1956–1959: Critical
acclaim and marriage to Arthur Miller
Monroe began 1956 by announcing her win over 20th
Century-Fox. She legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. The press wrote
favorably about her decision to fight the studio; Time called her a "shrewd businesswoman" and
Look predicted that the win would be "an
example of the individual against the herd for years to come". In
contrast, Monroe's relationship with Miller prompted some negative comments,
such as Walter Winchell's statement that "America's
best-known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing
intelligentsia."
In March, Monroe began filming the drama Bus Stop, her first
film under the new contract. She played Chérie, a saloon singer whose dreams of
stardom are complicated by a naïve cowboy who falls in love with her. For the
role, she learned an Ozark accent, chose costumes and makeup that lacked the
glamor of her earlier films, and provided deliberately mediocre singing and
dancing. Broadway director Joshua Logan agreed to direct, despite initially
doubting Monroe's acting abilities and knowing of her difficult reputation. The
filming took place in Idaho and Arizona, with Monroe "technically in charge" as the head of MMP, occasionally
making decisions on cinematography and with Logan adapting to her chronic lateness
and perfectionism. The experience changed Logan's opinion of Monroe, and he
later compared her to Charlie Chaplin in her ability to blend comedy and
tragedy.
Monroe's dramatic performance in Bus Stop (1956) marked a
departure from her earlier comedies.
On June 29, 1956, Monroe and Miller were married at the
Westchester County Court in White Plains, New York; two days later they had a
Jewish ceremony at the home of Kay Brown, Miller's literary agent, in Waccabuc,
New York. With the marriage, Monroe converted to Judaism, which led Egypt to
ban all of her films. Due to Monroe's status as a sex symbol and Miller's image
as an intellectual, the media saw the union as a mismatch, as evidenced by
Variety's headline, "Egghead Weds
Hourglass".
Bus Stop was released in August 1956 and became a critical
and commercial success. The Saturday Review of Literature wrote that Monroe's
performance "effectively dispels
once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality"
and Crowther proclaimed: "Hold on to
your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has
finally proved herself an actress." She also received a Golden Globe
nomination for Best Actress for her performance.
In August, Monroe also began filming MMP's first independent
production, The Prince and the Showgirl, at Pinewood Studios in England. Based
on a 1953 stage play by Terence Rattigan, it was to be directed and co-produced
by, and to co-star, Laurence Olivier. The production was complicated by conflicts
between him and Monroe. Olivier, who had also directed and starred in the stage
play, angered her with the patronizing statement "All you have to do is be sexy", and with his demand she
replicate Vivien Leigh's stage interpretation of the character. He also
disliked the constant presence of Paula Strasberg, Monroe's acting coach, on
set. In retaliation, Monroe became uncooperative and began to deliberately
arrive late, later saying, "if you
don't respect your artists, they can't work well."
Monroe also experienced other problems during the
production. Her dependence on pharmaceuticals escalated and, according to Spoto,
she had a miscarriage. She and Greene also argued over how MMP should be run.
Despite the difficulties, filming was completed on schedule by the end of 1956.
The Prince and the Showgirl was released to mixed reviews in June 1957 and
proved unpopular with American audiences. It was better received in Europe,
where she was awarded the Italian David di Donatello and the French Crystal
Star awards and nominated for a BAFTA.
After returning from England, Monroe took an 18-month hiatus
to concentrate on family life. She and Miller split their time between NYC,
Connecticut and Long Island. She had an ectopic pregnancy in mid-1957, and a
miscarriage a year later; these problems were most likely linked to her
endometriosis. Monroe was also briefly hospitalized due to a barbiturate overdose.
As she and Greene could not settle their disagreements over MMP, Monroe bought
his share of the company.
