✦"The Death Of Marilyn Monroe" (1962)

_{^{An NBC radio broadcast, aired on August 8th, 1962, discussing her career, character, final days, and the impact of her death to the public worldwide. Features interviews from: Frank McGee, Milton Greene, and Pete Martin.}}

✦"The Legend Of Marilyn Monroe" (1966)

_{^{A heartfelt documentary that features key people in Marilyn's personal life, showcasing her journey to stardom and after. It is narrated by John Huston and features interviews from: The Bolenders, her school teacher, James Dougherty, Emmeline Snively, Harry Lipton, Tom Kelley, Lee Strasberg, and Eunice Murray.}}

✦"Marilyn Monroe: 10 Years On" (1972)

_{^{This documentary gives rare and exclusive interviews that not only give anecdotes but also insight to the complexities and personal struggles of Marilyn. This documentary include interviews from the following: James Dougherty, Ben Lyon, John Huston, George Axelrod, Lee Strasberg, Joshua Logan, Allan "Whitey" Snyder, Ralph Roberts, and Lawrence Schiller.}}

✦"The Discovery Of Marilyn Monroe" (1991)

_{^{This documentary explores the then-uncovered images of a 19-year-old Marilyn Monroe taken by David Conover in 1945. It delves into her first marriage, early modeling days, transition to young starlet, and to her rise to fame. Includes interviews from: Bebe Goddard, James Dougherty, Jane Russell, and Robert Mitchum.}}

✦"Marilyn Monroe: The Last Interview" (1992)

_{^{This documentary recounts the interview she conducted with Richard Meryman for LIFE Magazine’s August 3rd, 1962 issue. It features the original raw recordings, allowing fans to hear from Marilyn herself her reflections on fame, Hollywood, and other personal challenges she faced along the way. This documentary is a must for any fan wanting to gain insight to Marilyn’s own reflections of her life, both as a celebrity and person, towards the end of her life.}}

✦"Marilyn on Marilyn" (2001)

_{^{"Marilyn on Marilyn" features recordings from her interviews with George Belmont in 1960 and Richard Meryman in 1962. This is perhaps the closest we can have of Marilyn narrating her own life story in depth.}}

✦"Marilyn's Man" (2001)

_{^{This documentary explores Marilyn's first marriage with James Dougherty, where you can learn more Norma Jeane as a young bride and the beginning of her transition to modeling. Has wonderful and touching anecdotes of a young Norma Jeane before her rise to stardom. It also discusses the impact Marilyn’s rise to fame had on Dougherty after their marriage ended.}}

✦"ARTE Mysteries in the Archives | 1954 Marilyn Monroe in Korea" (2008)

_{^{Gives an overview of Marilyn in Japan and Korea while providing detailed historical context and understanding of the significance of her visit. Features beautifully restored footage, allowing viewers to feel the warmth and love she provided all the way back in 1954.}}

✦"Love, Marilyn" (2012)

_{^{"Love, Marilyn" gives a brief overview of her life, while featuring dramatic readings of Marilyn's own writings by various acclaimed actors. It also provides excerpts from recorded interviews, Marilyn related publications and quotations from those who knew her. This allows viewers an up-close and intimate understanding of the private Marilyn Monroe. A must-watch for any Marilyn fan. Features interviews from: Sarah Churchwell, Louis Banner, Ellen Burstyn, Amy Greene, George Barris, Donald Spoto, Jay Kanter, Patricia Boworth, and other prerecorded interviews.}}

✦"Signoret et Montand, Monroe et Miller: Deux couples a Hollywood" (2020)

_{^{Dives into the complex relationships between Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Yves Montand, and Simone Signoret surrounding the filming of "Let's Make Love". Gives individual spotlights to the notable figures, behind the scenes of filming, post-filming, and their shared moments off screen-allowing viewers to learn about the personal and professional tensions that unfolded among them.}}

✦"Marilyn, Femme d'Aujourd'hui" (2022)

_{^{Presents Marilyn as more than a sex symbol by showcasing examples that prove her as an intelligent, independent, persevering woman ahead of her time. A wonderful examination and discussion of the multifaceted person she was and offers a deeper understanding of her legacy through a modern perspective.}}

✦"Reframed: Marilyn Monroe" (2022)

_{^{A four-part CNN documentary that "reframes" Marilyn's life and legacy through a feminist lens. Highlights Marilyn's challenges and perseverance within the Hollywood industry, along with shedding light on her lesser-known admirable qualities. A wonderfully refreshing documentary. Narrated by Jessica Chastain and features nearly an all-female commentary by: Cindy de la Hoz-Sipala, Sarah Churchwell, Lois Banner, Mira Sorvino, Joan Collins, and many more.}}

_{Pickwick Book Shop first opened in 1938 on Hollywood Boulevard, nearby the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, so it's no wonder how it quickly became the hot spot for celebrities' book needs. Providing an extensive collection of new and used books in an convenient location, it would supposedly attract the likes of William Faulkner, Humphrey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and other notable figures. It would later expand into 16 southern California locations by 1974. Pickwicks ultimately was acquired by Dayton Hudson and it's stores was fully rebranded to B. Dalton Books in 1979. It closed it doors officially n 1995.^{(Source: "Final Chapter Ends for Bookstore", The Los angeles Times - May 25th, 1995; "Pickwick Book Shop (Hollywood)" Water and Power Associates, viewable here)}}

_{"I have only one charge account and that's at a Beverly Hills book store."^{(Source: "New Pin-Up Queen Likes Good Books" by Bob Thomas, News-Pilot - January 5th, 1951)}}

_{"It was Johnny, too, who started me reading. Now I have to restrain myself from buying out Pickwick's Book Store on Hollywood Boulevard! There's a beautiful set of Michelangelo's paintings reproduced in book form I'd like to own as soon as I can."^{(Source: Movieland Magazine - May 1951)}}

_{"There is one particular remembrance I have of Marilyn which I think tells a great deal about her at the time. One day on the set -we were shooting the party sequence- she walked by me, carrying a thin book. Had she been carrying a thin snake, I would have thought nothing of it. But a book. I called her over and asked what she was reading. She didn't say; she justt handed it to me. It was Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet I'd have been less taken aback to come upon Herr Rilke studing a Marilyn Monroe calendar.I asked Marilyn if she knew who he was. She shook her head. 'No. Who is he?' I told her Rilke had been a German poet, that he was dead, that I myself had read less of him and knew less about him than I should-and askedher how the hell she came to be reading him at all, much less particular work of his. Had somebody recommended it to her? Again, a shake of her head: 'No. Nobody. You see, in my whole life I haven't read hardly anything at all. I don't know how to catch up. I don't know where to begin. So what I do is, every now and then I go into the Pickwick (a bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, one of the very few in the entire City of the Angels which exists independent of being a required adjunct to an institution of learning) and just look around I leaf though some books, and when I read something that interests me-I buy the book. So last night I bought this one. Is it wrong?' No, I told her, that was far from wrong. That in fact, it was the best possible way for anyone to choose what to read. She was not accustomed to being told she was doing anything right, She smiled proudly and moved on. The next day Marilyn sent me a copy of Letters to A Young Poet. I have yet to read it."^{(Source: "More about All about Eve" By Joseph L. Mankiewicz)}}

_{Hunter's Books, also known as "Marian Hunter's Book Shop", first opened in 1923 on N. Rodeo Drive. It was founded by Dick and Marian Hunter. Hunter's had frequent celebrity customers such as Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Betty White and more. It officially closed it's doors in 1987.^{(Sources: "Hunter’s to Close 3 Bookstores on Christmas" by Denise Gellene, The Los Angeles Times, December 7th, 1987; "Hollywood Is My Best: The Week in Review" by Sidney Skolsky, Los Angles Evening Citizen News, February 6th, 1953; "Marty Allen New 'Matinee Idol'?" by Sheilah Graham, Valley Times - August 26th, 1969; "Hunter's Books" California Revealed, viewable here)}}

_{"The first charge account she ever opened was at Marian Hunter's book shop in Beverly Hills."^{(Source: "I Love Marilyn" - Sidney Skolsky, Modern Screen - October 1953)}}

_{"The only two charge accounts Marilyn Monroe has in town are at bookstores."^{(Source: "Hollywood Report" - Mike Connolly, Modern Screen - June 1952)}}

_{Martindale's Bookstore, owned by Walter Martindale, was a bookstore chain that was known for catering to celebrities. Besides Marilyn, stars like Gregory Peck, Maureen O'Hara, Joseph Cotton, and more would frequent the store. The exact opening and closing dates for the stores are unclear. It was open at least from 1943 and seemingly closed down in 1986.^{(Sources: "Incidentally" By Louise Gump, Independent - March 24th, 1946; Paradise Post, July 18th, 1986; "Hollywood, thanks for the Christmas Memories" by James M. Barrie, Kennebec Journal - December 19th, 2014, viewable here;"Don’t let anybody diss L.A.’s reading habits. This was and is a bookstore boomtown" by Patt Morrison, The Los Angeles Times -November 14th, 2023)}}

_{"After dinner, she asked me to go to Martindale's Book Store to do a little browsing."^{(Source: "Mimosa: Memories of Marilyn & the Making of "The Misfits"by Ralph L. Roberts with Chris Jacobs & Hap Roberts)}}

Marilyn seemed to be frequent shopper according to the book reciepts viewable below:

• (1954) Check

• (undated) RECEIPT

• (1958) RECEIPTs

• (1958 & 1960) RECEIPTs

• (1960) RECEIPT

• (1960) RECEIPTs

_{"My next stop was the Sutton Place Stationers at 1040 First Avenue, where Marilyn borrows books from the rental library.'She doesn't come in here too often by herself,' the proprietor, Jack Newman said. 'Usually she's with Mr. Miller, and she's holding onto his arm. I don't know why but to me she's never seemed like Marilyn Monroe, the sexy girl in the movies. She's just like an everyday housewife who's crazy about her husband. Mr. Miller stops in for Half-and-Half pipe tobacco or an evening newspaper.'We carry his book, 'The Collected Plays of Arthur Miller,' and she likes to point to it when they're together, and both of them smile. She's never dressed up, and he likes open shirts without neckties and old pants. My wife calls the way he dresses 'in the rough.''She always says hello to me. She does read a lot. She's always exchanging books, but I don't have time to pay attention to the titles.'"^{(Source: "What was Marilyn Monroe Doing at 685 Third Avenue?" By Evan Michaels, Photoplay - August 1959)}}

Barney's Beanery

_{^{Restaurant8447 Santa Monica Blvd, West Hollywood, CA
[Open](Source: "Bartender Who Battled Tierney in Jail Again" The Los Angeles Times - September 10th, 1948; Barney's Beanery Website)}}

_{"After it [nude calendar shooting] was over, Marilyn put on her black jersey sweater, her white slacks, and her ivory polo coat. They all went to Barney’s Beanery for chili and coffee. It was the first food Marilyn had eaten that day."^{(Source: "Marilyn Monroe" Maurice Zolotow)}}

The Bublichki

_{^{Cafe/Tavern8846 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA
[Closed](Source: "Don't Miss Siberian Pelmeni, Golubtzi" by Ken Tichrnor, Los Angeles Mirror - June 11th, 1957; "Vintage Los Angeles" Facebook)}}

_{"Marilyn Monroe turned up at the Bublichki with hubby (Arthur Miller) and willingly signed autographs for dozen teenagers outside the restaurant..."^{(Source: "The Hollywood Scene" by Lowell E. Redelings, Los Angeles Evening Citizen News - October 3rd, 1958)}}

Knickerbocker Hotel

_{^{1714 Ivar Ave, Hollywood, CA 90028
[Open](Source: Los Angeles Times - April 19th, 1955; Knickerbocker Hotel Website)}}

_{"Joe DiMaggio got uppity with me yesterday for daring to check with him that Marilyn Monroe came running into his arms at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel upon her return from Atlantic City."^{(Source: "Hollywood Report" By Mike Connolly, Pasadena Independent September 5th, 1952)}}

_{"Q. Where did you first meet Marilyn Monroe?A. At the Knickerbocker Hotel.""^{(Source: "On The Town" By Ann St. John, Los Angeles Evening Citizen News - September 25th, 1952)}}

_{"Her evenings she spends with DiMaggio, either at her home or dining here at the Knickerbocker Hotel where Joe lives, (and if anybody cares) so do I."^{(Source: "Marilyn Monroe Vows She'll Team With DiMaggio-Forever" by Inez Wallace, The Plain Dealer - November 23rd, 1952)}}

_{"The Marilyn Monroe-Joe DiMaggio romance may be over but they've been dining regularly at the Knickerbocker Hotel."^{(Source: "Movieland" Press of Atlantic City - November 26rd, 1952)}}

_{"Some evening when you want to spend a little more of that vacation savings and eat in finery stop in at the dining room of the Knickerbocker Hotel. There you will be greeted by their hostess Betty Brown (wife of actor James Brown) and will probably spot some star close by. It's the favorite eating spot of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe."^{(Source: Modern Screen - July 1953)}}

_{"Dinner at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, near Holly and Vine, are apt to find you with stars, but not at noon. When Marilyn Monroe's own studio could not locate her, she dined nightly at the Knick with Joe DiMaggio because he lived at that hotel."^{(Source: "If You're Visiting Hollywood Here's Where and What To Eat" by Inez Wallace, The Plain Dealer - June 13th, 1954)}}

_{"Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio couldn't stay married; now they can't remain separated. Marilyn, with hair flying, drove up to the Knickerbocker Hotel to pick up Joe and his luggage and drive him to the airport. Truly life is weird, wonderful, and surprising in Hollywood..."^{(Source: "Hollywood" by Hedda Hopper, Hartford Courant - November 26th, 1954)}}

Newtown Inn

_{^{Restaurant19 Main St Newtown, CT 06470
[Closed](Source: "The Inn at Newtown to Close", Dirk Perrefort, Newstimes - January 5th, 2016)}}

_{"The Arthur Millers of Woodbury (she's Marilyn Monore) were seen enjoying the French and Italian cooking in Newtown inn Sunday night. Marilyn was wearing her blonde hair upswept in Empire style and had on almost no makeup. With them were Mr. Miller's son and attractive teenage daughter."^{(Source: "This Is Our Town" The Bridgeport Post - February 22nd, 1959)}}

Slapsy Maxie's

_{^{Nightclub5665 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036
[Closed](Source: LA Conservancy)}}

_{"Charlie Chaplin Jr., with Marilyn Monroe at Slapsy Maxie's to see Martha Raye."^{(Source: "Louella O. Parsons' Hollywood", The Duluth News Tribune - December 17th, 1946)}}

_{"Don Randell and Marilyn Monroe were a duo at Slapsy Maxie's this week..."^{(Source: ""Homolka in Renior Film; College Documentary Set" by Lloyd L. Sloan, Los Angele Evening Citizen News - April 10th, 1948)}}

Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor

_{^{[Franchise]
[Multiple Locations]}}

_{"I've developed the habit of stopping off at Wil Wright's ice cream parlor for a hot fudge sundae on my way home from my evening drama classes."^{(Source: "How I Stay In Shape" by Marilyn Monroe, Pageant -September 1952)}}

• "Lonely"

• "life is wonderful what the hell"

• "a cat watching its own tail move"

• "Making love summertime"

• "Viewed from a night table"

• "girl waiting"

• "old man sitting on bench listening"

• "i must concentrate"

• "nude tucking her knees under"

• "jumping into the frying pan from the fire"

• "lover watching his love sleep"

• "A glass of champagn the morning after"

• "Myself Exercising"

_{^{Here are some of Marilyn's milestones. This is not a complete list, but rather some highlights.
Be sure to check back regularly for further additions to the list.}}

"I write poetry. Usually sentimental and philosophical. Not the best in the world, let's face it, but I get satisfaction from putting my thoughts on paper. I like to write on rainy nights."

Marilyn Monroe
_{^{"Marilyn Monroe Takes Good Look At-Marilyn"
The Des Moines Register
August 6th, 1953}}

"You get such wonderful thoughts and ideas at night when you are alone. I like to let my moods come and go then-and that's when I write poetry."

Marilyn Monroe
_{^{"Home Life of a Hollywood Bachelor Girl"
Television & Screen Guide
August 1951}}

"Well, not exactly a diary. Sometimes, when things used to happen, I used to write it down. But then, I used to tear it up."

Marilyn Monroe
_{^{Radio Interview with Dave Garroway
June 12th, 1955}}

"She liked poetry. It was a short cut for her. She understood, with the instinct of a poet, that it led directly into the heart of experience. She knew the interior floating world of the poem with its secrets, phantoms, and surprises. She loved surprises, verbal or visual. She enjoyed mischief and mystery, things a good poem can give. And somewhere within her, she sensed a primary truth: that poetry is allied with death. Its intoxication and joy are the other face of elegy. Love and death, opposite and one, are its boundary – and were hers."

Norman Rosten
_{^{“Marilyn: An Untold Story”}}

Here you can find a list of some of her personal writings. More can be read in the highly recommended book "Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe".

I.
I left my home of green rough wood,
a blue velvet couch
I dream till now
Ashiny dark bush
just left at the door.Down the walk
Clickity clack
As my doll in her carriage
Went over the cracks-
"we'll go far away.""II.
Don't cry my doll
Don't cry
I hold you and rock you to sleep
Hush hush I'm pretending now
I'm not your mother who diedIII.
Help Help
Help I feel life coming clocser
When all I want is to die.***

Life-
I am both of your directions
Existing more with the cold frost
Strong as a coweb in the wind
Hanging downward the most
Somehow remaining
those beaded rays have the colors
I've seen paintings-ah life
they have cheated you***

thinner than a coweb's thread
sheerer than any-
but it did attach itself
and held fast in strong winds
and sin[d]ged by (?) leaping hot fires
life-of which at singular times
I am both of your directions-
somehow i remain hanging downward the most
as both of your directions pull me***

From time to time
I make it rhyme
but don't hold that kind
of thing
against
me-
Oh well what the hell
so it won't sell
what I want to tell-
is what's on my mind
taint Dishes
taint Wishes
its thoughts flinging by
before I die
and to think
in ink
****

Night of the Nite-soothing-
darkness-refreshes air-Air
Seems different-Night has
No eyes nor no one-silence-
execpt to the Night itself***

"To the Weeping Willow"I stood beneath your limbs
and you flowered and finally clung too me
and when the wind struck with...the earth
and sand-you clung to me***

"Towers"
_{^{[About Manhattan]}}so many lights in the darkness
making skeletons of the buildings***

“Impatient taxi drivers, driving hot dusty New York streets,
So they can save for a vacation driving hot dusty
Highways all across the country to see
Her relatives.***

“Keep the balloon
And
Dare not to worry
Dare to
let go-so loose
Then you pick up
Stretch into your tone

Review

_{^{By Rina}}

_{I found out about the Marilyn Today Newsletter in the ‘Marilyn Remembered’ Facebook community a little over two years ago. I usually get my Marilyn-related news online or from small word of mouth within the community. In a nearly digital world, it is refreshing to discover a physical publication that is centered around Marilyn! Once I heard about it, I knew I needed to sign up for it immediately. From the day of subscription, I watched my mailbox like a hawk. When I finally saw the Marilyn stamped envelope in my mailbox peeking out, I nearly jumped from excitement! I didn't even wait to get into my apartment to pry it open.I smiled at the beautiful Marilyn cover before me. In giddiness, I flipped through the pages. I thought, "Wow, Marilyn can still generate this much news and interest?"}

_{Even from my first copy of the newsletter, I have been consistently impressed. It’s wonderfully and thoughtfully curated with all things Marilyn. You can catch up on news, such as ongoing exhibitions, recently released documentaries, to updates surrounding the condition of Marilyn Monroe’s first and final home. You can read rare vintage articles, for example, "Curves Versus Character," written by Marilyn herself-an article that I highly recommend! It's as if you are getting two publications for the price of one just for that feature alone.Beyond news and vintage articles, you can learn very detailed Marilyn history. From the nude calendar shooting to even the surrounding history on a singular outfit she wore, you'll be amazed by what you can learn. A favorite of mine to learn was about how her signature changed over the years. Things like that you'll never find in a standard Marilyn book on the shelvesA lovely feature is all the Marilyn art shared in the newsletter. Isn't it amazing how many people found Marilyn as their muse? I love seeing different creative interpretations of Marilyn by different artists. The ways they can express her aura all so differently fascinates me. I wish I could save each and every artwork featured in the newsletter.}

_{A big benefit of having the newsletter, for me personally, is the publication updates. It seems there is always a new book or magazine, being released around Marilyn...so many that it's hard to keep up! I love that at the back of the newsletter I can see right away what's on the horizon for me to read. Thanks to this, my fear of missing on any good reads has been completely diminished! Sometimes there is even an exclusive an interview with the author. It's really interesting to hear from the author directly about their book and the inspiration or research that went into it.Perhaps my favorite aspect of the newsletter is continually learning about fellow fans in the community through interviews. I always love hearing how people come to discover Marilyn and what impact she made on them personally. Marilyn has an essence that draws people to her in a personal way. Every fan’s story of finding Marilyn, and themselves in her, has been fascinatingly different and touching. I think this newsletter is a wonderful way of showcasing that impact and bringing the community closer and more familiar with one another.It still amazes me the impact she still continues to leave behind. It's as if she never left us....}

_{The newsletter publishes thrice yearly (April, August, and December). It’s always a special treat when it arrives in my mailbox. I wholeheartedly recommend this to everyone in the Marilyn community. If you are interested in joining the newsletter, please view the sign up information at the bottom of the page.}

Q & A

_{Before answering any questions, could you kindly give a small self-introduction to readers?Hello and „Moin“ as we say in Northern Germany. My name is Benjamin. I’m a social worker and a long time Marilyn Monroe and classic Hollywood fan. I am running the international Marilyn Monroe fan club „Some Like It Hot“ with members from all over the world. I am editing a printed magazine called „Marilyn Today“, coming three times per year for our members. I live with my husband in Kiel which is in the Norhern part of Germany.What is your own story with finding Marilyn?When I grew up in the 1980s, old Hollywood movies were often showed on TV at prime time. As children, my sister and I often spend time with my grandparents. We had dinner together and afterwards, we watched a movie together. One night, „River of no Return“ was shown. I was mesmerized by Marilyn. Her beauty and sweetness totally attracted me. I was probably around the same age as the boy in the movie is. I had no idea I was watching an old Hollywood movie neither who Marilyn Monroe was. My grandparents who were from Marilyn’s generation told me about her. They always supported me in giving me Marilyn books as Christmas or birthday gifts and I remember going to a Marilyn exhibition with them.Do you have other favorite Old Hollywood stars? And what makes Marilyn stand out to you from the others?Marilyn will always be my first love. She stands all above the others since she became this icon. When I grew up, other classic Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Russell were still alive. I loved to learn about their lives and careers. I also reached out to many of them to receive their autograph which is another hobby of mine. Whenever I saw a movie with them that touched me (and there are many), I felt I wanted to let them know I love their work by writing a letter to them. I also like Sophia Loren and Mamie Van Doren who are both still with us luckily.3. What's your favorite book centered around Marilyn?I like Donald Spoto’s biography which I think is very accurate and names sources. I also like Michelle Morgan’s books who is a profound writer showing her love for Marilyn and I love coffee table books. The ones by David Wills are of a stunning great quality. The colors are amazing. Marilyn shines in the Kodakchrome images.Which film do you find underrated of Marilyn’s?I think „The Misfits“ was an ambitious and important project for Marilyn that turned out a bit of a edgy movie, not a classic Monroe film. Also, I like her performances in „Don’t Bother to Knock“ and „Clash by Night“ which are totally different from the glamour parts.The first newsletter was released by Tina, who founded the fan club 30 years after Marilyn’s passing in August of 1992. Two different guys followed to run the fan club. I was a member since the beginning and had always written articles for the newsletter. When I was asked if I would take over the fan club in 2017, I need a moment to think about it. It quite a lot of work and takes time. In the end, I agreed and I am happy that there are Marilyn fans out there who appreciate receiving a printed newsletter in their mailboxes like in the old days.What is your favorite section of the newsletter?I think it is interesting to get in touch with other people to learn about their views and opinions on Marilyn or on certain aspects of her life and career. I reach out to authors, actors, photographers and other creative people to learn about their very own connection and interpretation of Marilyn. I also like to learn from other fans what attracts them to Marilyn and how their fascination started. It often seems like a biographical journey and tells also about the fans and their own lives. I also made friends through the shared love of Marilyn which is a great effect. When the fan club started, there was no such thing as social media. So the fan club brought together people with the same interest from different places.Which country do you ship to that surprised you the most?I was surprised when people from South Korea like you reached out. It's so wonderful to have members from so far away and to share the love for Marilyn. I also ship to Australia, the US, UK and all over Europe.What has been your favorite feature in the newsletter so far?It was wonderful that I had the chance to meet Marilyn’s fellow actresses like Noreen Nash, Barbara Rush and Kathleen Hughes and to discuss with those who really met Marilyn. I like the idea that for them, Marilyn was one of the girls. You can get a glimpse of the real person behind the icon.What was the most unexpected thing you learned about Marilyn while curating for your newsletter?The people I talked to who met Marilyn or where in business the same time she was, confirmed that she was totally different in person than she was on screen. Over the years, I learned that Marilyn Monroe was like a part for her - the ultimate glamorous movie star. I think she had a very complex character with contradictions and she surely fought against her demons. It sometimes wonders how she managed to appear so immortal as if she seems to shine. This I think is one of her qualities given by pure instinct. I often heard people saying she didn’t look that amazing in real life but when she was in front of a camera she did her magic. The results are still sensational.From all the people you interviewed, who left the best impression?Noreen Nash became a personal friend over the years. She wasn’t an A-list start but had an interesting Hollywood career and a wonderful life. You can spot her in „We’re Not Married“ in the episode with Zsa Zsa Gabor Lois Calhern as his secretary. In the classic „Giant“, she is Lona Lane, the movie star that flies in to attend Jett Rink’s (James Dean) banquet. Noreen and I talked on the phone, wrote emails and notes to each other for years. When we met in person, it was pure classic Hollywood for me. She was 95 and totally charming. Listening to her Hollywood stories and all the iconic stars she met was an unforgettable experience.How do you decide what content to feature in each issue?Sometimes an idea about a certain topic pops up on my mind and I am starting researching. Sometimes it is an anniversary that comes up like from a certain Marilyn movie. I tend to think what could be an interesting topic that is not so much known already. I don’t like to repeat Marilyn stories most fans know. So I sometimes take hidden paths to make fans learn about connections like when my friend Tim and I did the episodes about who else wore the dresses Marilyn made famous. It is interesting to see Marilyn costumes on other stars in different movies. Sometimes you learn a dresses wasn’t even designed for Marilyn but she made it her own.What do you think makes the Marilyn fan community so special and long-lasting?I think for many, she still is an inspiration in many ways and for many different reasons - as being a working actress, a woman in what is still a man’s business, her influence on the queer community and for classic movie lovers. She offers so much. You can still learn from her and you can focus on different aspects of her life and career. In many ways, she was ahead of the time she lived in.Do you have any upcoming special issues or features we should look forward to?Just lately, I was asked about a kind of best of stories issue, especially for new members. Maybe I’ll think about that. If people are interested, I also have a few back issues left I can offer.What would you like to say to any interested subscribers?Feel free to reach out. I always like to learn about other Marilyn fans, on their focus and it just a great thing to be connected and to be a supportive community especially in the challenging times we are in.}

_{Special thank you to Benjamin for agreeing to do an interview!
If you are interested in signing up, please use the links below to get in touch with him.}

Sign Up

• (1951) "Marilyn Monroe...A Serious Blonde Who Can Act"

• (1953) "Sexy Is Here To Stay"

• (1954) "Marilyn Talks about Joe and Babies"

• (1956) Saturday Evening Post Series

• (1956) Time Magazine Cover Story

• (1958) "The Empty Crib In The Nursery"

• (1962) "Marilyn Let's Her Hair Down About Being Famous"

_{Notice! This list is a work in progress. I am continuously updating it and will add more articles as I uncover more. Be sure to check back regularly for updates.}

• (1949) "Now It's The 'Mmmm Girl'"

• (1952) "The truth about me" Series

• (1953) "Marilyn Monroe Takes Good Look At-Marilyn"

• (1955) "Marilyn Shuns Hollywood, Seeks Culture" Series

• (1957) "She's hard to Figure"

• (1959) "She's No Dumb Blonde"

• (1962) "TWILIGHT OF A STAR" Series

_{Notice! This list is a work in progress. I am continuously updating it and will add more articles as I uncover more. Be sure to check back regularly for updates.}

Transcription of "The Last Interview" with Richard Meryman
_¹⁹⁶²

Transcriptions from the 1992 documentary "The Last Interview", that features audio recordings from Marilyn Monroe’s interview for the August 3, 1962 edition of LIFE Magazine. You can view the article here.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Monroe: Fame? It's like caviar. It's good to have caviar! But, if you had it every damn day, you know? You can have too much caviar.…And yet, it stirs up envy, fame.…Who does she think she is? Marilyn Monroe?...Richard Meryman: I arrived at Marilyn's house in Brentwood, which is just outside of L.A. I pressed the doorbell. My heart was pounding because I absolutely had no idea what to expect. When her housekeeper opened the door, I was amazed. In front of me was a virtually empty living room. There was nothing in it but a couple of chairs. I put the tape recorder on the floor and was kneeling down trying to get it to work. Suddenly, in front of me, I saw yellow slacks and a voice said, “Is there anything I can do to help?” And so that's the way I met Marilyn Monroe, on my knees.She looked great. She had her hair and makeup done, but she was clearly troubled. And I saw a rollercoaster of moods. Intensity, a lot of anger and sadness, as we discussed how her life had been changed, by fame...Monroe: You know, if this article is going to be on fame. I’ll like to state here and now, fame is fickle. And I know it. It has its compensations. It does. But it also has its drawbacks. And I've experienced those.…Monroe: Fame and happiness, it seems to me, is certainly temporary, and it's partial happiness. For a waif, and I'm not calling myself an orphan, but I was brought up a waif.…You see, I was brought up, I think, differently than the average American child, because...no, but the average American child is, you know, like, to be happy, you know? To be happy, that's it. See, happiness wasn't anything I took for granted. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me too much, because it was kind of grim.
I just felt like I was on the outside of the world, and suddenly, everything opened up! I thought, gee, what happened? You know, the world became friendly, it opened up to me. I didn't realize the value of a sweatshirt in those days. I mean, I started to begin to catch on, but I didn't quite get it. Because I couldn't really afford sweaters.
We are all born sexual creatures, thank God! It's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.Tom Kelly, you can find him around. He's still around town. You know, when he first said, you know, pose nude…Back then I thought, if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it sex than some other thing they got symbols of.See, that's just the trouble? Sex symbol becomes a thing. I’d just hate to be a thing....Meryman: She had that wild laugh, sort of a trademark, but in the interview, it seemed to come out at odd moments, out of place. Marilyn gave her fans the credit for her fame. She felt she never had respect from the Hollywood studios, and only her adoring fans really understood her, and they had made her a star. Talking about them were the only really happy moments of the whole interview.Monroe: If I am a star, the people made me a star. There was no studio, and no person, but the people did. There was a reaction. It came in through to the studio, I mean, fan mail you can't imagine. I mean, you know, you're the only star that they've got, or you're the only star. You know, and they look at me as if I was such.…Monroe: Gee, I never thought I had an effect on people until, I guess, I was in Korea. I don't think until then, really, because studios that I worked with have always said, “Remember one thing, you're no star!”*Sometimes, people to want to see if you're real. They kind of look to you, or towards you, for some kind of…something that's, I guess, away from their everyday life. I guess you call that entertainment, huh?…People are, like…nothing scares me like mobs. They scare me. But people, that's something you can trust.…Coming out of my apartment, in New York, you know…the people on the street, when I come out of the door, they say, “Marilyn! Hi! How do you feel this morning?” You know, to me, it's an honor. At first, they look because they, “Oh, it's a girl, she's got blonde hair, she's not out of shape…” And then it's just, “My God, it's Marilyn Monroe!”…I think that sexuality is only attractive when it's natural and spontaneous! This is where a lot of them miss the boat, you know what I mean?…Meryman: Marilyn was ambivalent about being a sex symbol and ambivalent about the press who had reinforced that image. They had delivered the audience to her, but she still didn't trust them. That's why she wanted my questions in advance and clearance of the final story.
Of course, she loved the attention of the press, but she hated being mobbed by reporters and photographers every time she came out in public....Meryman: Just tell me how you alway are…(inaudible)... just following you.Monroe: They are. They are, and I don't want to sound paranoid, but they are. They’d all like, sort of a chunk, you know, somehow. I mean, they kind of take like pieces out of you. And I don't think that they realize it.You know, they're kind of grabbing pieces out of you. And gee, you know, you do want to stay intact. You know, intact, on two feet. They want to know, like, well, what is it like?Sometimes it's nearly impossible, and there is a need for aloneness, which I don't think that most people realize for a creative person or an actress.It's almost having a certain kind of secret for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on, but you know, there have to be those moments of privacy.…I used to laugh so loud, so gay. I would ask the boys, I'd say, I said, “Can I ride your bicycle now?” And they'd say, “Sure.” And then I'd go zooming! I thought I'd start to laugh in the wind, you know, riding down the block, laughing, you know! But I loved the wind because it felt like it caressed me.…Meryman: Marilyn only got a couple of phone calls during the entire interview, and once when the phone rang, Marilyn told her housekeeper, “If it's an Italian, tell him I'm not here.” I believe she was referring to Joe DiMaggio.Marilyn had three marriages, but all were failures. She didn't even want me to mention her first marriage at age 16 to a sailor.…Monroe: But I have to explain to you, I was never used to being happy. So that wasn't something I was sort of counting on. I think I counted on this in marriage.…When I was very young, and I used to love to play house, and you could pretend, you could say, “Hey, what about if you were such and such, if I were such and such.” And they say, “Oh, yeah!” And it was like, you know, you could make your own boundaries.…I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it. I think. gee, sometimes I think I'm fooling somebody. I don't know who. Maybe myself. Maybe others.…Monroe: Anyway, see why I couldn't have just been a housewife? I've had too many fantasies. You know, I mean, I have feelings sometimes. Or some days when I...There are certain things... Gee, I think, gee... If only... If only I were a cleaning woman…on the way to the studio, see somebody cleaning. You know, I think, oh, that's what I like to be. I guess I’ll settle for what I am.…Monroe: Say, would you like a drink?Meryman: No…Monroe: Oh, come on, have a little.…Meryman: Late in the interview, Marilyn began drinking champagne. The more she drank, the more angry and defensive she became. She spilled out all her hurt over her treatment by Hollywood during 15 years in the movies. To me, she was like a record stuck in a groove. She felt they had never treated her like a star. Her anger really flashed when I asked her, very innocently, I thought, how she cranked herself up for her acting role.…Meryman: Yeah, I mean, the business of you cranking yourself up for the camera is part of what you're doing.Monroe: I don't crank anything, you know, I'm not a Model T. Yeah, I don't crank. I don't know, I think it's kind of disrespectful to kind of refer to it that way.We are not machines. No matter how much they want to say we are, we are not!…I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity. When I'm older, I'm going to play all kind of parts.My teacher, Lee Strasberg, always said to me, you know, and I said…I said, “I don't know what's wrong with me, but I'm a little nervous.” “When you're not, give up because nervousness indicates sensitivity.” But with everything, you just go out there, you know, that's all we do. Give up and do it. But this is a real struggle. I mean, I really have to struggle.…You've read there was some actor that once said about me that kissing me was like kissing Hitler.Meryman: Oh my God!Monroe: Well, I think that's, you know, his problem. And if I really have to do intimate love scenes with an individual who really has these kind of feelings towards me, then my fantasy can come into play. In other words, out with him, in with somebody else. There's somebody else there. Not him. He was never there.…I take it that the public would be quite disillusioned the way the industry treats its stars.I remember when I got the part in “Gentleman Prefer Blondes”, and Jane Russell, she was the brunette in it, and I was the blonde. She got $200,000 for it, and I got my $500 a week. To me, that was considerable. But the only thing was, I couldn't get a dressing room. And I said, I really got to this kind of a level. I said to them, I said, look, after all, I am the blonde, and it’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Because they always kept saying, “Remember, you're not a star.” I said, “Well, whatever I am, I'm the blonde.” I mean, it got to that.But yeah, but not to sound paranoid or something…and I don't think I am. I think that every weakness is exaggerated. A lot of people have real quirky problems. They wouldn't dare have anyone know. But one of my problems is that I'm late. Well, I guess they think that why I'm late has to do with some kind of arrogance. And I think it's the opposite of arrogance, just as a starter…Let's start with that. It's the opposite. I mean, the things they send out about me from this corporation over here, we’ll leave nameless…but I never lost sight of the fact that I am not at a studio at any time for discipline or to be disciplined.If you have a cold, how dare you have a cold? I mean, the executives can get a cold and stay home for, you know, forever and phone it in. But how dare you get a cold?…Meryman: Marilyn refused to acknowledge any responsibility for missing so many days on the set at Fox. She claimed she was sick, but the studio just didn't believe her. And in the midst of it all, Marilyn took off two more days to travel from Hollywood to New York to sing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy. Whom she spoke rather coyly, I thought, as a complete stranger.Monroe: I was honored when they asked me to appear at Madison Square Garden.
It was like a hush, you know, in the whole place. Which I thought, “My God,” you know, if I’d have been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. There was this kind of hushed (inaudible). I thought, “My god, what if no sound comes out?” And then you'll think, like, gosh…I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do. You know?
Meryman: Did you meet Kennedy?
Monroe: Afterwards, they had some kind of reception, because I never did see the food, but maybe it was in another part of the place. And I had met the Attorney General, briefly, so it was good to see a smiling, friendly face.Meryman: Less than three weeks later, Marilyn was fired from “Something's Gotta Give”. To Fox, Madison Square Garden was the last straw. She had been absent twenty-one of thirty-three shooting days. And to them, she was obviously unstable and falling apart. Marilyn was exhausted. She had drunk a full bottle of champagne and she had barely eaten anything. And she continued to paint herself as the victim.Monroe: Fame is also a burden. An industry, I don't think, should behave like, let's say, a mother whose child maybe has, let's say, let's just say…the worst is running out in front of a car, so what do they do with the child? Instead of clasping the child to them, they start beating up on the child.They feel that it gives them some kind of a privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you. So at least it's something that, let's say, I experienced. So it's not just that, okay, fame will go by. You know, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I told you it was fickle.I don't know if it's going to come off on tape, but I know what I mean.Meryman: It really is great.Monroe: Well, I hope you got something here. But please don't make me look like a joke.Meryman: Those were the last words she said to me. I said goodbye, and as I walked down the driveway, I looked back for a second. Marilyn was framed in the door, and she waved and called, “Hey, thanks!” I went back to New York and wrote the piece, and it appeared in LIFE Magazine in the August 3rd issue. On August 5th, the phone rang. It was a reporter telling me that Marilyn was dead. I was dumbfounded. Marilyn had obviously been a woman in pain, but I never saw any sign that this was a woman giving her last interview, a woman on the verge of suicide.In the 30 years that have passed since then, I've listened to those tapes a dozen times to see if I somehow missed some clues. I still don't know the answer.

