Marilyn Monroe

**Marilyn Monroe** (/ˈmærəlɪn mənˈroʊ/; born **Norma Jeane Mortenson**; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2022) by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

## Marilyn Monroe

### Relatives

**Parents:** Charles Stanley Gifford and Gladys Pearl Baker
**Half-siblings:** Berniece Baker Miracle, Doris Elizabeth, Charles Stanley Jr. and Robert Baker
**Husbands:** Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, and James Dougherty,
**Grandparents:** Della Mae Monroe, and Otis Elmer Monroe,
**Brother-in-law:** Paris Miracle
**Half-Niece:** Mona Rae Miracle

## Physical description

### Eye color

Blue

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in a total of 12 foster homes and an orphanage before marrying James Dougherty at age sixteen. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career, which led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. After a series of minor film roles, she signed a new contract with Fox in late 1950. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including *As Young as You Feel* and *Monkey Business*, and in the dramas *Clash by Night* and *Don't Bother to Knock*. Monroe faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photographs prior to becoming a star, but the story did not damage her career and instead resulted in increased interest in her films.

By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars. She had leading roles in the film noir *Niagara*, which overtly relied on her sex appeal, and the comedies *Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* and *How to Marry a Millionaire*, which established her star image as a "dumb blonde". The same year, her nude images were used as the centerfold and cover of the first issue of *Playboy* magazine. Monroe played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, but felt disappointed when typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in *The Seven Year Itch* (1955), one of the biggest box office successes of her career.

When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe's contract, she founded her own film production company in 1954. She dedicated 1955 to building the company and began studying method acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Later that year, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in *Bus Stop* (1956) and her first independent production in *The Prince and the Showgirl* (1957). She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in *Some Like It Hot* (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama *The Misfits* (1961).

Monroe's troubled private life received much attention as she struggled with addiction and mood disorders. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicized; both ended in divorce. On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her Los Angeles home. Her death was ruled a probable suicide.

## Life and career

### 1926–1943: Childhood and first marriage

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, at the Los Angeles General Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker (née Monroe; 1902–1984), was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico to a poor Midwestern family who migrated to California at the turn of the century. At age 15, Gladys had married John Newton Baker, an abusive man nine years her senior. They had two children together, Robert (1918–1933) and Berniece (1919–2014). She successfully filed for divorce and sole custody of her two oldest in 1923, but Baker kidnapped the children soon after and moved with them to his native Kentucky.

Monroe was not told that she had a sister until she was 12, and they met for the first time in 1944 when Monroe was 17 or 18. Following the divorce, Gladys worked as a film negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. Her second marriage occurred in 1924 when she married Martin Edward Mortensen, but they separated just months later and divorced in 1928. In 2022, DNA testing indicated that Monroe's father was Charles Stanley Gifford (1898–1965), a co-worker of Gladys, with whom she had an affair in 1925. Monroe also had two other half-siblings from Gifford's marriage with his first wife, a sister, Doris Elizabeth (1920–1933), and a brother, Charles Stanley Jr. (1922–2015).

Although Gladys was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, Monroe's early childhood was stable and happy. Gladys placed her daughter with evangelical Christian foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in the rural town of Hawthorne. She also lived there for six months, until she was forced to move back to the city for employment. She then began visiting her daughter on weekends. In the summer of 1933, Gladys bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved seven-year-old Monroe in with her. They shared the house with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie. In January 1934, Gladys had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After several months in a rest home, she was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals and was rarely in contact with Monroe. Monroe became a ward of the state, and her mother's friend Grace Goddard took responsibility over her and her mother's affairs.

Over the next four years, Monroe's living situation changed often. For the first 16 months, she continued living with the Atkinsons, and may have been sexually abused during this time. Always a shy girl, she now also developed a stutter and became withdrawn. In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Grace and her husband Erwin "Doc" Goddard and two other families. In September 1935, Grace placed her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home #2, Hollygrove. The orphanage was "a model institution" and was described in positive terms by her peers, but Monroe felt abandoned. Encouraged by the orphanage staff, who thought that Monroe would be happier living in a family, Grace became her legal guardian in 1936, but did not take her out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937. Monroe's second stay with the Goddards lasted only a few months because Doc molested her. She then lived for brief periods with her relatives and Grace's friends and relatives in Los Angeles and Compton.

Monroe's childhood experiences first made her want to become an actress: "I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim ... When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be ... Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it."

