It's About Time To Set This Straight, I Think...

What do you think of when you hear the name 'Marilyn Monroe'?

I'll be honest, five years ago I only knew her name because of Marilyn Manson. I'd not seen her films, had the thought to look her up or read a word about her. Still, despite this, I never marched around parading falsities as the truth, which I am proud of now that I know what I do about this wonderful woman.

In my experience, men, women - everyone - will assume Marilyn was a whore, a tramp, an awful actress who was just in it for the fame or the glamour, a drug addict, an alcoholic, 'the actress that committed suicide in 1962', she was fat, wore a white dress once, or was the one who had an affair with that president that was shot, and his brother. YAWN.
I think it's time to set the record straight on who Marilyn Monroe was, what she accomplished, what she did and didn't do, and what she really thought of the world (rather than seeing people regurgitate those ridiculous quotes that she never said).

So, about Marilyn's early years - THE TRUTH:

Norma Jean Mortenson was born illegitimately to Gladys Pearl Baker, a film cutter from California. Before she gave birth to Norma Jean, she had had two children to a husband that ran away, taking the children with him - Norma's half sisters. Marilyn recalled in her slim autobiography 'My Story', that the day her mother came to take Norma to her rooms for a visit was the first happy day in her life that she remembered.
Norma witnessed her mother's descent into mental health issues, and said she remembered hearing a terrible noise from the stairs outside of the kitchen and her mother laughing and screaming, before she was taken to the Norwalk Mental Hospital. Norma was taken to an Orphan's Asylum, where the memories of her mother haunted her daydreams. Norma was placed in nine different families before she was able to quit being a legal orphan at sixteen when she married James Dougherty (some people often mistake DiMaggio for her first husband. She married James out of a kind of desperation to avoid an orphanage).

Jimmy was the 'boy next door' type; the wholesome, all-American soldier, training to fight in WW2 at the time of their marriage. Marilyn described their marriage as 'being retired to a zoo'. She stated that the first effect marriage had on her was that it increased her already severe lack of interest in sex, to which Jimmy either didn't realise or didn't mind - she said they were 'too young to discuss such an embarrassing topic openly'. She saw it as a sort of friendship with sexual privileges, and that she found out later that marriage is often no more than that. Jimmy's parents didn't care much for Norma, as she was a 'peculiar' wife - she disliked grownups and preferred washing dishes to sitting and talking. Norma preferred boys and girls younger than herself and would play games with them in the street until Jimmy called her inside.

Jimmy joined the Merchant Marines in 1944, and Norma went to work in a parachute factory for the war effort. Marilyn recalled once that they made the girls work in overalls. She was surprised by this, saying that working in them was like  a girl working in tights - particularly if she knows how to wear them. Norma was completely faithful to her overseas husband during this time in the factory, despite the amount of men and boys buzzing around her, offering to buy her drinks and whatnot. Her fidelity was due to her lack of interest in sex, she said.

The only real issue between Jimmy and Norma was that he wanted a baby, and that thought scared Norma at that time. She saw a baby as another version of her, sat in that orphanage in a white blouse and blue dress while Jim left them both. After Jimmy fell asleep, Norma would lay awake crying. By 1955 however, around the time she wrote her autobiography, having a baby was no longer a scary thing for Marilyn, and was rather a dream for her. She no longer saw a baby as being a replica of her by that time - but back to the 1940s we go!

The end of Norma Jean came with the end of her first marriage. She moved to a room in Hollywood and lived by herself at 19, to discover herself and find out just who she was. Marilyn stated that she sometimes felt Norma Jean's frightened, sad eyes looking out of hers, saying 'I never lived, I was never loved' - it confused her, as she thought she was saying it. A true Gemini, she often saw herself as two different people, though not in the sense of bipolar disorder.

As Norma began posing for photographers as a model while in Hollywood, it was purely to earn enough money to pay for her room and food - food being something she often fell behind on, being left hungry which would later be the reason behind the 'red velvet' shoot that she declined the first time around, but accepted when she was broke. Those were the photographs Playboy bought from the photographer - Marilyn never outright posed for Playboy as is commonly believed. She never even met Hugh Hefner or visited any kind of mansion.

Marilyn recalled walking through the streets lonely at night at those times, when men would say 'Hi baby,' and if she didn't turn to look at them they'd sneer 'Stuck up, eh?'. Marilyn was far from the easy trollop people assume she was - but many people seem content on settling with this idea of her. If a man approached her to start a one-sided conversation, and she ignored them, it was through no moral attitude, it was rather a sense of not wanting to be used as Norma had been used. She was never easy, she was never a kept woman, and she was, at the very least, free as a woman could be in those oppressed, pre-feminism times. She was ultimately a precursor for what was to come, yet people seem not to realise that that's what the social/sexual revolution was all about - a change in attitudes that had been there all along, just repressed in a prudish society.