Transcription of Arthur Miller's Trial Press Conference
_{^{May 23rd, 1957}}

Marilyn appears at a press conference on the final day of Arthur Miller’s trial, held at the home of Miller's lawyer, Joseph Rauh.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Interviewer: How have you been following the trial?Monroe: I've been following it.Interview: Have you been reading the papers about it?Monroe: I rather not comment on that.Interviewer: How long have you been here, Ms. Monroe?Monroe: Since the beginning of the trial.Interview: Just staying in the house here?Monroe: That's right.Interviewer: Has the trial upset your personal life in any degree, Ms. Monroe?Monroe: I would like to say that I'm fully confident that in the end, my husband will win this case.Interviewer: And it didn't upset your professional career at all? It didn't stop anything you were working on at the time?Monroe: No, I haven't been working lately.Interviewer: What are your plans when you return to New York?Monroe: Well, we hope to go back to our normal life. That’s all.Interviewer: Would you care to comment on one rumor, Ms. Monroe?

Transcription of "Person to Person" TV Interview
_{^{April 8th, 1955}}

Marilyn appears on CBS's "Person to Person" television broadcast, hosted by Ed Murrow. She is joined by Milton and Amy Greene at their home in Connecticut.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Ed Murrow: Good evening. I'm Ed Murrow. The name of the program is “Person to Person”. It's all live. There's no film. Tonight we'll be going first to Western Connecticut, where photographer Milton Greene, his wife, and her friend and house guest Marilyn Monroe will be waiting for us. Then we'll come back to the city for a visit with the conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Lady Beecham. We'll be ready in exactly 20 seconds.…Female Announcer: Long distance, Maine to Florida.Male Announcer: The American Oil Company, the drillers who produce oil, the scientists who refine it, the seamen who transport it, the men who deliver it, and the Amoco dealers who serve you, all the Amoco people calling you person to person.Murrow: Milton Greene is a photographer. For years, millions of us have seen his pictures on the covers of Look, Life, Vogue, and others. And inside, his pictures have been illustrating advertisements. But few people outside magazine and advertising offices ever heard of Milton Greene until he became vice president of Marilyn Monroe Productions, Incorporated.Milton, who is 33, his wife and their year-old son, live in this 150-year-old home in western Connecticut. It's about an hour's drive from his studio in Manhattan. It used to be a barn and a stable, but Milton and his friends have been converting it. He added a garage and that studio you see there at the left. It's here on 11 acres and 16 rooms that Marilyn Monroe has been spending some of her time since she came to New York.Evening, Milton. Hello, Milton.Milton Greene: Ed, hello.Murrow: How are you?Milton: Fine, thank you. And you?Murrow: Good. What are you doing there?Milton: Well, we're just going over some pictures.Murrow: Tell me, what part of the house are we in now, Milton?Milton: This is the studio.Murrow: And where is Mrs. Greene and Marilyn?Milton: They're in the kitchen right now. Well, we can go in and meet them in a minute, I imagine.Milton: All right.Murrow: While we have you in the studio, could we take a better look at it?Milton: Yes. We have a camera and some posters.Murrow: I gather those pictures on the wall must be your work, aren't they?Milton: Yes.Murrow: Let's see, that one would be Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, wouldn't it?Milton: That's right.Murrow: And the next one over, Grace Kelly?Milton: Yes.Murrow: Oh, and that's Janet Leigh alone, isn't it?Milton: That's right.Murrow: And Ava Gardner.Milton: Right.Murrow: And Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.Milton: That's right.Murrow: And Audrey Hepburn.Milton: That's it.Murrow: And those are all covers of yours, aren't they?Milton: Yes.Murrow: Do you have any more pictures about, Milton?Milton: Yes, we have some over here. We have some pictures here of my son, Josh, and...Murrow: How old is he, Milton?Milton: Well, Josh is one year. And then right above Josh is Jimmy Durante.Murrow: Wonderful.Milton: And then is Dorothy and Dick Rogers.Murrow: Yes. Oh, that's wonderful of them.Milton: Thank you. And then Marlene Dietrich.Murrow: Oh, I like that.Milton: And then we have Jay Cantor's Judy and Amy Cantor's Amy Cantor.Murrow: Yes.Milton: And then this one...Murrow: Oh, yes. That's Marilyn Monroe, isn't it?Milton: That's right.Murrow: Tell me, how many of your photographs of Marilyn have been on magazine covers, Milton?Milton: Only one.Murrow: Aha. Was it difficult to take that one? Do you have any trouble with it?Milton: No. That was done with two or three photo floods and the Roloflex in the Look office in California.Murrow: Aha. And what does she think of it?Milton: Well, why don't we go inside and ask her?Murrow: All right. Good. Milton, tell me, did you study photography at school?Milton: Yes?Murrow: And what sort of camera did you use when you first started taking pictures?Milton: It was a Kodak that my sister had.Murrow: An old-fashioned collapsible one, was it?Murrow: Yeah, with a leak and a bellows. Ed, this is my wife, Amy.Murrow: Good evening, Amy.Amy Greene: Good evening, Mr. Murrow.Murrow: Good evening, Marilyn.Monroe: How do you do, Mr. Murrow?Murrow: Marilyn, I was asking Milton what you thought of that look cover that he did of you.Monroe: I liked it very much, although I like most of Milton's pictures.Murrow: Uh-huh. Well, now, your picture has been on the cover of almost all popular magazines, hasn't it?Monroe: No, not the Ladies Home Journal.Murrow: That you would like, would you?Monroe: Yes.Murrow: Why?Monroe: Well, I used to long for it. I used to appear on, when I was modeling, on men's magazine covers, such as, I don't know, “Squint”, “Peep”, “Take a Peep”, all those things.Murrow: But not the Ladies Home Journal.Monroe: No.Murrow: Marilyn, tell me, how did you three meet?Milton: Well…Amy: We met in California.Monroe: I really met Milton first. I was working on a set in Hollywood, and one of the Look writers came over to the set one day and asked me if I'd like to look at some pictures in a portfolio. And I said, yes, I'd like to. And I saw the most beautiful pictures I'd ever seen. And I said, I'd like for this photographer to photograph me. And…he says, well, here he is. And I turned and looked, and I said, “But he's just a boy!”Murrow: And what did you have to say to that, Milton?Milton: Well, “She's just a girl.”Amy: Comedians.Murrow: Amy, that looks like a large dining room and kitchen. Are you the cook? No, I'm not. We have a wonderful girl by the name of Sadie Ingram. She's not with us tonight. But we're very proud of this kitchen, Ed. Milton built the table.Milton: Built to help her cook.Murrow: Amy, tell me, does Marilyn know her way around the kitchen? Does she very much help around the house?Amy: Well, yes, she is. She's sort of an ideal guest. She's not trouble to anyone. And she picks up after herself, and she's just fine. You don't even know she's around.Murrow: Does she make her own bed?Amy: Yes, she does, and she helps me with the baby to bathe him…feed him.Murrow: And cleans her own room?Amy: Yes, she does.Murrow: Has she ever come in handy as a babysitter?Amy: Quite a number of occasions.Monroe: Yes, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.Murrow: Milton, about this matter of Monroe Productions.Milton: Yes?Murrow: Have you and the president of the company had any offers yet?Amy: Excuse me, why don't we go into a more comfortable room?*Murrow: All right. Where are we going now, Amy?Amy: This is our den. With the books and television set and a nice warm fire. It's chilly tonight.Murrow: Milton, I was asking you just before you moved about Monroe Productions.Milton: Yes?Murrow: Have you and the president had any offers yet?
Milton: Oops, there's the telephone, Ed. That's another offer. Yes, we've had quite a few, Ed. We had some for TV and the theater, in Europe and here. Movies, books, real estate.Murrow: But you haven't decided on any one yet, is that it?Milton: No, we've got a few things in mind, but nothing definite as yet.Murrow: Marilyn, tell me, what's the basic reason for this corporation?Monroe: Primarily to contribute to help making good pictures.Murrow: Well, would it be fair to say that you got rather tired of playing the same kind of roles all the time and wanted to try something different?Monroe: Well, it's not that I object to doing musicals or comedies. In fact, I rather enjoy it. But I would like to do also dramatic parts, too. I guess that covers it.Murrow: Amy, are you in the corporation, too?Amy: No, I'm not. I sort of take care of Milton. He's very important. And Josh. And Marilyn.Murrow: That's even more important, isn't it, Josh?Amy: *Sound asleep, by the way.8Murrow: Marilyn, what's the best part you ever had in a movie?
Monroe: Well, one of the best parts I've ever had was in “The Asphalt Jungle”, John Huston's picture, and then “The Seven Year Itch”, well, Billy Wilder's picture.Murrow: You think that's going to be a big one too, don't you?Monroe: Pardon?Murrow: You think that's going to be a big one too, don't you, “The Seven Year Itch”?Monroe: Yes, I think it'll be a very good picture, and I would like to continue making this type of picture.Murrow: Well, now, what's the smallest part you ever had?Monroe: Um, two I can think of. One in a picture called “Ticket to Tomahawk” I had one word. Well, not exactly a word. I said, “Mmm.” And then, uh…Amy: “Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!”.Monroe: “Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!”Murrow: Was that all you had to say?Monroe: No. No, in a picture called “Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!”, I had one word to say. I said, “Hello”. But it went fast. In fact, they cut it out.Murrow: Who's helped you most in your movie career, Marilyn?Monroe: Well, a number of people have contributed greatly. I think when John Huston wanted me for the part in “Asphalt Jungle”, and I think when Billy Wilder wanted me for the part in “The Seven Year Itch”, I think that was very important. Also, working with my coach, Natasha Lytess, she's helped me very much from the very beginning. And I also got a great deal from attending classes with Michael Chekhov.Murrow: I noticed you mentioned two directors. Have you found Huston and Wilder important to you?Monroe: Yes, very much so.Murrow: Well, Marilyn, now that... How do you mean important? I mean, do you play a part in order to impress them or please them?Monroe: Definitely. I think when you have a very good director, of course you... In fact, I think the story is very important. But even personally, more important to me than the story is the director, because the director usually has a good story. A good director usually has a good story. A director, I think, can contribute a lot, because when you feel that when you're acting and the director is with you and not just sitting by as the audience, but he's really with you every moment, everything you do. That's very important. It's helpful to me.Murrow: Marilyn, now that you're a New Yorker, how do you like this city, anyway?Monroe: Well, I love it. Everyone's very friendly, and it's a very optimistic, friendly city.Murrow: How do you like Connecticut?Monroe: I like it. It's the first time I've ever seen the woods. I like to walk in the woods with the dogs and enjoy it.Murrow: Well, are you always recognized wherever you go in the nearby towns and in New York?Monroe: No, not really. I can put on a nice polar coat and no makeup and get along pretty well.Murrow: Is that right, Milton?Milton: What's that?Murrow: Is that right, that she can go about without being recognized?Milton: Well, sometimes it seems that way. Other times...Amy: Oh, the funny thing was, remember that day in the taxi cab?Milton: Oh, yes, that's right. It was when she came to do the window scenes for “The Seven Year Itch”.Murrow: Yes.Milton: And we were depositing her back in her hotel, and there were about five million people outside. And the taxi cab driver turned around to the three of us, Marilyn in the middle, and said, “Hey, you know who's in there? Marilyn Monroe!”Murrow: Marilyn, I saw some pictures of you the other day riding an elephant at the circus. Did you have fun?Monroe: Oh, I loved it. It was wonderful. It was a pink elephant.Murrow: Did you have any practice before you rode it?Monroe: No, I hadn't, but I enjoyed it very much. I became quite fond of the elephant. He was very nice. And the people were wonderful. All the crowds and everything.Amy: Especially the ones way up in the balcony.Monroe: Yes, that's right. I was telling Amy before about the people up in the balcony, way up in the far, far balcony. They were especially friendly. But I think it meant a lot, probably because I hadn't been to a circus as a kid. And I like circuses.Murrow: I think we all do. Thank you very much, Milton, Amy, and Marilyn, for letting us come and visit you in your home in Connecticut this evening.Milton & Amy & Monroe: Good night, Mr. Murrow.

Transcription of George Belmont Interview
_¹⁹⁶⁰

Marilyn’s recorded interview with George Belmont, conducted for the October 1960 issue of the French edition of Marie Claire.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Monroe: Here…Wonderful…Oh, that's awfully close!Belmont: Awfully close?Monroe: (inaudible) Frightening thing, you know…This object here.Belmont: Well, not a microphone.Monroe: Okay…Five came out in one month. And Howard Hughes had just had his airplane accident, remember? And he sent for them, and I went to 20th, where Ben Lyon was head of casting. And…didn't I tell you that?Belmont: No.Monroe: Well, he came out. There was a long waiting. I mean, hard benches were sitting out. People of all ages and sizes and everything. He came out, he says, “Who is this girl?” So…he said, I look so fresh and young, and I don't know what else. He was very enthusiastic. I mean, he said, oh, you know, he had high hopes for me. Well, they made a technicolor test the following day, which was unusual, but they sort of sneaked it in. All of them got together in the talent department. And they put me under contract, under stock contract, for a year, and then I was dropped. And then I was hired at Columbia.Then when I was hired back after “The Asphalt Jungle”, you know, the 20th Century Fox, Zanuck said, “I understand you used to be here.” I said, “That's right.” “Well, things are quite different now.” And he said I had a three-dimensional quality having to do with sex. He says, uh, he says, “quite reminiscent of Harlow.” And it was interesting since Ben Lyon had been saying that.Belmont: Did he [inaudible]?Monroe: Oh, yes. Yeah. Because, well, I wanted my mother's maiden name because I felt that rightfully was my name. I couldn't take my father's name very well. So, uh, I wanted at least something that was related. So I said I want the name “Monroe”, which was my mother's maiden name. And, uh, the true things are rarely; the true things rarely get into circulation. It's usually the false things.…Yes, that's what she claimed. But as a friend of my husband said, he was one of our lesser presidents.…Truly, I was at the Hollywood Studio Club, although they say that I wasn't. I was. I know. It was me. It happened to. It was I. It was me. I. It was I. It was all true. I was behind in the rent, and they usually let you get about a week behind in the rent. And since, you know, they write me and say, “You're the only one who doesn't support this wonderful”...you know, “Wonderful”. It's not so “wonderful” unless you're working and paying your rent.…Tom Kelly had asked me. I had done some beer ads, for beer, for him, and he had asked me to pose nude. Actually, I'd be in a bathing suit or something like that. So he'd ask me to pose nude, and his wife, Natalie Kelly, she'd be in the dressing room, and I'd be getting dressed and changing. So she said to him, probably, you know, she ought to do nudes or something.
And then sometimes other photographers, Willinger had asked me. Well, we won't put his name on it. And I was like, “Oh, I don't do. I'm sorry.” And one time, André de Dienes, I went on an interview, and he said, “So you do nudes?” I said, “No, I don't do nudes. Never.” So I always went around saying never. And then I got so far behind in the rent, four weeks, and I was in debt and everything. So I called up, I said, “Are you sure they won't recognize me?” He said, “I promise.” I said, “Well, if it's at night and you don't have any helpers,” you know, to put the lights in. I said, I don't know. I said, “I'm shy, and I don't want to expose myself to, you know, all the people you have.” And I said, “And at night.” He said, “All right, just Natalie and myself.” So we did it. And that's all. He just spread out some red velvet and had me lie down on the red velvet. I thought, you know, they put some kind of lotion on you or something. Nothing. Just, you know, it was very simple and drafty.…Calendar? No, they've all been stolen. And I wanted to keep one for my grandchildren. But I can't keep them either. I don't know who takes them. If I get a copy and I pack it away, it'll be gone.…Yes, by the time it was known, I had already done “The Asphalt Jungle”. I was hired at Fox. And I remember they called on the set, the publicity department, and said something to the effect of, “Did you post for a calendar?” And I said, “Yes. Anything wrong?” There was great anxiety. They said, “No! Don't say you did. Say you didn't.” So I said, “But I did. I signed the release and I did, and I feel I should say it too.” I did say that I did. And they were very unhappy about it. And then the cameraman who was working on the film at that time, he got a hold of one and he asked me if I'd sign it. And so I said yes, I would. I signed it. And I said to him and then his name, and I said, “This isn't my best angle.” And of course, they got mad…the studio.And they said, but you can't sign them. I said, but it's me, and they'd rather have these than the other signs. If they're friends, I don't sign for strangers, but they're friends. Or some, I said, “Do you like me better with long hair?” Because the hair was down to here, my hair, before “The Asphalt Jungle.” Little by little, I think Fox got used to it.…No, I was really hungry. To, you know, to eat. When you live at the Hollywood Studio Club, you get two meals a day. You get breakfast, and you get dinner. Of course, it doesn't taste very good, but still, you eat.…I always supported myself. I never, what you'd call, I don't know…how can I say it? No one else ever supported me in my life, in my older life. You know, like, so I didn't, I had no family... And I mean, I had no place to go just to have a roof over my head. Of course, a lot of people say, well, why didn't you go and get a job at the ten cent store or something like that. And because I didn't have a high school education, they wouldn't accept me.…That's not true. Neither are true. My mother's first husband was named Baker. Her second husband was Mortenson, but she was long since divorced when I was born. So, on my birth certificate, I believe it says, profession, Baker. So she was just trying to think quickly, I guess, and said Baker. Well, in all my school records, it was Norma Jeane Baker. In fact, I was always told, by the way, when I was very young, that my father was killed in an automobile accident in New York before I was born. When I was very young, I was told that. Yes.Belmont: As regards your mother, to you, she was just a woman with red hair?Monroe: Actually, she was. You see, when I was very young, I called every woman I would see. I'd say, well, there's a mama. And if I would see a man, I'd say, there's a daddy. Or Papa, I guess you say in French. So, to learn that she was my mother was quite a shock. You know…it was a woman with red hair.The people I was staying with, I was about three. And one morning I was having a bath, actually. And I referred to the woman as Mama. And she said, “I'm not your mother. The one who comes here with the red hair” and so forth, “she's your mother. Don't call me mother anymore. Call me aunt…so and so.” But the one I was concerned with was her husband. I said, “But he's my daddy.” She said, “No, you call him uncle…so and so.” Well, they weren't my aunt and uncle. I never lived with my mother. I don't know about the 12 days old, I don't remember. But I know I was very young.Belmont: (inaudible)Monroe: No. I used to ask where my mother was…when I… Oh, I don't know, I was about… Well, when I was put in the orphans home. And I refused to go into the orphans home. I mean, I said, I saw the “orphan”. I could read at 10, “orphan”. And I put my feet down on the sidewalk. They had to drag me in. And I said, “I'm not an orphan.” And so I thought, well, she's dead somewhere. And then later some people said, well, it's better you forget about your mother. I said, “But where is my mother?” And I said, “Well, better you forget about her. She's dead.” I was told that. So, whatever “invented”, I don't know what they meant by that. It was all kind of vague, you know, I couldn't find out anything for sure. I wasn't eight, because when I was eight, I remember where I had... when I had a birthday at eight years old, and so I would still be seven, and my mother did buy a home, but I didn't see her very often. It was very...well, the circumstance was very unhappy and kind of haphazard. I didn't see her very much. The English couple that I told you, they were the couple…They came to live there in the home, but we only had a home for about, oh, maybe... I don't even think it was three months.With the English couple, they used to take me to The Egyptian, where they used to have monkeys in cages outside, and they put me there early in the morning, and I watched the monkeys. Or else they'd take me to the Grauman's Chinese. I tried to fit my foot. My feet prints are there now, but I would try to, you know... But they had these, what do you call those, high-vamped…(inaudible). Yeah, and I never could get my feet in there. My feet were always too big. Every Saturday and Sunday, I was taken there because they worked during the week. They worked very hard, and they didn't want to be bothered with a child around the house, I think. You know, you can't blame them. They were very tired. And so I was taken there in the morning. I'd wait till the movie opened for 10 cents. I would go in, sit in the first row, and I watched all kinds of movies, like “Cleopatra” with Claudia Colbert. That I remembered very well. I'd sit there, and I'd see it over and over and over and over again. Till late at night. I was supposed to come out at dark, but of course I didn't know when it was dark. Just before dark. Because with their conscience, they didn't want me to come, you know, at night. But I never knew when it was dark. Besides, it was much nicer there. I've just seen the movie over and over and over and over again.…No, it didn't matter. I knew I'd eat when I got home, eat something.…Let's see, I don't think there was twelve, but there were quite a few. Because I was going to stay with these people from New Orleans, and then suddenly I was taken to the orphan's home. Let's see. So counting the orphan's home. Do you want me to count all of them? I'll try, let's see….Three…You see, some places I lived, I was taken there at the end of the school term, and they were planning to keep me, but then after the summer, they'd had enough. So, or for whatever reason, and then I was taken to another place. So that's why there's so many. I know I went to six different grammar schools. You know, that's before you're in the seventh grade. I'll try to recall and let’s see. I'm to nine so far, just a second. Ten…Ten. But I moved back to a place where I had stayed. So that would make eleven different moves, but ten, ten counting the orphans home. Mm-hmm. Ten different places.Belmont: Surprising.Monroe: Oh, it's such a bright, cheerful place.Belmont: According to McCall's. [inaudible]Monroe: I guess it is now. They've made a lot of improvements. I used to sit up in the window and cry because I'd look over and I'd see RKO and I knew my mother had worked there, and she'd been a cutter there, and all the kids were asleep. I used to sit up in the window. And at night, and as I say when everyone was asleep, and when I went there to work during “Clash by Night”, I stood there, and I wanted to sit back to see if I could see the orphanage, but you can't. It's too many sound stages in the way, and office buildings and homes.Oh, by the way, I slept in a room with 27 beds because they say so…I have the number. I know. I read it. Because you had to work your way to the honor bed. You start with one, well, really the 27th bed, and you had to work your way down and around, and then you could work yourself into the other dormitory. Which had fewer beds, but... I got there once, but once I was putting on my shoes, and the matron said, “Go downstairs,” “I'm tying my shoes.” She said, “Back to the 27th bed!”Well, we lived there. We all had jobs. Um... I had different jobs. I worked for a while. Oh, we'd get up at 6 in the morning, and we did our work before we went to a public school. It's very, um... Well, it's bad to have children from an institution like that go to a public school because in a public school, the kids say, “Oh, they're from the home. They're from the home.” And, you know, and you feel... I always tried to go around as if I were one of the other kids. You know? And we all were ashamed, you know, to have been from the orphans home.Well, I was very tall and thin. Um... I was taller than all the... I was as tall as I am now. And very, very thin. Eleven, things changed. And I never grew any taller, but they always say, Oh, she's going to be a very tall girl. Oh, in fact, when I was first going... When I first...I went to the orphanage, and they pulled me in, you know, they took one arm here and pulled me in. I kept crying, screaming, “I'm not an orphan.” And then there was a dining room straight ahead, and there were these 100s, you know, 100 kids sitting there eating at 5 o'clock. And then, as a child, you know, you're ashamed to cry in front of other children. So I stopped right away. And then the children filed out and went to their...They were sitting on the porch after dinner. They usually did that on the girls' side. And they all thought I was at least 14. I was so tall. I thought I was going to be an AD girl.Well, but they were. Well, anything tasted good to me. I always, when I was a child, I ate everything because the families that I lived with, they said they never saw a child who would eat everything. I'd eat anything. Everything.*Oh! There was one other family I stayed with for a short time, but it was only for about three weeks. I forgot to mention. Makes eleven. I liked singing, athletics, English. I hated arithmetic. I never had my mind on it. You know, I was always dreaming out the window. And then, too, another thing people would remark, not only that I would eat everything, but I never complained when I went to bed. I would even say, “I think I'll go to bed now.” Well, that's very unusual, because children, they say, “No, I don't want to go to bed.” But what I would do would be to go in my room and... Except at the orphans home was different. But otherwise, I would go in my room, and if I had seen a movie, I would act out every part. Only I would act out before that happened, or after, and I would act out all the parts, the men as well as the women. That's what I'd be doing, you know, standing up on my bed, being taller, even. Just the feeling, what he said and what she said, and what he felt and she felt, and usually be sad.Belmont: How tall are you, Marilyn? Five foot six?Monroe: Five, six, exactly.…First time was at the orphanage, and then later in my teens I stuttered. And I was... They elected me secretary of the English class. No, secretary of the minutes of the English class, whatever you call it. And then I'd say, “minutes of the last meeting. I'd make a m-m-m”…Oh, it was terrible.…When? I don't know. I was there at the orphanage, and after I left, I guess, and then when I was about 13, I did it again. It just, I don't know how it happened. I just stuttered. Sometimes, when I'm very nervous or excited or something, I stutter. In fact, one time they were doing a... I had a small part in a movie and the assistant director came in and yelled at me. Oh, he talked awful. And he “rrrr-”...And so I... When I got into the scene, instead of my mouth, I “wo-wo-wo” ... And the director came up, he was furious. He says, “You don't stutter!” I said, “That's what you think!” Oh, it's painful. Oh, God.…

Well, when I went to live with a woman, her name is Mrs. E. Anna Lower. And I used to do the dishes in the evening and whistling. And she said, “I never had a child sing so much.” So, I did it during that period. I liked being with her, staying with her. I always kept in touch with her. She’s…I loved her very dearly. Aunt Ana, I adored her.Well, they used to call me the mouse because I didn't...I never said anything. And I was quiet…most of the time, except with other children. I had imagination. Other children liked to play with me because I could think of things. You know, I'd say, “Now we're going to have a murder! Then a divorce! And then a…” And they'd say, “How do you think like that?” “I don't know.” So other children...You know, I could be myself with other children. But with grown-ups, I was always very quiet. Went around about doing my work. You know, whatever I had to do.…Oh, no. Okay. I don't want to say too much. Well, uh, Grace arranged it. She and her husband were going to, um, West Virginia. And they were going to put me in a, uh, a home. Or, you know, like I'd been before. Or I could marry this, boy who was 21…at the time. So I married……Oh, no. I was 15, turning 16. When the marriage took place, I had just turned 16. In the state of California, you can marry a 16-year-old girl. But it was arranged when I was 15.…No. Not at all. Then, uh, he was drafted to go into the Army, but instead he went to the Merchant Marines. Yes, towards the end of the war, I divorced him. And I divorced him when I was 20. I went to Las Vegas to divorce him.
If they let you do one thing, they let you do the other.…Well, how does it feel being yourself? That's exactly how I feel. I didn't know. One time, a very wonderful director, Kazan, said I had no ambition. That was my problem, my trouble.
But I would like very much to be a fine actress. A true actress, that's what I mean by fine. A real actress. I would like to be happy, but who's happy? I think trying to be happy is almost as difficult as trying to be a good actress. You have to work at both of them.Well, I think comedy is harder for me. I mean, it's just harder to write comedy, I think, for me. It seems that way. But I would like a variety of parts. You know, dramatic, sometimes comedy. Not musical too much, because I never studied it. I always wanted to, but I never did. And it's very difficult. And after you've finished it, they say, Oh, you just did it like that, and really all you do is…so much more. It looks easy. It looks like you just walked through it. And I've never studied that, either singing or dancing.…It is. It takes, uh... Takes its toll. I think an artist, uh... Art. I consider myself becoming an artist, though. You excuse me. Some people will laugh. I don't apologize to you, but to them I apologize. Um... Sometimes, you know, the work is so... You know, you try to be true. And, uh... You feel sometimes you're on the verge of a kind of craziness. But it isn't really craziness. It's really, uh... Getting the truth part of yourself out. And it's very hard, you know? I mean, it's not easy, let's say. And yet it can be very simple at the same time. Um... Being an artist, because sometimes you think, Oh, well, all I have to be is true. But sometimes, it doesn't come so easily.Well, I always have a secret, um... Feeling that I'm really a fake or something. Or a phony. You know how people feel about themselves. They have something secret they feel about themselves. I always feel that. I know my teacher says, “Why do you feel that about yourself?” And then he starts to say, “But you're a human being.” I said, “Yes, I am.” I said, “But I feel like I have to be more.” He says, “No.” He says, “You start with yourself,” Lee Strasberg. I think he probably he changed my life more than any other human being that I've met. Including…everyone. Because when I started to work with him, I would sort of assume something. And he says, what are you doing? I said, “Well, I have to get into the part.” He says, “No, but you're a human being, so you start with yourself.” I said, “But with me?” He said, “Yes, with you.” So, in a way, if you can concentrate, correctly, I don't mean deep thinking where you're pounding the skull, but if you can just concentrate simply, that's what I mean about being easy. Anyway, he helps me a great deal.…I have a hard time at it. I don't know. I might leave something out, but I won't put anything else in extra. I might leave something out, because to my benefit or somebody else's benefit, hurt people or hurt myself sometimes, you know. We all want to protect ourselves also. So, I might leave something out. But I don't think I... No, I don't think I lie. At least if I would try, it's difficult.But I do want to be wonderful. You know, when I walked out of 20th Century Fox and I went to New York, and I stayed for I don't know how many months, 15 months, 13 months, I don't know how many months, and the lawyer, you know, he said, oh, he was telling me about my tax deductions, my I don't know what, and about, oh, the lawyer for 20th Century Fox. And I said, “I don't know about that. I only know I want to be wonderful.” Couldn't say that to a corporation lawyer, he thinks you're mad. And that's at the bottom of everything, you know.…Belmont: People were making them up. It's not true. There was nobody there that smart.Monroe: They never made them up.Belmont: And they were often more advantaged by them. (inaudible)Monroe: Yeah, like, you know, they ask you questions like, well, just an example, “What do you wear to bed? Do you wear a pajama top, the bottoms of the pajamas, or a nightgown, or what kind of…” So I say “Chanel No. 5,” because it's the truth. And yet I don't want to say nude, you know, but it's the truth. Or, I don't know, all of those things come from the truth. If you ever get any of those things you want to ask, what does it mean, I'll tell you where the truth comes from, or what it does mean. Because, as I say, I leave things out. I don't elaborate sometimes. But it'll be from the truth. Because otherwise, it's hard to know where to start if you don't start with the truth.…Okay, here, I get up early in the morning. I jump into my clothes. Get my belongings together, get in the car, and I have a driver who brings me to the studio. And I have somebody waiting here who makes my breakfast, then they start with the hair and the makeup, and I eat while they're doing my hair. And then they leave it that way while the makeup man, he comes in and he does the makeup. And then they comb out the hair later, and they put on the body makeup and then the clothes.I don't like to rush this process because I find if I rush, I'm very tired. By the time I have to do a scene, I'm all worn out from rushing through the hair and the makeup and the clothes. So I like to do it leisurely, like I like to dress when I go out in the evening. I love to dress leisurely. I like to soak in the time. And, leisurely, I like music.
I think that we're rushing too much nowadays. That's why people get nervous. Well, I don't think I'm late all the time, but maybe it is because I can't go as fast as other people. You know, people that get in automobiles, they run into each other because they never stop. They're going like that. I don't think that mankind, it's intended for them to go like that. They're not supposed to be like machines.And I think you get more done the other way, by doing it more sensibly, more leisurely.Mr. Cukor on this film has been very wonderful to me, in as much as he lets me come in an hour later than I would usually come in. So, it helps because I'm fresher at the end of the day. He says he does it for my work, and I think it's so. I think actors in movies work too long hours, you know, for too long. Always, nearly always. Sometimes, I feel a doom set over me, just as I'm walking on the stage. It's just like a doom sets on me. I don't know why, but I get over it, sometimes. Sometimes, it lasts all day. Well, I want to do the best that I can do in that moment, when the camera starts until it stops. That moment I want to be perfect, as perfect as I can make it.I used to go to movies on Saturday night, for instance, when I worked in a factory, and that was my only time that I could enjoy myself, really, that I really relaxed and enjoyed…Shh…This is on tape. We're trying to think. Excuse us…And, so, I used to be very disappointed if I went to a movie because I waited all week to go to the movie, and I worked hard for the money that I spent. And, uh, if I went to a movie, and it was a bad movie, or I thought people didn't do their best and did it sloppy or something, I really was mad, you know, angry when I left, because then I didn't have anything to go on for a whole week, and wait for another week. So, I always feel that I work for the ones who work hard, and they go to the box office and put down their money, and they want to be entertained, or... I always feel I do it for them. But I do care, because I know how the others feel. You know, they've worked hard all week, and...…My favorite stars, then? Oh, I liked anybody who was good. Sometimes you'd be (inaudible)...Oh, that was when I was very small. That's when I was seven years old. When I was seven years old, my favorite was Jean Harlow. And the reason why she was my favorite, because she had white hair, and I had white hair. And they used to call me Towhead. I don't know how you'd say it in French, but it was white hair and stiff. And I dreamed of having golden hair, but instead mine was white. And so when she had white hair, I felt sort of close to her, because she had white hair, I had white hair.And Clark Gable, I'm sure he won't mind if I say it, because in a Freudian sense, it's supposed to be very good. I used to always think of him as my father. I pretended that he was my father. I never pretended anyone was my mother. I don't know why. But I always pretended he was my father. I was just seven years old, and he was a very young man, and I thought that's how I wanted my father to look.…Love? I think it's a rare thing, and not to be discounted at all, not to be pushed away in a corner. I find that's why I like poetry, I think, also. They don't discount it. They take it for its worth, its value. It's one of the most important things that ever happens to us. I think the most important thing. I think love and work are the only things that really happen to us, and everything else is just, you know, doesn't really matter.And I think one without the other isn't so good. I think they both need... I think, I don't know. I mean, like I said before, I have a few years to go yet. But I think it's... I think it's the most important thing. Because even work is a kind of love, something that you'd love to do. Even workers, factory workers. I used to take pride in the way that I would do it, even though I did it very fast. I would take a pride in the fact that I would do it exactly perfect, as perfect as I could, you know. So I think that, well... I guess I'm a little impetuous. Exclusive, I think I am, because I have very few friends. But not to be exclusive, it's just that... I like... although I like people, but for friends I like few people. A few people who (inaudible) need to call....Belmont: Joe DiMaggio.Monroe: Well...I met him the year he retired. He had already retired. And...I saw him for about a year and a half, two years, and we married in San Francisco. And...His background...You know, his family, they were immigrants, and they had a very difficult time. And when he was young, he had a very difficult time. The other thing, he was a wonderful athlete. And he could hit a baseball. Anything thrown his direction, he could hit. So...He understood some things about me, and I understood some things about him, and we based our marriage on it. And I say some things. Well, I don't want to say that, I just say we understood some things about each other. He has a very sensitive nature in many respects. You know, one thinks of an athlete as being, I don't know, not having that, but they do. Our marriage wasn't a happy one, it ended in nine months, unfortunately. I don't know what else to say.…Do I feel happy in life? Uhm…let’s say…let’s say, I hope I'm finding happiness, right? Well, for me, if I can realize certain things in my work, I come the closest to being happy, and I can say that also about my life. Well, it only happens, I think, in moments, sometimes when I'm working, and I'll be able to fulfill a scene truthfully, and then I think I'm the happiest.Well, I find it very stimulating to keep studying and working, but I'm not just generally happy. If I'm generally anything, I guess I'm generally miserable. I don't know. Sometimes, I think. I don't know. I think sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, which is natural, I guess, for everyone.I would like to be more sociable when I am, on some days. Sometimes I'll chat when I'm not pleased, but sometimes the work itself requires more that I'm quiet and to myself more. On other days, like during a musical number, I try not to get too... I like to be more outgoing, because that's what I have to express, and so I try to keep it general. I try to, even if I feel like it or not, I try to make the effort to make contact with people around me. Yes, because I could easily be alone. It doesn't bother me to be alone. Some people, I know, they don't like to be alone. I don't mind it. I mean it as a rest, and yes, it kind of refreshes myself. Yeah, as a rest. Yes, I think there's two things in human beings that they, as I think there is in myself, they want to be alone, but they also want to be together, you know? Because I think I have also a gay side to me, also a sad side, and I think that's the way with people also. But there is something in people where they want, they need solitude for a while.…Yes, it was. He came with Elia Kazan on the set of a picture called “Young As You Feel”. And as he described it, I was crying when he met me. A friend of mine had died, anyway, Kazan came over and said he was very sorry. (inaudible) he had Arthur with him, and so, even though I was in tears, he introduced me to him...Arthur. I had forgotten, but he said I was crying when I was, you know, in tears, weeping when he met me. Then I didn't see him for about four years.
I used to think that maybe he might see me in a movie. For instance, there would be two pictures playing. They used to have it. I thought I might be in the other movie. He'd see me, and I'd want to do my best, because he said that he thought that I should act on the stage. And people who were around heard him say it, and they laughed. So he said, no, I'm very serious.Belmont: At what time, Marilyn?Monroe: It was in 1950.Belmont: 1950.Monroe: Does one ever know that? I mean, I know certain qualities that I remembered at the time, but I don't know exactly what. I think that's mysterious.…No, I can't say he gave me a feeling of security. There wasn't any reason for him to, really, except he treated me as a human being, and he was a very sensitive human being, and he treated me as a sensitive person, also. I can't, I don't know how to describe it.Belmont: No, of course it’s very difficult.