Monroe found a more permanent home in September 1938, when she began living with Grace's aunt Ana Lower in the west-side district of Sawtelle. She was enrolled at Emerson Junior High School and went to weekly Christian Science services with Lower. She excelled in writing and contributed to the school newspaper, but was otherwise a mediocre student. Owing to the elderly Lower's health problems, Monroe returned to live with the Goddards in Van Nuys in about early 1941.

The same year, she began attending Van Nuys High School. In 1942, the company that employed Doc Goddard relocated him to West Virginia. California child protection laws prevented the Goddards from taking Monroe out of state, and she faced having to return to the orphanage. As a solution, she married their neighbors' 21-year-old son, factory worker James Dougherty, on June 19, 1942, just after her 16th birthday. Monroe subsequently dropped out of high school and became a housewife. She found herself and Dougherty mismatched, and later said she was "dying of boredom" during the marriage. In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was stationed on Santa Catalina Island, where Monroe moved with him.

### 1944–1948: Modeling and first film roles

In April 1944, Dougherty was shipped out to the Pacific, where he remained for most of the next two years. Monroe moved in with her in-laws and began a job at the Radioplane Company, a munitions factory in Van Nuys. In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover, who had been sent by captain Ronald Reagan, then working in the U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, to the factory to shoot morale-boosting pictures of female workers. Although none of her pictures were used, she quit working at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends. Defying her deployed husband, she moved on her own and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945.

The agency deemed Monroe's figure more suitable for pin-up than high fashion modeling, and she was featured mostly in advertisements and men's magazines. To make herself more employable, she straightened her hair and dyed it blonde. According to Emmeline Snively, the agency's owner, Monroe quickly became one of its most ambitious and hard-working models; by early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as *Pageant*, *U.S. Camera*, *Laff*, and *Peek*. As a model, Monroe occasionally used the pseudonym Jean Norman.

Through Snively, Monroe signed a contract with an acting agency in June 1946. After an unsuccessful interview at Paramount Pictures, she was given a screen-test by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, but he gave her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe's contract began in August 1946, and she and Lyon selected the stage name "Marilyn Monroe". The first name was picked by Lyon, who was reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller; the surname was Monroe's mother's maiden name. In September 1946, she divorced Dougherty, who opposed her career.

Monroe spent her first six months at Fox learning acting, singing, and dancing, and observing the film-making process. Her contract was renewed in February 1947, and she was given her first film roles, bit parts in *Dangerous Years* (1947) and *Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!* (1948). The studio also enrolled her in the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, an acting school teaching the techniques of the Group Theatre; she later stated that it was "my first taste of what real acting in a real drama could be, and I was hooked". Despite her enthusiasm, her teachers thought her too shy and insecure to have a future in acting, and Fox did not renew her contract in August 1947. She returned to modeling while also doing occasional odd jobs at film studios, such as working as a dancing "pacer" behind the scenes to keep the leads on point at musical sets.

Monroe was determined to make it as an actress, and continued studying at the Actors' Lab. She had a small role in the play *Glamour Preferred* at the Bliss-Hayden Theater, but it ended after a couple of performances. To network, she frequented producers' offices, befriended gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, and entertained influential male guests at studio functions, a practice she had begun at Fox. She also became a friend and occasional sex partner of Fox executive Joseph M. Schenck, who persuaded his friend Harry Cohn, the head executive of Columbia Pictures, to sign her in March 1948.

At Columbia, Monroe's look was modeled after Rita Hayworth and her hair was bleached platinum blonde. She began working with the studio's head drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would remain her mentor until 1955. Her only film at the studio was the low-budget musical *Ladies of the Chorus* (1948), in which she had her first starring role as a chorus girl courted by a wealthy man. She also screen-tested for the lead role in *Born Yesterday* (1950), but her contract was not renewed in September 1948. *Ladies of the Chorus* was released the following month and was not a success.

### 1949–1952: Breakthrough years

When her contract at Columbia ended, Monroe returned again to modeling. She shot a commercial for Pabst beer and posed for artistic nude photographs by Tom Kelley for John Baumgarth calendars, using the name 'Mona Monroe'. Monroe had previously posed topless or clad in a bikini for other artists including Earl Moran, and felt comfortable with nudity. Shortly after leaving Columbia, she also met and became the protégée and mistress of Johnny Hyde, the vice president of the William Morris Agency.

