In 1944, Norma Jean Dougherty’s husband James was shipped to the Pacific Theater of World War II. Norma Jean, like many military wives, moved in with her in-laws and went to work in a radio plane factory. The Radio Plane Company made small radio-controlled airplanes that were used by Army gunners for target practice. Dougherty’s mother was a nurse in the company hospital. Norma Jean worked as a shoot-packer and glue-sprayer on an assembly line.
The following year, the US Army sent photographers in radio aircraft to film women engaged in combat work. One of them, Corporal David Conover, took photographs of 19-year-old Norma Jean. When she saw the developed photos, he told her that she was beautiful enough to be a model.
Norma Jean waited until her husband, who was then home on leave, returned to duty. The day after he left, she walked out, quit her job and never returned.
Conover took more photographs of him for Yank magazine. She showed these to a friend, who put her in touch with the Blue Book Modeling Agency in Los Angeles, who recommended her to a talent scout, who gave her a screen test at Twentieth Century-Fox (now 20th Century Studios). Norma Jean dyed her hair blonde and signed a contract as Marilyn Monroe, borrowing Marilyn from Broadway star Marilyn Miller and Monroe from her mother. As the world celebrates the centenary of his birth this month, his story continues to resonate, and not just because of the glamour.
It’s hard to say how important this contract was to him. It was a step in the door that Norma Jean had been dreaming of since she was a child, abandoned by a mentally ill mother to an orphanage; Entering the world of films, her only safe haven from a series of abusive foster homes, where she was sexually abused and blamed for instigating that abuse.
But by the time his contract expired a year later, he had played only minor roles in two unimportant films. Worse, head of production Darryl F. Zanuck found her unattractive. His contract was not renewed.
She joined the “party circuit”. Soon, she became a regular at Joe Schenck’s high-stakes gin-rummy games, which took place every Saturday night. Schenck was chairman of the board of Twentieth Century-Fox and one of the richest and most influential men in Hollywood. The game was attended by the most powerful studio executives in Hollywood. And Monroe and other aspiring movie stars were expected to spend time with Uncle Joe’s friends in exchange for dinner and the opportunity to meet people who could build their careers. She also became a regular attendee of producer Sam Spiegel’s parties.
At one of these he met Johnny Hyde, one of Hollywood’s most influential agents. According to biographer Barbara Leeman, he was the first person to see her as she saw herself. Within a few weeks, Monroe became Hyde’s girlfriend. They helped him get small but visible roles in high-quality films: John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950); Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950). Hyde died when she was 24, and his death halted her career for a while, but by this time, Marilyn Monroe’s persona: the breathy baby voice, the hip-swaying gait, the chest-out stance, were all in place. After this more films came. Not stardom, not yet, but critical attention and fan appreciation. The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes declared her Miss Cheesecake of 1951 and thousands of letters began arriving every week. She was a star without making headlines in a single film.
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Monroe’s films were popular in the 1950s, but are not “classics”, with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) and Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1953). Instead, we have a series of iconic images: Monroe in a pink dress, singing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend; In The Seven Year Itch (1955), she stands on a subway grate, holding up her skirt.
She was now a sex symbol, the archetype of the dumb blonde who rises to the top because of her innocence, but this also meant she was not considered an “actress”. They hoped popularity would open those doors – and they didn’t. She had been working closely with acting coach Natasha Lytes since 1948. Littes was his Pygmalion, advising him in reading: Rilke, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust; Music: Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart. She was also taking drama, enunciation and singing lessons. According to Lytes, she knew immediately when something was wrong with her performance, but she didn’t know how to fix it.
By 1955, she was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. But good roles remained away from him. So she moved to New York to learn new acting techniques, the Method, under one of its leading gatekeepers, Coach Lee Strasberg, at America’s most popular acting school, the Actors Studio. Strasberg and his wife Paula welcomed him, but the Method demanded the use of affective memory or emotional recollection, requiring actors to dig into their own past traumas to bring real emotion to a character. For Monroe, it was so emotionally stressful that she visited her psychiatrist before her sessions with Strasberg. The pressure also increased his already considerable drug use. He died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1962. She was 36 years old.
He left most of his fortune to Strasbourg. Many conspiracy theories. And some unforgettable images, including Andy Warhol’s iconic painting, which came out that year. Madonna’s Material Girl paid tribute to Monroe, including the iconic dress. Biographies and biopics came out at regular intervals. Lee Strasberg’s third wife, actor Anna Strasberg, turned Monroe’s legacy into a multimillion-dollar fortune, periodically auctioning off iconic items, including the figure-hugging dress she wore to sing Happy Birthday to U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1962, which was in the news again in 2022 after being worn (and torn up) by reality star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala. She will come.
We create myths about people who die young. Percy Shelley. John Keats. Carole Lombard, James Dean. Kurt Cobain. And Marilyn Monroe. Frozen in time forever. Always glamorous, always attractive. The sex symbol she worked so hard to become was forever overshadowed by the actress she wanted to be.
(K Narayanan writes on movies, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
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More about Munro…
*The actor’s soulful voice was no accident. The deliberate, unhurried pauses and shy movements, which blurred the lines between speech and song, were the result of a childhood stutter that Monroe struggled to hide. Working with a therapist, she learned breathing and movement techniques, not realizing that they would one day help give Hollywood one of its most iconic voices.
*Munro was married three times. Each marriage and each separation shaped a phase in his life. At the age of 16, in 1942, to avoid being sent to an orphanage or foster home, she married James Dougherty, a merchant marine. Their marriage ended in 1946, as her modeling career began to take off. She dated baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio and married him in 1954. They separated after nine months. In 1956, Monroe married playwright Arthur Miller. They worked together on the film The Misfits (1961), written by Miller, but divorced later that year.
* By 1953, Monroe had become a pop-culture phenomenon, appearing on magazine covers and in advertisements. She starred in two major box-office hits that year alone: ​​Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. That year she was nicknamed the most advertised girl in the world by the Advertising Association of the West.
* She was determined to be taken seriously as an actress and demonstrated her true talent in films such as Niagara (1953; as a femme fatale) and Bus Stop (1956; as a naïve, hopeful salon singer). As the precocious, clumsy Cherry at the bus stop, she broke out of the blonde-bombshell stereotype and earned a Golden Globe nomination. Later, in The Misfits, she gave a career-defining performance as Rosalynn, a newly divorced woman struggling with loneliness in Nevada.
* She was also a producer, founding Marilyn Monroe Productions in 1955 with photographer Milton Greene. He independently produced a film, The Prince and the Showgirl, in 1957. He died in 1962 from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was 36 years old.