Transcription of "Bus Stop" Press Conference
_{^{February 25th, 1956}}

Marilyn appears at a press conference for "Bus Stop" in the Los Angeles Airport lounge.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Monroe: It will be “The Sleeping Prince”.Reporter: This is with Lawrence Olivier?Monroe: Yes.Reporter: And you selected him because he is what? Marvelous?Monroe: Yes.Reporter: What will you do after that? What's the next one? Do you have anything lined up in the future then? Beyond “The Sleeping Prince”?Monroe: No, not…(inaudible)Reporter: Might you do another film with Olivier?Monroe: Well, there are no plans ahead of that really. I mean, it's very indefinite. We're still working on it.Reporter: How do you feel about coming back to Hollywood? Is it a happy time for you?Monroe: Yes, it is, it's a very happy time. I'm happy to be back. (inaudible) It's my hometown.Reporter: You're a happy girl now.Monroe: Uh…Reporter: Uh?Monroe: *Laughs* I'm much happier now. I’m very pleased.Reporter: Do you feel-you said you wanted to grow? Do you feel you've grown?Monroe: Well, I hardly know how to answer that since they misinterpret that. Meaning, in inches or something.Reporter: I'm not talking about proper growth.Reporter: The Actor’s Studio has added a lot to your career.Monroe: I think it's been very beneficial to me, very helpful…for my work.Reporter: How long have you been going there now?Monroe: Well, let's see, not quite a year.Reporter: You're going again and then you go back?Monroe: Yes.Reporter: Well, speaking of measurements, are they still the same as when you left? Have you gained weight? Have you lost weight?Monroe: I think I'm about the same.Reporter: About the same? Nobody has any complaints?Monroe: I don't know.Reporter: Speak up, boys.Reporter: You’re wearing a high-neck dress now and the last time I saw you weren’t. Is this a new Marilyn or a new style?Monroe: No, I'm the same person. But it's a different suit.…Monroe: I think the starting date is 15th of March. I'm not sure of that. It might be before that. I have to report before that because we have wardrobe…Yes, I report Monday.…Monroe: I am working. You know, I'll be working, and I have been. I'm studying everything, so I haven't really had the time. There'll be time for everything, I'm sure.Reporter: Now, Marilyn all we know is what we've been reading in the stories from New York about, you know…I saw a post that you and Joe DiMaggio are friends at a distance. How great a distance?Monroe: Well, we haven't seen each other.Reporter: Do you hear from each other? Do you write? Talk?Monroe: I'd rather not answer.Reporter: All right, fine. Well, now, Grace has got herself a prince. Do you think you might find yourself a prince? Or at least a duke? You're going to England.Monroe: I'm not particular.Reporter: No? You're not particular? You'd like to find yourself a prince?Monroe: Not particularly.Reporter: Maybe she doesn't even know how to find a man out there. She's so busy.Reporter: Romance while you're at it?Monroe: (inaudible)Reporter: Tell me, Marilyn, do you understand the business aspects of your company? Or do you run it? Does Mr. Green run it? We are confused on this. We hear so many...Monroe: *Well, um, I'm aware of what's going on with the company.Reporter: You are. Do you make the decisions? Are you the boss lady?Monroe: Oh, no…well, I'm president. Mr. Green is vice president. And then, uh, there are other members in our company.Reporter: Yes.…Reporter: Marilyn, are you happy to come back and do this picture? Are you pleased with the picture “Bus Stop”?Monroe: Oh, yes, very much. I'm looking forward to working with Josh Logan and doing the picture, and it's good to be back.Reporter: Was he your selection as a director?Monroe: 20th Century Fox selected him, and, I have director approval, and they asked if I would approve of him and definitely...Reporter: You're very happy. You think you're going to make a very good picture?Monroe: I hope it will be a good picture, yes.Reporter: Do you have any preference for a leading man?Monroe: That's up to 20th Century Fox.Reporter: Entirely?Monroe: *Nods yes*Reporter: Do you have leading man approval?Monroe: No. But I'm sure they have very good judgment.Reporter: Tell me, Marilyn, is it true that you submitted a list of directors that you would work with?Monroe: Uhm…Reporter: We only know the rumors we hear, you know.Monroe: I would rather say that I have director approval, and that is true.Reporter: This you think is important?Monroe: Yes, it is very important to me.…Reporter: (inaudible)Monroe: Gee, I hope so, since it’s a year.

Transcription of Sutton Place Apartment Press Conference
_{^{June 21nd, 1956}}

Marilyn appears at a press conference outside her Sutton apartment.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Reporter: Would you like to appear in a play written by Mr. Miller?Monroe: Um, I'd like to work up to that someday, if it’s possible.Reporter: Is he writing anything for you yet?Monroe: No, not really. He's working on something but……Monroe: I met him in California, 1951.Reporter: Where was that?Monroe: Well, it was on the set of, uh... I think it was called…”As Young As You Feel.” I had a small part in it. I hadn’t seen him since untill I moved to New York.Reporter: When did you…Until you moved to New York. When was that approximately?Monroe: Last year.Reporter: Oh, you met him last year? Again.Monroe: Oh!Reporter: Have you been engaged long?Monroe: No. Just a few days.Reporter: How long ago did you decide to get married? Did you talk about it before the formal engagement?Monroe: Well…a little maybe.Reporter: Well, who proposed it first?Monroe: Well, I really believe he took the initiative, I suppose. But we were both sort of talking…simultaneously.Reporter: Did you hear any of his testimony today before the committee in Washington?Monroe: No, I didn't hear it.Reporter: How do you feel about it?Monroe: No comment.…Reporter: When are you getting married, Miss Monroe?Monroe: It'll be sometime between now and the 13th of July.Reporter: Where, do you know?Monroe: No, I'm not sure where.Reporter: What are you doing on the 13th of July?Monroe: I'll be flying to London.Reporter: You work on the picture with Laurence Olivier?Monroe: Yeah.Reporter: Is Mr. Miller going with you?Monroe: I hope he'll be with me, yes.Reporter: That's where you plan to honeymoon? England?Monroe: Oh, yes.Reporter: Miss Monroe, do you think your marriage plan is going to change your career any?Monroe: Well…I don't think so. I mean...He's a wonderful playwright…And I think he would like me to be a good actress too as much as I would like to be...Reporter: When are you planning to have some children?Monroe: Well, I'm not married yet, dear.Reporter: Miss Monroe, uh, this is a rather personal question, but...is there anything in particular about Mr. Miller that attracted you?Monroe: Have you seen him?Reporter: Yes. That's the answer. Thank you.

Transcriptions of the Sutton Place and Roxbury Press Conferences
_{^{June 22nd, 1956 & June 29th, 1956}}

Marilyn appears alongside Arthur Miller at a press conference outside her Sutton Place apartment building on the 22nd. A second press conference takes place on the 29th, outside their home in Roxbury, Connecticut, with Arthur Miller’s parents also in attendance.

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Sutton Place - June 22nd, 1956

Interviewer: Mr. Miller and Ms. Monroe, yesterday you didn't know when you were going to get married. Do you know today?Arthur Miller: It'll be in July before the 13th.Interviewer: No definite date has been set?Miller: I haven’t got one yet.Interviewer: Where are you going to be married?Miller: I wish I could tell you at this moment. I'm arranging it.Interviewer: Suppose Mr. Miller doesn't get a passport. Are you prepared to change your plans in any way?Monroe: There’s no change of plans.Interviewer: No change of plans.Interviewer: What do you think of this whole ruckus, Mr. Miller?Miller: It's good you only get married once.

Roxbury - June 29nd, 1956

Interviewer: Miss. Monroe, could you tell us what kind of a wedding you're going to have?Monroe: Very quiet, I hope.Interviewer: Do you feel certain at this time that you will be able to get away to go to England?Miller: I feel certain I'm going to try awfully hard. Well, we just had a terrible accident on this road as a result of mobs that have been coming by here. And I knew that was going to happen, at least I suspected it was, because these roads were made for horse carts and not for automobiles, and people who don't know them oftentimes smash up around here. And I asked the press to assemble all at once today so that the pictures could be taken that are wanted in the hope that that could be avoided every day in the week. I'm not going to say where we will be married for just that reason, because I think it's time enough for everybody to know when it happens.Interviewer: I am sorry about the accident.Monroe: Somebody should question you…somebody should question you.…Interviewer: The way we always promised. No one is forcing you to.Interviewer: [inaudible]Monroe: Alright, fine.Interviewer: This is the way we always work.…Interviewer: Mr. Miller……Miller: …a little bit of peace until it happens. So, that is about it.Interviewer: Miller, have you heard yet on your passport?Miller: No, I have not.Interviewer: Mr. Miller, about that, the House Committee gave you ten days, I believe, to give the names of the people you didn’t give when you were at the hearing down there. Do you have any comment about that at this time?Miller: Well, that is business between the Congress and myself, and I do not think that it is proper for me to make any comment at this time.Interviewer: But would you answer this, Mr. Miller, at the time you refused to name names, would you tell us why you refused to?Miller: It's all in the record.Interviewer: Well, I wonder if you'd state it here.Miller: I'm not in a situation now where I would want to go into that. I think it's all quite clearly stated in the record of the Congress. I'll stand by that.Interviewer: In the event that you are not able to go, will Ms. Monroe still go?Miller: Oh, sure. She's got to go. She's got a contract to go.Interviewer: Well, that means you may not have a honeymoon together then.Miller: I think we will.Monroe: I hope so.Interviewer: Ms. Monroe, a school teacher just got a letter from an 11-year-old boy, in which he was to write about three wishes, what he would do with three wishes. And he said that he would like money, first, and second, to be an engineer, and third, he said, “When I grow up, I'd like to have a blonde. She has to have blue eyes. She has to be like Marilyn Monroe. This is my life.” Now, you were the third choice on that.Monroe: I'm flattered.Interviewer: Ms. Monroe, a rival of yours, Ms. Diana Doors, has arrived in the United States. Is your going to England just a coincidence, or is it any kind of an exchange arrangement, so we won't be lonesome while you're gone?Monroe: Well, I'm afraid not. We've made arrangements about “The Sleeping Prince”, well, nearly a year ago. I mean, it's been going on.Interviewer: Well, have you met Diana Doors?Monroe: No, I've never met her.Interviewer: Have you ever seen her in film? Have you ever seen her act?Monroe: No, I haven't.Interviewer: Then you're not in a position to comment on.Monroe: Sorry.Interviewer: Okay, well, thank you very much.Miller: Thank you.

Transcription of NYC Idlewild Airport Interview
_{^{September 9th, 1954}}

Marilyn arrives in NYC at Idlewild Airport for filming for the exterior scenes for "The Seven Year Itch".

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Monroe: Oh…Interviewer: Sorry…sorry.Monroe: Is everything working?Interviewer: [Inaudible] now? Okay, we're rolling, huh?…Monroe: Well, we're here to make “The Seven Year Itch.”Interviewer: Location shots on “The Seven Year Itch,”, huh?Monroe: Yes, uh-huh.Interviewer: That's your latest picture, right?Monroe: Yes.Interviewer: You just finished a picture called, “There’s No Business Like Showbusiness”?Monroe: That’s right. With Ethel Merman and Donald O'Connor…Interviewer: There's no picture like that one. [Inaudible] A great job. You did the best job. Well, it's the only picture you've done since you got married, isn't it?Monroe: Yes. It's the only one I've done.Interviewer: The one before that was “How To Marry a Millionaire”, is that right? Or…“River of No Return”? I think it was.Monroe: Yes, but we won’t talk about that.Interviewer: All right. Well, [inaudible] on “Seven Year Itch.”Monroe: Yes, I'm looking forward to working to it very much.Interviewer: [inaudible] Some fabulous location shots are going to be made next Saturday night on Lexington Avenue. Where you get the cony island treatment, walking over the subway grating and a gust of wind catches you and so forth. I imagine you stop traffic [inaudible].Monroe: Yes, I'm looking forward to working on it very much.Interviewer: I hear you getting to be quite a cook too. Joe says you can really broil a mean steak?Monroe: Well, I'm learning, a little slow, but…Interviewer: Joe didn’t come along with you, huh?Monroe: No.Interviewer: Did he see you off in Hollywood last night?Monroe: Oh, yes.Interviewer: Do you expect to [inaudible], you know, for the World Series?Monroe: I wish I could, but I'll be finishing this picture. When the…Interviewer: Right.Monroe: I've never seen the World Series, and I would love to, but... I just can't seem to put the schedule together.Interviewer: But you brought your hairdresser, and, your drama coach, and four men from 20th Century Fox. All those, but no Joe, huh?Monroe: Isn’t that a shame?

Transcription of "The Bob Crane Show" Interview
_¹⁹⁶⁰

Marilyn guests on KNX-CBS Radio's "The Bob Crane Show" during the filming of "Let's Make Love".

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Monroe: I rehearsed in it.Crane: Is this a dancer outfit thing?Monroe: No, it's a pair of slacks and sort of an old sweater.Crane: It's a nice old sweater. A nice old pair of pants.Monroe: Are we on, Bob? Yeah. Well, I mean, I’ve been rehearsing all day. I'm still out of breath.Crane: I'd like to get your breath for just a minute there. Marilyn, I've often wondered, being the sex symbol of the movies, are you ever offended when men pass by you and whistle and things like that?Monroe: I’m honored.Crane: You?Monroe: Of course.Crane: You suppose women are?Monroe: Of course.Crane: Is that the high point? Is that a big compliment?Monroe: Yes. How about when you whistle at a girl, or you feel like whistling?Crane: How’s Jack Lemmon to work with?Monroe: Wonderful. He's a wonderful actor.Crane: He's a very funny guy. You're working with a funny guy in the new picture, Tony Randall.Monroe: Yes, very funny.Crane: You want to know something? This will knock you back on the back of the couch. I was supposed to test for this picture.Monroe: You?Crane: Did you mean that...did you mean that with all..inferred by the "you"? I read a lot into the line. No, really, the part they finally gave to Tony Randall. The press agent part.Monroe: Oh, yes. Mhm.Crane: What’d you think?Monroe: Well, Bob, it's nice meeting you, and hope to see you again.Crane: Oh, dear.

Transcription of "The Tex and Jinx Show" Radio Interview
_{^{December 12th, 1955}}

Marilyn, along with Marlon Brando and Sid Caesar, is interviewed at The Rose Tattoo premiere by Jix Falenburg for "The Tex and Jinx Show".

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Jinx Falkenburg: I hate to break up this conversation you're having with Marilyn Monroe.Sid Caesar: It's a very nice conversation, I must say.Falkenburg: But, um, I was told that you had to disappear quickly because Mrs. Caesar is waiting for you. So, um...Caesar: Yeah.Falkenburg: Do you want to be on and leave? How can you leave this, though?Caesar: Well, whatever you want, I can sit here and watch her. Marilyn, I can watch all the time. Marilyn, you want to get down here? Go ahead.Falkenburg: No, no, I'm kidding. I just didn't want to interrupt. But, uh, Sid, are you a movie fan, or are you just concentrating on television these days?Caesar: Well, I'm both. I'm a movie fan. I love movies, but I'm concentrating on television.
Falkenburg: When you see a movie like “The Rose Tattoo”, it's open tonight, does it make you want to go back and make another picture?Caesar: Well, I only...I made one.Falkenburg: “Tars and Spars”, I remember.Caesars: I would like to make a picture again, but I don't know when it will be or how it will be. But I've been trying to make a picture now for several years, but I just never made, got the right connection to get to it.Falkenburg: This is your Monday night when you're usually on television, but this is the fourth Monday, I take it, so you weren't on tonight.Caesar: That’s right, a week off.Falkenburg: You get a week off from television. And so you go out, but you don't have a chance to do too much, do you?Caesar: No, I don't go out all the time. Usually, I just sit home. This was a lucky break for me. I mean, just happened on a Monday night, and I took advantage of it.Falkenburg: How is (inaudible)?Caesar: She's much better, thank you. I'll tell you, I get more of a kick out of just sitting around here with all these guys as anybody else.Falkenburg: Do you really? How do you feel sitting at a table with Marilyn Monroe at your right, Marlon Brando in front of you, and the great playwright Tennessee Williams directly in front of you?Caesar: I don't know. It's probably because if anybody told me this this afternoon, I wouldn't believe it.Falkenburg: It's dazzling, isn't it?Caesar: I get a kick out of it.Falkenburg: Would you like to ask Mr. Williams or Marlon or Marilyn anything? Before I take over, yes, it's live, Marlon. We're on the air. This is live. How was this interview, Tennessee?Caesar: Did you…are we arrested yet or what? I don't know.…[Inaudible]…Falkenburg: Hello? Are we on, Lee, or is something not working? All right, OK, we're on the air. What were you saying, Marlon?Marlon Brando: I personally feel this is particularly the best picture, the best director, and the best actress. And besides, I thought the photography, Jimmie Wong Howe was very, very beautiful. Especially, you know, those moments when Marissa and the boy were together, the love scene, you know, they were talking about their…and it was just beautiful lighting. But they have a new kind of film that they're using now, the hyper-sensitive film.Caesar: It shows feelings.Brando: It shows feelings. And they can get a lot of wonderful photographic effects with very little light. I mean, they can photograph with the light of a candle or something like that. The thing that is marvelous about this film, and I think that it's an innovation in American filmmaking, is the fact that Danny allowed for the simple, in-between moments in life. We don't see any of that in American film. It's kind of hygienic and clean-cut, and there are no loose edges. And it was the in-between moments, and the little tiny, causal moments, that, you know, very few actors can create that Danny left in. He could have to completely direct around that kind of performance, that kind of... But to me, that's really where the, you know, the poetry of human relations and human existence on the film has merit and has worth. And it was so lovely, lovely moments, because it was able to reach inside of her brain, and then give them a new feel. And she gave a very interesting performance, because she played on several different levels. I think she, she played...She stretched the character out of shape without you knowing it. For instance, in the (inaudible) scene, when she was coming, it was funny. It was these types of (inaudible) you know, little things, you know. She didn't go crazy, and that other moment, she was very elegant, and very sensitive, and very aware. And that other moment, she was, you know, like a marvelous, (inaudible) woman. And...Falkenburg: You liked it, Marlon?Brando: What?Falkenburg: You liked it.Caesar: Marlon, you said one thing that…Brando: Listen, by the way, I never thought you looked so young and handsome.Caesar: Thank you very much. And I…same to you. I never looked...oh, yeah...You said one thing about the in-between moments. I'm going to do a thing, and I've been working on it for, oh, practically for years now. What happens, you know, when they fade out on the scene in movies, and then they fade up in the morning? All I show you is a big ashtray full of cigarettes, you know. That's all they show you. But let's see…Brando: (inaudible)Caesar: That's right. Or a pair of shoes. But I would like to show these moments, the in-between moments, of what happens between, you know. They just fade out, you know. The guy is...They've just given the message. The dog was run over. The son is locked up, or this or that. And then this night has to pass, where nothing can be done. And the night has to pass.Brando: (inaudible)Caesar: The time, the time that elapses. In between…Brando: Generally speaking?Caesar: Yeah, I mean, like you say, it's hygienically cut out. And it's not...They don't show you this. This is what you don't have to go through. But in life, you do have to go through it.Brando: I think the American audience is not really up to waiting. They don't care. I don't think the American audience has really, you know, developed a level of sophistication whereby they can appreciate it.Caesar: Oh, I (inaudible).Brando: You think so?Caesar: Oh, yeah.Brando: Well, but then how do you explain the fact that most foreign films don't go here, and that they make a foreign film, for instance... For instance, in a French film, a guy here, they show such a good guy getting up in the morning, he yawns, he brushes his teeth, he looks in the mirror for half an hour, stares at his nose, and picks his scalp, then stares at the drain and turns around, and goes out and sits down, and watch him eat a breakfast, and gets some of the...fish some of the seeds out of the orange juice, or roll the bread up in the little balls and throw it out the window, and then you take him downstairs to the office, and they follow him through going downstairs, and in the taxi, and in the elevator. And in America audiences, not in... I mean, in America, to be specific, you know, cut right along.Falkenburg: Look, we have the most famous movie star in America today, excuse me, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, sitting there, listening to you two, with Sid Caesar and Marlon listening, and I have a feeling that she has something she can add about all this. Were you able to hear their very serious conversation?Monroe: Yes, a very interesting conversation. I enjoyed the picture immensely. And I think the performance was marvelous.Falkenburg: You've been working at the Actors Studio now as an actress, actually, Marilyn, or are you still an observer there?Monroe: I'm an observer-student at the Actors Studio.Brando: She's an actress, alright.Falkenburg: Alright, that's (inaudible).Brando: I'm sad that she's late tonight.Falkenburg: She was late?Monroe: What?Brando: She was late. [?]Monroe: The traffic was terrible.Brando: Huh?Monroe: The traffic was…Falkenburg: Marilyn, I've heard from Marlon and from other people who have worked at the Actor's Studio that it's awfully good to keep acting, to keep performing and learning, and that at the Actor's Studio, under Lee Strasberg’s direction, you have a chance to play and develop maybe a role that you'd never have a chance to do on screen or on stage. Is there any one part that you're working on there?Monroe: Let's see. Yes, I'm going to do a scene with Maureen Stapleton shortly. Who plays, you know, “The Rose Tattoo” on the stage.Falkenburg: On Broadway, yeah.Brando: What are you going to do?Monroe: We're doing Noël Coward's Fallen Angel.Falkenburg: Fallen Angel?Monroe: Yes.Falkenburg: Are these the sort of things that you would like eventually to do on stage or on screen? Or are you just doing it to develop as an actress now?Monroe: Yes.Falkenburg: What?Monroe: *Laughs*Falkenburg: Huh?Falkenburg: So Marlon explained on the air last week that you were taking it very seriously and that you were really working at it?Monroe: Yes, I am working with Lee Strasberg. Also in his private classes.Brando: She's working hard at it. It’s hard, that you know, to say, that I'm working hard at it.Falkenburg: Well, I'd like to know what she does. What do you do at the acting studio? I've never been there. I've just heard about it. Do you go every day? Do you go regularly? Or do you work on a part alone and then go?Monroe: Well, at the studio, I go twice a week. And to Lee's class, the class that I participate in, I go twice a week also. And I also go to his other class at the studio, to observe.Brando: You do improvisations, don't you? That's what we worked on when we went to...Monroe: Yes.Brando: What kind of improvisations have you done?Monroe: I did James Joyce's Ulysses. It's called “Molly Bloom.”Brando: You improvised that?Monroe: Yes.Brando: On the way, you improvised Ulysses? But I mean, Lee may have you get up and do a little thing. Doesn't Lee you have to get up and do improvisations that you create yourself?Monroe: Well…Brando: Like you've got your foot caught in a subway railing and somebody comes up and says, “Can I help you?”, and you're hurrying (inaudible), you know.Monroe: Mostly, I mean doing is, acting that is (inaudible) on the stage. Which I am going to…Brando: (inaudible)Monroe: And also (inaudible). I don't mean (inaudible) or something.Brando: Have you done the one where you're in a barnyard?Monroe: No, I haven't been that one yet.Brando: Do you do any animal improvisation?Monroe: Yes, I'm working on a cat.Brando: You are?Monroe: Yes.Cesar: I'm working on a tree.Falkenburg: Wait a minute.Caesar: I haven't made it yet, but I think I should know.Falkenburg: Well, explain what that is. The one about the barnyard. What is that?Brando: I never understood it. There's a chicken or (inaudible) up there. And they left me alone.Falkenburg: And you have to improvise from there?Brando: Your guess is as good as mine. No, actually... Actually, I don't know.Falkenburg: What is the method that I've read about and heard about that has to do with the technique of the actor's studio? What is the method that they talk about?Brando: Well, that’s what 50 million actors that I'd like to know, too. It's an age-old argument. You know, you could spend 12 hours in a Walgreens drugstore arguing about that. Stanislavski wrote several long (inaudible) on the subject. Did you hear me say (inaudible) instead of (inaudible)? You know. It would really be... I think it…You know, it's impossible to really be...Now listen, Marilyn [?]. You tell her, Marilyn.Falkenburg: If you explain the method, what is it? Is it a different type of acting? Is it a different type of...Monroe: Well, I think it started with Stanislavski, but many people have added to it, and…Caesar: Well, Stanislavski is a very good (inaudible). Tremendous actor, but he used to watch the pins go down. And as the pins go down, he would, you know, tell people, form a formation of pins. Then he would roll a ball of them, and it would fall down as a pin. And once you get past the pin stage, that's when acting... Acting is just what you are, you know. It just comes out, that's what it is. And nobody can... I mean, I believe in teaching and things like that. But it mostly has to come from the individual itself.Falkenburg: Marilyn, had you ever studied acting before going to the actor's studio?Monroe: Yes, but not in this way.Falkenburg: Just acting on a part that you were going to do on screen, you mean?Monroe: Yes. Completely different.Caesar: You know, Marlon, the first time…I beg my pardon.Monroe: No, go ahead.Caesar: The first time I ever saw Marlon, I was in the Coast Guard. I went to see a play. I was in the Coast Guard. And I bought tickets to see a play called “I Remember Mama”.Brando: “I Remember Mumble”?Caesar: “I Remember Mama.” And you played the part of an little Swedish boy. And I just thought it was just so good. And I wasn't in the acting business. I was a musician. But I wasn't a musician in the Coast Guard.Brando: What did you play?Caesar: I played saxophone, violin, flute. Played with George (inaudible)...I worked with (inaudible).Brando: Oh, that's…Caesar: Yes. I played since I was 15.Falkenburg: Have you ever seen Sid Caesar's impersonation of, not you Marlon, but Stanley Kowalski in The Streetcar Named Desire? He’s done that on television a couple of times, you know.Caesar: Well, uh...Brando: (inaudible) I thought (inaudible) and Max showed it to me one day. I went out to the office. And he said, ….Caesar: I tell you, I mean…They wanted me to do an impression of Marlon and several characters I would never do it. Because I respect him as, I think, one of the greatest [?] actors.Brando: (inaudible)Caesar: No, but I mean, I'll only do it, you know, if it's... Not just to do it just for that, you know. We had an idea once...which I was going to call...Marilyn, you look so beautiful.Monroe: You’re so nice.Caesar: Thank you. But, uh, we were going to do a French version of..”On the Waterfront”. A short, you know, about ten minutes long.Brando: That's your problem.Caesar: And I (inaudible) it. We, uh...We didn’t do it yet. I don't know if we'll do it or not.Brando: Listen, did you ever think of playing a serious part or a straight part?Caesar: Well, I've thought a lot about it, but I'm not an actor. I'm a...Brando: No, listen, I think that it is because you are an actor that you are as good as you are. I think that all your performances really have a basis in reality.Caesar: I don't...Brando: Go ahead.

Caesar: You have to. I mean, even in comedy, I mean, which... It's not ridiculous. I don't know. Uh, which, uh, doesn't sound that easy, but, even in comedy, people know, uh, that you believe in what you're doing. And as soon as they sense, bang, like that, they don't believe anymore, you can stand on your head, with your eyes folded, and your nose crossed, and you'll not get a laugh. But if they believe, that you believe, in what you're doing, no matter how silly it is, if it's a half-truth, even, even if it's a half-truth, if they know that you believe it, they'll respect your belief in it, and they'll go along with you. But once they sense it, there's a sense between an audience and a performer, that once that, that feeling, that rapport, that, I can't explain it, but once they find out, it's like an animal almost, an animal knows when you're afraid of it, an animal knows when you're not afraid of it, but as soon as they feel it, an audience is not with you anymore, and there's nothing you can do to get them back. But as, as long as they believe that you believe in what you're doing, they'll give you the respect and watch you. And they'll go along with you. Then it's up to you how good you are.Falkenburg: Sid Caesar, Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe, wait one minute. Let them go. Just one second. Goodbye, Marlon. Thank you very much. And Sid, goodbye. Marilyn, before they push you away from here, have you decided, are you going to make “Bus Stop” on screen?Monroe: Well, when and if it's worked out, I would like to, but that depends.Falkenburg: And what about doing a play? I've read that you're really serious about doing a play on Broadway. Are you thinking about that? Is that often in the distant future, or is it something you'd like to do very soon?Monroe: Well, it's most certainly in the distant future, but I would like to one time. I hope to do it.Falkenburg: Do you know who this is right over there? Have you ever met?Monroe: Yes.Falkenburg: This is the First Lady of the American Theatre.Monroe: Yes.Helen Hayes: Oh, thank you, dear. We met the other day at the Actors' Studio, didn't we?Monroe: Yes, that’s right.Falkenburg: Well, you can observe this lady and learn, I suppose, everything there is to know about the theatre, who this year is celebrating her 50th anniversary, believe it or not, on the stage, with a great, great party, the First Night Ball at the Waldorf in the Grand Ballroom on the night of December 30th. Thank you very much, Marilyn. Nice to see you again here at the Actors' Studio Benefit, we'll see you in five minutes.Falkenburg: Tex, I don't know what's happening there. Photographers all around, and I can't see a clock. What is the schedule? All right, why don't you sit down at the mic now for a moment, would you, okay? We've had great activity here for the last 45 minutes, as you may have heard, and I never had as many people helping interview guests as we had when Sid Caesar and Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams and Marilyn Monroe were sort of asking questions of each other, which was fun. I couldn't see a clock, so Tex, you help me get organized, will you?

Transcription of Radio Interview with Dave Garroway
_{^{June 12th, 1955}}

Marilyn is interviewed by Dave Garroway for NBC's radio program "Monitor".

_{This transcription may not be 100% accurate, and there might be slight discrepancies. Please use the video linked here for your reference.}

Garroway: Old friend [?] and, Garroway, our host right now, to the very likes of Miss Marilyn Monroe. I wonder if I'm scared of you. Are most men scared of you? I'm not sure whether I should be frightened of you or not.Monroe: No, nobody's scared of me.Garroway: I don’t know. I bet a lot of guys are scared of you, though, because you're such an institution now. Really you are…you're kind of a national possession. Do you feel that you belong to the nation as a whole?Monroe: I don't know quite what you mean by that. I live here.Garroway: That’ll do it very nicely. I heard you were smart, but I didn't know.Monroe: I'm not.Garroway: Yes, you are.Monroe: Don't let him fool you; I'm not.Garroway: You know, you have a reputation as, among the great mass of people…I think you're probably the most beautiful blonde in the world, but kind of a dumb girl, because you're a beautiful blonde. And blondes and dumb seem to go together. I think it all started with, maybe with “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”.Monroe: You know, it's interesting that people associate…if you happen to have blonde hair, you know, naturally or not naturally-however. Or if you're not out of shape, in some way, you're absolutely dumb. I mean, you’re considered dumb. I don't know why that is. It’s very…I think it's a very limited view.Garroway: It isn’t true. I'm sure.Monroe: Well, I mean, it doesn't matter what the person…what they look like, what color hair they have, or if they happen not to be out of shape. I mean, my time is to come. Gravity catches up with all of us.{#850101}Garroway: Yes. Slowly, but I’m afraid, inmiserably-if that’s the right word. I hear that you're moving to New York City to live, is that so?Monroe:Yes. This will be my home from now on. That is, until I retire. And when I retire, I'm going to retire to Brooklyn.Garroway: Really? Why Brooklyn?Monroe:Oh, that's my favorite place in the world, so far, that I've seen. I haven't traveled much, but I don't think I'll find anything to replace Brooklyn.Garroway: You're going to help our rating in Brooklyn by nine points. Why is it Brooklyn? What happens there with you?Monroe: Well, almost everything. I just like walking around. I think the view is better from Brooklyn. You know, you can look back over and see Manhattan.Garroway: Yeah, that's the only place you can see Manhattan, if I’m right.Monroe: That's the best view but it isn’t only the view. It's the people. It’s…I like the streets. I guess the people and the streets and the atmosphere. I just like it.Garroway: Let me ask you about the singing-thing for a little bit. Did you...well, who are your favorite people to hear sing? Modern, maybe.Monroe: Well, my very favorite person, and I love her as a person, as well as a singer. I think she's the greatest, and that's Ella Fitzgerald.Garroway: All right. [?] Who is your favorite male singer?Monroe: Well, frankly, I have to say Frank.Garroway: It’s as easy as that.Monroe: However, he didn't used to be. It's the way he sings now. I know when I was a kid in, you know, junior high school and high school, and he was sort of a bobby-sox idol. Even though I was in bobby-sox, he wasn't my idol. It isn't until recently. I think his whole style…I don't know. There's something that's changed drastically-for the best.Garroway: He matured somehow. The sound that he makes now is such a big [?].Monroe: Well, it's his style. To me, it's his style. When it comes to sound, I like Sammy Davis, too. But Frank's style, he can't beat it.Garroway: How long do you think you'll be at the top? [?]Monroe: At the top isn't so important. What I'd like to do, that is what I would like to accomplish. I would like to be a good actress. And it's not a matter of being on top, because I think some of the best actors and actresses perhaps aren't on the top. So that's not the thing.Garroway: I knew you were smart somehow. I’d heard so many times.Monroe: No, I’m not. Don't let me fool you, I’m not.Garroway: Well, you haven't learned to say that because you say it just at the right time. So I know and that I'm sure of what I'm [?] The voice you hear over there is Marilyn Monroe, if you need to be told.Monroe: And this is Dave Garroway.Garroway: And they need to be told. Was there a point, a one moment, when your career went where it is, instead of someplace else? Did you go through a revolving door and meet somebody?Monroe: Not actually. I modeled, and then I was under contract to Fox. They signed me. After one month, 5 magazine covers appeared, and they signed me. And then they dropped me after a year. I didn't have an opportunity to do anything. Actually, during the year that I was there for 20th Century Fox the first time. Except one part, in “Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!”, and I was cut out of it, so I can't exactly call that a chance to do anything.Garroway: I've heard so many people think that that must be an ideal year, with nothing to do, just sit and take the studio’s checks. It’s torture, isn’t it?Monroe: No-no, it's very painful. Because at least... Although I knew I didn't know anything about acting, but I wanted to know, and I wanted to experience. But, well, that's how it is.Garroway: Do you keep a diary, by the way?Monroe: No.Garroway: Did you ever?Monroe: Well, not exactly a diary. Sometimes, when things used to happen, I used to write it down. But then, I used to tear it up.Garroway: &Do you miss your anonymity? Do you miss being able to go out and not be recognized and go places? So that, as it used to be before you became famous, so no one would pay any attention to you?*Monroe: I'll tell you. I do, in a way. However, I'm terribly grateful for everything that's happened, because I remember when things weren't like this at all. But you do miss sometimes just…being able to be completely yourself in some place. And…people just know you as another human being.Garroway: I don't think you can get away with a gag I use. I have a kind of a disguise. A mustache, and some trick glasses, and I part my hair in the middle.Monroe: Oh, I use a wig sometimes.Garroway: Does it work?Monroe: It has.Garroway: Marilyn, if the house you have caught on fire, what material thing would you run for to save first?Monroe: Some books.Garroway: Which books?Monroe: I'd rather not say. It's very personal.Garroway: Alright.Monroe: It's more than one book.Garroway: I knew you were smart, all the time somehow. I’m just flattered to find it out for myself. Well now, you're success has been, or close to, a dream of every American girl-I guess. After you got what you wanted, did you want it?Monroe: Well…I…as I say, the thing I like the most is to become a real actress. And I remember when I was a kid, sitting in the front row at the movies on Saturday afternoon. And I would never come out of the movie, I’d have to come and get-sit in the front row. I think how wonderful it would be to be an actress and so forth. But I didn't really realize about acting. Except I appreciate what I saw. Bad, good, it didn't matter. I enjoyed it very much, everything that I would see. Anything that would move on the screen. However, I think I realized more and more the responsibility. And it is a responsibility. And, as I say, I would like to be a good actress.Garroway: Well, I knew you were smart like you said, all the time. I just want to thank you, girl, for coming in and making me confirm my own opinion, which I had from other people-but not to know myself in person. Well, on to scramble that sentence during the following month. Goodnight, Marilyn.Monroe: Bye-bye. It's a pleasure meeting you.Garroway: You too.