"I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, 'there must be thousands of girls like me sitting alone, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest."

Marilyn saw acting as something golden and beautiful. Not an art; more a way to step out of your own dull world and experience bright colours and worlds that 'made your heart leap just to think of them'. She went to bed hungry, and woke up hungry, thinking all actors and actresses were geniuses sitting on 'the front porch of Paradise - the movies'.
Marilyn said the Hollywood she knew was the Hollywood of failure - the people she met almost always suffered from malnutrition or suicide impulses, she said in the mid fifties. She desperately auditioned for talent agents, seeing herself as 'the one from the orphan asylum' among Vaudevillian stars, drama school graduates and real workers.
Marilyn's first audition was with a man called Mr Sylvester. He took her to an office he shared with another man, and handed her a script. Marilyn recalled thinking 'get a hold of yourself, you're an actress, you mustn't let your face twitch' as she began to read the long speech he asked of her. Mr Sylvester asked her to keep raising her dress a few inches, and as it got higher and higher and she never faltered with her speaking, though curious as to why he was asking her to do as she was doing, he suddenly was on the couch and Marilyn realised it was a complete lie - Sylvester didn't work for Goldwyn and had lured her there for sex. He pawed at her, and she held the script up, treasuring it, before jumping up, hitting him, kicking him and slamming her heel into his toe before running out of the building. Still think Marilyn was a whore? Easy? A trollop?

"In Hollywood, a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo. You're judged by how you look, not what you are."

Marilyn was one of the few aspiring actresses that didn't accept monetary offers from high-profile men in order to achieve their dreams. Men who tried to buy her with money made her sick, perhaps because of her days being given to families for $5 a week at the orphanage.
Marilyn learnt to talk huskily ('like Marlene Dietrich'), walk a little wantonly and bring emotion into her eyes when she wanted to. She ate 'like a horse' when she was taken out for meals by people yapping at her heels that she always turned down when it came to money, usually to make up for the lack of food she got throughout the week. She had no money for clothes and tried to keep the splitting seams and mends hidden from people - this would continue into later life, as she hardly ever wore anything glamorous, usually favouring casual sportswear, slacks and sweaters while borrowing dresses and costumes from the studio to wear to events. Marilyn was never a huge fashion icon as such while she was alive.
She watched men trade thousands of dollars, laughing and frolicking. She remembered when her Aunt Grace had gone for months with one lens missing from her glasses just because she couldn't afford it - she knew poverty, and she wasn't looking to show off any money she earned. She just wanted to act; rich people who didn't know how good they had it upset Marilyn no end.

"They didn't have my illusions. My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God! How I wanted to learn! To change, to improve! I didn't want anything else. Not men, not money or love, but the ability to act. With the arc lights on me and the camera pointed at me, I suddenly knew myself. How clumsy, empty, uncultured I was! A sullen orphan with a goose egg for a head"

Her lines were cut from the first film she really acted for - Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay! - and so she went on to spend the salary she was getting on dramatic lessons, dancing lessons and singing lessons. She bought books to read, over time collecting a library of over 400 books including Dostoevsky, James Joyce and books about anything from American Communism to the human body. She sneaked scripts from the set and read them to herself in her mirror, and suddenly fell in love with who she saw herself becoming.

"I used to say to myself, 'what the devil do you have to be proud of, Marilyn Monroe?' and I'd answer 'Everything, everything'."

Marilyn was told by a person she became close to in the industry - Mr Schenk - through the parties that she hated attending, that her looks were against her if she wanted to become an actress. He fired her, and she went home and cried for a week without eating, talking or brushing her hair. She pondered on how she could possibly change her looks - of course if he had fired her for a lack of talent she could still learn and improve and become an actress, but she didn't know what she could do about her looks. She began seeing herself as unattractive - through the eyes of the bosses who wanted her fired. She was ashamed of herself.
She was given another offer of a week on a cruise ship by a high profile industry worker around this point, and she immediately refused, saying she was busy as she realised what would be happening were she to go on this cruise with him.

Johnny Hyde was the man who ultimately made Marilyn. He knew he was dying of a heart condition and asked Marilyn to marry him, ensuring she would inherit everything from him - she declined on the premise that she loved him, but she wasn't in love with him, and that she would feel wretched taking his money and belongings from his children despite their dislike of him. Johnny somewhat 'discovered' Marilyn, made her, skyrocketed her into the star we know her as. Marilyn saw him as the first man to understand her - one thing she liked was that she had a habit of not finishing her sentences, or taking a while to get them out. Most people saw this as her lying, but in fact it was just her not finishing her sentences (she had suffered a stammer as a child, also). Johnny understood this, realising she wasn't lying.

