Marilyn
Monroe defined the terms “movie star” and “sex symbol” during her lifetime, and
she continues to define them now, nearly five decades after her controversial
death. She was shamelessly sensual but fragile, intelligent but helpless,
ambitious but difficult, an icon of perfection but deeply flawed.
On June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles, California, Gladys Monroe
Baker gave birth to a daughter she named Norma Jeane. Norma Jeane’s paternity
has never been authenticated, although Gladys’s estranged husband, Edward
Mortenson, is listed on the birth certificate. Whoever fathered Norma Jeane
Baker, though, was definitely nowhere to be found, nor was Gladys on a regular
basis. Mentally unstable and institutionalized from time to time, Gladys handed
over most of the care of her daughter to a succession of orphanages, guardians,
and foster homes, in some of which she was reportedly abused.
In June 1942, when she was sixteen, Norma Jeane married James
Dougherty, a marriage arranged to keep her out of yet another foster home.
Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marines in 1943 and during World War II left
his young wife in the care of his mother. Norma Jeane was hired by a munitions
factory, where she was photographed for an article in Yank magazine. As a result of that photograph, she was
signed by the Blue Book Modeling Agency and, with its encouragement, transformed
herself from a brunette to a blonde and became a successful model who began to
dream of an acting career. Dougherty demanded, when he returned home, that she
choose between their marriage and her career. She chose her career and divorced
James Dougherty in 1946.
Norma Jeane quickly captured the attention of Ben Lyon, a
Twentieth Century Fox executive, who signed her to a six-month contract and
changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. After a couple of nonstellar film
appearances in 1947, Marilyn was released from her obligations to Fox and
returned to modeling until 1948, when she signed a six-month contract with
Columbia Pictures.
It was her appearance in a Marx Brothers film called Love Happy in 1949 that attracted a successful agent named
Johnny Hyde, who promptly signed her and was instrumental in landing critically
acclaimed roles for her in John Huston’s The Asphalt
Jungle and Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve.
Hyde is also credited with negotiating Marilyn’s seven-year contract at
Twentieth Century Fox in 1950.
Her film career was well on its way by the end of 1952
despite the stage fright that had begun to plague her, causing her to hide in
her dressing room for hours while the rest of the cast and crew waited
impatiently for her. She graced the cover of the first issue of Playboy in 1953, the same year in which she was suspended
from her Fox contract for failing to appear for work and in which she met
baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio, whom she married on January 14, 1954, a
marriage that lasted less than a year.
Displeased with the quality of roles being offered to her by
Fox and with the relatively small salary, Marilyn broke away from the studio and
moved to New York, where she studied acting at the famed Lee Strasberg Actors
Studio and began dating playwright Arthur Miller, whom she married on June 29,
1956. Her severe stage fright continued to plague her throughout her acting
classes, but she was also recognized as a genuinely gifted standout. In the
meantime, her film The Seven Year Itch was released to
enormous success, and she re-signed with Twentieth Century Fox with a much more
lucrative nonexclusive contract.
Under her new contract Marilyn starred in Bus Stop and The Prince and the
Showgirl with critical acclaim and relatively few problems. She took a
year off to focus on her marriage to Arthur Miller, but she sadly suffered a
miscarriage in August 1957. She returned to Hollywood in 1958 to shoot Billy
Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, costarring Jack Lemmon and
Tony Curtis, during which her compulsive tardiness, hostile refusal to take
direction from Wilder, and general obstructive behavior contributed to her
growing reputation for being difficult to work with. But the film was a huge
box-office success, received five Academy Award nominations, and earned Marilyn
the Golden Globe Best Actress Award.
By the late 1950s Marilyn’s health was in a conspicuous
decline, due largely to a growing dependence on prescription medication,
particularly sleeping pills to battle her chronic insomnia, and the strains on
her marriage were becoming more and more apparent.
Arthur Miller had written a screenplay called The Misfits, which began filming in July 1960 with Marilyn,
Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift, directed by John Huston. It was to become
Marilyn Monroe’s last completed film. She was often too ill and too anxious to
perform, her fragile health further compromised by a steady stream of
prescription medications and alcohol. A month after filming began she was
hospitalized for ten days with an undisclosed illness, and when she returned to
the set her open hostility toward her husband was a recurring obstacle. Clark
Gable became ill while shooting The Misfits as well,
and less than ten days after filming was completed, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur
Miller officially separated and Clark Gable was dead from a heart attack.