The Truth About Me: Part I
_{^{By Marilyn Monroe, as told to Liza Wilson}}

The San Francisco Examiner
November 16th, 1952

On Monday morning, the most scared kid in the entire United States was a little six-year-old girl, skinny as a bean pole, named Norma Jeane Baker. I know. I was Norma Jeane Baker.It was my first day at school. I had been lonely and scared all of my six years that I remembered. But this was a new low, even for me.I was living with an English family at the time. They lived in a small flat near the Hollywood Bowl, and they worked, when they were lucky, at the studios, as extras and bit players. One of them was a stand-in for George Arliss. I had only been with them a few days when they broke the news to me that I had to go to school the following Monday. They were sorry, they said, but they wouldn't be able to go with me because they were all working.At the school, I was herded into a long line of other frightened kids. Except there was a difference. Each one of them had a mother or a father with a nice comforting hand to hold on to for dear life. The plump little girl in front of me had both a mother and a father."You, little girl," one of the teachers stopped me. "You must have a grownup with you today. Where's your family?"
"I don't know," I managed to mumble. My lips were beginning to tremble.
"Is your mother dead?"
"Yes, Ma'am, I think so."
"Did your father die, too?"
"Yes, Ma'am, I guess he died, too."
"Well, stay in line," she said. "I'll speak to the principal about you."
"Look, Mummy," whispered a little girl. "That girl's an orphan."
That did it. I'd had it. I just leaned against the wall and bawled.…I think that in view of some of the surprising–even vicious–untruths that have been printed about me since I became a movie star, it is high time that I come out and tell the truth. I should like to start with my name. My mother named me Norma Jeane Baker. I married a James Dougherty. So that made me Norma Jeane Dougherty. Following my divorce I continued to use that name until I signed my first contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.My first contract with Twentieth Century-Fox was like my first vaccination. It didn't take.Ben Lyon, who was at the studio during my first term there, called me into his office my first day on the lot to work out a name for me. He didn't like Norma Jeane Dougherty, he said. It would be too long on a marquee. He asked me if I had any family names that I particularly favored. I told him that my mother's maiden name was Monroe, and I'd always liked it."Besides," I added, "I am a direct descendant of President Monroe.""All right, Monroe's in," said Mr. Lyon."Now a first name. You're a remarkable combination of two different people I know well, Jean Harlow and Marilyn Miller. Marilyn sounds better with Monroe than Jean. Yeah, that's it. Marilyn Monroe."I've never liked the name Marilyn. I've often wished that I had held out that day for Jean Monroe. But I guess it's too late to do anything about it now.…I was born in the Los Angeles County Hospital. There was no silver spoon in my mouth. I always been told that my father was an automobile accident before my birth. When I was a tiny child, living with different families, I would often ask about my mother. I had a vague memory of her, a pretty lady who used to take me for rides. "Your mother is very sick,” they would tell me with glum faces. "No, you won’t be able to see her for a long, long time.'I thought about it a lot and figured it my mother was really dead, but they wouldn't tell me because they didn't want me to cry. So really lying to the teacher that first day at school. I didn't know my mother was alive for many years. After I did know, I tried to respect her wish to remain anonymous. But what a furore it caused in the press and at the studio when a columnist tipped off that my mother was alive. Now I realize that I never should have withheld the fact from the press. But my motive was one of consideration for person who has suffered much, and for whom I feel a great obligation.A very fine woman with whom lived when I was going to junior high was Mrs. E. Ana Lower. I called her Aunt Ana, and I loved her dearly. She died a few years ago, before I was able to repay her for all the love and care she gave me the few years I lived with her before she became too sick to look after me. I learned in my teens that I had a sister, or rather a half-sister, but no one knew at the time where she was. It has been reported that I have a brother, but that is not true.A few years ago I was able to get in touch with my sister. She is happily married, lives in Florida, and has a young daughter who, she writes me, is a Marilyn Monroe fan.My mother was working as a cutter at the RKO studios when I was born, to take over my support. This was one of the few things I knew about her when I was a little girl. When I was nine I spent a year and a half at the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society which is two blocks from RKO. At nights, when all the kids were asleep, I’d perch on the dormitory window sill and look across at the RKP water tank, with RKO in big letters and lights shining like a Hollywood premiere. “My mother used to work there,” I’d whisper. “Some day I’d like to be a star there.”At that time I had just about as much chance of becoming a star as I had of becoming the Queen of England. But not too many years later the scrawny, sad-faced little girl who risked pneumonia night after night in her cotton nightgown actually made a picture on the RKO lot (Clash By Night) nd received star billing for the first time.While I was still a baby my mother was taken seriously ill and the doctors sent her to the State Hospital. Mrs. Grace McKee, who worked at Columbia Studios as film librarian, had been a friend of my mother. She offered to take over guardianship with the court's approval. She later married and quit work to raise her stepchildren and even with her private depression and with children to feed and dress, she always did what she could for me. But with this financial limitations it became necessary for Los Angeles County to take over my support. The county at that time paid families $20 a month to board children, and I was considered an orphan and county ward. I was always afraid my schoolmates would find out I was a county ward. Now that I'm grown up it doesn't bother me, but no child wants to be different from other children.A number of families needed $20 in those days. Before I married, at the age of 15, I had lived in 12 different homes, including the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society. No one ever seemed interested in adopting me permanently. I've often wondered about this. I guess I wanted love more than anything else in the world. I prefer to think that it was because most of the families were transients, even as I was, and all were painfully poor, even as I was, that a permanent home didn't work out.A constant change of environment is confusing to a little girl. What one family would tell me was wrong, another family would tell me was right. One place where I lived, they made me recite and sign a pledge: "I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell or give alcoholic liquor while I live; from all tobaccos I'll abstain and never take God's name in vain." Another family let me have empty whiskey bottles to play with. Still another made me pray every night that I wouldn't wake up in hell. I always felt insecure and in the way. But most of all–just scared.The first family I lived with was an intensely religious family who lived near Los Angeles. They took me to church three times on Sundays–including Sunday School– every Wednesday night, and of course every night during tent revival meetings."Can't I go to the movies with the other kids?" I'd ask wistfully."What if the world came to an end this afternoon and you were sitting in a movie? Do you know what would happen to you? You’d burn, right along with all the bad people."If they saw me dancing and singing as little girls will, even sad little girls, they'd tell me that was a sin, too.
families, I wood premiere. "My mother used to work there," a vague I'd whisper. "Some day I'd like to be a star there." n another place where I lived, the woman of the come and At that time I had just about as much chance of house lost her pearl necklace, and I was accused sick," they becoming a star as I had of becoming the Queen of stealing it. I didn't know what a pearl necklace won't be of England. But not too many years later the even looked like! I have never forgotten the shame scrawny, sad-faced little girl who risked pneumonia and humiliation.
In another place where I lived, the woman of the house lost her pearl necklace, and I was accused of stealing it. I didn’t know what a pearl necklace even looked like! I have never forgotten the shame and humiliation. They left a scar that has remained.Once I received a birthday present. A friend of the family where I was then staying gave me a pretty birthday card, and in the envelope was 50 cents! I had never seen that much money before! The family took it away from me. “You dirtied your clothes today,” was their reason. The money was mine. A gift for my birthday. I couldn’t understand it.However I did do one thing while I was with the religious family that pleased them tremendously. It seems that one afternoon I had been playing jacks with a little girl across the street. We took carrots from her mother's vegetable bin and used them for money. We both loved raw carrots. That night I was taken to a revival meeting. The evangelist. spoke at length on the evils of gambling. I suddenly realized that I was a gambler, and I'd have to do something about it real fast to save me possibly from burning in hell. So when he called for sinners to come forth, I came forth. Right down the sawdust trail. That night the family patted me on the head, and told me how proud they were. That confused me, too. I couldn't see why I rated any applause for doing what I thought was the right thing.Later, I lived with the English family, who first sent me to school. They were happy, jolly and care-free. They liked to drink a little, smoke, dance and sing and play cards all the things that I had been taught were sinful. And still they seemed like very nice people to me.I prayed for them that they might overcome their "sins." I became more and more confused. They gave me a little hula skirt and taught me to dance. They taught me card games. While I'd set the table and wash dishes, I'd listen entranced to their stories of what happened at the studios that day.But always with the English family I had a sense of guilt. Every time I enjoyed anything, I could feel hellfire and brimstone nudging my elbow.In another family with whom I lived, there was a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, and three children. I have told before about the Christmas I spent with them. How all the children got presents under the Christmas tree–I got a 10 cent manicure set. And at that period in my life, believe me, I didn't have the least interest in my cuticle.Christmases were sometimes hard to take. In a way they still are. Like sometimes the other children would receive red dresses and I'd receive a brown one.For some reason, which I was never able to figure out, the great-grandmother of that family resented me. I admired her very much and wanted her to like me. I'd run my legs off trying to do errands for her because she told such marvelous tales about her early days in a frontier town. She had known Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok personally. I'd listen fascinated by the hour.One day no one was in the house except the great-grandmother, her, one of the children and myself. The child had torn her dress while playing. When the mother came home and demanded to know how the dress was torn, the great-grandmother promptly said, "Norma Jeane tore it." I hadn't torn it, I hadn't even dared touch it.After that I sort of lost my taste for Buffalo Bill and trigger-fingered Hickok. I was glad when I moved on to another place.I also remember the family who, for some strange reason which I never understood, always had to get me out of the house on Saturdays. I didn't mind. They gave me movie money and I spent the day, and sometimes part of the evening, at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, laughing, crying, enjoying myself completely.Thanks to them and their mysterious Saturdays I became a rabid movie fan.Just before my hitch at the orphanage, I was placed with a family in the San Fernando Valley. I think they moved East someplace. I lived with some of the families for such a short time that I never kept in contact with them. I remember some of them saying, "Norma Jeane is so quiet she makes us nervous." If I didn't talk, I decided, things would be simpler–I wouldn't get into trouble. I guess I clammed up good.During my year and a half at the Los Angeles Orphans Home I made my first money. Five cents a month. By helping in the pantry and setting tables. I never saw the money. It was put in a Christmas fund. It was customary for all the little girls to take their savings and on Christmas Eve buy presents for each other at the corner drugstore. Practical presents, like notebooks and pencils. The last few months I was at the orphanage I had my salary doubled.I was promoted to washing dishes in the kitchen at ten cents a month.It seems to me that I have been washing dishes forever. But over the sink of dirty dishes I used to dream that some day I'd become a famous movie star, have a good salary, and have a servant to wash my dishes for me. I have become a movie star–and I am still washing dishes.I am living at present in a one-bedroom house in the Outpost section of Hollywood. I have a six months' lease on it, the first lease I have ever signed. I have a horror of signing leases. I live alone. I don't even have that servant, yet. I do my own cooking and my own dishwashing.Maybe I should see a psychiatrist!No matter where I lived I always went to the nearest public school. There must have been dozens of them. Sometimes I was a good student, and sometimes I wasn't. It usually depended upon the teacher. If I felt she liked me and she encouraged me, I'd knock myself out trying to make her proud of me. Once I even wrote a theme on astronomy which was so good the teacher posted it on the bulletin board. I was so pleased because she was so happy.I was kept back a semester in grammar school (second grade) because of mathematics. Arithmetic bored the daylights out of me. And besides, right at that time I had much more important things to think about, and didn't wish to clutter up my mind with a lot of numbers. I was living in my own dream world. And my father, the King, had just forbidden me to marry a handsome groom, or ever to go near the royal stables again. But when my report card arrived with "not passing" on it, I received such a jolt that I completely forgot my father, the King. The other kids who hadn't passed were really poor backward kids–I felt humiliation and was afraid to go home. I went to the teacher with tears and wanted to know why she hadn't passed me."You certainly are not dumb, Norma Jeane," she said. "You could have passed easily. But you just didn't try." I knew she was right.It was slightly before I became a teen-ager that I went to live with Mrs. Lower, my beloved Aunt Ana. She gave me love and affection for which I was starved. Unfortunately Aunt Ana had little more of this world's goods than I had. My two outfits–two blouses and two skirts–were exactly alike.She kept them freshly laundered for me. But the kids at school would say, "Norma Jeane never changes her clothes."I was living in Sawtelle at the time and going to a really nice school in Westwood. Some of the other girls were from wealthy families. Some of them had chauffeurs who brought them to school and picked them up each day.As I walked the two miles to school in the morning, and the two miles back in the afternoon, I often wondered what it would be like to ride every day, much less with a chauffeur. The bus fare was a nickel. But Aunt Ana had very few nickels to spend on such luxuries as buses.

With Aunt Ana praising everything I did (she particularly liked the crush I had on Mr. Lincoln, whom I met in the history books), I began to come out of my shell just a little. Although I was a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, some of the kids asked me to join their games, and take part in school plays.Because I was so skinny–they called me "Norma Jeane, the Human Bean"–I found myself playing boys' parts, which didn't please me one single bit.However, when I was 12 I suddenly began to develop physically. I started using lipstick behind Aunt Ana's back.I was very intrigued when the boys outside of school thought I was a sharp 17.When Aunt Ana could not keep me any longer, I went to live with other families. When I was 15, it was arranged for me to marry Dougherty in a simple ceremony, with the idea that it would provide me with a home and a husband.My husband and I lived in a small bungalow court. I wanted to finish high school but I discovered that school and marriage didn't mix. We were poor, so naturally my job was to keep house on the lowest possible budget. I had done dishes and scrubbed floors in all the homes in which I had lived, but I had never learned to cook. I learned.I listened to cooking experts over the radio. I clipped recipes from magazines. I asked neighbors to help me. One neighbor taught me to bake bread. I baked it every other day. We had simple meals. I tried to be a good wife.I joined in on his fishing trips. Hunting I couldn't take. I didn't want to kill any living thing.I used to confide in my husband sometimes my childish dreams of becoming an actress. He'd laugh, and assure me I'd never make it. (Some critics, I've heard, are in perfect accord with him.)It was never a happy marriage. A few months after we married he enlisted in the Merchant Marine. When the war was over we were divorced. I did not write him a "Dear John" letter during the war, as has been printed.He is now a policeman, is happily married, and has three children. He hasn't the slightest interest in a person named Marilyn Monroe.

The Truth About Me: Part I
_{^{By Marilyn Monroe, as told to Liza Wilson}}

The San Francisco Examiner
November 16th, 1952

During one part of World War II, I got a job at the Radio Plane Company inspecting parachutes for target planes. I've heard about those big fat salaries women were supposed to be getting in plane plants during the war. But I never saw one. Believe me, I was earning a very hard dollar.After living in many furnished rooms, I moved into the Studio Club in Hollywood, where young business girls can live pleasantly, if not luxuriously, for a modest sum a week. I had started taking drama lessons at $10 a lesson. I had been modeling to pay for my lessons and room rent. Just as you might have suspected, I was no longer "Norma Jeane, the Human Bean," the skinny target of playmates' jibes. I had filled out some. Too full blown, they said, for high styled fashion modeling. Bathing suits and men's magazine covers brought in my expenses.Modeling was a hard grind, even when I got the jobs. My lessons took every cent I could make. Some days I didn't eat so much. I got four weeks behind in my rent at the Studio Club and the manager–she had been most kind and patient–finally had to tell me to pay up or move on.Nearly every photographer I had ever worked with had asked me to pose in the nude. But I had always refused.One photographer, Tom Kelley, I liked very much. I had done some beer ads for Tom and his wife, Natalie, and they asked me if I would like to do a nude for a calendar firm. They said no one would know my name or recognize me. I refused at first.But the day I received my eviction notice I called Natalie and said, "When and how much?"They arranged for me to pose at the studio that night. I received $50. The next day I paid my rent and treated myself to a quiet dinner alone, enjoying every bite. The Kelleys received little more than I did out of this episode. But the calendar company, I hear, cleaned up. I still don't know how I was recognized.In the summer of 1946, I appeared on the covers of five magazines in bathing suits and sweaters.
This flushed a covey of talent scouts. One of them rushed a batch of art of me to Howard Hughes, who was in the hospital at that time recovering from his near-fatal plane accident.Suddenly things happened fast. Mr. Hughes wanted to see me. So did 20th Century-Fox.I saw Fox first and signed immediately. They changed my name to Marilyn Monroe, as I have already reported.I was rushed into a small part in Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay. All I had to say was "hello," but I landed right smack on the cutting room floor.I did pin-ups and cheesecake at the studio after that, but I never had another go at acting. When option time came I was dropped. I went in to see Mr. Zanuck–I had never met him during the year I was on the lot–but his secretary said he was in Sun Valley.There followed a brief stint at Columbia. I played a burlesque queen in a nine-day quickie called Ladies in the Chorus. After six months I was bounced again.But a very good thing happened to me at Columbia. The coach there at that time was a very talented woman named Natasha Lytess. (She is now at 20th Century-Fox and, I'm glad to say, one of my greatest boosters.) She saw me having a cup of coffee at the hamburger stand on the Columbia lot one morning. I was shaking like a minor earthquake, and she came over to me with a look of concern."Marilyn, what's the matter?" she asked.
"I'm just s-s-scared, because I'm all through," I said.
"All through? Why, you haven't even started!" she said so calmly.After this conversation, I left with new strength because of the faith she had in my chances of becoming a real and serious actress some day.My first job of any importance, as far as promoting Marilyn Monroe was concerned, was in the Marx Brothers film, Love Happy. Actually, it was a walk-on, and it was all over in less than a hundred feet of film. I just walked across the stage while Groucho leered. Anyway, United Artists sent me on a tour of key cities to advertise the picture.It was the first time I had ever been out of the State of California. I did press interviews, personal appearances and charity shows for $100 a week. When I returned from the tour I played a small part, that of a dancing girl, in Ticket to Tomahawk, for 20th Century-Fox. (I didn't even say "hello" in this- -just "hummmmm.") I was secretly wishing that Fox would dangle another contract before my eyes after this, but they didn't.Back to the drugstore meals. And a lot of my meals were on the cuff.Lucille Ryman, a very kind talent scout at Metro, saw one day, quite by accident, an old test I once made at Fox. My test had been mixed in with some important tests the front office had asked her to see. Miss Ryman, a busy woman, took time out to look me up afterwards."Marilyn," she said, "you have talent." I could have kissed the ground she was standing on. Not Marilyn you have a figure, but Marilyn you have talent."Now don't be discouraged," she went on. "You can't expect everything to happen overnight. In the meantime, count on me to be your friend."She really proved herself a friend by tangibly helping, giving me $25 a week.About that time a very unpleasant and upsetting thing happened to me. I was renting a room with a family in the San Fernando Valley. One night I was alone in the house when I heard someone cutting the screen in my bedroom window. I jumped out of bed, called the police and Miss Ryman.The police took care of the man and Miss Ryman took care of me. She moved me into her Hollywood apartment–and for the first time since I had become a working girl I didn't have to bother about the rent or food. I can't explain the sense of well-being and security this gave me.When John Huston started casting for Asphalt Jungle at M-G-M. Miss Ryman felt I should play the part of Angela and arranged for me to read for Mr. Huston.I was so tense and nervous over reading for him I thought surely I'd read the part badly and begged him to please, please let me do it all over again."All right," he said most agreeably. When I finished, my heart in my mouth, he said. "You didn't have to read it the second time. I liked you the first time. The part is yours. I think you're going to be a good actress some day."Mr. Huston is a sincere man and I knew he wouldn't say anything like that if he didn't mean it. I think that was one of the happiest moments of my life. I played Louis Calhern's "niece" in Asphalt Jungle. Metro, for some reason or other, didn't put my name on the cast sheet. But there was a preview, and several members of the audience filled out cards asking who I was.A few executives took the trouble to call up the studio after they had seen the film and ask my name. Among them was writer - director Joe Mankiewicz. He wanted me for the part of the blond girl friend of George Sanders in All About Eve at 20th Century-Fox.I heard about the lineup of top players in that picture and I was thrilled to be working with them. When Mr. Mankiewicz showed Mr. Zanuck the first rushes of me, Mr. Zanuck said to his staff, "Put that girl under contract."They told him I had been under contract for an entire year, and had been dropped."I don't care," said Mr. Zanuck. "Bring her back."Since All About Eve, I have appeared in Clash By Night (produced by Harriet Parsons for RKO) and As Young As You Feel, Let's Make It Legal, Love Nest, Don't Bother to Knock, O. Henry's Full House, We're Not Married, Monkey Business and the soon-to-be-released Niagara, all for 20th Century-Fox. At present I am rehearsing for 20th Century's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In which I'll play another dumb blonde–who isn't really so dumb–Lorelei Lee. Jane Russell plays the part of Lorelei's friend, Dorothy. And–for the first time–I'll have the opportunity to do my own singing in this picture.After I finish Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I hope to go to Korea to entertain the troops. I've received so much mail from GIs in Korea that I feel the least I can do is to go over and say "hello" in person.Yes. I think I can say that career everything seems to be progressing. Romance-wise? Well...Last spring I met Joe DiMaggio. Mutual friends introduced us. Joe, who is now a television sportscaster, was in Hollywood on a visit. Some friends asked if I would join them for dinner and meet a friend of theirs, DiMaggio. I said, "I don't know a baseball from a football. But I'd like to meet him." The dinner was at an Italian restaurant Hollywood. I never used to care much for Italian food, but that's all changed now.I was late getting there. I always seem to be late getting places. But this time I had an excuse. I had been delayed at the studio. When I entered the restaurant I heard someone say, "Well, Joe, Marilyn stood you up."We had arrived separately. We met. But we left together.There is a rumor going around that I am married. This is not true. I have no definite marriage plans.Someday? Well, who knows?Since I became known, I have been connected romantically with a few male stars, via press agents for restaurants. I have been reported as being seen here and there with Peter Lawford. As a matter of fact I never have had a date with Peter. We were at the same table at a nightclub (one of my few appearances at a nightclub, I don't care for them) and I may have danced with him. But that hardly constitutes a date, and certainly not a romance.I've never dated Rock Hudson or Vince Edwards, as has also been reported at various times.I read recently that, before I met Joe, I had had a secret romance with Marlon Brando. That's not true either. I have met Marlon and I like him both as a person and as an actor. I think he is one of the finest actors on the screen. I have been receiving letters from teen-agers who adore Marlon, suggesting that I play in a picture with him. Maybe I'll forward these to Mr. Zanuck.The only man I ever saw very much of–before meeting Joe–was the late Johnny Hyde, an executive with the William Morris Agency. Johnny died of a heart condition almost two years ago. I loved him very dearly but I was not in love with him. He was wonderful to me and he was a dear friend. Johnny was more than twice my age, a gentle, kind, brilliant man, and I had never known anyone like him.He had great charm and warmth.It was Johnny who inspired me to read good books and enjoy good music."I know you can be a big star," he'd tell me. (This was when I was struggling to just eat.) "But you must work hard. Nightclubs won't help you. Don't rely on just what nature gave you, you can't take credit for that. It's up to you to continue to improve yourself."I first met Johnny while I was still living at the Studio Club. I met him at a friend's house and he called me the next day and invited me to lunch. After that I spent a great deal of time with him–until his death.It was Johnny who started me talking again. Though I am still not what you'd call a chatterbox exactly. As I reported in the first instalment of this article, I was a scared little kid who used to get punished for things I didn't do. So I figured it out early in life that if I didn't talk I wouldn't get into too much trouble. Besides, the continual state of being frightened had started me stammering. And people laughed at me when I stammered."Marilyn," Johnny said to me one day, "many times when you say so little, people think you are dumb. Sometimes for a whole evening you never say anything.""I guess there are several reasons I feel more comfortable not saying anything," I explained, "because I feel they'll only misunderstand me. When I feel a lack of contact with a person, I can't freely talk with him and still be completely myself."Johnny said, "Well, promise me one thing–you'll never try to be the life of the party." I think I understand what he meant.

Part I: The New Marilyn Monroe
_{^{By Pete Martin}}

Saturday Evening Post
May 5th, 1956

I said to Marilyn Monroe, “Pictures of you usually show you with mouth open and your eyes half closed. Did some photographer sell you the idea that having your picture taken that way makes you look sexier?”She replied in what I’d come to recognize as pure Monroese. “The formation of my lids must make them look heavy or else I’m thinking of something,” she told me.“Sometimes I’m thinking of men. Other times I’m thinking of some man in particular. It’s easier to look sexy when you’re thinking of some man in particular. As for my mouth being open all the time, I even sleep with it open. I know, because it’s open when I wake up. I never consciously think of my mouth, but I do consciously think about what I’m thinking about.”Tucked away in that paragraph like blueberries in a hot muffin were several genuine Monroeisms. I had studied the subject long enough to be able to tell a genuine Monroeism from a spurious one.When I asked her, “Has anyone ever accused you of wearing falsies?” she came through with a genuine Monroeism.
“Yes,” she told me, her eyes flashing indignantly. “Naturally,” she went on, “it was another actress who accused me. My answer to that is, quote: Those who know me better know better. That’s all. Unquote.”Another Monroeism followed hard on the heels of that. I said, “I’ve heard that you wowed the marines in Korea when you climbed up onto a platform to say a few words to them, and they whistled at you and made wolf calls.”“I know the time you’re talking about,” she said. “It wasn’t in Korea at all; it was at Camp Pendleton, California. They wanted me to say a few words, so I said, ‘You fellows down there are always whistling at sweater girls. Well, take away their sweaters and what have you got?’ For some reason they screamed and yelled.”Another example came forth when Marilyn was asked if she and the playwright, Arthur Miller, were having an affair. “How can they say we’re having a romance?” she replied. “He’s married.”Still another Monroeism had emerged from a press conference in the Plaza Hotel, in New York City. It was held to announce her teaming with Sir Laurence Olivier in an acting- directing-producing venture — a get-together described by one of those present as “one of the least likely duos in cinematic history.” The big Monroeism of that occasion was Marilyn’s answer to the query, “Miss Monroe, do you still want to do The Brothers Karamazov on Broadway?”“I don’t want to play The Brothers,” she said. “I want to play Grushenka from that book. She’s a girl.”Listening to her as she talked to me now, I thought, Nobody can write dialogue for her which could possibly sound half as much like her as the dialogue she thinks up for herself.Nunnally Johnson, who produced the film, How to Marry a Millionaire, costarring Marilyn, told me, “When I talked to her when she first came on the lot, I felt as if I were talking to a girl under water. I couldn’t tell whether I was getting through to her or not. She lived behind a fuzz curtain.”Johnson also directed How to be Very, Very Popular, and when Sheree North took Marilyn’s place in that film, he announced: “Sheree will not use the Monroe technique in How to be Very, Very Popular. She will play the entire role with her mouth closed.”Marilyn’s last sentence to me: “I never consciously think of my mouth, but I do consciously think about what I’m thinking about” seemed a trifle murky, but I had no time to work on it, for, without pausing, she said, “Another writer asked me, ‘What do you think of sex?’ and I told him, ‘It’s a part of nature. I go along with nature.’ Zsa Zsa Gabor was supposed to write an article for a magazine on the subject: ‘What’s Wrong With American Men,’ and I did marginal notes for it. The editor cut out my best lines. I wrote, ‘If there’s anything wrong with the way American men look at sex, it’s not their fault. After all, they’re descended from the Puritans, who got off the boat on the wrong foot — or was it the Pilgrims? — and there’s still a lot of that puritanical stuff around.’ The editor didn’t use that one.”I carefully wrote down every word she said to me. She told me that she’d rather I wouldn’t use a tape-recording machine while interviewing her. “It would make me nervous to see that thing going round and round,” she insisted. So I used pencils and a notebook instead. But I didn’t use them right away.I had to wait for her to walk from her bedroom into the living room of her apartment, where I sat ready to talk to her. It took her an hour and a half to make that journey. At 3:45, Lois Weber, the pleasant young woman who handled the Monroe New York publicity, admitted me to the apartment Marilyn was occupying. She pushed the buzzer outside of a door on the eighth floor of an apartment building on Sutton Place South, and a voice asked, “Who is it?”“It’s me,” said my chaperone.The lock clickety-clicked open, but when we went in, Marilyn was nowhere in sight. She had retreated into a bedroom. Her voice said to us through the door, “I’ll be out in just seven minutes.”A publicity man to whom I’d talked at Marilyn’s studio in Hollywood had warned me, “She’ll stand you up a couple of times before you meet her. Then she’ll be late, and when I say late, I mean real late. You’ll be so burned at her before she walks in that you’ll wrap up your little voice-recording machine and get ready to leave at least three times — maybe four times — before she shows. But somebody will persuade you to wait, and finally Marilyn will come in, and before you know it, she’ll have you wrapped up too. For she’s warmhearted, amusing and likable, even if her lateness is a pain in the neck. And after that, if somebody says, ‘That was mighty thoughtless of old Marilyn, keeping you waiting like that,’ you’ll want to slug him for being mean.“What you won’t know,” that studio publicity man went on, “is that while you’re having hell’s own headache waiting for her, whatever publicity worker is trying to get her to see you is having an even bigger headache. Marilyn will be telling that publicity worker that her stomach is so upset that she’s been throwing up for hours; she hasn’t been able to get her make-up on right; or that she’s got a bum deal in the wardrobe department and hasn’t anything to wear.”So, in an effort to be witty, when Marilyn said, through the closed door, “I’ll be out in just seven minutes,” I said, “I’ll settle for eight.” Time was to prove it the unfunniest remark I’ve ever made. One hour later I asked Lois Weber, “What do you suppose she’s doing in there?”“You know how it is,” my publicity-girl chaperone said soothingly, “a girl has to put on her face.”“What has she got, two heads?” I asked politely. A half hour later I suggested that Lois Weber go into the next room and see what was causing the delay.Waiting for Lois Weber, I roamed the apartment. On a table lay a play manuscript. Typed on its cover was: Fallen Angels, by Noel Coward. Among the books which seemed in current use were Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Ellen Terry, Shaw’s Letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A., by Richard Aldrich.Mute evidence of Marilyn’s widely publicized drama studies at the Actors’ Studio, where she was said to be seeking out the secrets of artistic acting, was a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Several lines of dialogue from that volume had been penciled on a piece of paper, obviously to be recited by or to a group of drama students; then the piece of paper had been thrust part way into the book. Lying on the floor was a large recording of John Barrymore as Hamlet.That dialogue from Ulysses and the Barrymore recording represented one of the reasons why I was there. I’d read that Marilyn had gone “long hair” and “art theaterish,” and I wanted to see for myself. Just seeing it in print didn’t make it true.
Millions of words had been written about the alluring blonde in whose living room I sat, but most of those words had been of the “authorized” or “with-Marilyn’s-blessing” variety. Several millions of them had appeared in fan magazines — after having first been O.K.’d by the 20th Century-Fox publicity department.I’d read a lot of those words, but I still felt that I didn’t understand this dame and I was sure that a lot of other people felt the same way about her and that, like myself, they’d been asking themselves for years, “What’s she really like?”On top of that, they were probably asking themselves other questions — as I was doing. “Why did she blow her marriage with Joe DiMaggio? Why did she walk out on a movie career which was paying her heavy money? Why did she duck California in favor of New York? Why, after she holed up there, did she attend the art-for-art’s-sake Actors’ Studio — surely an unlikely place for a girl who, up to that time, had done most of her acting with her hips?”I hoped that when I talked to her she would tell me the answers to some of these things. Maybe I’d even see the “new Marilyn Monroe” I’d heard existed.Lois Weber came back to report: “She thinks the maid must have gone off with the top of her tapered slacks. She’s running around without a top on.”In an effort to keep me from brooding, Lois Weber said, “The azalea people down in Wilmington, North Carolina, want her for a personal appearance in April, but I told them they’d have to call me in April. Who knows where she’ll be then?”The minutes crawled by and I thought of various things that people had told me about Marilyn before I’d begun my marathon wait in her Sutton Place apartment. Every male friend I had told I was doing a story about Marilyn had asked me, “Can I go along to hold your notebook?” or “You call that work?” or “You get paid for that?” or “Can’t I go along and hold the flash bulbs?” Apparently they felt that if they failed to go into a blood-bubbling, heman routine at the drop of her name, their maleness was suspect. When Marilyn appeared breathless and friendly as a puppy, I told her of this phenomenon. “How do you explain it?” I asked. “Have you become a symbol of sex?”She gave my query thought before answering. “There are people to whom other people react, and other people who do nothing for people,” she said. “I react to men, too, but I don’t do it because I’m trying to prove I’m a woman. Personally I react to Marlon Brando. He’s a favorite of mine. There are two kinds of reactions. When you see some people you say, ‘Gee!’ When you see other people you say, ‘Ugh!’ If that part about my being a symbol of sex is true, it ought to help at the box office, but I don’t want to be too commercial about it.” Quite seriously she said, “After all, it’s a responsibility, too — being a symbol, I mean.”I told her I’d heard that among the titles bestowed upon her were Woo-Woo Girl, Miss Cheesecake, The Girl With the Horizontal Walk. “I don’t get what they mean by ‘horizontal walk,’” she said. “Naturally I know what walking means — anybody knows that — and horizontal means not vertical. So what?” I thought of trying to blueprint it for her; then decided not to.The Hollywood publicity worker who had warned me that she would be “real late” had talked to me quite frankly about Marilyn; he had pulled no punches; but since it is unfair to quote a publicity worker by name, I’ll call him Jones. And since “flack” is Hollywood slang for publicity man, I’ll call him Flack Jones.Jones worked for 20th Century-Fox during the years before Marilyn staged her walkout. Since then he has moved on to bigger — if not better — things. He has opened his own public-relations office, with branches in Paris and Rome. He is bald as a peeled egg. He is as broad as a small barn door; a junior-executive-size Mister Five-by-Five. He wears black-rimmed glasses instead of the clear tortoise-shell plastic variety.“A thing that fascinates me is this,” I told Flack Jones: “the first time I ever saw her I was sitting with a friend in the Fox commissary and this girl came in without any make-up on. She was wearing a blouse and skirt, and she sat against the wall. She bore no resemblance to anybody I’d ever seen before, but, to my amazement, my friend said, ‘That’s Marilyn Monroe.’ What I want to know is: Does she have to get into her Marilyn Monroe suit or put on her Marilyn Monroe face before she looks like Marilyn Monroe?”“This is true of all platinum blondes or whatever you call the highly dyed jobs we have out here,” Flack Jones said. “If their hair isn’t touched up and coiffured exactly right; if they’re not gowned perfectly and their make-up is not one hundred per cent, they look gruesome. This is not peculiar to Monroe; it’s peculiar to every other synthetic blonde I’ve ever known in picture business. There are very few natural blondes in Hollywood and, so far as I know, there have been no natural platinum blondes in mankind’s history, except albinos. They are strictly a product of the twentieth century. They’re created blondes, and when you create a blonde you have to complete your creation with make-up and dramatic clothes, otherwise you’ve got only part of an assembly job.”I also talked to a member of the Fox Studio legal staff, who told me a Monroe story I found provocative. “One day,” he said, “she was in this office, and I said to her, ‘It would be better for you to sign this contract this year instead of next. It will save you money.’ She looked at me and said, ‘I’m not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.’ Then she walked out.” The legal light looked at me helplessly and shrugged. “What do you suppose she meant by that?” he asked. I said I had no idea, but that I’d try to find out.And I asked a friend high enough up in the Fox hierarchy to know the answer, “Why do you think your studio let her come back to work for it after she walked out and stayed in New York for fifteen months?”“Our attitude was that she’d never work on our lot again,” he announced firmly; then he grinned, “unless we needed her.”
One of my longer talks was with Billy Wilder, who directed her in the film The Seven Year Itch.
“What do you want to know?” he asked when I went to see him in his Beverly Hills home.“One of the interesting things about this Monroe girl, to me,” I said, “is she seemed in danger of spoiling what had begun as a successful career by running away from it. I began to ask myself: How long can a movie actress afford to stay away from moviemaking and still remain a star? The mere strangeness of her staying away gets her a terrific press for a while and makes everyone in the country conscious of her, but is it possible to stay away so long that you’re forgotten? Was that about to happen to Marilyn?”“I don’t think there was any danger of Marilyn sinking into oblivion,” Wilder said. “A thing like her doesn’t come along every minute.”I asked, “What do you mean ‘a thing like her’?”“She has what I call flesh impact,” he told me. “It’s very rare. Three I remember are Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Rita Hayworth. Such girls have flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it.”“I’ve heard that it’s a moot question as to whether Marilyn’s an actress or not,” I said.“I’ve heard that, too,” he replied. “Before we go further I must tell you that I like the girl, but it’s also moot whether you have to be an actor or an actress to be a success in pictures. I’m sure you’ve heard the theory that there are two kinds of stars — those who can act and those who are personalities. I’ll take a personality any time. Something comes down from the screen to you when you see them, in a way that it doesn’t always come from the indifferently paid actors, although they may be perfect at their jobs.”

