Was Marilyn Monroe's real life not interesting enough? Why else would
the makers of "Blonde" invent details about her real father,
a polyamorous triad, and her affair with a president?
The film attributes much of Marilyn Monroe's inner torment, professional ambition, and dysfunctional
relationships to an obsessive search for the father she never knew. Early on, her mother Gladys
shows a young Norma Jeane Mortenson a framed photograph of a dashing older man. This man is her
father, Gladys tells her, a powerful man in the movie business but whose name she can never tell.
"And one day I will return to Los Angeles to claim you."
Monroe will spend the rest of her life seeking him out. At the height of her stardom,
she begins to receive letters from a man claiming to be her father, and the cruel
revelation of the letters' true author is the push that sets Monroe toward taking her own life.
While it's true that Monroe was raised without a father in real life, she strongly suspected
her father was a man named Charles Stanley Gifford, whom Gladys had an affair with while
working as a film editor at RKO Pictures. In 1952, Monroe even attempted to contact him,
according to biographer Charles Casillo, and the anonymous letters signed "Tearful Father" are an
invention of the novel and film. In 2022, a French DNA researcher apparently proved that Gifford and
Monroe were related; his findings were broadcast in the documentary Marilyn, Her Final Secret.
Marilyn Monroe's fraught upbringing with her mother Gladys is represented primarily
by two hellish, frightening sequences early in the film. The first is when Gladys puts
young Norma Jeane in their car and attempts to drive into the Griffith Park wildfire of 1933;
the second is when she tries to drown her daughter in the bathtub. After the bathtub incident,
Gladys is hospitalized and confined to a mental institution for the rest of her life. Norma Jeane,
after being cared for by her neighbors for a short time, is dropped off at an orphanage.
When she sees her mother again, 10 years later, Norma Jeane has transformed fully
into Marilyn, and Gladys — in the throes of schizophrenia — doesn't recognize her.
While the specific incidents presented here may not be confirmed, both Gladys and her mother,
Della Monroe, were known to have violent outbursts related to mental illness. Monroe's
earliest years were mostly spent in the care of family friends. In an incident detailed in
J. Randy Taraborrelli's book The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, Della talked her way into
the home where infant Norma Jeane was living and tried to smother her with a pillow. Later,
when Norma Jeane was three, Gladys attempted to abduct her by stuffing her in a duffel bag.
After Gladys was institutionalized in 1934, Norma Jeane was a ward of the state, living in
orphanages and foster homes before being taken in by family friend Grace Goddard at age 11.
In Blonde, Marilyn Monroe's big break comes after years spent as a pin-up model, when she's offered
an audition for a studio mogul referred to as Mr. Z, played by David Warshofsky. Stepping into an
intimidating office full of taxidermied animals, Monroe nervously reads her script in front of a
silent Mr. Z until the man steps behind her, still without a word, and sexually assaults
her. Later in the film, when she's talking about the beginning of her career with the ex-athlete,
the film's stand-in for second husband Joe DiMaggio, played by Bobby Cannavale,
Marilyn flashes back to this moment and simply tells him that she was, quote, "discovered."
Mr. Z is by all accounts an avatar for 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck.
Monroe was under contract at Fox for much of her film career, and she and Zanuck
are known to have had a difficult working relationship. Monroe bristled at the "dumb
blonde" role she was regularly offered, while he considered her simply that — a dumb blonde.
And while tales of the "casting couch" were common in Hollywood both then and now,
according to biographer Anthony Summers, there's no evidence that Zanuck assaulted Monroe in this
manner. As to her being "discovered," Fox's official story was that she'd
been discovered while babysitting for a casting director, initially hiding the fact that she'd
been a pin-up and occasional nude model for years before being cast in her first film.
In Blonde, Marilyn Monroe is seen in 1951 auditioning for the Richard Widmark thriller Don't
Bother to Knock. In a tight close-up mimicking the angle of the screen test's camera, Monroe
gives an intense, soul-baring monologue. The role is uncomfortably close to her own life — a
woman whose mother was abusive and whose father had abandoned her long ago. After she's done,
she pleads for another chance but is taken away by her manager. The crew is dumbfounded
by what they saw as a terrible performance, but the director is captivated by her looks.
The scene treats Monroe as if she's an unknown at this time, as if she's never
stepped in front of the camera. In reality, she was a sensation almost from the moment
she appeared on film. In fact, the year before, she'd made two of her most notable early movies,
All About Eve and John Huston's noir The Asphalt Jungle. She'd even weathered a scandal involving
nude photos she'd posed for in 1949. As for Don't Bother to Knock, the film received mixed reviews,
but Monroe's performance was singled out for praise, with Variety writing,
"Marilyn Monroe ... gives an excellent account of herself in a strictly dramatic role."
Marilyn Monroe was romantically linked to any number of Hollywood
luminaries in the early 1950s before her relationship with Joe DiMaggio,
including Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan. The film represents this time in her
life by focusing on an unconventional romance with two show business scions:
Charlie Chaplin Jr., nicknamed Cass, and Edward G. Robinson Jr., known as Eddy G. Monroe envies
them because everyone in the world knows who their fathers are, while Cass and Eddy G. envy
her for the fact that she's an orphan and can make herself into anything she wishes.
"We're juniors. With men who never wanted us."
The three do everything together, and when Monroe gets pregnant, they celebrate as a group. Monroe
was involved with Chaplin in real life for a short time, according to biographer Anthony Summers,
but the relationship apparently came to an end after she had an affair with Chaplin's
brother. Robinson isn't known to have dated Monroe or Chaplin, either separately or in
the polyamorous triad the film depicts. The film also has Chaplin dying before Monroe, and in a
posthumous communication to her, he reveals that he was the author of all the letters her "father"
wrote to her. In real life, Chaplin would outlive Monroe by six years, dying in 1968 at age 42.
In the film, Marilyn Monroe balks at her contracted $500 a week salary for appearing
in Howard Hawks' musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes when she learns that
co-star Jane Russell is making $100,000. After all, she's the blonde of the title.
"And I'm playing the blonde in 'Gentlemen prefer blondes'? That's an insult."
But there are other complications in taking the role beyond money. Her pregnancy is a
professional barrier, and she also fears that her mother's mental illness could
be hereditary. At the studio's insistence, Monroe decides to terminate the pregnancy,
leading to the first of the film's two graphic abortion sequences.
Verifying the accuracy of Monroe's abortions, or even if she had any, is difficult. It was illegal
nationwide to terminate a pregnancy in 1953, and the notion that Monroe had several abortions in
the course of her life was popularized by author Gloria Steinem in her 1986 biography Marilyn:
Norma Jean. However, it is known that Monroe was paid considerably less for her star-making
role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was one of many small insults during her time under
the thumb of Darryl F. Zanuck and a large part of her motivation to break her contract with Fox and
start her own production company. This, however, is a chapter in her life that the film ignores,
along with any other sense that Monroe was an active participant in her career.
After Marilyn Monroe's abusive marriage to the Ex-Athlete ends in divorce, she
retreats to New York City to study acting. When the Playwright, the film's stand-in
for Arthur Miller, played by Adrien Brody, sees her in a reading of one of his plays,
he assumes that she's been cast because the director is in love with her. But as the lights
come up after the reading, the Playwright is in tears at her performance. Monroe impresses
him with how well-read she is, while she connects to his gentle intellectualism — a
complete opposite of the prudish brutality of the Ex-Athlete. The two marry in 1956.
The film frames the play reading as the first time they meet. The Playwright has heard of her,
obviously, but they don't know each other. In real life, Miller and Monroe met in Los Angeles
in 1950. The two would correspond off and on over the years until reconnecting in New York in 1955
while Monroe was studying at the Actors Studio and managing her own production company. Miller,
however, was married at the time of their affair and under investigation by the House
Un-American Activities Committee for alleged communist affiliations.
"There is nothing a politician won't stoop to if it means some publicity for him or some power."
Monroe stood by him through both his divorce and his legal troubles,
none of which is given any space in Andrew Dominik's film.
The affair between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy has always been the stuff of second-hand
reports and urban legends rather than established fact. According to Donald Spoto's comprehensive
1993 biography of Monroe, the two were only ever seen in public together four times. Biographer
Anthony Summers, on the other hand, treats it very much as a fact that she was involved with
both JFK and his brother, Robert, that her final days were preoccupied with thoughts of both men,
and that JFK may have even visited her in California shortly before her death.
The film dramatizes her alleged relationship with Kennedy via a nightmarish sequence in which an
inebriated Monroe is escorted off an airplane by Secret Service agents, literally dragged through
the back hallways of a New York hotel. She's then placed in the President's hotel room where
she's essentially forced to do something against her will. Afterward, she's escorted right back
out by Secret Service. That nightmare feeling continues in a later scene where she dreams of
men kidnapping her in the middle of the night and forcibly removing what we're to assume is
her baby with the President, the second of the film's explicit and disturbing abortion scenes.
During Blonde, it's 1962, and Marilyn Monroe receives a call from Eddy G. with the sad news
that Cass has died. He informs her that Cass left her something and to watch out for a delivery.
When that delivery comes, it's an old stuffed tiger like the one she had as a girl, along with
a note containing a terrible, cruel confession: Cass was the one writing letters to her,
claiming to be her father. The revelation sends Monroe into a tailspin of anguish. Standing by the
pool of her Hollywood home, she swallows dozens of pills, one after the other. She strips off
her clothes and climbs into bed, takes the phone off the hook, and passes out. As she slowly dies,
she has a vision of the man she thought was her father, his face beckoning her from the heavens.
However, Monroe knew who her father was and neither Cass nor anyone else wrote her letters
like that. The entire sequence, other than the condition Monroe's body was found in,
is a flight of fancy. So what might have happened? The Los Angeles coroner at the
time ruled her death a "probable suicide" due to the sheer amount
of barbiturates she'd ingested. Yet her personal correspondence from that time,
collected and published in 2010 as the book Fragments, shows a side of her that finally
felt on firm ground, leading credence to the idea that her death was accidental.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault,
help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network
website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).