The Some Like It Hot
trailer
Monroe returned to Hollywood in July 1958 to act opposite
Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder's comedy on gender roles, Some Like
It Hot. She considered the role of Sugar Kane another "dumb blonde", but accepted it due to Miller's
encouragement and the offer of 10% of the film's profits on top of her standard
pay. The film's difficult production has since become "legendary". Monroe demanded dozens of retakes, and did
not remember her lines or act as directed—Curtis famously said that kissing her
was "like kissing Hitler" due to the number of retakes. Monroe
privately likened the production to a sinking ship and commented on her
co-stars and director saying "[but]
why should I worry, I have no phallic symbol to lose." Many of the
problems stemmed from her and Wilder—who also had a reputation for being
difficult—disagreeing on how she should play the role. She angered him by
asking to alter many of her scenes, which in turn made her stage fright worse,
and it is suggested that she deliberately ruined several scenes to act them her
way.
In the end, Wilder was happy with Monroe's performance,
saying: "Anyone can remember lines,
but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet
give the performance she did!" Some Like It Hot was a critical and
commercial success when it was released in March 1959. Monroe's performance
earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress, and prompted Variety to call her "a comedienne with that combination of
sex appeal and timing that just can't be beat" It has been voted one
of the best films ever made in polls by the BBC, the American Film Institute,
and Sight & Sound.
1960–1962: Career
decline and personal difficulties
After Some Like It Hot, Monroe took another hiatus until
late 1959, when she starred in the musical comedy Let's Make Love. She chose
George Cukor to direct and Miller rewrote some of the script, which she
considered weak. She accepted the part solely because she was behind on her
contract with Fox. The film's production was delayed by her frequent absences
from the set. During the shoot, Monroe had an affair with co-star Yves Montand
that was widely reported by the press and used in the film's publicity
campaign. Let's Make Love was unsuccessful upon its release in September 1960.
Crowther described Monroe as appearing "rather
untidy" and "lacking ...
the old Monroe dynamism", and Hedda Hopper called the film "the most vulgar picture she's ever
done". Truman Capote lobbied for Monroe to play Holly Golightly in a
film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the role went to Audrey Hepburn
as its producers feared that Monroe would complicate the production.
The last film Monroe completed was John Huston's The
Misfits, which Miller had written to provide her with a dramatic role. She
played a recently divorced woman who becomes friends with her Reno land lady,
and three aging cowboys, played by Clark Gable, Eli Wallach and Montgomery
Clift. The filming in Reno, and in the Nevada desert east of Carson City
between July and November 1960 was again difficult. Monroe's and Miller's
marriage was effectively over, and he began a new relationship with Magnum movie
photographer Inge Morath.
Monroe disliked that he had based her role partly on her
life, and thought it inferior to the male roles. She also struggled with
Miller's habit of rewriting scenes the night before filming. Her health was
also failing: she was in pain from gallstones, and her drug addiction was so
severe that her makeup usually had to be applied while she was still asleep
under the influence of barbiturates. In August, filming was halted for her to
spend a week in a hospital detox. Despite her problems, Huston said that when
Monroe was acting, she "was not
pretending to an emotion. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within
herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness."
Monroe and Miller separated after filming wrapped, and she
obtained a Mexican divorce in January 1961. The Misfits was released the
following month, failing at the box office. Its reviews were mixed, with
Variety complaining of frequently "choppy"
character development, and Bosley Crowther calling Monroe "completely blank and unfathomable" and writing that "unfortunately for the film's
structure, everything turns upon her". It has received more favorable
reviews in the 21st century. Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute has
called it a classic, Huston scholar Tony Tracy called Monroe's performance the "most mature interpretation of her
career", and Geoffrey McNab of The Independent praised her "extraordinary" portrayal of
the character's "power of
empathy".
Monroe was next to star in a television adaptation of W.
Somerset Maugham's Rain for NBC, but the project fell through as the network
did not want to hire her choice of director, Lee Strasberg. Instead of working,
she spent the first six months of 1961 preoccupied by health problems. She
underwent a cholecystectomy and surgery for her endometriosis, and spent four
weeks hospitalized for depression. She was helped by DiMaggio, with whom she
rekindled a friendship, and dated his friend Frank Sinatra for several months.
Monroe also moved permanently back to California in 1961, purchasing a house at
12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles, in early 1962.
Monroe returned to the public eye in the spring of 1962. She
received a "World Film
Favorite" Golden Globe Award and began to shoot a film for Fox, Something's
Got to Give, a remake of My Favorite Wife (1940). It was to be co-produced by
MMP, directed by George Cukor and to co-star Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. Days
before filming began, Monroe caught sinusitis. Despite medical advice to
postpone the production, Fox began it as planned in late April.