“It’s nothing against them or for them,” Flack Jones said, when I repeated Wilder’s idea to him. “It’s the way this business is put together. If the public likes a personality, he or she goes over. You take Tab Rock,” he said (only Tab Rock is not the name he used). “Old Tab’s a terrific personality. I doubt if he’s ever made a flop picture, but he’s never made a really good picture. This fellow can’t pick up his hat without instruction, yet he’s always picking up villains and throwing them across a bar singlehanded. He can clean up any barroom on the frontier, but he can’t clean up a kitchen. He’s a nice guy, but no one has ever called him an actor. You take Lloyd Nolan now, or Van Heflin. That’s acting for you. You believe them. There are lights and shades and meaning to what they do. But when old Tab Rock comes on the screen, he’s got to throw somebody around to prove his art. He can do this quicker than anybody in Hollywood, and this is his great value.”“He sounds brave,” I said.“No one is braver or more scornful about it,” Flack Jones said. “His bravery is without parallel in the industry. He’s the only man I ever saw who could take a forty-five and go to the Near East and clean the whole mess up in a day or two. He never fails. That’s the difference between a personality and an actor.”When I talked to Wilder I said that I’d read that when Marilyn had announced that she wanted to appear in a movie version of The Brothers Karamazov, some people hooted.“The hooters were wrong,” Wilder told me. “She meant that she wanted to play the part of Grushenka in that book, and people who haven’t read the book don’t know that Grushenka is a sex pot. People think this is a long-hair, very thick, very literary book, but Dostoevsky knew what he was doing and there is nothing long-hair about Grushenka. Marilyn knows what she’s doing too. She would be a good Grushenka.“It was after she said that she wanted to be in The Brothers Karamazov,” Wilder went on, “that she started going to the Actors’ Studio School of Dramatic Arts in New York. She didn’t do it for publicity. She’s sincerely trying to improve herself, and I think she should be admired for that. She could have sat here in Hollywood on her pretty little fanny and collected all of the money any ordinary actress would ever want, but she keeps trying.“Right now, as of today, no matter what she thinks, Marilyn’s great value is as a personality, not as an actress. [Wilder told me these things while Marilyn was still in New York being groomed by the Actors’ Studio. It may be that what happened to her during her Eastern schooling in new dramatic ways may change his opinion, but 1 haven’t talked to him since her return to Hollywood.] If she sets out to be artistic and dedicated, and she carries it so far that she’s willing to wear Sloppy-Joe sweaters and go without make-up and let her hair hang straight as a string, this is not what has made her great to date. I don’t say that it’s beyond the realm of possibility that she can establish herself as a straight dramatic actress — it is possible — but it will be another career for her, a starting all over.”Back in New York, when Marilyn made that long, long journey from her bedroom to her living room in her apartment, I said to her, “I’ve heard your childhood referred to as ‘the perfect Cinderella story.’”“I don’t know where they got that,” she told me. “I haven’t ended up with a prince, and I’ve never had even one fairy godmother. My birth certificate reads Norma Jean Mortenson. I was told that my father was killed in an automobile accident before I was born, so that is what I’ve always told people. There was no way I could check on that because my mother was put into a mental institution when I was little, and I was brought up as an orphan.”I had read that she spent her childhood being farmed out to foster parents and to orphanages, but, talking to her, I discovered that there’d been only one orphanage, although it was true about the foster parents. “I have had eleven or twelve sets of them,” she told me, “but I don’t want to count them all again, to see whether there were eleven or twelve. I hope you won’t ask me to. It depresses me. Some families would keep me longer; others would get tired of me in a short time. I must have made them nervous or something.”She thought of something else. “I had one pair of foster parents who, when I was about ten, made me promise never to drink when I grew up, and I signed a pledge never to smoke or swear. My next foster family gave me empty whisky bottles for playthings. With them I played store. I guess I must have had the finest collection of empty whisky bottles any girl ever had. I’d line them up on a plank beside the road, and when people drove along I’d say, ‘Wouldn’t you like some whisky?’ I remember some of the people in the cars driving past my ‘whisky’ store saying, ‘Imagine! Why, it’s terrible!’ Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.“The first family I lived with told me I couldn’t go to the movies because it was sinful,” Marilyn said. “I listened to them say the world was coming to an end, and if I was doing something sinful when it happened, I’d go down below, below, below. So the few times I was able to sneak into a movie, I spent most of the time that I was there praying that the world wouldn’t end.”Apparently I had been misinformed about her first marriage, to a young man named Jim Dougherty. I’d got the idea that she’d married him while they were both in Van Nuys High School; that she’d got a “crush” on him because he was president of the student body there, and a big wheel around school.“That’s not true,” she told me. “In the first place, he was twenty-one or twenty-two — well, at least he was twenty-one and already out of high school. So all I can say is that he must have been pretty dumb if he were still in high school when I married him. And I didn’t have a crush on him, although he claimed I did in a story he wrote about us. The truth is the people I was staying with moved East. They couldn’t afford to take me because when they left California they’d stop getting the twenty dollars a month the county or the state was paying them to help them clothe and feed me. So instead of going back into a boarding home or with still another set of foster parents, I got married.“That marriage ended in a divorce, but not until World War Two was over. Jim is now a policeman. He lives in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley, and he is happily married and has three daughters. But while he was away in the merchant marines I worked in the dope room of a plane factory. That company not only made planes, it made parachutes.“For a while I’d been inspecting parachutes. Then they quit letting us girls do that and they had the parachutes inspected on the outside, but I don’t think it was because of my inspecting. Then I was in the dope room spraying dope on fuselages. Dope is liquid stuff, like banana oil and glue mixed.“I was out on sick leave for a few days, and when I came back the Army photographers from the Hal Roach Studios, where they had the Army photographic headquarters, were around taking photographs and snapping and shooting while I was doping those ships. The Army guys saw me and asked, ‘Where have you been?’“’I’ve been on sick leave,’ I said. “Come outside.’ they told me. ‘We’re going to take your picture.’“‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘The other ladies here in the dope room will give me trouble if I stop doing what I’m doing and go out with you.’ That didn’t discourage those Army photographers. They got special permission for me to go outside from Mr. Whosis, the president of the plant. For a while they posed me rolling ships; then they asked me. ‘Don’t you have a sweater?’“‘Yes,’ I told them, ‘it so happens I brought one with me. It’s in my locker.’ After that I rolled ships around in a sweater. The name of one of those Army photographers was David Conover. He lives up near the Canadian border. He kept telling me, ‘You should be a model,’ but I thought he was flirting. Several weeks later, he brought the color shots he’d taken of me, and he said the Eastman Kodak Company had asked him, ‘Who’s your model, for goodness’ sake?’“So I began to think that maybe he wasn’t kidding about how I ought to be a model. Then I found that a girl could make five dollars an hour modeling, which was different from working ten hours a day for the kind of money I’d been making at the plane plant. And it was a long way from the orphanage, where I’d been paid five cents a week for working in the dining room or ten cents a month for working in the pantry. And out of those big sums a penny every Sunday had to go into the church collection. I never could figure why they took a penny from an orphan for that.”“How did you happen to sign your first movie contract?” I asked.
She tossed a cascade of white-blond tresses from her right eye and said, “I had appeared on five magazine covers. Mostly men’s magazines.”What, I asked, did she mean by men’s magazines? “Magazines,” she said, “with cover girls who are not flat-chested. I was on See four or five months in a row. Each time they changed my name. One month I was Norma Jean Dougherty — that was my first husband’s name. The second month I was Jean Norman. I don’t know what all names they used, but I must have looked different each time. There were different poses— outdoors, indoors, but mostly just sitting looking over the Pacific. You looked at those pictures and you didn’t see much ocean, but you saw a lot of me.“One of the magazines I was on wasn’t a man’s magazine at all. It was called Family Circle. You buy it in supermarkets. I was holding a lamb with a pinafore. I was the one with the pinafore. But on most covers I had on things like a striped towel. The towel was striped because the cover was to be in color and the stripes were the color, and there was a big fan blowing on the towel and on my hair. That was right after my first divorce, and I needed to earn a living bad. I couldn’t type. I didn’t know how to do anything. So Howard Hughes had an accident.”I wondered if I’d missed something, but apparently I hadn’t. “He was in the hospital,” she went on, “and Hedda Hopper wrote in her column: ‘Howard Hughes must be recuperating because he sent out for photographs of a new girl he’s seen on five different magazines.’ Right after that Howard Hughes’ casting director got my telephone number somehow, and he got in touch with me and he said Howard Hughes wanted to see me.“But he must have forgotten or changed his mind or something,” she said, “because instead of going to see him, I went over to the Fox Studio with a fellow named Harry Lipton, who handled my photography modeling. Expensive cars used to drive up beside me when I was on a street corner or walking on a sidewalk, and the driver would say, ‘I could do something for you in pictures. How would you like to be a Goldwyn girl?’ I figured those guys in those cars were trying for a pick-up, and I got an agent so I could say to those fellows, ‘See my agent.’ That’s how I happened to be handled by Harry Lipton.”Harry took her to see Ivan Kahn, then head of Fox’s talent department, and also to see Ben Lyon, who was doing a talent-scouting job for Fox.I asked her how it happened that she changed her name from Norma Jean Dougherty to Marilyn Monroe.
“It was Ben Lyon who renamed me,” she said. “Ben said that I reminded him of two people, Jean Harlow and somebody else he remembered very well, a girl named Marilyn Miller. When all the talk began about renaming me, I asked them please could I keep my mother’s maiden name, which was Monroe; so the choice was whether to call me Jean Monroe or Marilyn Monroe, and Marilyn won.”I asked Flack Jones, “What happened when she came to your studio?”“She came twice,” he said. “The first time was in 1946. We did our best with her, but she just hadn’t grown up enough. She was great as far as looks went, but she didn’t know how to make the most of her looks — or what to do with them. That came with practice. Not that you have to mature mentally to be a star. In fact, it can be a holdback. It might even defeat you. Stars who are mature mentally are in the minority. But actually we had no stories lying around at that time in which she would appear to advantage. So we tried her out in a picture or two in which she played bit parts — secretaries, the pretty girl in the background. Then we let her go, and she went over to RKO and did a picture with Groucho.”“I didn’t see the film,” I said, “but you’d think with the Marx Brothers chasing her, like a bosomy mechanical bunny romping about the sound stage a couple of jumps ahead of the greyhounds, the fun would have been fast and furious.”“The trouble was that while the Marx Brothers always chased a dame in their pictures,” Flack Jones told me, “they never caught the dame. And usually the dame never became a star, so the whole thing was a waste of time. It was amusing while you were watching it, but the girls usually outran the Marx boys and a career.”Marilyn gave me her own version of Flack Jones’ story:“Most of what I did while I was at Fox that first time was pose for stills. Publicity made up a story about how I was a baby sitter who’d been baby-sitting for the casting director and that’s how I was discovered. They told me to say that, although it strictly wasn’t true. You’d think that they would have used a little more imagination and have had me at least a daddy sitter.”Flack Jones had filled me in on some more Monroe chronology: “After she left us she went to Metro and appeared in The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston,” he said. “Marilyn’s role was small. She was only a walk-on, but she must have looked good to Darryl Zanuck, for when he saw it, he re-signed her. Asphalt Jungle was one of those gangster things. There was a crooked legal mouthpiece in it, a suave fellow, played by Louis Calhern. Marilyn was his ‘niece’; which was a nice word for ‘keptie.’ She’d say a few lines of dialogue; then she’d look up at him with those big eyes and call him ‘Uncle.’”“When did you first notice her impact on the public?” I asked.“Once we got her rolling, it was like a tidal wave,” he said. “We began to release some photographs of her, and as soon as they appeared in print, we had requests for more from all over the world. We had the newspapers begging for art; then the photo syndicates wanted her; then the magazines began to drool. For a while we were servicing three or four photos to key newspapers all over the world once a week — and that was before she had appeared in a picture.“Once this building-up process started,” Flack Jones explained, “other people got interested in her. We called up the top cameramen around town who had their own outlets, and we told them what we had, and we asked them if they’d like to photograph her. They said, ‘Ho, boy, yes.’“We told them what the deal was,” Flack Jones went on. “We said, ‘We think this girl has a great future; she’s beautiful, her chassis is great, and are you interested?’ Each guy had his own idea of what he wanted, and he let his imagination play upon her. This is the way such things get done. They’re not created by one person. They’re the creation of all of the press representatives who cover Hollywood for all the publications in the world, which means about three hundred and fifty people.

“Everybody in the studio publicity department worked on her.” Jones ticked them off on his fingertips, “The picture division, the magazine division, the fan-magazine division, the planters who plant the columnists, the radio planters, and so forth. Then, when you make a motion picture, a ‘unit man’ or ‘unit woman’ is assigned to cover its shooting, and he or she handles publicity for that film alone. In addition, the whole department works on the same picture. Our department is highly specialized, but each specialist makes his contribution to the personality we’re erecting in the public’s mind.”“I’ve met a couple of press agents who’ve been unit men on Marilyn’s films,” I said.“But the unit man is not always the same for a certain star’s pictures,” Jones said. “Sonia Wilson’s been unit woman on Monroe pictures, and Frankie Neal’s been a unit man on her pictures, but Roy Craft has been her unit man more than anyone else. Roy likes her. He gets along with her fine.”There was something else I wanted to know. “In addition to distributing her photographs,” I asked, “did you have her show up at different places where you thought her appearance would do her good?”“We took her to all of the cocktail parties we thought were important,” Flack Jones said. “For instance, one picture magazine had its annual cocktail party, and we told Marilyn she ought to show so we could introduce her to various editors, columnists and radio and TV people. She waited until everybody had arrived; then she came in in this red gown. That gown became famous. She’d had sense enough to buy it a size or two too small, and it had what Joe Hyams calls ‘break-away straps.’“When she came in, everybody stopped doing what they were doing and their eyes went, ‘Boing, boing,’” Flack Jones went on. “The publisher of the magazine who was picking up the tab for the party shook hands with her a long, long time. After a while he turned to one of his associate editors and said, ‘We ought to have a picture of this little girl in our book.’ Then he looked at her again and said, ‘Possibly we should have her on the cover.’”Flack Jones grinned. “So that’s the way things went,” he said. “Some months there were as many as fifteen or sixteen covers of her on the newsstands at once. She came back to the Fox lot in 1950 to appear in All About Eve, but she was not anyone’s great, big, brilliant discovery until we got our still cameras focused on her and started spreading those Marilyn Monroe shots all over the universe.”“What did she do in All About Eve?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”“She’s the dumb broad who walks into a party at Bette Davis’ place leaning on George Sanders’ arm,” he said. “There’s dialogue which shows you that Sanders is a critic, like George Jean Nathan; and he brings this beautiful dish Marilyn in, and he sights a producer played by Gregory Ratoff. Sanders points at Ratoff and says to Marilyn, ‘There’s a real live producer, honey. Go do yourself some good.’ So Marilyn goes off to do herself some good while Sanders stays in his own price class with Bette.”“Do you remember the first day she came to work?” I asked.“Do I remember?” he said. “She was in an Angora sweater out to there. While we were shooting her in photography, the word got around and the boys rushed across the hall to get an eyeful. Next we did some layouts with her for picture magazines. We put her in a negligee, and she liked it so much that she wouldn’t take it off. She walked all over the lot in it, yelling, ‘Yoo hoo’ at strangers as far away as the third floor of the administration building. Pretty soon the whole third floor was looking down at her. The first and second floors looked too.”Flack Jones did an abrupt shift into the present tense, “It’s a bright, sunny day; the wind is blowing and she has Nature working with her. It has taken Nature quite a while to bring her to the ripe-peach perfection she reaches on that day, but it finally makes it. The wind does the rest. She walks all over the lot, has a ball for herself, and so does everybody else.”Then he shifted back again, “After that we took her to the beach with a lot of wardrobe changes. But the basic idea was that this is a beautiful girl with a great body, and that idea was always the same, although we had different approaches to it. We had color shots, we had black-and-white shots, we had mountain shots, we had field shots, faked water-skiing shots — every type of approach we could think of. Picnicking, walking — anything a person does, we let her do it. When we began to see what she did best, we concentrated on it.“Women always hate the obvious in sex,” Flack Jones said, “and men love it.” Apparently he had given this matter a lot of thought. He had even worked out a philosophy about it. “Guys are instinctively awkward and blundering and naïve — even worldly-wise ones — and subtlety in sex baffles them. Not only that, but they don’t have the time. Women who are not supporting a husband have all the time in the world for it. But men have other things to do, like making a dollar; and they like their love-making without preliminaries which last four or five hours. Instinctively Marilyn knows this. She is very down-to-earth, very straightforward.”I asked Marilyn when I talked to her back on Sutton Place, “Do you think men like their sex subtle or fairly obvious?” This was a double check. I already had the male answer.It seemed to me that she hedged. “Some men prefer subtleties and other men don’t want things so subtle,” she said. “I don’t believe in false modesty. A woman only hurts herself that way. If she’s coy she’s denying herself an important part of life. Men sometimes believe that you’re frigid and cold in the development of a relationship, but if they do, it’s not always your fault. Religion has to do with it and how you’re brought up. You’re stuck with all that.”I remembered something else Wilder had told me before Marilyn’s recent return to Hollywood to make the film version of the New York stage hit Bus Stop. “You take Monroe, now,” he remarked. “Aside from whether she’s an actress or not, she’s got this lovely little shape, it twitches excitingly, and the public likes to watch it, either coming toward them or going away. There are two schools of thought about her — those who like her and those who attack her — but they both are willing to pay to watch her. Their curiosity is good for eighty cents or a dollar and a quarter or whatever the price of the ticket.”He shook his head thoughtfully. “And she went back East to study at a slow-take arty place, where they feature understatement. Here’s a girl who’s built herself a career on overstating something, and she’s made up her mind to understate. It won’t be long before we’ll know whether she’s right and whether she needs the wardrobe department and the hairdressing department as much as she needs artistic lines to say. It’ll be interesting to watch and I hope it works out the way she wants it to, but the lines that the public really wants from her so far are not written in English. They are her curves.”The voice of Flack Jones echoed in the back of my head. “I forgot to tell you. When she finished that Marx Brothers picture, she went over to Columbia for a couple of shows, but she didn’t click, and they released her too. After that she was around town for a while going broke. It was then that she posed for that famous nude calendar — the composition of glowing flesh against a red velvet background which threw the public into a tizzy when they learned about it.”I asked Marilyn to tell me the story of that nude calendar herself, and she said, “When the studio first heard about it, everybody there was in a frenzy. They telephoned me on the set where I was working in a quickie called Don’t Bother to Knock. The person who called asked me, ‘What’s all this about a calendar of you in the nude? Did you do it?’“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is there anything wrong with it? So they’ve found out it’s me on that calendar. Well, what do you know!’“‘Found out!’ he almost screamed. ‘There you are, all of you, in full color!’ Then he must have gotten mixed up, for first he said, ‘Just deny everything’; then he said, ‘Don’t say anything. I’ll be right down.’”

Part II: Here She Talks About Herself
_{^{By Pete Martin}}

Saturday Evening Post
May 12th, 1956

“That nude calendar Marilyn Monroe posed for will probably be reprinted as long as we have men with twenty-twenty vision in this country,” Flack Jones told me.Jones had put in several years as a publicity worker at Marilyn Monroe’s Hollywood studio before opening his own public-relations office.“Curious thing about it,” Jones went on, “when that calendar first came out, it had no bigger sale than any other nude calendar.“You may not know it, but there’s a steady sale for such calendars. You might think that there are too few places where you can hang them up to make them worthwhile. But there’re lots of places where they fit in very nicely — truckers’ havens, barbershops, bowling alleys, poolrooms, washrooms, garages, toolshops, taprooms, taverns — joints like that. The calendar people always publish a certain number of nude calendars along with standards like changing autumn leaves, Cape Cod fishermen bringing home their catch from a wintry sea, Old Baldy covered with snow. You’re not in the calendar business unless you have a selection of sexy calendars. The sale of the one for which Marilyn posed was satisfactory, but not outstanding. It only became a ‘hot number’ when the public became familiar with it.”Billy Wilder, the Hollywood director who directed Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch, is witty, also pungent, pithy, and is not afraid to say what he thinks. “When you come right down to it,” Wilder told me, “that calendar is not repulsive. It’s quite lovely. Marilyn’s name was already pretty big when the calendar story broke. If it hadn’t been, nobody would have cared one way or the other. But when it became known that she had posed for it, I think that, if anything, it helped her popularity. It appealed to people who like to read about millionaires who started life selling newspapers on the corner of Forty-second and Fifth Avenue; then worked their way up. It was as if Marilyn had been working her way through college, for that pose took hours. Here was a girl who needed dough, and she made it by honest toil.”“I was working on the Fox Western Avenue lot when this worried man from Fox came tearing in wringing his hands,” Marilyn told me recently. “He took me into my dressing room to talk about the horrible thing I’d done in posing for such a photograph. I could think of nothing else to say, so I said apologetically, ‘I thought the lighting the photographer used would disguise me.’ I thought that worried man would have a stroke when I told him that.“What had happened was I was behind in my rent at the Hollywood Studio Club, where girls stay who hope to crash the movies. You’re only supposed to get one week behind in your rent at the club, but they must have felt sorry for me because they’d given me three warnings. A lot of photographers had asked me to pose in the nude, but I’d always said, ‘No.’ I was getting five dollars an hour for plain modeling, but the price for nude modeling was fifty an hour. So I called Tom Kelley, a photographer I knew, and said, ‘They’re kicking me out of here. How soon can we do it?’ He said, ‘We can do it tomorrow.’“I didn’t even have to get dressed, so it didn’t take long. I mean it takes longer to get dressed than it does to get undressed. I’d asked Tom, ‘Please don’t have anyone else there except your wife, Natalie.’ He said, ‘O.K.’ He only made two poses. There was a shot of me sitting up and a shot of me lying down. I think the one of me lying down is the best.“I’m saving a copy of that calendar for my grandchildren,” Marilyn went on, all bright-eyed. “There’s a place in Los Angeles which even reproduces it on bras and panties. But I’ve only autographed a few copies of it, mostly for sick people. On one I wrote, ‘This may not be my best angle,’ and on the other I wrote, ‘Do you like me better with long hair?”I said to Marilyn that Roy Craft, who is one of the publicity men at Fox, had told me that he had worked with her for five years, and that in all that time he’d never heard her tell a lie. “That’s a mighty fine record for any community,” I said.“It may be a fine record,” she admitted, “but it has also gotten me into trouble. Telling the truth, I mean. Then, when I get into trouble by being too direct and I try to pull back, people think I’m being coy. I’m supposed to have said that I dislike being interviewed by women reporters, but that it’s different with gentlemen of the press because we have a mutual appreciation of being male and female. I didn’t say I disliked women reporters. As dumb as I am, I wouldn’t be that dumb, although that in itself is kind of a mysterious remark because people don’t really know how dumb I am. But I really do prefer men reporters. They’re more stimulating.”I asked Flack Jones in Hollywood, “When did this business of her making those wonderful Monroe cracks start?”“You mean when somebody asked her what she wears in bed and she said, ‘Chanel Number Five’?” Jones asked. “You will find some who will tell you that her humor content seemed to pick up the moment she signed a contract with the studio, and that anybody in the department who had a smart crack lying around handy gave it to her. Actually, there were those who thought that more than the department was behind it. ‘Once you launch such a campaign,’ they said, ‘it stays launched. It’s like anyone who has a smart crack to unleash attributing it to a Georgie Jessel or to a Dorothy Parker or whoever is currently smart and funny.’ There was even a theory that the public contributed some of Marilyn’s cracks by writing or calling a columnist like Sidney Skolsky or Herb Stein, and giving him a gag, and he’d attribute it to Marilyn, and so on around town. But the majority of the thinking was that our publicity department gave her her best cracks.”“Like what?” I asked.“Like for instance. I’ll have to lead up to it; as you know, in this business you can be destroyed by one bad story — although that’s not as true as it used to be — and when the story broke that Marilyn had posed in the nude for a calendar and the studio decided that the best thing to do was to announce the facts immediately instead of trying to pretend they didn’t exist, we said that Marilyn was broke at the time and that she’d posed to pay her room rent, which was true. Then, to give it the light touch, when she was asked, ‘Didn’t you have anything on at all when you were posing for that picture?’ we were supposed to have told her to say, ‘I had the radio on.’”Flack Jones paused for a long moment. “I’m sorry to disagree with the majority,” he said firmly, “but she makes up those cracks herself. Certainly that ‘Chanel Number Five’ was her own.”When I told Marilyn about this, she smiled happily. “He’s right. It was my own,” she said. “The other one — the calendar crack — I made when I was up in Canada. A woman came up to me and asked, ‘You mean to say you didn’t have anything on when you had that calendar picture taken?’ I drew myself up and told her, ‘I did, too, have something on. I had the radio on.’”“Give her a minute to think and Marilyn is the greatest little old ad-lib artist you ever saw,” Flack Jones had insisted. “She blows it in sweet and it comes out that way. One news magazine carried a whole column of her quotes I’d collected, and every one of them was her own. There’ve been times when I could have made face in this industry by claiming that I put some of those cracks into her mouth, but I didn’t do it. This girl makes her own quotables. She’ll duck a guy who wants to interview her as long as she can, but when she finally gets around to it, she concentrates on trying to give him what he wants — something intriguing, amusing and off-beat. She’s very bright at it.“A writer was commissioned to write a story for her for a magazine,” Jones said. “The subject was to be what Marilyn eats and how she dresses. As I recall it, the title was to be ‘How I Keep My Figure,’ or maybe it was ‘How I Keep in Shape.’ The writer talked to Marilyn; then ghosted the article. He wrote it very much the way she’d told it to him, but he had to pad it out a little because he hadn’t had too much time with her. As a result, in one section of his article he had her saying that she didn’t like to get out in the sun and pick up a heavy tan because a heavy tan loused up her wardrobe by confusing the colors of her dresses and switching around what they did for her.“The article read good to me, and took it over to Marilyn for her corrections and approval. Most of the stuff was the routine thing about diet, but when she came to the part about ‘I don’t like suntan because it confuses the coloring of my wardrobe,’ she scratched it out. I asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’“‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Having a suntan doesn’t have anything to do with my wardrobe.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to say something, Marilyn. After all, the guy’s article is pretty short as it is.’ She thought for a minute; then wrote, ‘I do not suntan because I like to feel blonde all over.’ I saw her write that with her own hot little pencil.“The magazine which printed that story thought her addition so great that they picked it out and made it a subtitle. She’d managed to transpose an ordinary paragraph about wardrobe colors into a highly exciting, beautiful, sexy mental image. Some guys have said to me, ‘Why, that dumb little broad couldn’t have thought that up. You thought it up, Jones.’ I wish I could say, ‘Yeah, I did,’ but I didn’t. Feeling blonde all over is a state of mind,” he said musingly. “I should think it would be a wonderful state of mind if you’re a girl.“One reason why she’s such a good interview,” Flack Jones went on, “is that she uses her head during such sessions. She tries to say something that’s amusing and quotable, and she usually does. When I worked with Marilyn I made it a practice to introduce her to a writer and go away and leave her alone, on the grounds that a couple of grown people don’t need a press agent tugging at their sleeves while they get acquainted. So if her interviews have been any good, it’s her doing.”“One day she gave a tape interview and it was all strictly ad-lib,” he said. “I know, because I had a hard time setting it up. It was for a man who was doing one of those fifteen-minute radio interviews here in Hollywood, to be broadcast afterward across the country. We had a frantic time trying to get him the time with her, but finally he got his recorder plugged in, and the first question he pitched her was a curve. He wanted to know what she thought of the Stanislavsky school of dramatic art or whatever. Believe it or not, old Marilyn unloaded on him with a twelve-minute dissertation on Stanislavsky that rocked him back on his heels.”“Does she believe in the Stanislavsky method?” I asked.“She agreed with Stanislavsky on certain points,” Jones said. “And she disagreed on others, and she explained why. It was one of the most enlightening discussions on the subject I’ve ever heard. It came over the radio a couple of nights later, and everybody who listened said, ‘Oh, yeah? Some press agent wrote that interview for her.’ My answer to that was, ‘What press agent knows that much about Stanislavsky?’ I don’t.”In the course of my research, before interviewing Marilyn, I’d discovered that Billy Wilder agreed with Jones. “I think that she thinks up those funny things for herself,” he said. Wilder’s Austrian background gives his phrases an offbeat rhythm, but because of its very differentness, his way of talking picks up flavor and extra meaning.“I think also that she says those funny things without realizing that they’re so funny,” Wilder said. “One very funny thing she said involves the fact that she has great difficulties in remembering her lines. Tremendous difficulties. I’ve heard of one director who wrote her lines on a blackboard and kept that blackboard just out of camera range. The odd thing is that if she has a long scene for which she has to remember a lot of words, she’s fine once she gets past the second word. If she gets over that one little hump, there’s no trouble. Then, too, if you start a scene and say, ‘Action!’ and hers is the first line, it takes her ten or fifteen seconds to gather herself. Nothing happens during those fifteen seconds. It seems a very long time.”“How about an example of when she’s bogged down on a second word,” I asked.“For instance, if she had to say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Sherman,”’ Wilder told me, “she couldn’t get out the word ‘morning.’ She’d say, ‘Good …’ and stick. Once she got ‘morning’ out, she’d be good for two pages of dialogue. It’s just that sometimes she trips over mental stumbling blocks at the beginning of a scene.“Another director should be telling you this story, not me,” Wilder said. “This other director was directing her in a scene in a movie, and she couldn’t get the lines out. It was just muff, muff, muff, and take, take, take. Finally, after Take Thirty-two, he took her to one side, patted her on the head, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Marilyn, honey. It’ll be all right.’ She looked up into his face with those big wide eyes of hers and asked, ‘Worry about what?’ She seemed to have no idea that thirty-two takes is a lot of takes.”When I sat down to talk to Marilyn, I said, “I’ve tried to trace those famous remarks attributed to you and find out who originated them.”“They are mine,” Marilyn told me. “Take that Chanel Number Five one. Somebody was always asking me, ‘What do you sleep in, Marilyn? Do you sleep in P.J.’s? Do you sleep in a nightie? Do you sleep raw, Marilyn?’ It’s one of those questions which make you wonder how to answer them. Then I remembered that the truth is the easiest way out, so I said, ‘I sleep in Chanel Number Five,’ because I do. Or you take the columnist, Earl Wilson, when he asked me if I have a bedroom voice. I said, ‘I don’t talk in the bedroom, Earl.’ Then, thinking back over that remark, I thought maybe I ought to say something else to clarify it, so I added, ‘because I live alone.’”The phone rang in her apartment, and she took a call from one of the hand-picked few to whom she’d given her privately listed number. While she talked I thought back upon a thing Flack Jones had said to me thoughtfully, “I’m no psychiatrist or psychologist, but I think that Marilyn has a tremendous inferiority complex. I think she’s scared to death all the time. I know she needs and requires attention and that she needs and requires somebody to tell her she’s doing well. And she’s extremely grateful for a pat on the back.”“Name me a patter,” I said.“For example,” he said, “when we put her under contract for the second time, her best friend and encourager was the agent, Johnny Hyde, who was then with the William Morris Agency, although he subsequently died of a heart attack. Johnny was a little guy, but he was Marilyn’s good friend, and, in spite of his lack of size, I think that she had a father fixation on him.“I don’t want to get involved in the psychology of all this,” Flack Jones continued, “because it was a very complicated problem, of which I have only a layman’s view, but I honestly think that Marilyn’s the most complicated woman I’ve ever known. Her complexes are so complex that she has complexes about complexes. That, I think, is one reason why she’s always leaning on weird little people who attach themselves to her like remoras, and why she lets herself be guided by them. A remora is a sucker fish which attaches itself to a bigger fish and eats the dribblings which fall from the bigger fish’s mouth. After she became prominent, a lot of these little people latched onto Marilyn. They told her that Hollywood was a great, greedy ogre who was exploiting her and holding back her artistic progress.”I said that the way I’d heard it, those hangers-on seemed to come and go, and that her trail was strewn with those from whom she had detached herself. I’d been told that the routine was for her to go down one day to the corner for the mail or a bottle of milk and not come back; not even wave good-by.

“But she has complete confidence in these little odd balls, both men and women, who latch onto her, while they’re latched,” Jones said. “I’m sure their basic appeal to her has always been in telling her that somebody is taking advantage of her, and in some cases they’ve been right. This has nothing to do with your story, but it does have something to do with my observation that she’s frightened and insecure, and she’ll listen to anybody who can get her ear.”“Johnny Hyde was no remora,” I said.“Johnny was a switch on the usual pattern,” Jones agreed. “He was devoted to her. He could and did do things for her. I happened to know that Johnny wanted to marry her and Marilyn wouldn’t do it. She told me, ‘I like him very much, but I don’t love him enough to marry him.’ A lot of girls would have married him, for Johnny was not only attractive, he was wealthy, and when he died Marilyn would have inherited scads of money, but while you may not believe it, she’s never cared about money as money. It’s only a symbol to her.”“A symbol of what?” I asked.“It’s my guess that to her it’s a symbol of success. By the same token I think that people have talked so much to her about not getting what she ought to get that a lack of large quantities of it has also become a symbol of oppression in her mind. If I sound contradictory, that’s the way it is.”When Marilyn had completed her phone call, I put it up to her, “I guess you’ve heard it argued back and forth as to whether you are a complicated person or a very simple person, even a naive person,” I said. “Which do you think is right?”“I think I’m a mixture of simplicity and complexes,” she told me. “But I’m beginning to understand myself now. I can face myself more, you might say. I’ve spent most of my life running away from myself.”It didn’t sound very clear to me, but I pursued the subject further. “For example,” I asked, “do you have an inferiority complex? Are you beset by fears? Do you need someone to tell you that you’re doing well all the time?”“I don’t feel as hopeless as I did,” she said. “I don’t know why it is. I’ve read a little of Freud and it might have to do with what he said. I think he was on the right track.” I gave up. I never found out what portions of Freud she referred to or what “right track” he was on.“What happened in 1952, when the studio sent you to Atlantic City to be grand marshal of the annual beauty pageant?” I asked Marilyn instead.“Did you mind going?”She smiled. “It was all right with me,” she said. “At the time I wanted to come to New York anyhow. There was somebody I wanted to see here. This was why it was hard for me to be on time leaving New York for Atlantic City for that date. I missed the train and the studio chartered a plane for me, but it didn’t set the studio back as much as they let on. They could afford it.”Flack Jones had told me that story too. “They’d arranged a big reception for Marilyn at Atlantic City,” he said. “There was a band to meet her at the train, and the mayor was to be on hand. Marilyn and the flacks who were running interference for her were to arrive on a Pennsylvania Railroad train at a certain hour, but, as usual, Marilyn was late, and when they got to the Pennsylvania Station the train had pulled out. So there they were, in New York, with a band and the mayor waiting in Atlantic City. Charlie Einfeld, a Fox vice-president — and Charlie can operate mighty fast when he has to — got on the phone and chartered an air liner — the only one available for charter was a forty-six-seat job; it was an Eastern Air Lines plane as I recall it — and they all went screaming across town in a limousine headed for Idlewild.“The studio’s magazine man in New York, Marilyn and a flack from out here on the Coast boarded the plane and took off for Atlantic City,” Flack Jones said. “Bob and the Coast flack were so embarrassed at missing the train, and the plane was such a costly substitute that they were sweating like pigs. On this big air liner there was a steward aboard — they’d shanghaied a steward in a hurry from some place to serve coffee — but all of this didn’t bother Marilyn at all. She tucked herself into a seat back in the tail section, hummed softly; then fell fast asleep and slept all the way. The other two sat up front with the steward, drinking quarts of coffee because that was what he was being paid to serve. They drank an awful lot of coffee.”Flack Jones said that Marilyn and her outriders were met at the Atlantic City airport by a sheriff’s car and that they were only three minutes late for the reception for Marilyn on the boardwalk. There she was given an enormous bouquet of flowers, and she perched on the folded-down top of a convertible, to roll down the boardwalk with a press of people following her car.“She sat up there like Lindbergh riding down Broadway on his return from Paris,” Flack Jones said. “The people and the cops and the beauty-carnival press agents followed behind like slaves tied to her chariot wheels. That is, she managed to move a little every once in a while when the crowd could be persuaded to back away. Then Marilyn would pitch a rose at the crowd and it would set them off again, and there’d be another riot. This sort of thing went on — with variations — for several days. It was frantic.“But,” Flack Jones explained, “there was one publicity thing which broke which wasn’t intended to break. It was typical of the way things happen to Marilyn without anybody devising them. When each potential Miss America from a different part of the country lined up to register, a photograph of Marilyn greet- ing her was taken. Those pictures were serviced back to the local papers and eventually a shot of Miss Colorado with Marilyn wound up in a Denver paper; and a shot of Miss California and Marilyn in the Los Angeles and San Francisco papers, and so forth.”For a moment Flack Jones collected his thoughts in orderly array; then went on, “Pretty soon in came an Army public-information officer with four young ladies from the Pentagon. There was a WAF and a WAC and a lady Marine and a WAVE. The thought was that it would be nice to get a shot of Marilyn with ‘the four real Miss Americas’ who were serving their country, so they were lined up. It was to be just another of the routine, catalogue shots we’d taken all day long, but Marilyn was wearing a low-cut dress which showed quite a bit of cleavage — quite a bit of cleavage. That would have been all right, since the dress was designed for eye level, but one of the photographers climbed up on a chair to shoot the picture.”The way Marilyn described this scene to me was this: “I had met the girls from each state and had shaken hands with them,” she said. “Then this Army man got the idea of aiming his camera down my neck while I posed with the service girls. It wasn’t my idea for the photographer to get up on a chair.”“Nobody thought anything of it at the time,” Jones had told me, “and those around Marilyn went on with the business of their workaday world. In due course the United Press — among others — serviced that shot. Actually it was a pretty dull picture because, to the casual glance, it just showed five gals lined up looking at the camera.”Jones said that when the shot of the four service women and Marilyn went out across the country by wirephoto, editors took one look at it and dropped it into the nearest wastebasket because they had had much better art from Atlantic City.
“That night the Army PIO officer drifted back to the improvised press headquarters set up for the Miss America contest,” Flack Jones said. “He took one look and sent out a wire ordering that the picture be stopped.”“On what grounds?” I asked.“On grounds that that photograph showed too much meat and potatoes, and before he’d left the Pentagon he’d been told not to have any cheesecake shots taken in connection with the girls in his charge. Obviously what was meant by those instructions was that he shouldn’t have those service girls sitting on the boardwalk railings showing their legs or assuming other undignified poses. There was nothing in that PIO officer’s instructions which gave him the right to censor Marilyn’s garb, but he ordered that picture killed anyhow.”According to Jones, every editor who had junked that picture immediately reached down into his wastebasket, drew it out and gave it a big play. “In Los Angeles it ran seven columns,” he said, “and it got a featured position in the Herald Express and the New York Daily News. All the way across country it became a celebrated picture, and all because the Army had ‘killed’ it.”He was silent for a moment; then he said, “Those who were with her told me afterward that it had been a murderous day, as any day is when you’re with Marilyn on a junket,” he went on. “The demands on her and on those with her are simply unbelievable. But finally she hit the sack about midnight because she had to get up the next day for other activities. The rest of her crowd had turned in too, when they got a call from the U.P. in New York, asking them for a statement from Marilyn about ‘that picture.’”“‘What picture?’ our publicist-guardian asked, and it was then that they got the story. They hated to do it, but they rousted Marilyn out of bed. She thought it over for a while; then issued a statement apologizing for any possible reflection on the service girls, and making it plain that she hadn’t meant it that way. She ended with a genuine Monroeism. ‘I wasn’t aware of any objectionable décolletage on my part. I’d noticed people looking at me all day, but I thought they were looking at my grand marshal’s badge.’ This was widely quoted, and it had the effect of giving the whole thing a lighter touch. The point is this: a lot of things happen when Marilyn is around.” He shook his head. “Yes, sir,” he said. “A lot of things."“Another example of the impact she packs: when she went back to New York on the Seven Year Itch location,” Jones went on. “All of a sudden New York was a whistle stop, with the folks all down to see the daily train come in. When Marilyn reached LaGuardia, everything stopped out there. One columnist said that the Russians could have buzzed the field at five hundred feet and nobody would have looked up. There has seldom been such a heavy concentration of newsreel cameramen anywhere. From then on in, during the ten days of her stay, one excitement followed another. She was on the front page of the Herald Tribune, with art, five days running, which I’m told set some sort of a local record.“In the case of The Itch, there was a contractual restriction situation,” Flack Jones said. “The studio’s contract called for the picture’s release to be held up until after the Broadway run of the play. When Marilyn went back to New York for the location shots for Itch, the play version was still doing a fair business, but it was approaching the end of its long run. If you bought a seat, the house was only half full. Then Marilyn arrived in New York and shot off publicity sparks and suddenly The Itch had S.R.O. signs out again. The result was that it seemed it was never going to stop its stage run; so, after finishing the picture, Fox had to pay out an additional hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to the owners of the stage property for the privilege of releasing their movie.“Things reached a new high — and no joke intended,” Flack Jones went on, “when Billy Wilder shot the scene where her skirts were swept up around her shoulders by a draft from a subway ventilator grating. That really set the publicity afire again, and shortly after that The Itch location company blew town while they were ahead. The unit production manager had picked the Trans-Lux Theater on Lexington Avenue for the skirt-blowing scene. He’d been down there at two o’clock in the morning to case the spot; he’d reported happily, ‘The street was fully deserted,’ and he’d made a deal with the Trans-Lux people for getting the scene shot there because there was nobody on the street at that hour.“It seemed certain that Billy Wilder would have all the room in the world to work, and he had left word that nobody was to know what location he’d selected, because he didn’t want crowds. But word leaked out. It was on radio and TV and in the papers, so instead of secrecy you might almost say that the public was being urged to be at Lexington Avenue on a given night to Marilyn’s skirts blow. Instead of having a nice, quiet side street in which to work, Wilder had all the people you can pack on a street. Finally the cops roped off the sidewalk on the opposite side to restrain the public, and they erected a barricade close to the movie camera. But that wasn’t good enough, and they had to call out a whole bunch of special cops.”Flack Jones said that when Wilder was ready to shoot, there were 200 or 300 photographers, professional and amateur, swarming over the place. Then Marilyn made her entrance from inside the theater out onto the sidewalk, and when she appeared the hordes really got out of control and there was chaos. Finally Wilder announced that he’d enter into a gentleman’s agreement. If the press would retire behind the barricades, and if the real working photographers would help control the amateurs, he would shoot the scene of Marilyn and Tom Ewell standing over the subway grating; then he’d move the movie camera back and the amateur shutter hounds could pop away at Marilyn until they were satisfied.
“So the New York press took care of the amateurs and made them quit popping their flashbulbs,” Flack Jones said. “Wilder got the scene and the volunteer snapshooters got their pictures. Everybody was there. Winchell came over with DiMaggio, who showed a proper husbandly disapproval of the proceedings. I myself couldn’t see why Joe had any right to disapprove. After all, when he married the girl her figure was already highly publicized, and it seemed odd if he had suddenly decided that she should be seen only in Mother Hubbards.”I asked Marilyn herself if she thought that Joe had disapproved of her skirts blowing around her shoulders in that scene. I said I had heard his reaction described in two ways: that he had been furious and that he had taken it calmly.“One of those two is correct,” Marilyn said. “Maybe you can figure it out for yourself if you’ll give it a little thought.”
Something told me that, in her opinion, Joe had been very annoyed indeed. And while we were on the subject of Joe, it seemed a good time to find out about how things had been between them when they had been married, and the unbelievable scene which accompanied the breaking up of that marriage. “Not in his wildest dreams could a press agent imagine a series of events like that,” Flack Jones had told me.When I brought the subject up, Marilyn said, “For a man and a wife to live intimately together is not an easy thing at best. If it’s not just exactly right in every way it’s practically impossible, but I’m still optimistic.” She sat there being optimistic. Then she said, with feeling, “However, I think TV sets should be taken out of the bedroom.”“Did you and Joe have one in your bedroom?” I asked.“No comment,” she said emphatically. “But everything I say to you I speak from experience. You can make what you want of that.”She was quiet for a moment; then she said, “When I showed up in divorce court to get my divorce from Joe, there were mobs of people there asking me bunches of questions. And they asked, ‘Are you and Joe still friends?’ and I said, ‘Yes, but I still don’t know anything about baseball.’ And they all laughed. I don’t see what was so funny. I’d heard that he was a fine baseball player, but I’d never seen him play.”“As I said, the final scenes of All-American Boy loses Snow White were unbelievable,” Flack Jones told me. “Joe and Marilyn rented a house on Palm Drive, in Beverly Hills, and we had a unique situation there with the embattled ex-lovebirds both cooped in the same cage. Marilyn was living on the second floor and Joe was camping on the first floor. When Joe walked out of that first floor, it was like the heart-tearing business of a pitcher taking the long walk from the mound to the dugout after being jerked from the game in a World Series.”