Marilyn’s addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs
escalated following the lackluster box-office performance of The Misfits, and in February 1961, once her divorce from
Arthur Miller was finalized, she checked into a psychiatric clinic. For the
remainder of 1961 she battled a series of mental and physical health challenges,
with her former husband and still loyal friend Joe DiMaggio by her side.
In 1962 she started filming Something’s
Got to Give, but her repeated failure to report to work forced Twentieth
Century Fox to fire her and file a lawsuit against her. On May 19, 1962, she
gave an unforgettably breathy, voluptuous, and somewhat slurred performance of
“Happy Birthday” at the birthday celebration for President John Kennedy, with
whom she was later reported to have had an affair. She launched into a busy
series of interviews, photo shoots, and meetings about future projects. She and
Fox resolved their dispute, and they renewed her contract. And Something’s Got to Give was scheduled to resume filming in
the early fall of 1962.
But at 4:25 a.m. on the morning
of August 5, 1962, Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, placed an
emergency call to report that she’d been found dead in her small Brentwood,
California, house. She was just thirty-six years old. Following an autopsy, the
cause of death was listed as “acute barbiturate poisoning—probable suicide.”
Even now, nearly fifty years later, the circumstances surrounding her death
continue to create any number of theories and allegations, including homicide.
Marilyn Monroe was laid to rest on August 8, 1962, in the Corridor of Memories
at Westwood Memorial Park, leaving behind a legacy of thirty films and an iconic
standard of beauty and glamour at their most vulnerable that will never be
duplicated.
From Sylvia
Several years after Marilyn’s death I was asked by a
nationally syndicated television show to visit her house with a film crew to see
if she would communicate with me. A condition of filming on their part was that
I wouldn’t be allowed inside the house or even that close to it—just inside the
gate was as far as we could go. A condition on my part was, “No promises.” There
are no spirits or ghosts who can be counted on to come when I call them, and I
hadn’t even established yet whether Marilyn had made it to the Other Side or if
she was still earthbound. For all I knew we could end up with a lot of footage
of me standing in front of a house staring mindlessly into the camera without a
peep out of Marilyn.
I admit it, I’d done no research on her life before I
arrived, so I didn’t think much about being introduced to a lovely older
gentleman named James Dougherty until I was told he was her first husband. He
was quick to clarify that he’d never been married to Marilyn Monroe; he was
married to the young (pre-Marilyn) Norma Jeane Baker. He spoke of her with deep
affection, and her death had touched him deeply.
As soon as we’d arrived as close to the house as we were
allowed to get, a brief Latin phrase came to me. I pronounced it as best I
could, and when I saw him staring at me, I explained, “It’s in the tiles above
the entryway. It means something like ‘Everyone is welcome here.’”
He asked how I knew about that, since I’d never been to the
house before, and I told him. “Marilyn’s telling me.”
It was a nice surprise. She was definitely on the Other Side,
she definitely had a lot to say, and she was ready to say it to me without
preferring to talk through Francine. I can’t judge or comment on its accuracy.
I’ll just report what she passed along and leave the rest to you.
She was adamant about the fact that she did not commit
suicide. She described being alone in her bedroom that night, taking too many
pills and making some blurry phone calls. But she had a clear memory of a man
coming in and sticking a needle of what she believed to be Nembutol into her
heart.
She never stopped loving Joe DiMaggio, and one of the sources
of depression that plagued her in her later years was the fear that, because she
confided so much in him about things she undoubtedly wasn’t supposed to know,
which she’d written in a red journal or diary, loving her might have brought him
more pain and potential danger than joy. She visited him often from the Other
Side, particularly when he slept, and she was already determined to be the first
to greet him when he came Home.
Then she was gone. Even in that brief encounter, I was
pleasantly surprised at how much I liked her and the depth of her sincerity.
From Francine
Marilyn was indeed the first to welcome
Joe DiMaggio Home. They lead very quiet separate lives
here, but they also spend a lot of time together walking on the beach.
Marilyn is a voracious reader and can often be found studying
the great literary classics in the Hall of Records.
Like everyone else on the Other Side, she
looks back on her most recent lifetime with increasing clarity. She knows she was bipolar. She knows that
she was at her most comfortable when she was acting—pretending to be someone
else. She knows that if she’d lived a long life, she
would never have been the icon she’s become. She just
wants those who try to emulate her not to fall into the same trap she did, the
excess that comes with fame. People stop saying no to
you. You stop saying no to yourself. And before long you’ve forgotten what a loving word “no” can
be.
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