Monroe was too sick to work for most of the next six weeks,
but despite confirmations by multiple doctors, the studio pressured her by
alleging publicly that she was faking it. On May 19, she took a break to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President"
on stage at President John F. Kennedy's early birthday celebration at Madison
Square Garden in New York. She drew attention with her costume: a beige,
skintight dress covered in rhinestones, which made her appear nude. Monroe's
trip to New York caused even more irritation for Fox executives, who had wanted
her to cancel it.
Monroe next filmed a scene for Something's Got to Give in
which she swam naked in a swimming pool. To generate advance publicity, the
press was invited to take photographs; these were later published in Life. This
was the first time that a major star had posed nude at the height of their
career. When she was again on sick leave for several days, Fox decided that it
could not afford to have another film running behind schedule when it was
already struggling with the rising costs of Cleopatra (1963). On June 7, Fox
fired Monroe and sued her for $750,000 in damages. She was replaced by Lee
Remick, but after Martin refused to make the film with anyone other than
Monroe, Fox sued him as well and shut down the production. The studio blamed
Monroe for the film's demise and began spreading negative publicity about her,
even alleging that she was mentally disturbed.
Fox soon regretted its decision and reopened negotiations
with Monroe later in June; a settlement about a new contract, including
recommencing Something's Got to Give and a starring role in the black comedy
What a Way to Go! (1964), was reached later that summer. She was also planning
on starring in a biopic of Jean Harlow. To repair her public image, Monroe
engaged in several publicity ventures, including interviews for Life and
Cosmopolitan and her first photo shoot for Vogue. For Vogue, she and
photographer Bert Stern collaborated for two series of photographs, one a
standard fashion editorial and another of her posing nude, which were published
posthumously with the title The Last Sitting.
Death and funeral
During her final months, Monroe lived at 12305 Fifth Helena
Drive in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her housekeeper Eunice
Murray was staying overnight at the home on the evening of August 4, 1962.
Murray woke at 3:00 a.m. on August 5 and sensed that something was wrong. She
saw light from under Monroe's bedroom door but was unable to get a response and
found the door locked. Murray then called Monroe's psychiatrist, Ralph
Greenson, who arrived at the house shortly after and broke into the bedroom
through a window to find Monroe dead in her bed. Monroe's physician, Hyman
Engelberg, arrived at around 3:50 a.m. and pronounced her dead. At 4:25 a.m.,
the Los Angeles Police Department was notified.
Monroe died between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on August 4;
the toxicology report showed that the cause of death was acute barbiturate
poisoning. She had 8 mg% (milligrams per 100 milliliters of solution) chloral
hydrate and 4.5 mg% of pentobarbital (Nembutal) in her blood, and 13 mg% of pentobarbital
in her liver. Empty medicine bottles were found next to her bed. The
possibility that Monroe had accidentally overdosed was ruled out because the
dosages found in her body were several times the lethal limit.
Front page of New York Daily Mirror on August 6, 1962. The
headline is "Marilyn Monroe Kills
Self" and underneath it is written: "Found nude in bed... Hand on phone... Took 40 Pills"
Front page of the New
York Mirror on August 6, 1962
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office was assisted in
their investigation by the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, who had expert
knowledge on suicide. Monroe's doctors stated that she had been "prone to severe fears and frequent
depressions" with "abrupt
and unpredictable mood changes", and had overdosed several times in
the past, possibly intentionally. Due to these facts and the lack of any
indication of foul play, deputy coroner Thomas Noguchi classified her death as
a probable suicide.
Monroe's sudden death was front-page news in the United
States and Europe. According to Lois Banner, "it's said that the suicide rate in Los Angeles doubled the month
after she died; the circulation rate of most newspapers expanded that month",
and the Chicago Tribune reported that they had received hundreds of phone calls
from members of the public requesting information about her death. French
artist Jean Cocteau commented that her death "should serve as a terrible lesson to all those whose chief
occupation consists of spying on and tormenting film stars", her
former co-star Laurence Olivier deemed her "the
complete victim of ballyhoo and sensation", and Bus Stop director
Joshua Logan said that she was "one
of the most unappreciated people in the world".