Part III: Blonde, Incorporated
_{^{By Pete Martin}}

Saturday Evening Post
May 19th, 1956

I put this question to my friend and confidant, whom I call Flack Jones: “How did Joe DiMaggio happen to come into Marilyn’s life?” Jones is one of my principal sources of Marilyn Monroe information. As a skilled and articulate employee of the publicity department of the 20th Century-Fox motion-picture studio, he had worked closely with Marilyn for several years before her highly publicized departure from Hollywood to live in New York and “learn to be an actress.”“Marilyn met him in a café one night on a blind double date,” Jones said. “DiMaggio had heard about her and wanted to meet her. They met through friends and had dinner. Everything went just fine and dandy, until ultimately their friendship ripened into a romance which led to their marriage.“But to complicate things, late in 1952 she decided to mix her first holdout with her romance,” Flack Jones said. Then he corrected himself, “It must have been ’53, for she had made River of No Return and How to Marry a Millionaire. Anyhow, she decided — or else her confidential advisers had persuaded her — that she was worth more money. But instead of stalking into Darryl Zanuck’s office, slapping her next script down and saying, ‘I won’t do it!’ she simply hid out. She sneaked down alleys, didn’t answer her phone and couldn’t be reached by anybody.“This was before she ran off and married Joe DiMaggio, and the studio was taking a firm tone with her — a very firm tone. But when the romance reached full flower, the studio had to do a fast switch,” Jones said. “Here we were, issuing communiqués about this ‘silly and stubborn girl who was ill-advised enough not to come back and take this important part’ in whatever the picture was — Pink Tights, I think — when all of a sudden she ups and marries Joe, the All-American Boy. After that, if we kept on beefing about her absence, the studio would be the big bully in the plot so far as the public was concerned.“Then, to add to the studio’s confusion, the pair went off to Korea to entertain the troops. How are you going to snap a blacksnake whip at a girl’s calves for doing a thing like that? Snow White has married Prince Charming and they’ve gone off to Korea together to entertain the servicemen. So the studio started talking sweet in a hurry.“However, the sharp-eyed and cynical could tell that that marriage was in danger as early as their arrival in the Orient,” Flack Jones went on. “The press interviewed Marilyn in Tokyo, and a story was radioed back which said that Marilyn had talked about this and about that, and — oh yes — there was a man in the far corner of the room whose name was Joe DiMaggio. It didn’t take much of a genius to figure that situation was the beginning of the end. Then, after an interval, the lovebirds flew back to Beverly Hills.”“Did the studio start having its troubles making her report for work before she married DiMaggio or after she married him?” I asked.
“We were having trouble before,” Flack Jones told me.“When was the first fly in the Monroe-Fox ointment?” I asked.“I don’t know the exact time,” he said. “But it was not peculiar to Monroe alone. It’s peculiar to life in Hollywood. It almost invariably happens when money and success make an impact on a male or female ego. We expect it to set in when the fan mail of the party in question zooms up to over two thousand a week. It’s almost as much of a sure thing as the thermostat in your house turning on the heat. Two thousand fan letters a week is when we begin to say. ‘We’ll be having troubles with this doll.”“What form does it usually take?” I asked. “‘I want more dough,’ or ‘I don’t like my contract.’ or ‘My script stinks’?”“A better way to answer your question is to say that when they realize they’ve got weight to throw around, they start throwing it,” Flack Jones said. “They don’t do those things you mentioned right away; they do less serious things first. They complain about wardrobe, or, if it’s a musical, they complain about the songs or the dances, or, if it’s a plain comedy or a straight drama, they gripe about how a certain scene is being directed. Whatever’s handy, that’s what they complain about. It makes no sense, but it’s a means of saying that they have some weight now, and they want you to know it.”“What’s the next move?” I asked.Flack Jones rubbed his fingers over his scalp thoughtfully and said, “Ordinarily it’s a preliminary test of strength, like bracing the front office for more dough for your dramatic coach.“When she found out that she had that much weight, she decided to go out for herself, and she did. Some people think that she has always been a naive, flibbertigibbet girl moving through life. This is utter nonsense. She wasn’t that way when she first was under contract; she was a grown person then. She kept her dates, she was always on time.”From now on,” Jones said, “what I say is merely my own opinion, but I think that it was then that she discovered that there are people in Hollywood who respect other people who kick their teeth in. That’s not just Hollywood for you. Most people do.”“Let’s cut to the split-up between Joe and Marilyn,” I said. “As I recall it, first there were rumors of strife, then things reached an impasse.”
“Joe and Marilyn had a rented house on Palm Drive, in Beverly Hills,” Jones said. “We had a unique situation there with the embattled ex-lovebirds both cooped in the same cage. Marilyn was living on the second floor and Joe was camping on the first floor. Then a famous attorney, Jerry Giesler, was brought into the act for Marilyn, although why they had to employ such a great lawyer to handle a simple divorce case I don’t know. The public was all worked up, the press was, too, and they’re circling the house like Indians loping around a wagon tram, waiting for somebody to poke a head out. The next move was Giesler’s announcement that came Wednesday, at eleven o’clock, Marilyn would hold a press conference in his office.“In the Fox publicity department,” Jones said, “we concluded that if you call a press conference in a lawyer’s office, it presupposes an obligation to say something, and what could Snow White say when she was breaking up with Prince Charming, or Cinderella say when she was splitting from the All-American Boy? Any press conference would only bring more characters out to chase Marilyn from her house to Giesler’s office. And once they got there, if anybody issued one of those ‘They’re just a young couple who couldn’t make a go of it’ statements, it would only irritate everybody.“So the studio issued a statement of its own in advance. We said that Marilyn wasn’t going to hold any press conference, but she’d be leaving for work at ten o’clock from her house, to fulfill her commitment on Seven Year Itch, based on the Broadway play of the same name and costarring Tom Ewell, in Cinemascope. Once we’d got in that plug, we said that while we didn’t promise an interview, the boys would get some pictures. So forty or fifty of the press congregated. In addition, there were several hundred volunteer reporters and photographers in the trees and trampling the lawn.“Then an unbelievable thing happened,” Flack Jones said. He grinned when he thought of it. “They were all there to get a picture of Marilyn going to work, because it would be the first picture since her announcement that she wanted a divorce, and all at once, in front of the house a great, big, beautiful automobile pulled up. In it was a friend of Joe’s from San Francisco. As I’ve said, Joe’s been in that house for three days on the first floor, with Marilyn on the second. There was a back alley, and a rejected husband could have snuck out of that back alley and disappeared if he’d wanted to. But Joe faced up to his responsibilities and took them like a man. So what do the press and newsreels get? A bonus! Out of the front door comes Joe, grim-lipped, walking the last long mile, with his pal carrying his suitcase.“The press stopped him on the lawn, but Joe had no comment to make. They got pictures of him as he climbed into the car slowly, and one guy asked, ‘Where you going, Joe?’“‘I’m going home,’ Joe said.“‘We thought this was your home, Joe,’ chirped the press like a Greek chorus.“San Francisco has always been my home,’ Joe said. He stood there waving farewell, then he drove away.”Looking at Flack Jones, I could see that he was still marveling at a scene which no press agent would have thought of inventing in his wildest dreams. He said, “I’ve always admired Joe for that. A lot of guys would have sneaked out the back way and gone to San Francisco, avoiding that encounter in the front yard. Not old Joe.“About ten minutes later, Marilyn came down the stairs, sobbing, on Giesler’s arm. She was all broken up. Everybody was shoving and pushing. A lady columnist kicked the crime reporter for the Los Angeles Mirror in the shins. He turned on her and asked, ‘Who do you think you’re kicking?’ and she said, ‘I’ll kick you in the pants if you don’t get out of my way.’ All in all, there was quite a hubbub. The newsreel guys were grinding away, and somebody asked, ‘How about Joe, Marilyn?’ and Marilyn said, between sobs, ‘1 can’t talk! I can’t!’ And she got in a car and drove off.”Later, when I talked to Marilyn in New York, I guided our conversation around to a story written by Aline Mosby, of the United Press. The story was about how Marilyn had told her that she had bought Joe a king-size, eight-foot bed because she didn’t approve of separate bedrooms. “People say it’s chic to have separate bedrooms,” Marilyn told me. “That way a man can have a place for his fishing equipment and guns as well as sleeping, and a woman can have a fluffy, ruffly place with rows and rows of perfume bottles. The way I feel, they ought to share the same bedroom. With a separate-bedroom deal, if you happen to think of something you want to say, it means you have to go traipsing down the hall, and you may be tired. For that matter, you may forget what you started out to say. Besides, separate bedrooms are lonely. I think that people need human warmth even when they’re asleep and unconscious.”There were other things I wanted to ask her. “I’ve heard that in Asphalt Jungle you displayed a highly individual way of walking that called attention to you and made you stand out. I’ve heard a lot of people try to describe the way you walk, and some of those descriptions are pretty lurid. How do you describe it?”She leaned forward, placed her elbows on a table and cupped her chin in her palms. She was very effective that way. “I’ve never deliberately done anything about the way I walk,” she said. “People say I walk all wiggly and wobbly, but I don’t know what they mean. I just walk. I’ve never wiggled deliberately in my life, but all my life I’ve had trouble with people who say I do. In high school the other girls asked me, ‘Why do you walk down the hall that way?’ I guess the boys must have been watching me and it made the other girls jealous or something, but I said, ‘I learned to walk when I was ten months old, and I’ve been walking this way ever since.’”In California I had asked Flack Jones, “What would you say Marilyn does best? Is her walk her greatest asset?” Jones regarded the feathery top of a slender, swaying palm tree, as if searching for an answer. “She does two things beautifully,” he said. “She walks and she stands. Also, as I’ve already told you she has wit enough to buy her clothes one or two sizes too small, and with a chassis like hers, this infuriates women and intrigues guys. From a woman’s standpoint, there is no subtlety in such gowns. I remember when Marilyn came to a party. In a number which fitted her like a thin banana peel and the other women there thought it outrageous. Comments were made about that gown in a gossip column.”“How did Marilyn react to that?” I asked.“Marilyn asked me, ‘What should I have done?”’ Jones said. “I said, ‘Look, honey, the men loved it. Pay no attention to what the gossip-column cat said. You’re a man’s woman, so dress for men, not for other women. Any time you quit dressing for men you’re out of business.’”I told Jones that I’d been trying to find a phrase which would describe her walk, but that I hadn’t been able to. “I can’t help you there,” Jones said. “I’ve heard the words ‘quivering’ and ‘trembling’ used in connection with her walk, but I don’t know a description that really does the job. But when she walks across a screen a couple or three times, she attracts attention — a whole lot. That much I know.“The public laughed at her walk in Niagara,” Jones told me, “but Marilyn was only doing what the director wanted her to. It wasn’t up to her to cut the picture or to tell the director not to point the camera at her during a long walk across cobblestones. I challenge any girl to walkdown a cobblestoned street in high heels without wiggling at least once.”After his analysis of Marilyn as a pedestrian, Flack Jones picked up our conversational threads where we’d broken them off with her parting from Joe DiMaggio, and tied them together again. “After that she came back and finished Seven Year Itch at Fox,” he said. “Her agent, Charlie Feldman, flung a snazzy party for her at Romanoff’s, and she went to New York. The next thing anybody knew, she announced that, with a New York photographer named Milton Greene, she had formed Marilyn Monroe, Inc. She’s the president of the corporation; Greene’s vice-president. But I have reason to think that she’d done that before she left Hollywood, for a hairdresser at the studio told me that one day when he had Marilyn in front of his mirror, she had said, ‘Gee, I feel good. I’m incorporated.’”I put it to Jones, “When she left the studio that last time, was it a clean, sharp break or did her relations with the studio gradually become fuzzy and vague?”“After Itch,” Flack Jones said, “she simply didn’t show up again. I don’t know whether you’d call that sharp or vague.”I said, when I finally met Marilyn, “The way I get it, you invented a whole new system of holding out; you just disappeared.”“I disappeared because if people won’t listen to you, there’s no point in talking to people,” Marilyn told me. “You’re just banging your head against a wall. If you can’t do what they want you to do, the thing is to leave. I never got a chance to learn anything in Hollywood. They worked me too fast. They rushed me from one picture into another.“I know who started all of those stories which were sent out about me after I left Hollywood the last time,” she added. One paper had an editorial about me. It said: ‘Marilyn Monroe is a very stupid girl to give up all the wonderful things the movie industry has done for her and go to New York to learn how to act.’ Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the idea. That editorial was supposed to scare me, but it didn’t, and when I read it and I realized that it wasn’t frightening me, I felt strong. That’s why I know I’m stronger than I was.”She thought for a while; then she said, “I’m for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is, the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them an individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It’s tragic.”Going back to a straight question-and-answer routine, I said, “You’re habitually late for appointments. What are the psychological reasons for your lateness?’“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never come to any conclusion. If I knew, I’d get over it.”I said that I’d heard she was so nervous before appointments that she was sometimes became nauseated. I asked if this was caused by a feeling of pressure — of people pushing and hauling and pulling at her.

“You’d throw up, too, in some situations,” she told me. “I flew into New York at eight o’clock one morning and there were photographers waiting to take pictures of me at the airport, and all that morning I had a series of interviews with newspaper people. Those interviews came twenty minutes or a half hour apart. Then I was rushed to a luncheon with a group of magazine people, and right after luncheon I tore over to the Daily News Building. I don’t think anybody can take that routine very long. Another complication is that I have a certain stupid sincerity. I don’t want to tell everybody who interviews me the same thing. I want them all to have something new, different, exclusive. When I worry about that, I start to get sick at my stomach.”I asked her if writers had ever prepared material for her to use in an “interview” or in a “by-line story.”“I refuse to let articles appear in movie magazines signed ‘By Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I might never see that article and it might be O.K.’d by somebody in the studio. This is wrong, because when I was a little girl I read signed stories in fan magazines and I believed every word of them. Then I tried to model my life after the lives of the stars I read about. If I’m going to have that kind of influence, I want to be sure it’s because of something I’ve actually said or written.”“I’ve been told that you devote hours to selecting and editing pinup pictures of yourself,” I said.“I haven’t so far,” she told me. “But maybe it’s time I did. At least I’d like to have my pictures not look any worse than I do. I’d like them to resemble me a little bit. With some photographers, all they ask is that a picture doesn’t look blurred, as if you’ve moved while they were taking it. If it’s not blurry they print it.”“Somewhere,” I said, “I’ve read that at least half of the photographs taken of you are killed because they are too revealing.”“That’s the Johnston Office for you,” she sighed. “They’re very small about stuff like that, and what the Johnston Office passes, the studio ruins with retouching. After one sitting of thirty poses, twenty-eight of those poses were killed. The Johnston Office spends a lot of time worrying about whether a girl has cleavage or not. They ought to worry if she doesn’t have any. That really would make people emotionally disturbed. I don’t know what their reasoning is,” she went on with a puzzled air. “They certainly can’t expect girls to look like boys.”“I’ve read that your measurements are 37-23-34,” I told her.“If you’re talking about my lower hips, they’re thirty-seven inches,” she said. “If you’re talking about my upper hips, they’re thirty-four.” Eying her, I tried to decide where “upper” hip left off and “lower” began. I gave up.“Nowadays,” she said, “there’s a vogue for women with twenty-twenty-twenty figures. Models in the high-style magazines stick out their hipbones and nothing else. But I’m a woman, and the longer I am one the more I enjoy it. And since I have to be a woman, I’m glad I’m me. I’ve been asked, ‘Do you mind living in a man’s world?’ I answer, ‘Not as long as I can be a woman in it.’”“There’s another thing I want to ask you,” I said. “It’s about something you said to a man in the Fox Studio legal department. You said, ‘I don’t care about money. I just want to be wonderful.’ He didn’t know what you meant by that.”“I meant that I want to be a real actress instead of a superficial one,” Marilyn herself told me. “For the first time I’m learning to use myself fully as an actress. I want to add something to what I had before. I want to be in the kind of pictures where I can develop, not just wear tights. Some people thought that they were getting their money’s worth when they saw me in The Seven Year Itch, but in future I want people to get even more for their money when they see me. Only today a taxi driver said to me, ‘Why did they ever put you in that little stinker, River of No Return?’“I thought it was a good question,” Marilyn told me. “I’m with that taxi driver. He’s my boy. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t accept River of No Return today. I think that I deserve a better deal than a Z cowboy movie, in which the acting finishes third to the scenery and CinemaScope. The studio was CinemaScope-conscious then, and that meant that it pushed the scenery instead of actors and actresses.” Without missing a beat, she switched gears into another subject. “One of the things about leaving Hollywood and coming to New York and attending the Actors’ Studio was that I felt that I could be more myself,” she said. “After all, if I can’t be myself, who can I be?” I shook my head. She had me puzzled too.Nunnally Johnson had directed How to Marry a Millionaire, costarring Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn. “Do her pictures make a lot of money?” I asked him in Hollywood.“Millionaire earned a tremendous amount,” Nunnally told me.“What about The Seven Year Itch?” I asked.“Variety reports it as the top Fox grosser for 1955,” he said. “But speaking for myself, I can’t say that I saw the ‘new Marilyn Monroe’ in The Seven Year Itch that some others did. I thought that essentially it was the same performance, just longer. Still, this could scarcely be a cause for worry for her; God had given her that equipment and it was still magnificent. She was still a phenomenon.”“Maybe she’ll grow into a young Mae West and make people laugh at sex,” I suggested.Johnson agreed that it might be a good thing if she could do that. “I believe that the first time anybody genuinely liked Marilyn for herself, in a picture, was in How to Marry a Millionaire,” he said. “She herself diagnosed the reason for that very shrewdly, I think. She said that this was the only picture she’d been in in which she had a measure of modesty. Not physical modesty, but modesty about her own attractiveness. In Millionaire she was nearsighted; she didn’t think men would look at her twice, because she wore glasses; she blundered into walls and stumbled into things and she was most disarming. In the course of the plot she married an astigmatic; so there they were, a couple of astigmatic lovers. In her other pictures they’ve cast her as a somewhat arrogant sex trap, but when Millionaire was released, I heard people say, ‘Why, I really liked her!’ in surprised tones.”These comments of Johnson’s were made before Marilyn was enlightened by exposure to the Actors’ Studio. Upon her return from New York to work at Fox in Bus Stop, Johnson did see a “new Marilyn Monroe.”“In contrast to the old Marilyn, in her present incarnation she is a liberated soul, happy, co-operative, friendly, relaxed,” he wrote me. “Actually, it is as if she had undergone a psychoanalysis so successful that the analyst himself was flabbergasted. Now she’s different; her behavior and her manner as a member of the social order are O.K. As for her acting, that remains to be seen.”I told Marilyn that I had read an Associated Press story which estimated that her newest contract — scheduled to run for seven years — would bring her more than $8,000,000. When I mentioned this, she said, “Eight million dollars is a lot. However, no matter what they tell you, it’s not for money alone that I’m going back to Hollywood. I am free to make as many pictures for my own company as I do for Fox, and I can do TV and stage shows.”Among others I’d talked to about Marilyn, before discussing her with herself, was Milton H. Greene, the New York photographer who’d become vice president of Marilyn Monroe Productions.“I don’t know where they got that figure eight million, either,” Greene had told me. “Not from me or Marilyn.” He went on, “I don’t ask you what you make, do I? Everybody wants an exclusive release or an exclusive interview with Marilyn on the subject, and I want everybody to be happy, but things like that are confidential.”Like Marilyn, Greene asked me not to use a tape-recording machine when interviewing him. “Makes me stutter,” he said. So, carefully, laboriously, and word for word, I wrote down everything he said to me. While doing it, I noticed no signs of stuttering. Evidently a notebook and pencils didn’t bother him. Greene had also asked me to put the initial “H” in his name, making it Milton H. Greene. “Would you mind very much?” he said. “There’re other Milton Greenes who are also in the photography business.”He had met Marilyn when he had gone to California to do a series of photographs of Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons and Marilyn Monroe. It hadn’t been his idea to do anything too sexy. “After all,” he said, “in a national magazine you can only expose so much of a girl, even if the girl is willing. Marilyn turned out to be different from what I thought she’d be. More sensitive.”Greene had gone to California on a second assignment, and had begun to think of doing a book of photographs of Marilyn. “The book isn’t out yet,” he said, “but I’ll show you a few of the pictures I made for it. It will be Marilyn in different moods and settings, as if she were playing different parts.” He went to a shelf and brought back a box of aluminum squares. Each square contained a color transparency. “Here’s one where she looks as if she’s in England,” he said. “As you can see, she’s wearing an Edwardian hat. Here’s one where she looks like Bernadette in The Song of Bernadette.” I looked at that one for a long time. It was, I thought, a novel idea.Milton H. Greene watched me write down what he’d said in my notebook; then he went off on a slight tangent. “One day I plan to do a cookbook for dogs,” he said. “It would contain dog-dish recipes. I think it would be amusing.” I brought him back from his dog cookbook project to his association with Marilyn. “In Hollywood,” he said, “we got to talking. This was after she’d made Seven Year Itch and after her divorce from Joe, and I told her that I hoped to go into television and theatrical production. I found that all Marilyn wants is to make just enough money to be able to afford to make good pictures. That’s the way I feel about it, too, so Marilyn Monroe Productions hopes to buy a good story property; then approach the right studio about making and distributing the picture.”He stood up, walked around his office and came back to his chair. “If Marilyn had been only interested in making money,” he said, “she wouldn’t have been interested in me.”When I asked Marilyn to tell me about her association with the Actors’ Studio, she said that she not only attended classes there, but had also had private lessons from Lee Strasberg and his wife, who are the mainsprings of the project.Greene told me, “Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, Julie Harris and Montgomery Clift all studied under the Strasbergs. Marilyn observes, studies and watches. She listens to lectures. Occasionally she is allowed to take part.”The Actors’ Studio lets interested people like Marilyn sit in on an informal, guest basis. She is not an officially enrolled student member of the Actors’ Studio, because you are not admitted there on that basis unless you have contributed something notable on the stage in a performance or have passed a series of exacting auditions. Just wanting to be in isn’t enough. This is very smart of the Strasbergs, because it eliminates all those who are without talent; otherwise the studio would be full of women all seven feet tall and all trying to be actresses.I said to Marilyn that I’d heard she’d spent some time with Terence Rattigan, the British playwright, discussing the screenplay he was adapting for her from his London stage success, The Sleeping Prince, a vehicle in which Sir Laurence Olivier had played the prince. Sir Laurence had also agreed to play the same role opposite Marilyn and also to direct the film. “I had a bad cold the evening I spent with Mr. Rattigan, and he said I sounded like Tallulah Bankhead,” Marilyn told me proudly. Then she added thoughtfully, “Mr. Rattigan is young, but not too young.”I asked her what she meant. She smiled and said, “I guess you want me to say over twelve and not quite ninety. I don’t know how old Mr. Rattigan is. I’d say he’s kind of ageless.”I asked her to give me a hint of the story line followed by The Sleeping Prince. “I’m an American chorus girl in London, in it,” she said, “and the regent of a foreign country notices me and asks me to a reception at his country’s legation. I wriggle into my only formal and go, only it turns out it’s not a large gathering at all. In fact, it’s the same stale bit that’s been tried out on girls for the last three thousand years: dinner for two, candles, wine and soft music, when she’s expecting other guests. The next thing I know, I’ve had too much champagne and I’ve passed out. I won’t tell you any more. You ought to be willing to spend money to find out what happens next.“The truth is,” she said, “the plot is about a man who’s been asleep — at least his emotional something or other has been asleep — but little by little a relationship builds up between him and this American chorus girl, and he begins to stir in his sleep, as you might say. He’s a married man, but that doesn’t complicate things because he’s sophisticated about the whole deal. Terence Rattigan describes it as ‘an occasional fairy tale or a comedy with serious overtones.’”Weeks before, when I’d talked to Billy Wilder about Marilyn, I’d said to him, “I should think it would take a great deal of mature mental and moral strength to cope with becoming an enormous success overnight. It must be unsettling to suddenly become a sex symbol known all over the world.”Wilder replied, “It’s my opinion that she’s basically a good girl, but what’s happened to her is enough to drive almost anybody slightly daffy, even someone who is armored with poise and calmness by his background and bringing up. You take a girl like Marilyn, who’s never really had a chance to learn, who’s never really had a chance to live, and suddenly confront her with a Frankenstein’s monster of herself built of fame and publicity and notoriety, and naturally she’s a little mixed up and made giddy by it all. However, I’d like to go on record with this: I worked with her in Seven Year Itch and I had a good time with her. She was seldom on time, but it wasn’t because she overslept. It was because she had to force herself to come to the studio. She’s emotionally upset all the time; she’s scared and unsure of herself — so much so that when I worked with her I found myself wishing that I were a psychoanalyst and she were my patient. It might be that I couldn’t have helped her, but she would have looked lovely on a couch.”“You mean you didn’t get annoyed when she was late?” I asked.“I understood the reasons for it,” Wilder told me. “There was no use getting annoyed. Even at the beginning, when I discovered that I had let myself in for a certain amount of trouble, I found myself liking her. At no time did I find her malicious, mean, capricious or anything but conscientious. There are certain urges and drives in her which make her different, but, as a director, I think it worth combating those things and living with them in order to work with her.”I found myself hoping that Josh Logan, who will direct her in her next picture, the filmed version of Bus Stop, and Buddy Adler, the producer who bought that play for Fox, would feel the same way about her Wilder feels. That’s what she does to you. In spite of her spells of procrastination carried to fantastic lengths, in spite of her verbal convolutions, you wind up liking her.By “her” I mean, of course, all of the various Marilyn Monroes — and there are several of them. There is the sexpot Marilyn Monroe; she’s the one who tries so hard to live up to the legend of her sexiness that even her own stomach sometimes can’t take it. Then there’s the frightened Marilyn Monroe, product of a broken home and a battered childhood — a girl named Mortenson who still can’t believe that she’s that girl on the screen they’re making all the fuss about. And last of all there is “The New Marilyn Monroe” — the one who is supposed to have emerged from the Actors’ Studio as a composed and studied performer, “having achieved growth” and “developed more.”

Somehow, as I neared the end of my interview, I found myself wondering if people would accept her as the new and different Marilyn Monroe she thinks she is. I had heard one man say, “Even if you hung Ethel Barrymore’s and Helen Hayes’ talent on Marilyn’s beautiful body, people wouldn’t take her acting seriously.”To my surprise, I realized that I was dreading the possibility that when she turned on her new brand of acting, audiences might laugh at her, as they laughed at Zasu Pitts when she went in for “heavy drahma” after a lifetime as a comedienne.“It doesn’t scare me,” Marilyn told me bravely, when I mentioned my fears. “If I have the same things I had before I started to go to the Actors’ Studio and I’ve added more — well, how can I lose?”Whether she has really “added more” or not, I don’t know. But, as she herself points out, she does — emphatically — still have the same things she had before. My guess is that they’re still negotiable at the box office.

Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being Famous
_{^{By Richard Meryman}}

LIFE Magazine
August 3rd, 1962

Ever since she was fired from Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe has kept an almost disdainful silence. As far as her troubles with 20th Century-Fox were concerned, she simply said she had been too sick to work—not willfully tardy and truant as the producer charged. While 20th Century and her lawyers were negotiating for her to resume work on the movie, Marilyn was thinking about broader aspects of her career—about the rewards and burdens of fame bestowed on her by fans who paid $200 million to see her films, about drives that impel her, about echoes in her present life of her childhood in foster homes. She thought about these out loud in a rare and candid series of conversations with Life Associate Editor Richard Meryman. As a camera caught the warmth and gusto of her personality, Marilyn’s words revealed her own private view of Marilyn Monroe.Sometimes wearing a scarf and a polo coat and no make-up and with a certain attitude of walking, I go shopping-or just looking at people living. But then you know, there will be a few teenagers who are kind of sharp and they’ll say, “Hey, just a minute-you know who I think that is?” And then they’ll start tailing me. And I don’t mind. I realize people want to see if you’re real. The teenagers, the little kids, their faces light up-they say “gee” and they can’t wait to tell their friends. And old people come up and say, “Wait till I tell my wife.” You’ve changed their whole day.In the morning, the garbage men that go by 57th Street when I come out the door say, “Marilyn, hi! How do you feel this morning?” To me it’s an honor, and I love them for it. The workingmen-I’ll go by and they’ll whistle. At first they whistle because they think, oh, its a girl, she’s got blond hair and she’s not out of shape, and then they say, “Gosh, it’s Marilyn Monroe!” And that has its-you know, those are the times it’s nice, people knowing who you are and all of that, feeling that you’ve meant something to them.I don’t know quite why, but somehow I feel they know that I mean what I do–both when I’m acting on the screen or when if I see them in person and greet them-that I really always do mean hello and how are you? In their fantasies they feel-Gee, it can happen to me!But when you’re famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she-who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature-and it won’t hurt your feelings-like it’s happening to your clothing. One time here I am looking for a home to buy and I stopped at this place. A man came out and was very pleasant, very cheerful, and said, “Oh, just a moment, I want my wife to meet you.” Well she came out and said, “Will you please get off the premises?”You’re always running into people’s unconscious. Let’s take some actors-or directors. Usually they don’t say it to me, they say it to the newspapers because that’s a bigger play. You know, if they’re only insulting me to my face that doesn’t make a big enough play because all I have to do i say, “See you around, like never.” But if it’s the newspapers, it’s coast to coast and on around the world. I don’t understand why people aren’t a little more generous with each other. I don’t like to say this, but I’m afraid there is a lot of envy in this business. The only thing I can do is I stop and think, “I’m all right but I’m not so sure about them!”For instance, you’ve read there was some actor that once said about me that kissing me was like kissing Hitler. Well, I think that’s his problem. If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has these kind of feelings towards me, then my fantasy can come into play, In other words, out with him, in my fantasy. He was never there.But one thing about fame is the bigger the people are or the simpler the people are, the more they are not awed by you! They don’t feel they have to be offensive, they don’t feel they have to insult you. You can meet Carl Sandburg and he is so pleased to meet you. He wants to know about you and you want to know about him, Not in any way has he ever let me down.Or else you can meet working people who want to know what is it like. You try to explain to them. I don’t like to disillusion them and tell them it’s sometimes nearly impossible. They kind of look toward you for something that’s away from their everyday life, I guess you call that entertainment, a world to escape into, a fantasy.Sometimes it makes you a little bit sad because you’d like to meet somebody kind of on face value. It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have. Including, well, one corporation in particular which shall be nameless. If I’m sounding picked on or something, I think I am. I’ll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, oooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things-they talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it’s disappointing. These are the ones you aren’t interested in seeing every day of your life.Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table-like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.When I was 5-I think that’s when I started wanting to be an actress–I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim-but I loved to play house and it was like you could make your own boundaries. It goes beyond house-you could make your own situations and you could pretend an even if the other kids were a little slow on the imagining part you could say, “Hey, what about if you were such and such and I were such and such-wouldn’t that be fun?” And they’d say, “Well, that will be a horse and this will be–” it was play, playfulness. When I heard that was acting, I said that’s what I want to be–you can play. But then you grow up and find out about playing, they make playing very difficult for you.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. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened-and there was no popcorn either.When I was 11 the whole world, which was always closed to me–I just felt like I was on the outside of the world–suddeny, everything opened up. Even the girls paid a little attention to me just because they thought, “Hmmm, she’s to be dealt with!” And I had this long walk to school-2½ to school, 2½ miles back-it was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn–you know, workers driving to work, you know, and I’d wave back. The world became friendly.All the newspaper boys when they delivered the paper would come around to where I lived, and I used to hang from a limb of a tree, and I had sort of a sweat-shirt on-I didn’t realize the value of a a sweatshirt in those days-and then I was sort of beginning to catch on, but I didn’t quite get it because I couldn’t reall afford sweaters. But here they’d come with their bicycles, you know, and I’d get these free papers and the family liked that, and they’d all pull their bicycles up and around the tree and then I’d be hanging, looking kind of like a monkey, I guess. I was a little shy to come down. I did get down to the curb, kinda kicking the curb and kicking the leaves and talking, but mostly listening.And sometimes, the families used to worry because I used to laugh so loud and so gay; I guess they felt it was hysterical. It was just this sudden freedom because I would ask the boys, “Can I ride your bike now?” And they’d say, “Sure.” Then I’d go zooming, laughing in the wind, riding down the block, laughing, and they’d all stand around and wait till I came back, but I loved the wind. It caressed me.But it was kind of a double-edged thing. I did find, too, when the world opened up, that people took a lot for granted, like not only could they be friendly, but they could get suddenly overly friendly and expect an awful lot for very little.When I was older, I used to go to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and try to fit my foot in the prints in the cement there. And I’d say, “Oh, oh, my foot’s too big I guess, that’s out.” I did have a funny feeling later when I finally put my foot down into that wet cement. I sure knew what it really meant to me--anything’s possible, almost.It was the creative part that kept me going-trying to be an actress. I enjoy acting when you really hit it right. And I guess I’ve always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife. Well, also, I had to eat. I was never kept, to be blunt about it. I always kept myself. I have always had a pride in the fact that I was on my own. And Los Angeles was my home, to, so when they said, “Go home!” I said, “I am home.”The time when I sort of began to think I was famous I was driving somebody to the airport and as I came back there was this movie house and I saw my name in lights. I pulled the car up at a distance down the street--it was too much to take up close, you know–all of a sudden. And I said, “God, somebody’s made a mistake.” But there it was, in lights. And I sat there and said, “So that’s the way it looks,” and it was all very strange to me, and yet at the studio they had said, “Remember you‘re not a star.” Yet there it is up in lights.I really got the idea I must be a star, or something, from the newspapermen–I’m saying men, not the women–who would interview me and they would be warm and friendly. By the way, that part of the press, you know, the men of the press, unless they have their own personal quirks against me, they were always very warm and friendly an they’d they, “You know, you’re the only star,” and I’d say, “star?” and they’d look at me as if I were nuts. I think they ,in their own kind of way, made me realize I was famous.I remember when I got the part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane Russell–she was the brunette in it and I was the blonde–she got $200,000 for it and I got my $500 a week, but that to me was, you know, considerable. She, by the way, was quite wonderful to me. The only thing was I couldn’t get a dressing room. I said, finally–I really got to this kind of level–I said, “Look, after all, I am the blonde and it is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!” Because still they always kept saying, “Remember, you’re not a star.” I said, “Well, whatever I am, I am the blonde!”And I want to say that the people–if i am a star–the people made me a star–no studio, no person, but the people did. There was a reaction that came to the studio, the fan mail, or when I went to a premiere, or the exhibitors wanted to meet me. I didn’t know why. When they all rushed torward me I looked behind me to see who was there and I said, “My heavens!” I was scared to death. I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody. I don’t know who or what–maybe myself.I always felt towards the slightest scene–even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, “Hi,” that the people ought to get their money’s worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me. I do have feelings some days when there are some scenes with a lot of responsibility towards the meaning, and I’ll wish, gee, if only i would have been a cleaning woman. On the way to the studio I would see somebody cleaning and I’d say, “That’s what I’d like to be. That’s my ambition in life.” But I think all actors go through this. We not only want to be good; we have to be.You know, when they talk about nervousness–my teacher, Lee Strasberg—when I say to him, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I’m a little nervous,” he said, “When you’re not, give up, because nervousness indicates sensitivity.”Also, a struggle with shyness is in every actor more than anyone can imagine. There is a censor inside us that says to what degree do we let go, like a child playing. I guess people think we just go out there, and you know, that’s all we do–just do it. But it's a real struggle. I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle.An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are. Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer–you’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever. Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, “one tear right now,” that one tear would pop out. But once there came two tears because I thought, “How dare he?”Goethe said, “Talent is developed in privacy,” you know? And it’s really true. There is a need for aloneness which I don’t think most people realize for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on for only a moment, when you’re acting.But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you. They kind of like take pieces out of you. I don’t think they realize it, but it’s like “rrrr, do this, rrrr do that.” But you do want to stay intact–intact and on two feet.I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated. This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. Like you don’t dare get a cold–how dare you get a cold! I mean, the executives can get colds and stay home forever and phone it in, but how dare you, the actor, get a cold or a virus. You know, no one feels worse than the one who’s sick. I sometimes wish, gee, I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection. I am not an actress who appears at a studio just for the purpose of discipline. This doesn’t have anything at all to do with art. I myself would like to become more disciplined within my work. But I’m there to give a performance and not to be disciplined by a studio! After all, I’m not in a military school. This is supposed to be an art form, not just a manufacturing establishment.The sensitivity that helps me to act, you see, also makes me react. An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?If you’ve noticed in Hollywood where millions and billions of dollars have been made, there aren’t really any kind of monuments or museums, and I don’t call putting your footprint in Grauman’s Chinese a monument—alright this did mean a lot to sentimental ballyhoo me at the time. Gee, nobody left anything behind, they took it, they grabbed it and they ran—the ones who made the billions of dollars, never the workers.You know a lot of people have, oh gee, real quirky problems that they wouldn’t dare have anyone know. But one of my problems happens to show—I’m late. I guess people think that why I’m late is some kind of arrogance and I think it is the opposite of arrogance. I also feel that I’m not in this big American rush—you know, you got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason. The main thing is, I do want to be prepared when I get there to give a good performance or whatever to the best of my ability.A lot of people can be there on time and do nothing, which I have seen them do, and you know, all sit around and sort of chit-chatting and talking trivia about their social life. Gable said about me, “When she’s there, she’s there. All of her is there! She’s there to work.”I was honored when they asked me to appear at the President’s birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing Happy Birthday—like if I had been wearing a slip I would have thought it was showing, or something. I thought, “Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!”