"The truth is I've never fooled anyone. I've let men fool themselves. Men sometimes didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them, they were obviously seeing somebody I wasn't. When they found this out, they'd blame me for disillusioning them - and fooling them."

Schenk asked Marilyn once: 'which would you rather marry - a poor boy you loved, or a rich man you liked?' Marilyn replied, 'a poor boy I loved'. At Johnny Hyde's funeral, Marilyn threw herself on the coffin and cried. He was, to her, the 'kindest man in the world'.

Marilyn enrolled in the University of Southern California after fearing herself a dumb woman, and studied at nights while learning acting etc. in the daytime. She learnt about the Renaissance, Michelangelo, Raphael and Tintoretto, stating there were new geniuses to hear about everyday. She bought books by Freud and read them till she was dizzy. She did this along with acting lessons, singing lessons, press interviews, sessions with photographers and rehearsals. This is why she married intelligent men rather than big, handsome guys - she wanted someone wise who she could learn from, who would make her feel that by being with her she was almost an equal in terms of intellect.
DiMaggio, the quiet Yankee baseball hero, was attractive to Marilyn straight away; she met him first when she was tired and instantly felt rejuvenated by his side according to 'My Story'. Her heart apparently jumped the moment Joe told her she was beautiful, the first time it had when being told she was pretty.

Joe disliked Marilyn's career, one time when she accidentally showed her breast in a photo shoot saying it would be bad for the Armed Services for parents to think their daughters were being influenced by someone like Marilyn. She found it ridiculous how something like this could cause national concern - again, a precursor for the 1960s, right?

Now, I've covered most of the early stuff. I could go on all night talking about this incredible woman, but I'll just leave you with some factoids that I've collected over the years instead :)

1) She fought hard to be respected, becoming the first woman to start her own independent film company - this led in turn to the overhaul of the studio system, to what we have now. Before this, actors were handed roles and had to accept, after, actors could choose which roles they wanted to do. People don't seem to appreciate that, especially as it was such a huge feat for a woman in the 1950s. She did this purely because she refused to play anymore dumb blonde roles, realising the public were beginning to see her as just that.

2) Marilyn was the first celebrity to ever speak out about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child in a time where the victim was often dismissed for lying.

3) Her prescription drugs habits were just that - prescribed by doctors she trusted who neglected her, in a time where addiction was not understood. Marilyn trusted her psychiatrists and doctors wholly, and took whatever they prescribed for anxiety, endometriosis and her other illnesses.

4) She was in the #1 rated comedy of all time; Some Like It Hot.

5) She studied with two of the most acclaimed acting coaches of the time; Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg, whose methods are still taught today.

6) She was an early advocate for civil rights, something that wouldn't really be drawn attention to fully until the 1960s. When a whites-only club refused to let Ella Fitzgerald play, as she was one of Marilyn's favourite singers who she styled her own voice on, she called the club personally and said she would sit front row every night if they booked Ella.

7) She headed the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.

8) She gave copious amounts of money to charities, orphanages, Milk Fund...

9) She revolutionised the way the world saw, and still sees sex. Even today, we struggle to realise that women are equal to men in what they can and can't do sexually. In the uptight 50s sex was shameful, embarrassing and dirty. Marilyn made it fun and funny, being sexy but still innocent and proper enough. It altered society in a way to make everything that happened in the 1960s possible.

As you can see, Marilyn was an insecure, but incredibly savvy woman right from the start, with the same worries, niggles and anxieties as us all. She is the epitome of what a poor girl from a sad background can achieve if they work hard enough and stay true to themselves, learning and growing with each new day. That's something I've always admired, being a girl from a poor background myself. With anyone you admire, you try to find something in common so that you can learn from the person and further your own individual growth and development.
I took the time to discuss her seriously because she is one of my biggest motivating forces, a kind of energy that spurs me on to achieve, succeed and fulfil my own dreams. That being said, I don't want to be another Marilyn - never have. I don't think anyone should ever aspire to be the 'next so-and-so'. It's laughable somewhat, when people compare themselves, and I think that you should just try and be you, not someone from the past or someone you like a little bit. All you have to do is use the lessons those people you admire have taught you and see it as spiritual or intellectual guidance. I still do it with people alive and well today - revolutionaries, motivational speakers, even people I see in the streets putting up quirky posters in protest of something or other. You read about these people, learn as much from them as possible and transfer it into your own self, and the way you think about things and the way the world works.

I hope that this has given you a little more insight into Marilyn. Sorry for getting so wordy and heavy, but the truth needs to be known, and mostly straight from the horse's mouth - My Story is such a beautiful, truthful account of Marilyn's life from her own point of view. Not the media, not colleagues or someone looking to make a quick penny, just Marilyn.

Love to you all, x