Her funeral, held at the Westwood Village Memorial Park
Cemetery on August 8, was private and attended by only her closest associates.
The service was arranged by Joe DiMaggio, Monroe's half-sister Berniece Baker
Miracle, and Monroe's business manager Inez Melson. Hundreds of spectators
crowded the streets around the cemetery. Monroe was later entombed at Crypt No.
24 at the Corridor of Memories.
In the following decades, several conspiracy theories,
including murder and accidental overdose, have been introduced to contradict
suicide as the cause of Monroe's death. The speculation that Monroe had been
murdered first gained mainstream attention with the publication of Norman
Mailer's Marilyn: A Biography in 1973, and in the following years became
widespread enough for the Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp
to conduct a "threshold
investigation" in 1982 to see whether a criminal investigation should
be opened. No evidence of foul play was found.
Screen persona and
reception
The 1940s had been the heyday for actresses who were
perceived as tough and smart—such as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck—who
had appealed to women-dominated audiences during the war years. 20th
Century-Fox wanted Monroe to be a star of the new decade who would draw men to
movie theaters, and saw her as a replacement for the aging Betty Grable, their
most popular "blonde bombshell"
of the 1940s. According to film scholar Richard Dyer, Monroe's star image was
crafted mostly for the male gaze.
From the beginning, Monroe played a significant part in the
creation of her public image, and towards the end of her career exerted almost
full control over it. She devised many of her publicity strategies, cultivated
friendships with gossip columnists such as Sidney Skolsky and Louella Parsons,
and controlled the use of her images. In addition to Grable, she was often
compared to another well-known blonde, 1930s film star Jean Harlow. The
comparison was prompted partly by Monroe, who named Harlow as her childhood
idol, wanted to play her in a biopic, and even employed Harlow's hair stylist
to color her hair.
Monroe's screen persona focused on her blonde hair and the
stereotypes that were associated with it, especially dumbness, naïveté, sexual
availability and artificiality. She often used a breathy, childish voice in her
films, and in interviews gave the impression that everything she said was "utterly innocent and
uncalculated", parodying herself with double entendres that came to be
known as "Monroeisms". For
example, when she was asked what she had on in the 1949 nude photo shoot, she
replied, "I had the radio on".
In her films, Monroe usually played "the girl", who is defined solely by her gender. Her roles
were almost always chorus girls, secretaries, or models: occupations where "the woman is on show, there for the
pleasure of men." Monroe began her career as a pin-up model, and was
noted for her hourglass figure. She was often positioned in film scenes so that
her curvy silhouette was on display, and frequently posed like a pin-up in
publicity photos. Her distinctive, hip-swinging walk also drew attention to her
body and earned her the nickname "the
girl with the horizontal walk".
Monroe often wore white to emphasize her blondness and drew
attention by wearing revealing outfits that showed off her figure. Her
publicity stunts often revolved around her clothing either being shockingly
revealing or even malfunctioning, such as when a shoulder strap of her dress
snapped during a press conference. In press stories, Monroe was portrayed as
the embodiment of the American Dream, a girl who had risen from a miserable
childhood to Hollywood stardom. Stories of her time spent in foster families
and an orphanage were exaggerated and even partly fabricated. Film scholar
Thomas Harris wrote that her working-class roots and lack of family made her
appear more sexually available, "the
ideal playmate", in contrast to her contemporary, Grace Kelly, who was
also marketed as an attractive blonde, but due to her upper-class background
was seen as a sophisticated actress, unattainable for the majority of male
viewers.
Although Monroe's screen persona as a dim-witted but
sexually attractive blonde was a carefully crafted act, audiences and film
critics believed it to be her real personality. This became a hindrance when
she wanted to pursue other kinds of roles, or to be respected as a businesswoman.
The academic Sarah Churchwell studied narratives about Monroe and wrote:
The biggest myth is
that she was dumb. The second is that she was fragile. The third is that she
couldn't act. She was far from dumb, although she was not formally educated,
and she was very sensitive about that. But she was very smart indeed—and very
tough. She had to be both to beat the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s.