A hush like that from the people warms me. It’s sort of like an embrace. Then you think, by God, I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do. And for all the people. Because I remember when I turned to the microphone I looked all the way up and back and I thought, “That’s where I’d be—way up there under one of those rafters, close to the ceiling, after I paid my $2 to come into the place.”Afterwards they had some sort of a reception. I was with my former father-in-law, Isadore Miller, so I think I did something wrong when I met the President. Instead of saying, “How do you do?” I just said, “This is my former father-in-law, Isadore Miller.” He came here an immigrant and I thought this would be one of the biggest things in his life—he’s about 75 or 80 years old and I thought this would be something that he would be telling his grandchildren about and all that. I should have said, “How do you do, Mr. President,” but I had already done the singing, so well you know. I guess nobody noticed it.Fame has a special burden, which I might as well state here and now. I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. But what goes with it can be a burden—like the man was going to show me around but the woman said, “Off the premises.” I feel that beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamor—although the manufacturers won’t like this—cannot be manufactured. Not real glamor, it’s based on femininity. I think that sexuality is only attractive when it’s natural and spontaneous. This is where a lot of them miss the boat. And then something I’d just like to spout off on. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it—everything.I never quite understood it—this sex symbol—I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol of something I’d rather have it sex than some other things they’ve got symbols of! These girls who try to be me—I guess the studios put them up to it, or they get the ideas themselves. But gee, they haven’t—you can make a lot of gags about it—like they haven’t got the foreground or else they haven’t the background. But I mean the middle, where you live.All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them, don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out and I’ll answer all your questions. Don’t be afraid to ask anything. After all I have come up from way down.I wanted them to know of lives other than their own. I used to tell them, for instance, that I worked for 5¢ a month and I washed one hundred dishes, and my stepkids would say, “One hundred dishes!” and I said, “Not only that, I scraped and cleaned them before I washed them. I washed them and rinsed them and put them in the draining place, but,” I said, “thank God I didn’t have to dry them.” Kids are different from grownups—you know when you get grown up you can get kind of sour, I mean that’s the way it can go, but kids accept you the way you are.I always tell them, “Don’t admire somebody because they are grown up or because they say certain things—kind of observe them a little bit.” I think probably that is the best advice I have given them. Just observe people for a while and then make up your own mind. And I used to tell them that about myself. I said, “See if I’m worth being a friend. That’s up to you, and you figure it out after a while.”Fame to me certainly is only a temporary and a partial happiness—even for a waif and I was brought up a waif. But fame is not really for a daily diet, that’s not what fulfills you. It warms you a bit but the warming is temporary. It’s like caviar, you know—it’s good to have caviar but not when you have to have it every meal and every day. I was never used to being happy, so that wasn’t something I ever took for granted. I did sort of think, you know, marriage did that. You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy—that’s it, successful, happy, and on time. Yet because of fame I was able to meet and marry two of the nicest men I’d ever met up to that time.I don’t think people will turn against me, at least not by themselves. I like people. The “public” scares me but people I trust. Maybe they can be impressed by the press or when a studio starts sending out all kinds of stories. But I think when people go to see a movie, they judge for themselves. We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.Once I was supposed to be finished—that was the end of me. When Mr. Miller was on trial for contempt of Congress, a certain corporation executive said either he named names and I got him to name names, or I was finished. I said, “I’m proud of my husband’s position and I stand behind him all the way,” and the court did too. “Finished,” they said. “You’ll never be heard of.”It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It’s sort of like I don’t know what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again. But I believe you’re always as good as your potential.I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

Cinema: To Aristophanes & Back
_{^{By Ezra Goodman}}

Time Magazine
May 14th, 1956

Sin, sin, sin. Morning and night, that was all they talked about in the little frame house in the California poor-town where Norma Jeane Baker lived in the early years of the Depression. "You're wicked, Norma Jeane," the old woman used to shrill at the little girl. "You better be careful, or you know where you'll go." Norma Jeane was careful, especially not to talk back. If she did, she got whaled with a razor strop and told that a homeless girl should be more grateful to folks who had put a roof above her head. One night, when the child went to sleep in her cot, she had a strangely exhilarating and frightening dream: "I dreamed that I was standing up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church, and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone."The point of the story is that the little girl grew up to be a movie star named Marilyn Monroe, and the dream came true on such a preposterous scale that her new wide world has fallen at her feet. In Hollywood's pagan pantheon, Marilyn Monroe is the Goddess of Love. Furthermore, she has shown signs of becoming a good actress, and many a once-skeptical professional now thinks she may become an outstanding one.In any case, Marilyn Monroe's hip-flipping, lip-twitching, frolicsomely sensual figure is the latest curve on the path of erotic progress that has led Hollywood from the slithering vamp to the good-natured tramp. Her physical proportions (37-23-37) have become a vital statistic, and the poor little waif has become a big business; her last five pictures have grossed more than $50 million. Moreover, there is solid evidence that she knows how to run her business.As many as 5,000 letters a week pour in from Marilyn's fans, and they include at least a dozen proposals of marriage. In
Turkey a young man went so daft while watching Marilyn wiggle through How to Marry a Millionaire that he slashed his wrists. The Communists have angrily denounced her as a capitalist trick to make the U.S. masses forget how miserable they really are. In Moji, Japan, her notorious nude photograph was hung in the municipal assembly building in an effort "to rejuvenate the assemblymen." In the radiation control laboratory of the world's first atomic submarine a picture of Marilyn occupies a prominent place in the Table of Elements. She is the subject of more unprintable stories than anybody since the farmer's daughter.Figure of Fantasy. Actress Monroe stands 5 ft. 5½ in. in her stocking feet (5 ft. 9 in. in the stiletto heels her roles require), and she is a little leaner (118 Ibs.) than she looks on the screen. In a sweater, as everybody can see, she is a standout; "I defy gravity," says Marilyn. In skintight toreador pants, she manages to make the world's most famous come-on out of a simple walkaway, and Marilyn's face, by popular standards, is as spectacular as her figure.Offscreen as on, the face looks a little too beautiful to be true, like the kind of adolescent daydream served up in the comic strips. The cut of the face is Betty Boop, but the coloring and expression are Daisy Mae. The eyes are large and grey, and lend the features a look of baby-doll innocence. The innocence is in the voice, too, which is high and excited, like a little girl's.She bears, in fact, a sharp resemblance to the airbrush Aphrodite known in the '30s as the Petty Girl. And like the Petty Girl, the Monroe is for the millions a figure of fantasy rather than of flesh. She offers the tease without the squeeze, attraction without satisfaction, frisk without risk.Who Cares about Money? Last week, after an absence of more than a year, Marilyn was back at work. Early in 1955 she had walked out on Hollywood. "I want some respect," she huffed at the world in general, and off she flounced to New York. Her studio bosses hastily offered her more money. "I don't care about money," she said. "I want better parts and better directors. I want to be an actress."
Hollywood snickered. "Act?" sneered one of Marilyn's directors. "That blonde can't act her way out of a Whirlpool bra." Cocktail parties were convulsed with the news that Marilyn was holed up in Manhattan with the entire Modern Library, and had sworn she would not unlock the door until she was cultured. The rumors began to get wilder. Marilyn had been admitted to the Actors Studio, and was studying the deep-dish Stanislavsky Method. She wanted to play Grushenka in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. She had become the darling of the theater's intellectuals. ("My only regret," wagged one of them, "is that I have but one library to give to Marilyn Monroe.")Dumb Blonde? The rumors stopped abruptly. Marilyn had taken on a business partner named Milton Greene, a 34-year-old photographer who wears black silk shirts and looks something like an adolescent George Raft. Together they announced the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions, with Marilyn as president. Her studio decided it was time to holler uncle. In return for Marilyn's services in four pictures to be made in the next seven years, 20th Century-Fox agreed to pay her $400,000—plus what amounted, when all the legal ribbons were untied, to a colossal bonus. And Marilyn won the right to approve her directors.Was she only a dumb blonde? When Actress Monroe announced that her first independent production, The Sleeping Prince, would be made with Sir Laurence Olivier as her co-star and director, she began to look suspiciously like a shrewd business woman. "Monroe and Olivier," beamed Director Joshua Logan, "that's the best combination since black and white."Last month, when Marilyn flew back to Hollywood to make a movie version of William Inge's Bus Stop with a Monroe approved director (Joshua Logan) Hollywood turned out to meet her as few women have been met. Hundreds of news men and photographers moiled for vantage as she stepped off the plane, and a crowd churned about her for more than two hours before she could take evasive Cadillaction. But Hollywood was not yet prepared to admit that she knew anything about acting. The part she was playing in Bus Stop, the argument ran, was the same part she had always played: the dippy chippie. And in the studio commissary there was a good deal of low voiced derision about "the Bernhardt in a Bikini."A Natural. Yet on location in Sun Valley, Idaho, Marilyn Monroe managed to surprise the hard-bitten crew with the fire and sincerity of her feeling in a scene where she fights for her lover. And back on the set in Hollywood, she cut loose in some glancing little scenes of character play with a kind of shimmering intensity nobody on the lot had ever seen in her before. Director Logan was amazed. "It just wells up from some deep place," he said wonderingly. "She's a natural."From Manhattan came a chorus of as sent. Director Elia Kazan declared that "Marilyn's sensitivity is extreme." Said Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio: "She has a phenomenal degree of responsiveness [and] the greatest sensitivity." Playwright Arthur Miller says Marilyn "has a terrific instinct for the basic reality of a character or a situation. She gets to the core."
Is this "The Girl Most Likely to Thaw Out Alaska," the notorious nude in the most popular photograph ever taken? The story of Actress Monroe's life is not the maudlin tale that Hollywood loves to tell about how a star is born. It more resembles the plot of a social novel by Charles Dickens. "This girl," says one of Marilyn's friends, "has had it."Hell's Fire. Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles General Hospital, was an illegitimate child. Her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, was a pretty redhead in her middle 20s who had two young children. Norma Jeane's father was a man with a fair job in the movie business. One day while Gladys was carrying Norma Jeane she came home from her job as a film cutter to find, instead of her husband and children, a note: "I have taken the children, and you will never see them again." On top of that, her lover declined to take the consequences. Gladys held out until her child was born. Then she suffered a serious nervous breakdown—not without precedent in the family. Both her parents, Norma Jeane's grandparents, died in mental institutions.When Norma Jeane was twelve days old, she was put to board (for $25 a month) with a family of religious zealots who lived in a sort of "semirural semi-slum" on the outskirts of Los Angeles. She was a normal baby, bright and happy, but when she was about two years old she suffered a severe shock, which she insists she can remember. A demented neighbor made a deliberate attempt to smother her with a pillow, and almost succeeded before she was dragged away.As soon as Norma Jeane could understand what was meant, she was forced by the woman of the house to promise that she would never drink or smoke or swear. At every childish annoyance, she was told that she was headed straight for hell; on every possible occasion, she was made to say her prayers, and on every Sunday morning, noon and night, and sometimes once or twice in the middle of the week, the little girl was marched away to church. At home she had to scrub the floors before she was five years old, and do the family dishes."A Friend of the Family." Playacting, she remembers, was frowned on in that house. When Norma Jeane danced and sang and acted out her childish fantasies, she was sternly informed that such things were evil. She learned to hide in the woodshed when she wanted to pretend "a life more interesting than the one I had." But among her memories of this period is the recollection that at the age of six, she was raped by a grown man—"a friend," she recalls, "of the family."Her feelings of guilt began to be obsessive. She began to hear a noise in her head at night—and she began to brood about killing herself. The family noticed the change in her, and the whispers went around: "We have to watch her very carefully. It's in the family, you know." Norma Jeane knew what they were saying, and sank deeper into her troubles.
Then there was relief; she was sent to live with another family. But the change in atmospheric pressure was so sudden that she got the moral bends. Everybody in the house was a movie extra, and the first day Norma Jeane was there they gave her whisky bottles to play with, taught her a card game and put her up to a hula dance. "They drank, they smoked, they swore," says Marilyn. "It used to keep me busy praying for them all."When Norma Jeane was about eight years old, her mother collapsed for the second time and was taken away to a state hospital, where she was kept until her daughter could afford the private care she has today. "I was sorry she was sick," says Marilyn. "But we never had any kind of relationship. I didn't see her very often. To me she was just the woman with the red hair."
The Stutter. With nobody to pay her board, Norma Jeane was sent to an orphanage. "I remember," she says, "when I got out of the car, and my feet absolutely couldn't move on the sidewalk. I saw a big black sign with bright gold lettering. I thought it said 'Orphan.' I never could spell very well. I know I cried. They had to drag me in by force. I tried to tell them I wasn't an orphan." Soon after that Norma Jeane began to stutter.She hated the orphanage. As one of the older children, Norma Jeane was assigned to wash the dishes: 100 plates, 100 cups, 100 knives, forks, spoons. "I did it three times a day, seven days a week," says Marilyn. "But it wasn't so bad. It was worse to scrub out the toilets." As payment for their work, most of the children got 5¢ a month. Since everybody had to put a penny in the plate on Sunday, that left each child with 1¢ a month to spend. With her penny, Norma Jeane usually bought a ribbon for her hair.The Blue Sweater. At 11, Norma Jeane went to live with her new guardian, a friend of her mother's who could not always afford to keep her. In the next five years the child was batted back and forth from family to family. In all, she lived with twelve families, all poor. Once she was "sent back" because she made the lady nervous. Once she was happy with a goodhearted woman named Ana Lower. Once she lived in a drought area with a family of seven people; they all bathed once a week in the same tub of water, and the "orphan girl" was always the last one in the tub. There was always the dry bread, the army cot by the water heater, the monthly visit from the county social worker who inspected the soles of her shoes and patted the top of her head and went away. And there were still the noises in her head and the nameless feelings of guilt."How did I get through it?" Marilyn wonders today. "Or maybe it wasn't really so bad? Maybe I just took it all too hard?" For consolation, she went to the movies whenever she had a dime.One day, when Norma Jeane was twelve and getting sick and tired of her "county dresses" and the boys who called her "Norma Jeane the Human Bean," she borrowed a blue sweater from a girl friend. "When I walked into the class room," she says, "the boys suddenly began screaming and groaning and throwing themselves on the floor." In the schoolyard at lunchtime the swains stood around her three deep, and every afternoon after that there were a dozen bikes stacked along the curb outside her house. The neighbors were soon in a snit about "that little bitch." Norma Jeane was in a daze. "For the first time in my life people paid attention to me," she says. "For the first time I had friends. I prayed that they wouldn't go away."She did everything she could to keep them. She smeared on the lipstick with a will, and soon discovered mascara. "The neighbors called me cheap," she says, "but I knew I really wasn't." Her stutter began to disappear. She wrote verse. She skipped the last half of the eighth grade. "I looked back on the whole mess around that time," Marilyn recalls. "And something came up inside me and I said to myself. 'Somebody's got to come out of this whole!'Laying on Paint. Life did not seem to agree. When Norma Jeane was scarcely 16 years old, she was urged by her guardian into a marriage with a man she did not love. The groom was 21 years old, an aircraft worker named Jim Dougherty who is now a Los Angeles cop. They lived with his family for awhile, and then, she recalls, "in a little fold-up-bed place." In her despair, Norma Jeane made her first attempt—"not a very serious one"—at suicide. In 1943, after almost a year of such goings-on, Jim joined the Merchant Marine, and Norma Jeane went to work in a defense plant as a paint sprayer. That was that, in effect, though they were not divorced until 1946.Norma Jeane was trained for nothing except laying on paint; her education was so poor that she could not even fake a cultural conversation. In public she was smothered by feelings of inferiority. In private she was swept by panics, anxieties and hallucinations. And yet, curiously, life in its deepest expressions was on Norma Jeane's side—perhaps had always been on her side. The sensitivity which made her feel so deeply the shocks of her childhood was countered by a set of instincts as solid as an anvil. She took blows that would have smashed many people, and she cracked a little, but she did not fall apart. And always there was that traffic-jamming, production-stopping hunk of woman that the scared little girl inhabited.High Smile. A photographer was the first to appreciate her professional possibilities. He took some publicity stills of Norma Jeane at the defense plant, and dragged her over to see Miss Emmeline Snively at the Blue Book School of Charm and Modeling in Hollywood. Miss Snively bleached Norma Jeane's hair, taught her to lower her voice and smile ("She smiled high, and that made wrinkles"), and "tried to correct that awful walk, but I couldn't —she had double-jointed knees."

By the spring of 1947, Norma Jeane was the busiest model in Hollywood. In one month she adorned the covers of five magazines. The film studios cocked an eye. One day Norma Jeane got a call from two of them: Starmaker Howard Hughes and 2Oth Century-Fox. She went to Fox first. Cried Casting Director Ben Lyon: "It's Jean Harlow all over again!" He signed her for $125 a week. He slapped a new label on her (Monroe was the maiden name of Norma Jeane's mother, and Marilyn began with an M too), and put her to work on her first part, in Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay. Marilyn's part: "Hello." It was cut from the finished film. Nevertheless, Marilyn began to acquire some of a celebrity's mannerisms. She roared through the studio gate in her battered jalopy as though it were a Hispano-Suiza, and she was seldom less than an hour late.Others Are in a Hurry. Marilyn's lateness has since become legendary. She once missed a plane because she stopped at the boarding gate to smear a little more lipstick on. Already half an hour late for a mass reception in her honor, she ducked into a ladies' room and was not seen again for 45 minutes. She was even two hours late for her own appendectomy. She went to a psychoanalyst about her lateness; a friend says it was no good because she always walked in when the hour was almost over.The amazing thing is that nobody ever really seems to mind. When Marilyn turns on the charm, the affronted waiter forgets his waiting. She once explained the whole situation to a friend. "It's not really me that's late. It's the others who are in such a hurry." The truth is that Marilyn has been so terrified of failure during most of her life that she has often had to screw up her courage for the slightest encounter with the world. Before the least important interview she will put on her makeup five or six times before she is satisfied with her looks. "And then, too," a friend points out, "when she is late she feels guilty, and since she has always felt guilty she feels comfortable that way. It is easier for Marilyn to take guilt than responsibility."Marilyn was fired by Fox, and a friend got her a contract at Columbia, where she was called to the office of an executive. He asked her to visit his yacht. She declined. She was fired a few days later. No work for months, and money ran low. The finance company repossessed her car; she was four weeks behind in her rent. She called up Photographer Tom Kelley, who had often asked her to pose in the nude, and said she would. She got $50 for the job. He sold two pictures to two calendar companies for $900; the John Baumgarth Co., which produced the more popular calendar, sold 6,000,000 copies of it, most of them after Marilyn became famous. The company cleared around $750,000 on the deal.Who's That Blonde? A friend got her the big break: a chance to play the shyster's house pet in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. In this tidbit part, she was an instant sensation. Letters came in by the sackful. All asked the same question: "Who's that blonde?" Fox grabbed her back for $500 a week, raised her to $750 a week. She was on her way to the top—when suddenly the bottom fell out.A columnist printed the news that the girl on the nude calendar was Marilyn, and the scandal broke full about her ears.She was terrified, but she decided to tell the truth: "I needed the money." The press was delighted—especially when, in reply to the clucking of a newshen ("You mean you didn't have anything on?"), Marilyn delivered herself of a famous Monroeism: "Oh yes, I had the radio on."It was quite a victory, and she had won it by being herself. Marilyn began to think that maybe that was the way the public wanted her to be. Slowly she began to trust her own ear, and to play by it. She began to show up at public gatherings in dresses into which she had obviously been sewed, and under which there was just as obviously nothing at all. She made a series of not-so-Dumb-Dora remarks in public that soon added up to a widely quoted Monroe Doctrine of life and love. (Monroe on sex: "Sex is a part of nature. I'll go along with nature." On men: "We have a mutual appreciation of being male and female." On her walk: "I learned to walk as a baby, and 'I haven't had a lesson since.")Pink Champagne. Marilyn's publicity clippings began to arrive in bales. Her next three pictures (Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire) were box-office blockbusters. At the end of 1953, according to the trade press, she had made more money for her studio than any other actress in Hollywood. She also won the Photoplay Award as the year's most popular actress.This was pink champagne, and Marilyn loved it. But there was an emotional hangover. What she needed, Marilyn felt in a confused way, was not success so much as salvation. She developed a passion to put her life in order, and her vague longings to find a meaning in it took stronger direction. She had already enrolled in an extension course in literature at U.C.L.A. and had started a collection of classical records. Now she plowed deeper into her problem through psychoanalysis, got in touch with lettered people, e.g., Poetess Edith Sitwell, whenever she had the chance, began to read more serious books.As a result of all the heavy thinking, Marilyn began to nag her studio for better parts, and to wonder if she really should not marry baseball's Joe DiMaggio, with whom she had been keeping company for more than a year. When Fox told her flatly that she could have Betty Grable parts or nothing, Marilyn walked out of Pink Tights. She and Joe were married in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1954. Laughing for the cameras, they took their trip to the Far East, where Japanese crowds smashed doors, mobbed cars and fell in fish ponds to get a look at the "Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Actress." When Marilyn sang and danced for the troops in Korea, she got a wilder reception than the news of peace in Seoul.Back home, the DiMaggios sat under their expensive thatch in Beverly Hills night after night with almost nothing to say to each other. They had fights, and on Oct. 4, 1954, nine months after the wedding, they announced that they would be divorced.Desperate Attempt. Marilyn took the failure of her marriage hard. As soon as she was through with The Seven Year Itch, she walked out on her contract, went to New York in "an absolute, desperate attempt," says a friend, "to find out what she was and what she wanted."Almost at once Marilyn found friends in the theater—Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, the Strasbergs, Arthur Miller, Norman and Hedda Rosten, Maureen Stapleton. "For the first time," she says, "I felt accepted, not as a freak, but as myself." She showed a nice talent for painting (watercolors), and she read aloud from poems she could hardly understand. Friends sent her to the Actors Studio. After about six months of study and exercise, she finally worked up courage to do a 20-minute scene from Anna Christie before the other students, many of them practiced professionals. They praised her work in extravagant terms.A Real Actress? All at once Marilyn could talk without any stutter at all. She could hardly stop talking. She was gay, and her wit ran free. She leaned less on her friends, stood more on her own feet. Her health was better. The rashes, the sweats, the psychosomatic colds came less often. The old fears were still there, but now there was a way to transform them. "I never dared to think about it," says Marilyn, "but now I want to be an artist. I want to be a real actress."She probably can be. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Marilyn showed her talent for comedy. In Bits Stop she has a chance to show what she can do with the first part she has ever played that is any deeper than her makeup. In Sleeping Prince she will have to hold the screen against Sir Laurence Olivier, one of the most accomplished actors of the English-speaking world. Next winter, it was reported last week, Marilyn will tackle Aristophanes' Lysistrata on TV, and she is deadly determined that some day she will play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov.

She's No Dumb Blonde
_{^{By William Leonard}}

Chicago Tribune
May 17th, 1959

Don’t Try to Kid Marilyn Monroe. She knows All The Answers, and Her Fellow Actors Are Happy to Learn from Her on the Movie LotsMarilyn Monroe reminds one of the girl in “Annie Get Your Gun,” who sang about the virtues of “Don’t What Comes Naturally.”She is a manufactured product today, a blonde built by Hollywood hair dressers and make-up men and press agents, bearing no physical resemblance to the mop headed brunette she was 15 years ago.But she's herself, too. And that's what really has made her the nation's No. 1 glamor girl for nearly a decade. Marilyn discovered some years ago that the simplest and smartest method of operation for a girl being asked a lot of questions at all times was just to try telling the truth. It's a refreshing technique, in Hollywood, but for Marilyn it has worked.She didn't start that way. Her studio was circulating biographies in which she was called a 22 year old orphan, until it was discovered that she was, instead, a 26 year old divorcee with a mother in a sanitarium. Her studio also instructed her to deny that she was the nude girl in the photo on the calendars that flooded the country in 1946. Instead, she admitted it, and explained honestly: "I was hungry."That's when the legend of Marilyn's bright repartee began.You remember the early Monroeisms. There was the one where the girl reporter asked her: "Didn't you have anything on when that picture was taken?" and Marilyn replied: " Yes, the radio." A pretty snappy rejoinder was the famous one to: "What do you wear to bed?" when Marilyn said: "Chanel No. 5." Everyone admitted those samples of Monroe dialog were mighty clever, but many a cynical observer suspected they were written for her by some underpaid fellow at a typewriter in the studio's publicity office.It isn't so. Marilyn Monroe makes up her own answers on the spur of the moment, and they're good. I've watched her at it in Hollywood and Chicago, and when she's besieged by a circle of reporters, each trying to maneuver her into saying something silly, she bats their answers back like a hockey goalkeeper.They ask outlandish questions like: "What do you think of the Berlin situation? " pretending they believe her opinion might be important, and Marilyn slaps their wrists gently but deftly with a soft answer that makes them ashamed of themselves.They ask: " How old are you?" and she says: " Thirty-two." They go back to the office, look it up, and find she was born June 1, 1926.To the stock question: "Is Arthur Miller (her third and current husband) writing a play for you?" she has a stock answer: "Well, you know, of course, that Arthur doesn't write vehicles for individuals."When girl reporters ask, even at a time when she's pregnant: "How much do you weigh? 91 and Marilyn says: "I don't know," you think she actually doesn't.I watched a smart young reporter, ask her: "What is your favorite book?" Apparently he thought the question was too complicated for her, so he clarified it: “You know, like 'The Wizard of Oz,' or the Bible?”Marilyn pondered a moment, then declared: "Well, I guess I've read Rilke's ' Letters to a Young Poet' oftener than any other book in recent years."The poor fish gawped. He obviously never had heard of Rainer Maria Rilke, internationally famous Austrian poet. Another reporter had to spell the name for him.The funny part about it is, Marilyn wasn't fooling. She is a devotee of Rilke, and of Walt Whitman.Some times Miss Monroe has issued statements that looked ridiculous when they made print. When she walked out on Hollywood early in 1955 (causing many to conclude that she had irretrievably thrown away her film career), she went to New York and let it be known that she would like to play Grushenka in Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." That was a laugh.But she put in six months studying at the Actors studio in New York. And she still will tell you that she'd like to play Grushenka.At work on a movie set, Marilyn Monroe is no ball of fire.
I watched her when they were shooting "Some Like It Hot," now being shown in Chicago, and it was an ordeal. One shot had four elements: (1) finish song with arms raised, (2) drop whisky flask, (3) look down at flask on floor, (4) look around guiltily at bystanders. Marilyn could get three of those things right every time, but not four.She finished the song without her arms raised, or she looked around first before looking down, or she looked down before dropping the flask, or she lost her balance as she finished the song–the variations were endless. Director Billy Wilder, model of patience, went over his instructions and repeated the shooting time after time, hour after hour.At last, when everybody else in the scene was so weary of the repetition that he could drop, Wilder indicated he was satisfied. All sweetness and coöperation, Marilyn asked: "Could we try it just once more?"When I saw "Some Like It Hot" a few weeks ago, there was a close-up of the flask hitting the floor, but the other details were missing. Perhaps Wilder, who was a writer as well as director, just gave up.Yet, Tom Ewell, who starred opposite Marilyn in "The Seven Year Itch," once told me: "Before they shoot the scene, you wonder if she's going to hold up her end of it. When you see it on the screen, she's stolen it from you!"There have been a lot of sarcastic remarks written about her habit, just before the cameras start turning, of holding her hands above her head and shaking them violently. Spectators and some of her fellow workers seem to think it's a mad mannerism. But it's no eccentricity; it's another example of Marilyn's being smarter than many customers realize.Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, who appear in feminine disguise thru most of " Some Like It Hot," were told by a special coach that the overhead hand shaking helps female impersonators. A few minutes' brisk shaking of the hands high in the air will smooth out, momentarily, knotty veins or other roughness on the back of the hand.Marilyn learned the trick from the boys. One look at those hands of hers and you'll realize why. Marilyn is beautiful everywhere except her hands.She washed dishes and scrubbed floors in an orphanage, sprayed paint in an airplane factory, sanded down the bodies and wings. Her hands look it.Off screen, Marilyn would just as soon not talk about the rough and ugly days of her earlier life, but she's not hiding or denying anything about that era.Play Grushenka in "The Brothers Karamazov"? It doesn't seem likely.
A dumb blonde? Not exactly.

Now It's The 'Mmmm Girl'
_{^{By Earl Wilson}}

The Akron Beacon Journal
July 31st, 1949

She's Marilyn Monroe, Former Parachute InspectorOver the years, Hollywood has joyously given us its “It Girl,” its “Oomph, Girl” its “Sweater Girl,” and even “The Body”–and they’ve all become big movie names.Now we get the “Mmmm Girl.”Miss Marilyn Monroe still wasn’t quite sure what an “Mmmm Girl” has to do when I talked to her.“But I’m sure none of the girls ever got hurt by being called such names,” she said,Miss Monroe is probably right. They don’t get hurt, but they get mighty tired, even sick, of the tages. Miss Monroe, who is practically an unknown, is a 21-year-old, long-haired blonde from Van Nuys, Cal. She has a nice flat waist that rises to an (mmmmmm!) 36½ bra line. She also has long, pretty legs.…“But why do they call you the ‘Mmmm Girl’?” I asked her.“Well,” she said, “it seems it started in Detroit where they were having a sneak preview of my picture.”“But why?”“Well,” she said, doubtless remembering it just like the press agent told her to, “it seems some people couldn’t whistle so they went ‘Mmmm.’”“Why couldn’t they whistle?” I said.“Well,” she said, “some people just can’t whistle.”“Maybe they couldn’t whistle because they had their mouths full of popcorn,” I suggested,…Personally, we think the whole thing was dreamed up by the publicist-but the fact remains that these appellations (get HIM!) have helped make a few girls pretty famous.Annie Pie Sheridan, the “Oomph Girl,” told me once she was sick to death of oomph, and she was a good enough actress to make people forget she ever was the Oomph Girl....The "Mmmm Girl" starts out candidly, without any claim to acting genius. She was working as a typist in a factory in California a couple of years ago when The big Thing happened."I did 35 words a minute and didn't do them very well, so they gave me a job inspecting parachutes," she says."One day some photographers came in and they said, Where have you been hiding?'"Very soon after that her picture was in magazines and a Howard Hughes scout phoned her, but by this time she was already signed by 20th Century-Fox,"They gave me a bit part in a picture but cut it out," she says. So she left there.…One day she met Louis Shurr, the Hollywood agent who keeps a lot of mink coats for emergencies, and without so much as offering her a coat he suggested she go to see Producer Lester Cowan.“Groucho Max was there, too.“Groucho said, ‘You get behind me and walk like I do.’“Groucho did a girlish swagger, very much exaggerated. I did it, and they said, ‘You start tomorrow.’”That’s how she got into the picture, “Love Happy,” and got acquainted with the press agent who insists there are people in Detroit who can’t whistle but say “Mmmm” instead.Strangely, the “Mmmm Girl,” while dazzling others with her figure, is a little starry-eyed herself about a young movie actor she’s never met, Montgomery Clift.“He’s got tremendous talent,” she says. And she added, of course, “Mmmmmm.”

Sexy Is Here To Stay

Screen Magazine
July 1953

It's no secret that SCREEN wants to bring you the unvarnished truth about the biggest names, the brightest lights in Hollywood. sometimes, in order to do it, we have to catch our subjects unawares with the candid camera. But many of the stars are happy to answer our direct questions, (even though they sometimes reply with an indirect answer), and so on the theory that a quote is the most revealing kind of information, we bring youSCREEN SECRETSFour of your favorites, Marilyn Monroe, Gordon MacRae, Jeff Chandlet and Doris Day were most obliging in answering our intimate queries. sometimes their answers weren't quite what we expected, and judging from their occasional startled expressions, not quite what they expected either. But that's what makes life interesting.Looks as if la Monroe is more than just a passing fancy,,,
She's going to be around Hollywood a long time, and that's why we've recorded some of her most intimate thoughts for you...Are your screen kisses strictly business?
"I keep my mind on my work."To what do you owe your phenomenal rise to stardom?
"Good luck...good pictures...and the faith of Mr. Zanuck nd other studio executives."Has your sexy body made you sex conscious?
"I see nothing wrong in a good, strong, healthy body."How do you handle wolves?
"I laugh at them!"Do you dress for men?
"Yes, I do."Can a girl find true happiness married to a man older than herself?
"I think a girl can find happiness with any man she really loves."Do you think you would make a good step-mother?
"This sounds like a loaded question..."How would you handle a rival?
"That depends on the rival."Is it more important for a girl to develop her charm or her mind?
"I think both are important for a well-rounded human being."Would you marry a poor man?
"As I said before, a girl can be happy with any man if she loves him."Are you sensitive to criticism of your acting?
"Yes, but I try to learn from valid criticism."What does marriage mean to you?
"Just what it means to any other girl: a home, family, a good life."How do you handle catty women you meet at parties, etc.-ignore them or wither them with a remark?
"I've encountered very few really catty women. I try to be friends with everyone."Do you have a maternal instinct?
"Doesn't every woman worthy of the name?"What sort of man do you think would make a good husband.
"A man who is mature, thoughtful and considerate-who's aware that marriage is always a fifty-fifty proposition."Is it true that gentlemen prefer blondes, Marilyn?
"Well according to my 20th-Century picture of the same name, it is."What about marriage, Marilyn?
"My career comes first, and I have no marital plans at present," she says emphatically."

