in his casket so that he would be "upside down over Marilyn" for all time. His widow complied
until 2009, when she decided to move the body and sell the crypt to pay off her mortgage.
Founder of Playboy Hugh Hefner purchased the crypt right next to Monroe for $75,000,
insisting that being next to the Hollywood legend forever was too good an opportunity to pass up.
"You know I'm a sucker for blondes and she is the ultimate blonde."
The grave is notable as a pilgrimage point,
with fans continuing to leave flowers and lipstick marks in tribute to Monroe.
An overlooked aspect of Marilyn Monroe's career is that she was one of the first
people to speak out against Hollywood's culture of rampant sexual harassment. As early as 1953,
Monroe condemned a culture that allowed men to take advantage of her during the years when she
was breaking into the film industry. In an article she penned for Motion Picture and
Television Magazine, she lashed out against the "wolves" who cornered her relentlessly,
showering her with gifts or promising to further her career in return for sexual
favors. Although she refused to take their money, she said later in her autobiography My Story,
"[I would be riding in] their limousines and sitting beside them in swanky places.
There was always a chance a job, and not another wolf, might spot you."
Furthermore, as much as she had tried to avoid the predatory world of the casting couch,
she found herself in situations where men lied about their film connections to secure
a meeting with her. She described in her book how one man had offered her
a fake audition and then started "pawing" her. In response Monroe "socked him in the
eye" before managing to escape. She was only much later given the credit for speaking out,
with many of her male biographers having skated over her role as a low-key trailblazer.
Questions have persisted over how much Marilyn Monroe's relationship with the Kennedy brothers
might have been exploited by the mafia, the FBI, and the Kennedy brothers themselves.
Author Anthony Summers, who penned the recently updated biography Goddess, highlighted in Vanity
Fair that Monroe's sexual relations with John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby had led to her
making a string of unanswered phone calls to them. Marilyn's calls were founded in the deluded belief
that her pregnancy, which she didn't carry to term, would mean she would marry Bobby. This was
her main fixation during her final hours. Soon she would be tragically dead at the age of 36.
As a form of blackmail, the mafia, who sought greater influence among the Democrats,
were involved in bugging Monroe's apartment in an effort to find damning evidence of the
Kennedys' illicit sexual visits. Although the recordings proving it never emerged,
it fed rumors that Monroe had been silenced to prevent national embarrassment.
Misinformation and conflicting reports have abounded. The FBI file on Monroe claimed,
inaccurately, that she had a conversation with JFK about the morality of atomic
weaponry — even though the President was in a different part of the country. Novelist Andrew
O'Hagan argued in an interview with Granta that Monroe and
the Kennedys were hardly ever in the same place at the same time.
Despite rumors that she was murdered, experts on Marilyn Monroe's life agree that she died
tragically of a drug overdose in 1962. She had suffered from substance abuse problems
for a number of years, particularly her addiction to barbiturates, which
she used as sleep aids. Monroe was found dead by her housekeeper at her home in Los Angeles,
naked in bed with a phone receiver in her hand and an empty bottle of Nembutal,
a sleeping drug, next to her. 12 to 15 medicine bottles were also
found. It was widely considered to have been a suicide, although it wasn't known for sure.
Monroe had been troubled for some time about her divorce from Arthur Miller,
along with the rumors about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers and the fact that her
career had been waning due to some of her films performing poorly. They included Let's Make Love,
from 1960, and 1961's The Misfits. She was fired from the set of Something's Got to Give due to
her difficult antics while on set, although she negotiated her way into being re-hired later in
1962. Prior to this point, the film studio had been trying to sue her for half a million dollars
after her lateness and frequent absences on set caused expensive production delays. Ultimately,
she could not overcome her addiction issues. Marilyn Monroe died troubled, but not forgotten.