[...] The dumb blonde was a role—she was an actress, for heaven's sake! Such a
good actress that no one now believes she was anything but what she portrayed
on screen.
Biographer Lois Banner writes that Monroe often subtly
parodied her sex symbol status in her films and public appearances, and that "the 'Marilyn Monroe' character she
created was a brilliant archetype, who stands between Mae West and Madonna in
the tradition of twentieth-century gender tricksters." Monroe herself
stated that she was influenced by West, learning "a few tricks from her—that impression of laughing at, or mocking,
her own sexuality". She studied comedy in classes by mime and dancer
Lotte Goslar, famous for her comic stage performances, and Goslar also instructed
her on film sets. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, one of the films in which she
played an archetypal dumb blonde, Monroe had the sentence "I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like
it" added to her character's lines.
According to Dyer, Monroe became "virtually a household name for sex" in the 1950s and "her image has to be situated in the
flux of ideas about morality and sexuality that characterised the Fifties in
America", such as Freudian ideas about sex, the Kinsey report (1953),
and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). By appearing vulnerable and
unaware of her sex appeal, Monroe was the first sex symbol to present sex as
natural and without danger, in contrast to the 1940s femme fatales. Spoto
likewise describes her as the embodiment of "the
postwar ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently needy, worshipful of
men, naïve, offering sex without demands", which is echoed in Molly
Haskell's statement that "she was
the Fifties fiction, the lie that a woman had no sexual needs, that she is
there to cater to, or enhance, a man's needs." Monroe's contemporary
Norman Mailer wrote that "Marilyn
suggested sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with
her", while Groucho Marx characterized her as "Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one".
According to Haskell, due to her sex symbol status, Monroe was less popular
with women than with men, as they "couldn't
identify with her and didn't support her", although this would change
after her death.
Dyer has also argued that Monroe's blonde hair became her
defining feature because it made her "racially
unambiguous" and exclusively white just as the civil rights movement
was beginning, and that she should be seen as emblematic of racism in twentieth-century
popular culture. Banner agreed that it may not be a coincidence that Monroe
launched a trend of platinum blonde actresses during the civil rights movement,
but has also criticized Dyer, pointing out that in her highly publicized
private life, Monroe associated with people who were seen as "white ethnics", such as Joe
DiMaggio (Italian-American) and Arthur Miller (Jewish). According to Banner,
she sometimes challenged prevailing racial norms in her publicity photographs;
for example, in an image featured in Look in 1951, she was shown in revealing
clothes while practicing with African-American singing coach Phil Moore.
Monroe was perceived as a specifically American star, "a national institution as well-known
as hot dogs, apple pie, or baseball" according to Photoplay. Banner
calls her the symbol of populuxe, a star whose joyful and glamorous public
image "helped the nation cope with
its paranoia in the 1950s about the Cold War, the atom bomb, and the totalitarian
communist Soviet Union". Historian Fiona Handyside writes that the
French female audiences associated whiteness/blondness with American modernity
and cleanliness, and so Monroe came to symbolize a modern, "liberated" woman whose life takes place in the public
sphere. Film historian Laura Mulvey has written of her as an endorsement for
American consumer culture:
If America was to
export the democracy of glamour into post-war, impoverished Europe, the movies
could be its shop window ... Marilyn Monroe, with her all American attributes
and streamlined sexuality, came to epitomize in a single image this complex
interface of the economic, the political, and the erotic. By the mid-1950s, she
stood for a brand of classless glamour, available to anyone using American cosmetics,
nylons and peroxide.
Twentieth Century-Fox further profited from Monroe's
popularity by cultivating several lookalike actresses, such as Jayne Mansfield
and Sheree North. Other studios also attempted to create their own Monroes:
Universal Pictures with Mamie Van Doren, Columbia Pictures with Kim Novak, and
The Rank Organization with Diana Dors.
In a profile, Truman Capote quoted Monroe's acting teacher,
Constance Collier: "She is a
beautiful child. I don't mean that in the obvious way—the perhaps too obvious
way. I don't think she's an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What
she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—could
never surface on the stage. It's so fragile and subtle; it can only be caught
by the camera. It's like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the
poetry of it."
