The Full Biography
Marilyn Monroe. Actress. The Los Angeles child who made a studio’s blonde into a comedienne, then spent her last years trying to own the work the still had already taken.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a white dress over a subway grate, or a mouth half open on a magenta still, or a woman saying happy birthday to a president as if the room were a secret. The year is usually 1953, or 1955, or 1962. What the still cannot show is Norma Jeane Mortenson of Los Angeles, a mother in and out of hospitals, a string of foster rooms and an orphanage, and a working actress who went east to the Actors Studio because the body the studio used was not, in her mind, the whole job.
She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles, and baptized Norma Jeane Baker. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, assembled film at a laboratory and could not keep a household together. Psychiatric hospitalizations took Gladys out of the room for years at a time. The father on the paperwork was a name, not a presence.
Norma Jeane moved. Foster homes. The Los Angeles Orphans Home. Grace McKee, a friend of Gladys, tried to be a permanent adult and could not always be one. The first pressure is not fame. It is not having a house that stays. A child who learns that every address is temporary will treat a studio contract as another temporary address, even when the world calls it destiny.
On June 19, 1942, at sixteen, she married James Dougherty. The marriage kept her out of another institutional placement. He went to sea. She went to work at the Radioplane plant in Van Nuys, spraying parts for target drones. A photographer on an army assignment found her on the line. Modeling followed. Twentieth Century-Fox signed her in 1946 and handed her a name: Marilyn Monroe. The studio dropped her, Columbia used her, Fox took her back. Small parts. The Asphalt Jungle (1950). All About Eve the same year, a few minutes that people remembered. The door was not a single premiere. It was a face the camera liked before the studio knew what to do with the woman wearing it.
Niagara (1953) made the walk a plot point. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the same year, opposite Jane Russell, made the voice a comic instrument: Lorelei Lee, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” a gold-digger smarter than the men who thought they had hired a doll. How to Marry a Millionaire put her in CinemaScope with Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall. She was now the studio’s blonde. She was also, already, a timing machine. The breathy tone was a choice. Watch the eyes in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The joke is hers.
The Seven Year Itch (1955) gave the country the grate and the dress. Billy Wilder knew what he had. So did the crowd on Lexington Avenue the night they shot the exterior. Joe DiMaggio, whom she had married on January 14, 1954, did not enjoy the crowd. The marriage lasted nine months. He would send roses long after it ended. She would not become a baseball wife. She had already decided the work was the house she had not been given as a child, and she was not going to leave it for a more respectable address.
In 1955 she walked away from Fox’s terms, went to New York, studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, and formed Marilyn Monroe Productions with the photographer Milton Greene. The studio had used the body. She tried to own the work. Fox, after a public standoff, signed a new contract that paid her more and promised better parts. Bus Stop (1956), for Joshua Logan, is the first fruit: Cherie, a saloon singer who is not a cartoon, a performance critics had to take seriously because it left them no other honest option. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), with Laurence Olivier, was her company’s picture. The set was a war. The footage is a woman holding her own against a knighted actor who had not expected to be met.
She married Arthur Miller on June 29, 1956, in a civil ceremony, then again in a Jewish one. She had converted. She wanted a writer’s household and a serious part. She got both, and the cost of both. Some Like It Hot (1959), again with Wilder, opposite Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, is the performance the public still correctly files as her finest comic work: Sugar Kane, late, luminous, exact. She was difficult on that set. She was also the reason the picture is not only a drag farce.
The Misfits (1961), from a script Miller wrote for her, put her in Nevada with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, John Huston directing. Gable died shortly after the shoot. The marriage to Miller ended the same season. The picture is the last one she finished. It is not a farewell by design. It is a last completed sentence.
The work the stills skip is a working actress’s pile. Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) is a babysitter coming apart, a first proof the blonde could scare a room. Monkey Business the same year, with Cary Grant. Niagara made the walk a plot point. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire made 1953 a climate. River of No Return (1954), with Robert Mitchum, and There’s No Business Like Show Business are the Fox machine using the face between the jokes. The Seven Year Itch gave the country the grate. Bus Stop made critics put the doll down. The Prince and the Showgirl is her company’s picture. Some Like It Hot (1959) brought a Golden Globe and the performance the public still correctly files as her finest comic work. She was difficult on that set. She was also the reason the picture is not only a drag farce. A 1949 nude calendar session, shot when modeling money was the rent, became the first issue of Playboy in 1953. Hugh Hefner bought photographs she had already made. She did not pose for his magazine. The culture filed it as if she had.
In 1961, after The Misfits and the end of the Miller marriage, she spent time in psychiatric care: Payne Whitney, which she experienced as a lockup, then Columbia Presbyterian, a quieter floor. Joe DiMaggio helped get her out of the first room. The year is not a conspiracy hour. It is a woman between pictures, between husbands, still trying to own the work the still had already taken. She legally took Monroe as her name in 1956. She wanted the invented person to be, at last, a legal adult. The last year would test whether the adult would be allowed to finish a picture.
