Marilyn Monroe

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Elizabeth Haas

In 1962, at age 36, and after completing only 29 films, Marilyn Monroe died, leaving a legacy as one of the most recognizable movie stars and powerful cultural images in American history. White-blonde hair, seductively lowered eyelids, skin-tight glittery gowns clinging to her hourglass shape, and a cultivated habit of purling her shoulders just as her face broke into a demure smile constituted the inimitable Monroe presence, one exuding idealized femininity and sexual thrill. The epitome of desirability, Monroe was the sex symbol who also suggested vulnerability and a childlike desire to please. After working with her in 1949's Love Happy, Groucho Marx declared, "It's amazing. She's Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one." Novelist Norman Mailer, who never met her but penned a book-length tribute titled Marilyn, described her as "fed on sexual candy." This mixture of carnal allure and naivete emanating from a full-figured woman with the whispery voice of a girl created the distinctive contradiction integral to Monroe's success and the force of her image. Monroe claimed she never cared about money, saying, "I just want to be wonderful."

Marilyn Monroe's death increased her popularity by nearly incalculable measure, and in her untimely end lies another key to her iconic status. Her screen personality suggested a "bad girl" in the bedroom but also a weak child-woman requiring protection from male predators. When she died from a self-administered barbiturate overdose, it seemed an unlikely and unjust finish for a star of her magnitude. Her shocking death only reinforced this vulnerable aspect of Monroe's appeal. The gossip surrounding her death and the famous men then involved with her--including President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy--only whetted the public appetite to know more of her, to see more of her, to feel as if it understood who she really was. She shared this afterlife with other celebrities who died tragically. Actor James Dean was killed in an automobile crash in the desert in the 1960s after famously proclaiming he aimed to "die young and leave a beautiful corpse." Like Monroe's, his image continued to haunt poster shops and post card stands decades later. The mythos of a dazzling life burning at both ends until finally extinguishing itself has proven endlessly fascinating to an American culture obsessed by youth. Also like James Dean, Monroe was a natural before a photographer's lens. While movie acting frightened her and she developed the unconscionable work habits of arriving hours late to a set and requiring countless takes to deliver even minimal lines, in front of a still photographer she was magic. Her face appeared transparent to mood and yet managed to withhold something, too, making each picture of her unique.

She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 in Los Angeles, California, to a single mother struggling with mental illness and a travelling salesman who would not claim her. Traded in and out of orphanages and foster homes, her early childhood was defined by emotional neglect and sexual abuse at the age of eight. She would later lie about her childhood, claiming she was an orphan to hide the fact of her mother's institutionalization. As her own insecurities and episodes of severe depression mounted in nearly direct proportion to her fame, the image of her mother's instability haunted her. She never met her father and pretended that he was movie star Clark Gable. Her inauspicious roots may not have signaled her future celebrity, but her early experiences being shuffled off to the movies did. As many other film stars from the studio system era in Hollywood would report, movie-going cultivated in Monroe a driving desire to join the privileged, shining faces, and outsized personalities of the silver screen. As she later put it, "I told myself a million times that I was an actress because that seemed to me something golden and beautiful."

In 1942, at age 16, Norma Jeane (now going by Norma Jean Baker) agreed to marry Jim Dougherty, a few years her senior. Marriage spared her further sexual abuse at the hands of older men and alleviated the obligation of family friends to care for her. Dougherty joined the merchant marines, departed for the war, and Marilyn found employment at the Radio Plane munitions plant. There a photographer discovered her during a shoot to promote women working for the war effort. Her then-brunette good looks so struck him that he helped her win a modeling contract. Shortly after establishing her modeling career, Norma Jean peroxided her hair, divorced Dougherty, and set her sites on a movie stardom at age 20. In 1946, the head of new talent at 20th-Century Fox rewarded her with her first contract and renamed her Marilyn. She chose Monroe after her grandmother's last name. Norma Jean's transformation from hard-working plant employee to model and then starlet Marilyn Monroe, dependent on the connections and business acumen of men to further her career, would prove representative of further struggles. Just as her celebrity connoted a contradiction between nave and assertive sexuality, Monroe also represented a woman who, freed from domesticity by WWII, did not know how best to exploit her own raw talents and fierce ambition. Monroe was shrewd and helpless both, involving herself repeatedly with men like talent agent Johnny Hyde to score movie auditions then turning down studio-offered scripts in search of better parts. As her career evolved, she became a committed student of "The Method," a theory of acting she learned at the feet of Lee Strasburg, head of the famous Actor's Studio in New York where other acting luminaries like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift also honed their craft. Her longing to step out of the mold the studios forced upon her and her use of the Method to do so positioned her stardom in a time of limbo. The studio system was eroding yet its imprint on Monroe's image remained lasting. Monroe both fought for attention any way she could get it and resented the static and demeaning stereotype of her movie roles, saying, "A sex symbol becomes just a thing and I hate that--but if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it be sex."