Filmography
Monroe in Some Like It Hot (1959)
Dangerous Years (1947)
Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948)
Ladies of the Chorus (1948)
Love Happy (1949)
A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
All About Eve (1950)
The Fireball (1950)
Right Cross (1951)
Home Town Story (1951)
As Young as You Feel (1951)
Love Nest (1951)
Let's Make It Legal (1951)
Clash by Night (1952)
We're Not Married! (1952)
Don't Bother to Knock (1952)
Monkey Business (1952)
O. Henry's Full House (1952)
Niagara (1953)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
River of No Return (1954)
There's No Business Like Show Business (1954)
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Bus Stop (1956)
The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Let's Make Love (1960)
The Misfits (1961)
Something's Got to Give (1962–unfinished)
Legacy
According to The Guide to United States Popular Culture, "as an icon of American popular
culture, Monroe's few rivals in popularity include Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse...
no other star has ever inspired such a wide range of emotions—from lust to pity,
from envy to remorse." Art historian Gail Levin stated that Monroe may
have been "the most photographed person
of the 20th century", and The American Film Institute has named her
the sixth greatest female screen legend in American film history. The
Smithsonian Institution has included her on their list of "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time", and both
Variety and VH1 have placed her in the top ten in their rankings of the
greatest popular culture icons of the twentieth century.
Hundreds of books have been written about Monroe. She has
been the subject of numerous films, plays, operas, and songs, and has
influenced artists and entertainers such as Andy Warhol and Madonna. She also
remains a valuable brand: her image and name have been licensed for hundreds of
products, and she has been featured in advertising for brands such as Max
Factor, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, and Absolut Vodka.
Monroe's enduring popularity is tied to her conflicted
public image. On the one hand, she remains a sex symbol, beauty icon and one of
the most famous stars of classical Hollywood cinema. On the other, she is also
remembered for her troubled private life, unstable childhood, struggle for
professional respect, as well as her death and the conspiracy theories that
surrounded it. She has been written about by scholars and journalists who are
interested in gender and feminism; these writers include Gloria Steinem,
Jacqueline Rose, Molly Haskell, Sarah Churchwell, and Lois Banner. Some, such
as Steinem, have viewed her as a victim of the studio system. Others, such as
Haskell, Rose, and Churchwell, have instead stressed Monroe's proactive role in
her career and her participation in the creation of her public persona.
Owing to the contrast between her stardom and troubled
private life, Monroe is closely linked to broader discussions about modern
phenomena such as mass media, fame, and consumer culture. According to academic
Susanne Hamscha, Monroe has continued relevance to ongoing discussions about
modern society, and she is "never
completely situated in one time or place" but has become "a surface on which narratives of
American culture can be (re-)constructed", and "functions as a cultural type that can be reproduced, transformed,
translated into new contexts, and enacted by other people". Similarly,
Banner has called Monroe the "eternal
shapeshifter" who is re-created by "each
generation, even each individual... to their own specifications".
Monroe remains a cultural icon, but critics are divided on
her legacy as an actress. David Thomson called her body of work "insubstantial" and Pauline
Kael wrote that she could not act, but rather "used her lack of an actress's skills to amuse the public. She had
the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting—and vice
versa; she did what others had the 'good taste' not to do". In
contrast, Peter Bradshaw wrote that Monroe was a talented comedian who "understood how comedy achieved its
effects", and Roger Ebert wrote that "Monroe's eccentricities and neuroses on sets became notorious,
but studios put up with her long after any other actress would have been
blackballed because what they got back on the screen was magical".
Similarly, Jonathan Rosenbaum stated that
"she subtly subverted the sexist content of her material" and
that "the difficulty some people
have discerning Monroe's intelligence as an actress seems rooted in the
ideology of a repressive era, when super feminine women weren't supposed to be
smart".
Notes
Monroe had her screen
name made into her legal name in early 1956.
