Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane Mortenson was born on June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, worked as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries, and the identity of her father was never legally settled. Gladys suffered from serious mental illness and was institutionalized for long stretches, so the child spent most of her early years with foster families, in the Los Angeles Orphans Home, and in the care of family friends ^[1].

The instability marked her deeply. She later counted more than ten households in her childhood, including a formative period with Ana Lower, an aunt of her guardian Grace Goddard, whom she remembered with unusual warmth ^[2]. She attended schools around Los Angeles, including Emerson Junior High and Van Nuys High School, but never finished her secondary education.

In June 1942, a few weeks after her sixteenth birthday, she married James Dougherty, a neighbor and merchant marine, largely to avoid returning to an orphanage when the Goddard family moved out of state ^[1]. While Dougherty served in the Pacific during the Second World War, she worked at the Radioplane munitions factory in Burbank, spraying varnish on drone aircraft parts. A photographer documenting women in war work noticed her there in 1944, and the resulting pictures opened the door to a modeling career ^[3].

By 1945 Norma Jeane had signed with the Blue Book Model Agency, straightened and lightened her hair, and appeared on dozens of magazine covers. The modeling work brought her to the attention of Twentieth Century-Fox, which gave her a standard contract in August 1946. Around this time she adopted the stage name Marilyn Monroe, combining a first name suggested by studio executive Ben Lyon with her mother's family surname ^[1]. She divorced Dougherty the same year, since his objections to her career could not be reconciled with her ambitions.

Her first years in Hollywood were lean. Fox dropped her after two small parts, Columbia signed and released her after one musical, Ladies of the Chorus (1948), and she supported herself with modeling jobs, including a nude calendar session in 1949 that later resurfaced when she was famous. Rather than destroying her career, her frank handling of the calendar story in 1952 won public sympathy ^[2].

Small but striking roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, both released in 1950, changed her fortunes. Critics and audiences noticed her, and Fox signed her to a new long-term contract ^[3]. Between 1951 and 1953 the studio built her up through a string of supporting and leading parts, while fan mail arrived in volumes that outpaced her billing. The thriller Niagara (1953) gave her a rare dramatic lead and confirmed that her name alone could sell a picture ^[1].

The year 1953 turned Monroe into a phenomenon. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she sang "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," and How to Marry a Millionaire were both major box office successes, and in December she appeared in the first issue of Playboy, using the 1949 calendar photographs published without her consent ^[2]. She and co-star Jane Russell pressed their hands and heels into cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre that June, a ritual reserved for the industry's biggest names.

Any honest account of Marilyn Monroe achievements has to weigh her comic craft alongside her celebrity. The Seven Year Itch (1955), directed by Billy Wilder, produced the image of her white dress lifted by a subway grate, photographed before crowds in Manhattan and reproduced ever since ^[3]. Frustrated by the shallow roles Fox kept assigning her and by a salary far below her market value, she broke with the studio in late 1954, moved to New York, and studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg ^[4].

In January 1955 she and photographer Milton Greene announced Marilyn Monroe Productions, making her one of the very few actresses of the era to run her own company. The gamble worked: Fox renegotiated her contract in December 1955 on far better terms, including director approval ^[4]. The films that followed showed her range. Bus Stop (1956) drew serious critical praise, The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) was produced by her own company opposite Laurence Olivier, and Some Like It Hot (1959) brought her a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a comedy. That Wilder film is regularly ranked among the greatest comedies ever made ^[5].

Monroe's marriages drew as much attention as her films. In January 1954 she wed baseball star Joe DiMaggio in San Francisco. The marriage collapsed within nine months, strained by his discomfort with her public image, and the couple filed for divorce that October ^[1]. They remained close in later years, and DiMaggio handled her funeral arrangements in 1962.

In June 1956 she married the playwright Arthur Miller, a union the press treated as an improbable pairing of Hollywood and the American theater. During their marriage she converted to Judaism, and she stood by Miller while he faced questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee ^[2]. Miller wrote the screenplay for The Misfits partly as a vehicle for her, but the relationship deteriorated during its difficult Nevada shoot, and the two divorced in January 1961.

Behind the public glamour she struggled with chronic insomnia, anxiety, and a growing dependence on prescription barbiturates. She suffered several miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy during her marriage to Miller, losses that biographers connect to her worsening health in the late 1950s ^[4]. In early 1961 she spent time in the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic in New York, an experience she found frightening, before DiMaggio helped arrange her transfer to a conventional hospital ^[2].

The Misfits, released in February 1961 with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, was the last film Monroe completed. Reviews were mixed at the time, though its reputation has grown, and the production was overshadowed by Gable's death shortly after filming ended and by Monroe's own hospitalizations ^[4].

In the spring of 1962 she began work on Something's Got to Give for Fox. Illness kept her from the set for much of the schedule, and in May she flew to New York to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" at a Madison Square Garden gala for John F. Kennedy, an appearance that became one of the most replayed moments of her life ^[3]. Fox fired her from the picture in June, sued her, then reversed course and opened negotiations on a new contract in the weeks that followed. She gave interviews and sat for major photo sessions that summer, including the Bert Stern portraits later known as The Last Sitting.

On the morning of August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead in the bedroom of her home on Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles; she had died during the night of August 4. She was 36. The Los Angeles coroner recorded acute barbiturate poisoning and ruled the death a probable suicide, a finding that has been disputed and re-examined ever since, including a 1982 review by the district attorney's office that found no credible evidence of foul play ^[6]. She was interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park on August 8 after a small service arranged by DiMaggio.

Few performers have had an afterlife like Monroe's. Andy Warhol began his silkscreen portraits of her within weeks of her death, and Elton John's 1973 song "Candle in the Wind" fixed her in popular music. The American Film Institute placed her sixth on its 1999 list of the greatest female screen legends of classical Hollywood ^[5]. Her films continue to circulate widely, and Some Like It Hot topped the AFI ranking of American comedies.

Scholars have treated her as more than an icon. Biographers such as Donald Spoto and Lois Banner, along with critics like Sarah Churchwell, have examined how myth, rumor, and marketing accumulated around a working actress who read seriously, studied her craft, and challenged a studio system that underpaid her ^[7]. Feminist writers in particular have revisited her fight for contract control and her founding of a production company as early assertions of independence in an industry run by men.

Among basic Marilyn Monroe facts, a few carry the weight of her story: a childhood in foster care, roughly two dozen films in a sixteen-year career, a Golden Globe, and a death at 36 that turned a star into a permanent subject. Any Marilyn Monroe biography ends up describing two people at once, the invented screen persona and Norma Jeane, and the distance between them is a large part of why she still fascinates ^[7].