Through Hyde, Monroe landed small roles in several films, including two critically acclaimed works: Joseph Mankiewicz's drama *All About Eve* (1950) and John Huston's film noir *The Asphalt Jungle* (1950). Despite her screen time being only a few minutes in the latter, she gained a mention in *Photoplay* and according to biographer Donald Spoto "moved effectively from movie model to serious actress". In December 1950, Hyde negotiated a seven-year contract for Monroe with 20th Century-Fox. According to its terms, Fox could opt to not renew the contract after each year. Hyde died of a heart attack only days later, which left Monroe devastated. In 1951, Monroe had supporting roles in three moderately successful Fox comedies: *As Young as You Feel*, *Love Nest*, and *Let's Make It Legal*. According to Spoto all three films featured her "essentially [as] a sexy ornament", but she received some praise from critics: Bosley Crowther of *The New York Times* described her as "superb" in *As Young As You Feel* and Ezra Goodman of the *Los Angeles Daily News* called her "one of the brightest up-and-coming [actresses]" for *Love Nest*.

Her popularity with audiences was also growing: she received several thousand fan letters a week, and was declared "Miss Cheesecake of 1951" by the army newspaper *Stars and Stripes*, reflecting the preferences of soldiers in the Korean War. In February 1952, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association named Monroe the "best young box office personality". In her private life, Monroe had a short relationship with director Elia Kazan and also briefly dated several other men, including director Nicholas Ray and actors Yul Brynner and Peter Lawford. In early 1952, she began a highly publicized romance with retired New York Yankees baseball star Joe DiMaggio, one of the most famous sports personalities of the era.

Monroe found herself at the center of a scandal in March 1952, when she revealed publicly that she had posed for a nude calendar in 1949. The studio had learned about the photos and that she was publicly rumored to be the model some weeks prior, and together with Monroe decided that to prevent damaging her career it was best to admit to them while stressing that she had been broke at the time. The strategy gained her public sympathy and increased interest in her films, for which she was now receiving top billing. In the wake of the scandal, Monroe was featured on the cover of *Life* magazine as the "Talk of Hollywood", and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper declared her the "cheesecake queen" turned "box office smash". Three of Monroe's films—*Clash by Night*, *Don't Bother to Knock* and *We're Not Married!*—were released soon after to capitalize on the public interest.

Despite her newfound popularity as a sex symbol, Monroe also wished to showcase more of her acting range. She had begun taking acting classes with Michael Chekhov and mime Lotte Goslar soon after beginning the Fox contract, and *Clash by Night* and *Don't Bother to Knock* showed her in different roles. In the former, a drama starring Barbara Stanwyck and directed by Fritz Lang, she played a fish cannery worker; to prepare, she spent time in a fish cannery in Monterey. She received positive reviews for her performance: *The Hollywood Reporter* stated that "she deserves starring status with her excellent interpretation", and *Variety* wrote that she "has an ease of delivery which makes her a cinch for popularity". The latter was a thriller in which Monroe starred as a mentally disturbed babysitter and which Zanuck used to test her abilities in a heavier dramatic role. It received mixed reviews from critics, with Crowther deeming her too inexperienced for the difficult role, and *Variety* blaming the script for the film's problems.

## References

1. ↑ Hertel, Howard; Heff, Don (August 6, 1962). "Marilyn Monroe Dies; Pills Blamed". *Los Angeles Times*. Archived from the original on September 25, 2015. Retrieved September 23, 2015.
2. ↑ Chapman 2001, pp. 542–543; Hall 2006, p. 468.
3. ↑ "Marilyn Monroe". *Encyclopædia Britannica Online*. Retrieved April 14, 2023.
4. ↑ Spoto 2001, pp. 3, 13–14; Banner 2012, p. 13.
5. ↑ "Inside Marilyn Monroe's Family Tree". November 17, 2020.
6. ↑ Spoto 2001, pp. 9–10; Rollyson 2014, pp. 26–29.
7. ↑ Miracle & Miracle 1994, p. see family tree; Banner 2012, pp. 19–20; Leaming 1998, pp. 52–53.
8. ↑ Spoto 2001, pp. 7–9; Banner 2012, p. 19.
9. ↑ # Spoto 2001, p. 9 for the exact year when divorce was finalized; Banner 2012, p. 20; Leaming 1998, pp. 52–53.

## External links

* Instagram account
* "Marilyn Monroe: Still Life"