Gladys named
Mortensen as Monroe's father in the birth certificate (although the name was
misspelled), but it is unlikely that he was the father as their separation had
taken place well before she became pregnant. Biographers Fred Guiles and Lois
Banner stated that her father was likely Charles Stanley Gifford, Gladys's
superior at RKO Studios, with whom she had an affair in 1925, whereas Donald
Spoto thought that another co-worker was probably the father.
Monroe spoke about
being sexually abused by a lodger when she was eight years old to her
biographers Ben Hecht in 1953–1954 and Maurice Zolotow in 1960, and in
interviews for Paris Match and Cosmopolitan. Although she refused to name the
abuser, Banner believes he was George Atkinson, as he was a lodger and fostered
Monroe when she was eight; Banner also states that Monroe's description of the
abuser fits other descriptions of Atkinson. Banner has argued that the abuse
may have been a major causative factor in Monroe's mental health problems, and
has also written that as the subject was taboo in mid-century United States,
Monroe was unusual in daring to speak about it publicly. Spoto does not mention
the incident but states that Monroe was sexually abused by Grace's husband in
1937 and by a cousin while living with a relative in 1938. Barbara Leaming
repeats Monroe's account of the abuse, but earlier biographers Fred Guiles,
Anthony Summers and Carl Rollyson have doubted the incident owing to lack of
evidence beyond Monroe's statements.
RKO's owner Howard
Hughes had expressed an interest in Monroe after seeing her on a magazine
cover.
It has sometimes been
claimed that Monroe appeared as an extra in other Fox films during this period,
including Green Grass of Wyoming, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, and You Were Meant
For Me, but there is no evidence to support this.
Baumgarth was
initially not happy with the photos, but published one of them in 1950; Monroe
was not publicly identified as the model until 1952. Although she then
contained the resulting scandal by claiming she had reluctantly posed nude due
to an urgent need for cash, biographers Spoto and Banner have stated that she was
not pressured (although according to Banner, she was initially hesitant due to
her aspirations of movie stardom) and regarded the shoot as simply another work
assignment.
In addition to All
About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle, Monroe's 1950 films were Love Happy, A Ticket
to Tomahawk, Right Cross and The Fireball. Monroe also had a role in Home Town
Story, released in 1951.
Monroe and Greene had
first met and had a brief affair in 1949, and met again in 1953, when he
photographed her for Look. She told him about her grievances with the studio,
and Greene suggested that they start their own production company.
Monroe underwent
psychoanalysis regularly from 1955 until her death. Her analysts were
psychiatrists Margaret Hohenberg (1955–57), Anna Freud (1957), Marianne Kris
(1957–61), and Ralph Greenson (1960–62).
Monroe identified
with the Jewish people as a "dispossessed
group" and wanted to convert to make herself part of Miller's family.
She was instructed by Rabbi Robert Goldberg and converted on July 1, 1956.[200]
Monroe's interest in Judaism as a religion was limited: she called herself a "Jewish atheist" and did not
practice the faith after divorcing Miller aside from retaining some religious
items. Egypt also lifted her ban after the divorce was finalized in 1961.
Endometriosis also
caused her to experience severe menstrual pain throughout her life,
necessitating a clause in her contract allowing her to be absent from work
during her period; her endometriosis also required several surgeries. It has
sometimes been alleged that Monroe underwent several abortions, and that unsafe
abortions made by persons without proper medical training would have
contributed to her inability to maintain a pregnancy. The abortion rumors began
from statements made by Amy Greene, the wife of Milton Greene, but has not been
confirmed by any concrete evidence. Furthermore, Monroe's autopsy report did
not note any evidence of abortions.
Monroe first admitted
herself to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York, at the suggestion
of her psychiatrist Marianne Kris. Kris later stated that her choice of
hospital was a mistake: Monroe was placed on a ward meant for severely mentally
ill people with psychosis, where she was locked in a padded cell and not
allowed to move to a more suitable ward or leave the hospital. Monroe was
finally able to leave the hospital after three days with the help of Joe
DiMaggio, and moved to the Columbia University Medical Center, spending a
further 23 days there.
Monroe and Kennedy
had mutual friends and were familiar with each other. Although they sometimes
had casual sexual encounters, there is no evidence that their relationship was
serious.