The New York years are the turn the grate cannot hold. In 1955 she walked away from Fox’s terms, studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, and formed Marilyn Monroe Productions with Milton Greene. The studio had used the body. She tried to own the work. Fox, after a public standoff, signed a new contract that paid her more and promised better parts. Bus Stop is the first fruit. The Prince and the Showgirl is the company picture, a war with Laurence Olivier on the set and a woman holding her own against a knighted actor who had not expected to be met. She converted, married Miller, wanted a writer’s household. She got the household and the cost. The blonde on the still is a studio invention. The woman who went east is the one who tried to invent herself back.
I restore myself when I’m alone.Marilyn Monroe
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the grate. The turn is New York, the Studio, the production company, the insistence that talent is born in private. She said that if she had observed all the rules she would never have got anywhere. The studio preferred the rules. She preferred the work. The last year of her life is not a conspiracy hour. It is an unfinished picture, a new house, and a set of interviews in which the voice is still trying to describe the job.
Six things most people never knew
- The first pressure is an address that will not stay. Gladys. Foster rooms. An orphanage. Fame is the second weather, not the first.
- The Dougherty marriage, at sixteen, was a roof. 1942. Radioplane came after. The camera found a factory worker, not a debutante.
- She formed Marilyn Monroe Productions in 1955. New York, Milton Greene, a walkout from Fox. The blonde tried to become the owner.
- Bus Stop is the serious part people skip on the way to the grate. 1956. Cherie. Critics had to put the doll down.
- DiMaggio sent roses after the nine months ended. He also organized the funeral. Miller, who had written The Misfits, did not attend.
- The house on Fifth Helena was the first she owned. Brentwood, 1962. She bought a home at last. She did not get a year in it.
Colleagues split into camps, as they do around a difficult star who is also a gifted one. Russell and Bacall were professionals beside her. Wilder praised the result and paid for the hours. Strasberg treated her as a student, not a souvenir. Paula Strasberg, Lee’s wife, became the on-set coach Fox learned to resent. Gable was patient on The Misfits. Clift was a fellow wounded instrument.
The husbands are three different contracts: Dougherty the roof, DiMaggio the famous name who could not share her with a crowd, Miller the playwright who wrote her a last film and could not stay in the marriage that film used up. She legally took Monroe as her name in 1956, a decade after the studio had issued it. She wanted the invented person to be, at last, a legal adult.
The later years
The last chapter is short and is not only a death date. In early 1962 she bought the house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, a modest Spanish place with a courtyard. For the first time the address was hers. Foster rooms and studio bungalows had been other people’s keys. She furnished it. She planted. She treated a small house as the job the orphanage had not taught. In 1962 she began Something’s Got to Give for Fox, George Cukor directing, Dean Martin opposite her. She was late. She was ill. Sinus, a fever, a calendar the studio treated as a moral failing. On June 8 Fox fired her. Martin would not finish the picture with a replacement. The studio wanted her back. The footage that survives — a swimming-pool scene, a brightness that looks like recovery — is an unfinished argument about whether she could still be the studio’s blonde and her own actress at the same time.
On May 19 she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, a Democratic fundraiser, a dress the room still talks about. The night is in every clip reel. It is also a working actress taking a political booking between sick days on a Fox lot. In the same season she sat for interviews, including the long one with Richard Meryman that Life would publish as if it were already an epitaph. She talked about privacy, about work, about being alone. She talked about talent being born in private. The Actors Studio exercises had not stopped. Paula Strasberg was still in the file. The production company had already taught her what ownership cost. The house was the first proof she could buy a door that stayed.
Friends who saw her that summer split, as they do. Some describe a woman planning pictures. Some describe a woman running out of night. Both can be true in a short year. DiMaggio was back in the orbit as a friend. Miller was not. The unfinished Fox picture sat on the lot. The Meryman tapes sat in a reporter’s notebook. Fifth Helena sat in her name.
She died in that house on August 4, 1962. The Los Angeles County coroner ruled the death a probable suicide by barbiturate poisoning. She was thirty-six. DiMaggio kept the funeral small, at Westwood Village Memorial Park, and kept the industry out. He had roses sent to the crypt for years. The night is not a committee. The unfinished picture, the Studio exercises, the Meryman tapes, and the house are the last years. The grate is the climate. The last years are a woman still trying to work.
After she was gone
The stills multiplied until they became a separate career the dead woman could not supervise. Some Like It Hot still teaches comic timing. The Misfits still looks like a last serious bet. Every actress who has had to fight a studio for a part that is not a costume still walks a little of that 1955 road to New York. The conspiracy shelf is a different industry. It is not this page.
She came out of foster rooms, took a factory job, accepted a studio name, made 1953 look like a coronation, married a ballplayer and then a playwright, founded a company, studied as if the blonde were a first draft, finished The Misfits, bought a house, and left an unfinished Fox picture on the lot. If you only remember August 1962, you have the headline. If you remember the orphanage, the production company, and Fifth Helena, you have her.
Portrait: Bert Parry · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons