Marilyn Monroe (June 1, 1926 – August 5, 1962) was
an American actress of
the 20th century. Her sizzling screen presence and premature death would make
her a perennial sex symbol and
later a pop icon.
She was born Norma Jeane Mortensen in the charity ward of
Unable to persuade Della to take the baby, an overwhelmed Gladys placed
Norma Jeane with Wayne and Ida Bolender of Hawthorne, southwest of Downtown Los Angeles, where she lived until she was seven. The Bolenders were a religious
couple who supplemented their meager income by being foster parents. In her
autobiography, My Story, ghostwritten by Ben Hecht,
Marilyn said she thought Wayne and Ida were her parents until Ida, rather
cruelly, corrected her. After Marilyn's death, Ida claimed that she and Wayne
had seriously considered adopting her, which they could not have done without
Gladys's consent.
According to My Story, Gladys visited Norma Jeane every Saturday,
but never hugged or kissed her, or even smiled. One day, Gladys announced that
she had bought a house for them. A few months after moving in, she suffered a
breakdown. Marilyn recalled Gladys "screaming and laughing" as she
was forcibly removed to the
Norma Jeane was declared a ward of the state. Gladys's best friend,
Grace McKee, later Goddard, became her guardian. After Grace married in 1935,
Norma Jeane was sent to Los Angeles Orphanage, then to as many as twelve foster
homes, in which she was subjected to abuse and neglect. Then in September 1941,
Grace took her in again. She was then introduced to a neighbor's son, James
Dougherty, who would become her first husband. The Goddard family was moving to
the East Coast and felt marriage would be the best solution for the teenaged Norma
Jeane. Norma Jeane had come to think little of herself,
yet also developed a gritty, opportunistic side and a super-human drive. She was very intelligent and more unhappy
than her screen image suggested. Some say she was a genius.
In 1945,
Norma Jeane worked as a parachute inspector while her husband was in the Merchant Marines. One day, a photographer spotted her and asked if he could take her picture to boost morale for
the war effort. Soon afterwards, she moved out of her mother-in-law's house and
signed with a modeling agency, which led to her first studio contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.
In My Story she recounted how she chose her stage name. When
Norma Jeane told Grace that "Marilyn" had been suggested by a Fox
employee, Grace replied that it went well with Gladys' maiden name,
The next few years were lean. Biographers maintain she was working
"the party circuit" when she met Johnny Hyde, a partner of the
William Morris Agency, on December 31, 1948 at a
party thrown by producer Sam Spiegel. Like Grace Goddard, he believed she was destined to become a great
star; unlike Grace, Hyde - who discovered Lana Turner and
counted Rita Hayworth among his clients - had the power to do something about it. Despite
being married and old enough to be her father, Hyde fell madly in love with
her. Due to his persistence, Marilyn landed the two movies that put her on the
map: The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve
She posed nude for photographer Tom Kelley on May 27, 1949, and
was paid $50. The model of the Miss Golden Dreams calendar from that shoot was
billed as "anonymous." In 1952, a blackmailer threatened to reveal her as Marilyn, but she thwarted
the scheme by announcing the fact herself. When asked why she did it, she said,
"I was hungry" (in My Story, she said did it to get her car
out of hock). Hugh Hefner
bought the rights to use the photo for the first issue of his new men's magazine, Playboy.
A dying Hyde repeatedly asked Marilyn to marry him, assuring her that
she would be a rich widow. But she refused. She loved him, she explained in My
Story, but was not in love with him. According to Donald Spoto's biography,
she renewed contact with producer and "party circuit" host Joseph Schenck, ignoring Hyde for weeks at a time. When Hyde suffered a fatal heart
attack in Palm Springs on December 18, 1950,
Marilyn, who had refused to join him, blamed herself
for his death. His family threw her out of his Beverly Hills estate. The
day after his funeral, she attempted suicide.
By late 1951, Fox
was convinced of her potential and gave her a big buildup. Though she was the
biggest star in the world by 1954, she tired of the dim bulb roles Darryl F. Zanuck assigned her. She broke her contract and went to New York to
study acting at The Actor's Studio; she formed her own production company with photographer Milton H.
Greene. These moves were met with derision by the movie industry. Yet, when Jayne Mansfield and Sheree North failed to click with audiences, Zanuck finally
admitted defeat. Her new contract gave her more creative control and the right
to make one non-Fox movie a year; the first project under the deal was Bus Stop. Her co-stars during these years included Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, Joseph Cotten, Richard Widmark, Jane Russell, Lauren Bacall, Ethel Merman, Charles Laughton, Tony Curtis, and Yves Montand (with
whom she had an affair during the filming of Let's Make Love).
She married James Dougherty on June 19, 1942.
Grace, moving with her husband, wanted Norma Jeane to marry to avoid going to
an orphanage. In "The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe" and
"To Norma Jeane With Love, Jimmie,"
Dougherty claims they were in love and would have lived happily ever after had
not dreams of stardom lured her away. By contrast,
In 1951, Joe DiMaggio saw a picture of Marilyn with two Chicago White Sox players, but waited until after
he retired from baseball to ask the PR man who arranged the
stunt to set them up on a date. But she did not want to meet him, fearing him
the stereotypical jock. Their January 14, 1954 elopement at City Hall in San Francisco was the culmination of a two-year
courtship that had captivated the nation.
The union was complex, marred by
conflicting personalities, his jealousy and her casual infidelity. DiMaggio
biographer Richard Ben Cramer asserts it was also violent. One incident
allegedly happened after the skirt blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch was filmed on
When she announced she would seek
a divorce - just 274 days after the wedding - (on grounds of mental cruelty),
she was quoted as telling 20th Century Fox that "our careers just
seemed to get in the way of each other." Oscar Levant quipped it proved no man could be a
success in two
She later married playwright Arthur Miller in a civil ceremony on June 29, 1956, then
in a Jewish ceremony two days later. When they returned from England after
she wrapped The Prince and the Showgirl, they learned she was pregnant.
Sadly, she suffered from endometriosis; the pregnancy was ectopic and had to be aborted to save her life. A
second pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
By 1958,
Retired from the Los Angeles Police Department, Dougherty claims in the 2003 documentary, Marilyn's Man, that he was her Svengali, the
creator of "Marilyn Monroe." No
biographer has ever come across any evidence to support this, or Dougherty's
claims that she was "forced" by Fox to divorce him or that they
remained friends. The fact that Monroe was furious when Dougherty claimed to Photoplay
magazine in 1953 that
she had been so in love, she threatened to kill herself if he left her, and
that he did not attend her funeral, would seem to dispel these claims. He lives
in Maine, and
was married to his third wife until her death in 2003.
DiMaggio re-entered her life as her marriage to Miller was ending. On February 7, 1961, she
was admitted into a psychiatric clinic, reportedly placed in the ward for the
most seriously disturbed. He got her out and took her to another facility.
After her release, she joined him in Florida where he was a batting coach for his old team, the New York Yankees. Their "just friends" claims did not stop remarriage rumors
from flying. Bob Hope even
"dedicated" Best Song nominee "The Second Time Around" to
them at the 1960 Academy Awards. According to DiMaggio biographer Maury Allen, he quit his $100,000 a
year job with a military post-exchange supplier to return to
On February 17, 1962,
Miller married Inge Morath, one
of the Magnum
photographers recording the making of The Misfits. In January 1964, his After
the Fall opened, featuring a beautiful, child-like, yet devouring shrew
named Maggie. It upset all of
In May of 1962 she
delivered a memorable rendition of Happy Birthday, Mr. President at a
televised birthday party for President John F. Kennedy
Marilyn Monroe was found dead August 5 1962 in
the bedroom of her Brentwood, California, home at age thirty-six from an overdose of barbiturates. As
with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a cottage industry of conspiracy theories have sprung up around the
circumstances of her death -- even to the point of allegations that she was
murdered due to her involvement with the Kennedy family. However, the fact that Kennedy's many girlfriends, including Judith
Campbell Exner (who was also the paramour of mobster Sam Giancana), outlived
the president, would dispell this.
Marilyn's body was discovered by live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Eunice Murray, assigned to Marilyn's care by her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Controversy today still surrounds the unexplained
timeframe of events on the night of
A formal investigation in 1982 by the Los Angeles County District Attorney came up with no credible evidence of foul play, but
the stories persist. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who performed the autopsy (and the
autopsies of Robert F. Kennedy, Natalie Wood and William Holden, among other celebrities), wrote in his book Coroner that
Marilyn's death was a highly likely suicide.
DiMaggio claimed her body and arranged her funeral. According to her
half-sister, Berniece Baker Miracle, he just took over and she allowed him to.
For twenty years, he had a dozen red roses delivered three times a week to her
crypt. Unlike the other men who knew her intimately (or claimed to), he never
publicly spoke about her nor wrote a book.
Marilyn is interred in a crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park
Cemetery. She had Grace Goddard interred there
because Grace's aunt - who cared for Norma Jeane briefly - is there. Just as
her career took off, she asked her make-up man, Whitey Snyder, to promise he
would make her up when she died. Snyder joked he would if her body was brought
to him while it was warm. A few days later, he received a money clip:
"Whitey Dear, While I am still warm,
Marilyn." He fulfilled that promise with the help of a bottle of whiskey.
When Gladys was between mental hospitals, she married her last husband,
John Stewart Eley, who died in 1952. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, she walked out of a sanitarium in the early 1970s and
flew to Florida,
where Berniece picked her up at the airport. She died of congestive heart failure on March 11, 1984 at a
nursing home. Obsessed by Christian Science, she would refuse to discuss Norma Jeane or Marilyn Monroe, perhaps
unable to relive the past. A woman once so fascinated with movie stars that
she named her daughter after one, Norma Talmadge, apparently never knew she had given birth to one of the most famous
women in history
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (argues for Kennedy connection to