Part I: "Marilyn Shuns Hollywood, Seeks Culture"
_{^{By Mirror-News}}

Los Angeles Mirror
October 5th, 1955

Distrustful of Love Goddess Role Films Forced Upon HerWhat has happened to Marilyn Monroe? What has she been doing in New York for the past nine months?The Mirror-News, with the help of Manhattan reporters, has been sleuthing and this is what we found:The Beauteous Bombshell is staging a personal revolution!She has turned her back on the old Marilyn to seek things cultural and literary.This is the first of two articles which will reveal the secret of the NEW Marilyn.Marilyn Monroe, America’s midcentury celluloid Love Goddess, is waging a private rebellion to break out of her Hollywood prison of Stereotyped Sex.She is rebelling against Biology, bearing forward the banner of Intellect,The battleground of this one-girl revolution is New York–far from the studio that made her the generation’s movie Dream Girl, and far from unhappy reminders of her unsuccessful marriage to Joe DiMaggio.Hollywood has snickered behind her back.Her processed desire to star in a movie version of “The Brothers Karamavov” has been flogged to death by the TV comics.Spokesmen for the industry have castigated her as an ingrate and a Dumb Blonde with delusions of culture.She has ignored it all.Marilyn’s friends in New York say that despite her uncertainties about the world of the intellect she is wooing the little Monroe, 29, is a woman with a good deal of native shrewdness.Her primary reason for moving to New York and her revolt is her realization that the screen’s Love Goddesses–the Theda Baras, the Clara Bows, the Mae Wests, and even the Rita Hayworths–lose their worshipers after a time.Miss Venus of 1955, fully aware of how tough it is to keep a lease on a suite in Olympus, has decided to learn some new ways to please her unpredictable landlord–the public.For several months now she has attended Lee Strasberg’s drama classes at Actors’ Studio in New York, the alma mater of such people of talent as Marlon Brando and Julie Harris.All reports indicate she is pitching into the task with great energy and dedication.“Wise foresight it is, too,” a friend said this week. “Marilyn knows better than anyone that Hollywood sees in just one light–sex appeal is a polite word for it. She knows that, as long as it can, Hollywood will exploit biology for all it’s worth.“And when the males in the audience stop whistling she’ll stop working–unless she can prove she has more to offer than a beautiful bust and a wiggle."With keen instinct Marilyn has acquired a new circle of friends that include Strasberg, Poet-Playwright Norman Rosten, and Actor Eli Wallach–and significantly, their friends too.Most of her new-found intimates have several qualities in common. Their creative work is public, but their ways of life are determinedly private and unpretentious.They accept Marilyn with all her limitations, without making demands of her, and are, uniformly, more eager to shield her than exploit the friendship.Shielding her occasionally has been necessary to forestall panic and possible mayhem. Her visits to the suburban homes of her friends can sometimes be a strain on the community honored, the host, or both.She has divided her out-of-town week ends among the Westport (Ct.) home of her good friend and business partner, Milton L. Greene, and his wife; Strasburg’s summer cottage on Fire Island and Rosten’s summer place near Port Jefferson, Long Island.A beach appearance at Port Jefferson a few weeks ago resulted in a near-mob scene. Rosten reportedly was so incensed at the absence of privacy that he risked drowning both himself and Marilyn in order to escape a crowd of Monroe fans.They swam out to a passing motorboat and flagged a ride to a distant, empty stretch of beach.When she stays in town for the week end, she regularly descends from the Waldorf Towers, packs two bicycles into her car, and with her secretary drives to Brooklyn.They pedal down to Coney Island, where they stand unnoticed, washing down frankfurters with root beer.Except for the few manifestations of frenzy among her fans, Marilyn tells her friends, her in and around New York has given her a freedom and happiness which she has seldom experienced.She appears to consider her New York friends largely responsible for her new bliss.She goes to an occasional small party.“I don’t discount her physical attractions,” said one New Yorker who met her at a party. “Apart from these in an informal social group she frequently seems like a child that’s wandered into a home where nobody speaks its language. It’s the childlike, almost paintive quality that leaves the deepest impression.”Another recalls, “Marilyn seems uncertain of herself, so eager to please and so helpless that you want to take her in your arms and mother her.”When she walked into a party given by attorney-producer Jay Julien not long ago, some of the guests failed to recognize her at first.She wandered about the room, listening but generally refraining from joining the little group conversations, and finally settled by the bookcase whose contents she proceeded to examine studiously.She confided to a guest that she was searching for a book on Goya.“She had seen the Goya etching at the Metropolitan Museum and she said she loved Goya. Also she loved El Greco.“I don’t mean to be unkind. Her conversational resources are pretty limited, but she’s obviously uncertain of herself and shy with casual acquaintances.”She is aware that many of her new friends boast high literacy rates, an achievement that attracts her as an elaborate window display would excite the interest and envy of an underprivileged child.She entertains a respect for education that amounts to reverence. In so far as her reading habits are fiercely regular and on a high level, a friend notes, those cultural yearnings are real and have been unfairly derided.He agrees, however, that it is almost impossible to know how far her painful safari through the classics has gone,“You’re never quite sure how much she’s learned” he said.“She learns slowly, but once she’s absorbed something, she holds on to it. Even when you suspect that the whole business might be out of her reach, you keep thinking she might arrive at some kind of state of artistically advanced grace.”The hero of Marilyn’s hegira to New York is Greene, her good friend and photographer, who has often been singled out as “Marilyn’s Svengali.”He stoutly denies any hypnotic talents.Greene put her in touch with two knowing New York lawyers, Frank Delaney and Irving L. Stein,The two of them, reportedly, found enough holes in her contract with 20th Century Fox to be able to tell Darryl F. Zanuck: “You have no contract but we’ll welcome discussions of a new one, on our own terms.”The Marilyn Monroe Corp., headed by its namesake, was formed with Greene as vice-president. The two lawyers are on the board along with an accountant named Joseph Carr.The corporation has financed her during the long holdout while her new agents at MCA have so far battered 20th Century into agreeing to allow Marilyn to alternate four appearances for the studio with an equal number of independent products.The last hurdle is still to be scaled: Marilyn wants script and directorial approval.With time and the studio’s biggest box-office draw on its side, MM Productions seems to feel the studio eventually will unbend.

Part II: "THe New Marilyn Tells Her Views On Life, Love and Art"
_{^{By Earl Wilson for Mirror-News}}

Los Angeles Mirror
October 6th, 1955

No rebellion starts from a single cause, not even the rebellion of Marilyn Monroe. There are many Marilyn Monroes in the MM who is every man's dream and every woman's envy–and Hollywood pinched them all.Diplomatically, perhaps, Marilyn doesn't call her flight from Hollywood a rebellion.
“I just know I wanted to grow and develop, and that wasn't in Hollywood," she told me.Which Marilyn, then, is she trying to improve?There's the Marilyn who loves Goya, and Louis Armstrong, and Tennessee Williams, and Mozart- and Brooklyn shopkeepers.There's the Marilyn whose baby stare can melt the most hardened waiter or pierce the fine print of a contract like a hardened lawyer.And there's the Marilyn, who, cognizant of the popular conception of herself, can say demurely: “Some of my best friends are men.”All of them, it seems.Her many facets sparkled when I met her in a little French restaurant in the East 50s. The “new” Marilyn she unveiled was by turns a breathless undergrad discovering “culture,” an outlander discovering the big city, a woman discovering herself.I heard a silken sultriness of that voice as the door opened…then Marilyn bounced in as only she can bounce, plopped down beside me…and I copped a peek at my watch.She was only 15 minutes late!
“I have a few hundred questions here,” I said.Marilyn leaned across the table and looked at the folded, torn, somewhat soiled piece of copy paper as thoufhit were a precious jewel. She possesses the quality of making youfeel that you and your wishes are inordinately important.“Ready,” she said.Q. – Do you consider that there is a NEW Marilyn Monroe?
A. – I consider I would like to grow and develop. I don’t wish to be a new person.Q. – Do you feel you are in rebellion against becoming a stereotype Hollywood actress?
A. – I just know I want to grow and develop and that wasn’t happening in Hollywood.Q. – Do you want to be known first as a great actress or a great glamour girl:
A. – I’d like to be known as a real actress and human being, but listen, there’s nothing wrong with glamour, either.Q. – What movie role did you like best and which did you like least?
A. – Of all the roles I’ve had I’ve really liked two. “Asphalt Jungle,” Joe Manckiewicz directing, and “The Seven-Year Itch,”with William Wilder directing. The one I liked least: “No Business Like You Know What.”Q. – Do you have any love life now?
A. – If there were, I wouldn’t tell you Earl.Q. What of the future?
A. – Who knows? I’m looking.Q. – What of DiMaggio?
A. – DiMaggio? He’s back from Europe. I know that because I read it somewhere.Q. Who is your favorite actor and favorite actress?
A. – Gable, Brando, Sinatra, Charles Laughton–I’d love to work with Sir Laurence Olivier sometime. There are so many French actors, and then there’s DeSica…you see how many favoriite actors I have. And actresses–I like nearly all of them.Q. – What about your bedroom voice?
A. – BEDROOM voice? I use this voice everywhere, except in the bedroom. I never talk in the bedroom…Q. You don’t?
A. – Except on the phone.*Q. Why?
A. – Because I live alone.Q. What plays do you like best and who is your favorite playwright?
A. – “Seven-Year Itch” wasn’t my favorite play. I guess my favorite plays were “Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of a Salesman” My favorite playwrights: Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.Q. – What part would you have enjoyed playing on the stage?
A. – I would have enjoyed playing the Vivian Blaine part in “Guys and Dolls”–who wouldn’t?Q. – What about your music and art?
A. – Painters, you mean. I’m in love practically with Picasso, but Goya’s No. 1 jazz I’m insane about. Louis Armstrong and Earl Bostick–it just gets stronger all the time. I guess my favorite composer is Beethoven. Museums? I’ve been going to museums, seeing prints for years but never the originals like now.Q. I heard you love Brooklyn.
A. – Oh, I do. Sometimes I just take one little section like along the water, and I walk. I like how the storekeepers sort of stand out on the sidewalks and watch life go by. They don’t do that on this side of the bridge. Things are more hectic.Q. – What are your favorite sports?
A. -- I tried water-skiing but I was vertical only about once.Q. – Who are your favorite writers?
A. -- Dostoyevski, J.D. Salinger. George Bernard Shaw. I liked “Stanislavsky Directs,” a new book. Poetry–“The Pain and the Shadow,” by Norman Rosten. Then I love Keats. Also I like Walt Whitman. I keep Walt Whitman next to my bed. I keep going back to him all the time. I’m reading G. B. Shaw little by little.Q. – What about your baby stare?
A. – That’s because of the parts I play. If I play a stupid girl and ask a stupid question, i’ve got to follow through. What am I supposed to do–look intelligent?Q. – How come your walk?
A. -- I started walking when I was 9 months olf and I’ve been walking since ans I’ve never had a lesson.Q. – How do you keep your figure?
By eating spaghetti–I do enjoy a good massage every so often.Q. – Do you ever buy your own dinner?
A. – Well, I have! And I do when all of us eat at Child’s on Broadway between classes. I buy my own dinner sometimes because I eat alone a lot.Q. – Do yo have much difficulty getting around the city?
A. – No, the cab drivers are very nice and, besides, I learn a lot from men.Q. – Does your lack of privacy bother or amuse you?
A. – It can have both effects. The times you need to have privacy, you can find an excuse. Sometimes I kid the fans. They say, “Oh, you’re Marilyn Monroe!” I say, “ Oh, no, I’m Mamie Van Foren or Sheree North,” if I’m in a real hurry.Q. – Is it true you only wear one thing to bed–Chanel No.5?
A. – I like to wear something different once in a while. Now and then I switch to Arpege.Q. – Do you have any love interests now?
A. – No serious interests–but I’m always interested.Q. – There are always rumors about your attractions driving this or that famous man, sometimes married, to distraction. What do you say about these tales?
A. – Oh, first of all, it just isn't so. I like men and I guess my friendship for them is sometimes misunderstood. Some of my best friends are men.Q. In view of today’s changing morals, do you think it’s all right for a single girl to encourage the attentions of married men?
A. – I think everybody ought to do what they feel. Who am I to set any kind of rules?Q. – Have you ever thought of playing the life story of Jean Harlow?
A. -- I would like to, providing everything is right for it. It should be done at the highest level. She should be done humanly.Q. Is it true that you know your way around a contract?
A. – I’m learning through experience, which has been kind of rough at times.Q. Are your friends in New York more stimulating than in Hollywood?
A. -- Life here is more stimulating and alive and hopeful. Hollywood–it’ll be a nice place to visit while I make pictures but I’ll be coming back here because this’ll be my home. I’ll live here.Q. – Would you say that interest in sex is less predominant here than in Hollywood?
– I haven’t taken a sexus I mean census but sex is sex and that’s good, isn’t it?

The Empty Crib In The Nursery
_{^{By Radie Harris}}

Photoplay
December 1958

I heard the familiar, soft, breathy voice on the phone: “Tomorrow afternoon will be fine, Radie. It’ll be nice to see you again.”As I hung up, my thoughts went backward in time–when had I talked with Marilyn last? Oh yes. There was the day I called her, because I’d expected to see her at a Broadway opening night, and she hadn’t been there. “Arthur doesn’t like opening nights,” she had explained. “And since he’s my husband, I do as he does.” There was always a special note in her voice when she said “my husband,” I remembered–a possessive pride that seemed to caress the two words.And when had I seen her last? Well, it was at an opening night, an off-Broadway production that featured Arthur Miller’s sister. I’d watched Marilyn hold hands with her husband all through the play and afterwards join the rest of the Miller family group. Before she went off with them, she told me that she and Arthur were planning to build a modern ranch house in Connecticut. She seemed bright and gay, and in those surroundings I said nothing about the baby she had lost just a few months before.Time had gone by, and here we were both back in Hollywood, I thought, as I drove out in a cab to see her. Plans had changed; Marilyn and Arthur had forgotten the modem house and moved into a Connecticut farmhouse of Revolutionary vintage. She wanted to put down roots there. Yet she had returned to Hollywood, to face the cameras again. Was she trying to thrust miles as well as long months between herself and that shadowy moment in Doctors Hospital, in New York?–when she had waked from a haze of sedatives to feel pain stab through her, to call out “Arthur!” and grasp her husband’s hand for comfort, realizing that their baby could not be saved. Should I ask her about this? I wondered.On the phone, her voice had sounded the same as when I heard it last. But how would she look when I arrived at the Bel Air Hotel? It had been hard to get through to her at all; there had been a ban on interviews, and the set of her picture had been closed to the press.But I needn’t have worried, I soon found. Marilyn came to the door of her bungalow, and instantly I felt as if I’d seen her just yesterday. “Look at me,” she smiled. “Not a bit of makeup–I’m sorry.” I’ve seen many stars minus the artifices that help to glamorize them: mascara, lipstick, caps for their teeth, false chignons. And, accustomed to it as I am, it’s often a shock. But Marilyn looking natural still looked more sextacular than all the Bardots and Lorens put together. Her fair hair, cut a little shorter than the last time I’d seen her, was tousled; she was dressed informally in slacks and a silk sport shirt. Offscreen, it’s her little-girl quality rather than her physical allure that attracts and endears, her to you.She led the way to a big sofa and settled down, motioning me to sit beside her. Suddenly I felt reassured and at ease. This was going to be like two friends talking in a girls’ dormitory instead of a Hollywood star issuing statements to the press. “How come you decided to make this picture?” I asked. “After all the others you turned down.”“Billy Wilder just sent me a brief outline,” Marilyn told me, curling up comfortably. “If I liked it, he said, he would finish it–because he was writing it with me in mind. So I read it–and loved it! I told Billy to go ahead–I’d do it without even reading the rest. Remember, he directed me in ‘Seven Year Itch’ four years ago, and I’ve always wanted to work with him again.“But I really wasn’t taking any chances. You see, I knew that with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon ‘Some Like It Hot’ would be a real fun picture. Did I tell you, it’s about the roaring twenties, and I actually sing and dance a tango with George Raft.”When she talked about the dance scene, her hands went through lively sweeping movements, suggesting the romantic glide of the tango. I thought of other actresses who come back after long absences. Many of them are so conditioned to acting that between pictures they grow restless and bored. I couldn’t believe this of Marilyn, for each time I had seen her in the East she had seemed utterly contented with her role as wife of playwright Arthur Miller. Still, she discussed her work with such pleasure that I couldn’t help wondering. She seemed so relaxed and at home. “Are you going back East after you finish the picture?” I asked. Marilyn drew in her breath and smiled, and I knew what I had seen on her face the moment before had been merely pleasure, not the full happiness that I saw now. “Just as fast as the airlines can take me!” She glanced around her at the handsome furnishings in the bungalow. “This is nice, but it isn’t home…Do you know, for the first time in my life, I not only have a home of my own–I have two! There’s the farmhouse in Connecticut. It was built in 1776, and it has two hundred and twenty-five acres around it, and–Well, I’ll tell you all about it later. First, I’ll probably be going back to our apartment in the city.”I leaned back and let her talk. She wasn’t really in Bel Air; she was in Manhattan, and her wide blue eyes were looking pridefully around her own home. “We’re living in the East Fifties now, and our apartment is done all in white, except for the bedroom. I know it’s considered chic and modern for husband and wife to have separate bedrooms,” Marilyn said, “but I’m an old-fashioned girl who believes that a husband and wife should share the same bedroom and bed. Ours is a king-sized bed, and we also have a love seat in the room. The color scheme is beige and dark brown. That’s a happy combination, I think–feminine for me and masculine for my husband.”The well-remembered note was in her voice–“my husband.” With a twinge of sadness, I imagined how she might have said “our baby,” on a note special in its own way. Apparently, her thoughts weren’t tending in the same direction; I’d just have to wait for the subject to come up. The New York apartment she was describing has no nursery.“Arthur has his own study where he does his writing,” Marilyn went on, “and I never intrude except to bring him a second cup of coffee. . . . Would you like some coffee now, Radie?” I said I would. After she’d ordered it, she came back to the sofa. “Where was I?...Oh, yes, that second cup of coffee for my husband. Somehow, I never have to look at a clock. I seem to sense intuitively when he’s ready for more coffee, and I tiptoe in and leave it on his desk.”The picture she painted was very clear to me; I could see her tiptoeing out again, leaving Arthur Miller in his own private world, with the people he was creating. He was her whole world. “Have you tried to work out any organized schedule for yourself while Arthur is finishing his new play?”“No,” she laughed. “As you may have suspected by now, I’m not a very organized person.” I smiled with her, because I’m one of the many who know–and forgive–the incorrigibly “late” Miss Monroe. “In New York,” she continued, “I never do the same thing two days in a row. Sometimes I go for a long ride along the East River with our dog, a basset hound. Or I’ll bicycle up Second Avenue. Or window-shop in the antique shops along Third Avenue.”“Don’t fans follow you?”“Rarely.” She almost whispered, confiding, “I usually wear a polo coat, put a scarf around my head and wear dark n that neck of the woods, so if I seem to look familiar they think I’m someone trying to look like Marilyn Monroe! I also love to go to Bloomingdale’s and putter around in the household-equipment department. I have no sales resistance when it comes to anything for the house–especially when there’s a sale. Then I buy as if I were storing in for an atomic shelter! I’m working on the theory that I’m being very economical and saving money. But when I try to balance my budget, somehow I’m always overdrawn!”She spread her hands out in appealing helplessness. The coffee was brought in, and Marilyn poured a cup for each of us, tasted hers and pursed up her mouth. “Be careful, Radie–it’s hot! I think I’ll let mine stand a moment.”She set down the cup and saucer, stretched lazily and then smoothed the fine white fabric of her shirt more neatly inside the waistband of her slacks. “You know, it’s strange,” she mused. “When I was about four, I used to dream of the day when I’d be rich enough to go up to a shop, look at the window display of clothes and then go inside and say, ‘I’ll take that and that and that and that and that–in all different colors!’ Now, when I could afford to do it, not just dream it, clothes are unimportant to me–except for evening clothes, which I love. But I’ll go absolutely berserk buying furniture, garden implements, seed for birds and clothes for Arthur.”“For Arthur?”“That’s right. I buy all his shirts, socks and ties. If I left it up to my husband, he’d wear the same two years in a row and never think of getting new ones. I also take care of his laundry. I definitely don’t approve when a man has to go out and he has no clean shirts to wear because his wife has been out playing bridge.”“But you have some help, haven’t you, Marilyn? I mean in New York, as well as at your country house.”“Oh yes.” Marilyn sipped at her coffee, tilted her head critically and decided, “ Almost as good as mine….In New York, we have a maid, and then there’s Mary Reese, who’s more than a wonderful secretary for me–she’s my friend. In the country, we just have a maid over the weekends or when we have company. Arthur’s two children are with us every other weekend, but then they’re not ‘company.’ Jane’s fourteen now, and Robert Arthur is eleven.”“I adore Jane and Robert, and it’s such fun for all of us to plan different things to do together. I really look forward to each visit…” She was silent for a brief while, and I couldn’t see her eyes as she reflectively drank coffee. Was she thinking of Arthur’s third child–her child–the baby that would have passed its first birthday by now? Whether she felt a mother’s bereavement in those few seconds, I will never know, for when she looked up across the rim of the cup her eyes were sparkling, and she returned to the cheerful problems of housewifery as she set the cup down again.“I don’t believe I need full-time help at the farmhouse. I’m an expert dishwasher and floor-scrubber!–a throwback to my early days, I guess. And I’m learning to be a pretty good cook by following the recipes in ‘The Joy of Cooking.’ My specialties are home-made noodles and bread. Then there’s chicken with a special seasoning that my husband likes, so I’ve learned to fix that for him.”“Aren’t there any particular dishes that you like to make for yourself?”Marilyn shrugged. “I’m what you might call an erratic eater. There are times when I just can’t eat meat–and then I suddenly get a craving for steak. I hate olives–but I love olive oil. I used to have a terribly sweet tooth for chocolates–but once I had a bad dream that I couldn’t eat anything with a chocolate taste, and ever since I’ve completely lost my taste for it. But I do enjoy eating,” she admitted.“Don’t you have to watch your figure?”“Not with any special diet. And certainly not now. I always lose weight while I’m working, because I’m so intense about it.”For some actresses, I thought, an attitude like that has been a real threat to married happiness; they devote too much of themselves to their work. But I didn’t think this actress was in any such danger. “Marilyn, it seems to me you’re just as intense about your marriage.”“Oh, but you have to be!” She leaned forward, clasping her hands earnestly in her lap. “I’ll tell you my definition of a good wife: somebody who feels needed as a wife. You have to contribute to feel needed! Too many women underrate the responsibilities of marriage. They think once they have a wedding ring they can just settle back and relax…I think I’m much better equipped for marriage now than I was with my previous two marriages. I’ve learned by experience all the things not to do, and I’ve learned so much from my husband, who’s twelve years older than I am. Because he’s so famous in his own right, he understands the demands of my career, too, and there’s never any friction between us.“I’d say there’s only one…one cloud on our happiness. We do long so much for a child.”Marilyn had come out with the statement at last; I hadn’t had to ask her. The suddenness caught at my heart–but I hadn’t time to feel sorry for her.With buoyancy in her voice, she was talking right on. “That will come, I’m sure. We’ve built a new wing on our country house, and we’ve christened it, out loud, ‘the nursery.’ When we decided to buy the property, all our friends agreed the land was beautiful, but they said the house was just uninhabitable. I looked at it and thought how it had been standing there, weathering everything, for more than 180 years. And I just hated the idea of its being tom down or even left unoccupied.“So my husband and I ignored everybody’s advice and got to work. We modernized the back part, put in sliding glass doors, built a garage and a separate oneroom studio for Arthur. But in the house itself we left all the old beams and ceilings intact.” Her eyes showed she was far away again — not here in California, but in the Connecticut hills. She had slid her hands forward to clasp them around her knees, and she said quietly, “I look at our house, and I know that it has been home for other families, back through all those years. And it’s as if some of their happiness has stayed there even after they went away, and I can feel it around me. Does that sound sort of crazy?”“No, Marilyn. It doesn’t. It makes wonderfully good sense.”I wasn’t just being polite; I did understand. For Marilyn, this indestructible old house is a symbol not merely of other people’s pasts but of her own present and future. She sees herself and Arthur setting their own mark of happiness on the rooms under the beamed ceilings. Everything that happened to her before Arthur came into her life has receded into a dim and fading background.Now is all that matters to her. Now, the time when the loneliness, unhappiness, frustrations and pressures are no more. Now, when they have been supplanted by the family ties she has never known before and by the Jewish religion she has adopted as her own faith (but will not discuss, considering it too sacred a subject). I was not wrong in believing that she wanted roots–she has put them down deep.As we walked across the living room of the bungalow, saying our goodbyes, she paused by a table to rearrange some red roses in a vase and looked up at me, a little surprised, when I suddenly asked, on a whim, “Suppose a fairy godmother waved a wand your way and gave you three wishes. What would you ask?”She laughed and answered quickly, like someone who has learned that miracles do happen. “First, I’d wish for a continuation of everything wonderful in my life now. My second wish would be for Arthur–for the success of his new play. And the third . . .” Standing in the doorway, she shook her head slowly. “No. I won’t say it…Goodbye, Radie.”We both knew what the third wish would have been. I was willing to let her keep it. Marilyn no longer sees tragedy in the emptiness of the crib that stands in the new “nursery” wing. With Arthur she can see hope in the emptiness. She now believes, one day, it will be joyously filed.

Marilyn Talks About Joe and Babies
_{^{By Sheilah Graham}}

Modern Screen
September 1954

The most intimate interview ever given by Hollywood’s most exciting star."I'd hate to think that marriage was Joe's only interest," said Marilyn Monroe. "There are twenty-four hours in each day. How many hours can you give to being a husband or a wife? You must have other interests, too, to make for a full, happy life." This is "The Monroe Doctrine."Marilyn was giving me the frankest interview of her life, revealing her most secret thoughts on marriage and babies–and she threw in the famous calendar for fascinating good measure. She's a trifle old-fashioned. She believes a wife should not be separated from her husband and she believes a mother should not be separated from her children. She has definite ideas about child care–having been a neglected child herself. She discussed all of this with the honesty that has always existed between this reporter and the blonde, beautiful and most exciting movie star of our generation.Some of the women reporters in this town have given Marilyn a bad time. They've called her cheap, tawdry, a bad actress. She has always been grateful to me because way back, even before the bit in Asphalt Jungle, in the days when only the late diminutive agent, Johnny Hyde, believed she would one day be a great actress, I regarded her as a nice girl, caught in the Hollywood jungle. I must confess I didn't think she had much chance of breaking out of the overgrown forest into the bright sunlight of stardom. I like her even more now, because success has loosened the tight bonds of an inferiority complex that used to bind her tongue when you asked her the simplest question. But now?"Joe," said Marilyn, "will always come first with me. He is the human being closest to my heart. He's the most important person in my life. Everything else is second. But he understands that my career is very important to me. I fought hard to get it. Sometimes starved. And the same goes for his career with me. We both had our jobs before we were married. And we expect to continue them in the same way. But with one big difference. If we can help it, and we can, we'll never let our work separate us. It's no fun to be married and parted all the time."This is why Joe DiMaggio told hisTV sponsors in New York that he would not renew his contract with them. "It meant," said Marilyn, "that Joe would be away for weeks at a time. And he had to travel backwards and forwards and every which way for us to be together. I was always making a picture and I couldn't leave Hollywood. We decided that when we married Joe would work from San Francisco or Hollywood so we never would be away from each other by more than an hour's plane trip."I had heard from a usually reliable source that the famous Yankee ballplayer was so infatuated with his wife that he was giving up his own line of work to be a co-producer in the pictures Marilyn plans to make independently (allowed in her new contract, eventually).There was another story that Joe was planning to turn actor. When I asked about it, Marilyn yelled, "God forbid! I couldn't take that. And I'm sure he doesn't want to be an actor. I hope not, anyway. And as far as I know, he wouldn't want to be a producer. Of course he could do anything he wanted to do. He's the most intelligent man I ever met in my life. And if he were an actor, he'd be good. But he loves his own profession. I just can't see him in mine.""How about the previews and parties, now that you're married?" I asked Mrs. Joe. To my knowledge (and Marilyn confirmed it) Joe, who is shy and unhappy outside his own crowd, has never escorted the blonde he loves to any party, nightclub or premiere. Rumors have a way of starting when a star attends functions without her husband. "If you won an Academy Award or something like that, wouldn't you like to go with Joe?" I wondered."It wouldn't matter what I won or whether I'd want him to come with me or not. He never would," Marilyn replied. "At least Joe's very consistent," she continued. "He hates premieres and parties. So do I. But it's my business to go. It makes no difference that we're married. Joe has always been like this. I knew what he was like before we married. He wouldn't come then, and I don't think it's fair to him to try to change him now. I married him for what he was when I fell in love with him."I think she has something. How many women fall in love with a man because of what he is, then immediately after the wedding try to make him over into their preconceived dreams of what a husband should be. But not our Marilyn. She doesn't want Joe to change her, so why should she change him?Yet the fact that Marilyn will always have to attend certain "career must" functions, and apparently without Joe, will present some possibly irritating situations. "Because," Marilyn told me, "Joe doesn't mind my day time. But he wants me home at night." I think that if the situation ever became really difficult, Joe would swallow his antipathy to Marilyn's world. Or Marilyn would sacrifice her movie stardom. I believe her when she says Joe will always come first. And I believe they are going to stay married. Forever? That's a long word. But, yes, forever. They're so intelligent about each other. Especially Marilyn about Joe."I'm not too interested in baseball," she told me. "I've been around Joe long enough to pick up a few rules and expressions. But I wouldn't break my neck to go to a game with him. I'm not crazy about watching television either. But Joe loves it. That's his idea of real fun, staying home and watching television. Don't tell anyone, but I don't care for watching television too much. I like to read and I have to study my scripts."A wire story from Korea reported that Marilyn had announced that she and Joe wanted to have six children. "That isn't true," she told me candidly. "It's too many. Joe already has a child (with his first wife, Dorothy Arnold) . Of course I'd like to have a baby with Joe very much. Maybe two. But when you have children you must give them a great deal of your time. With my own unhappy childhood, I know this too well. Joe comes from a big family and they're all so devoted to each other. Right now our work is important to us both, and it wouldn't be fair to raise a big family. But whatever Joe wants will be all right with me.""How does Joe feel about the calendar?" I asked. And perhaps I shouldn't have asked. Because even though Marilyn smiled, she said quietly, "Will you please pretend you didn't ask me that question?" So I assume that Joe isn't crazy about the calendar. And you can't blame him. But it never has visibly embarrassed Marilyn, even though she is one of the few people in the world who does not own a copy."If I had one," she told me with a grin, "I'd save it for my grandchildren." She meant it seriously and I knew what she meant. It's the most beautiful body ever exposed to the not-so-casual scrutiny of the world, including Manet's Olympia, Goya's Duchess of Alba, all of Renoir's nudes put together. And Venus de Milo."You mean that when you're an old woman, you'd like your grandchildren to know what you looked like once upon a time, and they'd be proud of such a body." She flashed me a thoughtful look and said, "You really do understand, don't you?" Understand! All I know is I'd give my eye teeth to have a figure like the Monroe's."People are sometimes so embarrassed for me about the calendar," she continued. "In Korea, for instance. I arrived at one place and they weren't expecting me. In the middle of the hall, there was a huge blow-up of the calendar. There was complete silence when I came in, and everyone seemed to be looking down. Well, I couldn't hide my head in the sand. I had posed for it. So I went to the mike and told them all, 'Gentlemen, I'm deeply honored that you have put my picture in the place of honor.' Everyone laughed and we were all friends. But you know, Sheilah, I really was honored." Today, I'm sure that Marilyn would give ten years of her life not to have posed, but she has never been a girl to cry over the past or even look forward to the future too much. This so-called dumb blonde has learned the happy knack of living in the present.She was reading my thoughts. "I've often been asked," she revealed, "does it bother you when someone refers to you as a dumb blonde? It never has, Sheilah. You see, I've always known I wasn't. Things go on in my mind that no one knows about. I've always figured things out and done them according to plan. Oh no, I'm not calculating or tricky. But I know what I want." And she certainly knows how to get it.Marilyn insists to this day that her refusal to do Pink Tights had nothing to do with wanting a new contract. It was the story she didn't like. At the time, the hottest property in Hollywood was earning $750 a week. It could have jumped to $1,250, but on advice of agents she didn't accept. When she went on strike, Darryl Zanuck who has never professed to like Marilyn (she has kept him waiting too many times) was ready to forgive her any time. But she took her time, made the boss sweat it out, even after he signed Sheree North to take her place. Marilyn knew he was bluffing. She didn't have to be told that no one can take her place. Today she is paid by the picture–$100,000 each, and she'll do at least two a year.She was just as unhurried and determined about Mr. DiMaggio. "When I started going with Joe, people said, 'Oh, you shouldn't get married.' That my career would be ruined and my appeal would be all gone. They said all men liked to dream they had a chance with me. All that so-called friendly advice. But when I went to Korea it didn't make any difference. No one asked me there if I felt different because I was married. And they didn't care. All they knew was that I was there and they were happy about it. And I'm so happy I went. All those men–it was the biggest thrill of my life. They didn't care if I was hot or cold, married or single just so long as they could see me."According to studio count, Marilyn's fan mail has not decreased since her marriage to Joe. But I remember passing a shop window in Hollywood just after the sudden San Francisco wedding of Joe and Marilyn, and the famous calendar had a line through the price of $1.50, and underneath, "$1–due to marriage." And a friend of mine in the locker room at UCLA reported a general tearing down of her pinup pictures. But I don't think marriage with Joe will hurt Marilyn's career. She never professed to be a saint when she was single. There's no real difference now. Marriage merely gave her a partner as glamorous as she is — but in the world of sports. And fans who did not care for her before, now love her because DiMaggio is her husband. Ask any small boy."We're going to build our own house in Hollywood," Marilyn told me happily. "Nothing large or flashy. Neither of us wants the bother of a huge home." So I asked what kind of home. "Maybe a two-bedroom house somewhere in Beverly or Brentwood. Not in the valley. We looked there and it's too hot. We'll probably have a pool, but that's not essential. I'm not very much the outdoor type. But maybe Joe's son would like to swim. How will I furnish it? I know how I won't. I hate early American. Let's say modern rustic. I don't really care what, as long as it's warm and cozy." Meanwhile Joe and Marilyn have rented decorator Barbara Barondess McClean's fancy two-bedroom with pool home in Palm Drive. And if you want to know which house it is, look for two new Cadillacs, one all black (Marilyn's) and one pale blue (Joe's)."What about the report that you and Joe bought a house in an expensive San Francisco suburb?" I asked Mrs. Joe. "Honestly," she exclaimed, "there've been more wrong stories about us than anyone else. Joe owns the family house in San Francisco. He bought it for his parents, but now they have both passed away. And we live in the house when we are there. That's where we'll live mostly, when we don't have to work in Hollywood.""You'd be stretching a point if you called A Marilyn the domestic type. But she can cook. "Nothing fancy though. But Joe is terrific." He learned in his father's restaurant, which is now operated by his brother. "He's teaching me to make spaghetti the way he likes it," said Marilyn. Joe is teaching his beautiful bride something else — and that's even better for a busy reporter. Marilyn was actually on time for our lunch. In fact, she was waiting for me! For a girl who took seven hours to prepare for the Millionaire premiere, it's a revolution.But more important than anything, Marilyn's marriage is giving her emotional security. She's still keyed up before the camera. This makes her break out in a rash sometimes. But her contentment shines clear through her lovely blue eyes. She's singing, "I've got my man." And she doesn't ask for very much more.

Marilyn Monroe Takes Good Look at - Marilyn
_{^{By Marilyn Monroe}}

Des Moines Register
August 6th, 1953

Dorothy Kilgallen is on vacation. Pinch-hitting for her today is the screen's most talked-about blonde, Marilyn Monroe,I'm going to pull a typically female stunt. I am going to prop a mirror in front of the typewriter and try a Monroe story myself. Now, this isn't going to be one of those Don't-believe-what-you've-heard-This-is-what-I'm-really-like-stories. But it will be an objective look at Marilyn Monroe by Marilyn Monroe.I think this is as good a time as any. I'm not unaware that my career is approaching a peak.First for the records: I consider myself a lucky girl. When 20th Century-Fox put: me under contract three years ago I was no better an actress than I was four years earlier when I couldn't find a job. I weighed than as I do now, 118 pounds. I was 5 feet 5½, had blonde hair and blue eyes. These statistics haven't changed. I was trying to get a break in pictures and-if you can understand this-I was scared of the very thing I sought. Today I'm still scared-I just hide it better. Seven years ago I was hungry and couldn't pay my room rent. Today I'm well paid and photographers stop me to take pictures.It has been said before that I'm trying to "find myself." I guess that's true. The usual goal is to achieve as much happiness as possible and for a woman, the worthwhile goal is marriage and children.Because I've played sexy, dumb blondes, people laugh when it's suggested I read books. But if you want your arm talked off, mention Thomas Wolfe to me. I've practically memorized his books.[Editor's Note: Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel" is 662 pages long; "Of Time and the River," 912 pages; "Web and the Rock," 695 pages.]I write poetry. Usually sentimental and philosophical. Not the best in the world, let's face it, but I get satisfaction from putting my thoughts on paper. I like to write on rainy nights.This is where I straighten out a little legend about me that has been making the rounds, i.e., that I wear no underclothing. This story started when I had try on a slinky gown for picture role, and the underskirt I was wearing was too bulky for the dressmakers to fit over it, Forever after, when I appeared a snug fitting gown people insisted that I wasn't wearing underwear. I admit I hate stockings and I've never worn a girdle (men seldom jump hurdles for girls who wear girdles). But other than that always well clothed in the under garment department.I have other sloppy habits. I don't put things away where they belong and often wear jeans because the dress I didn't hang up is wrinkled; I lose telephone numbers and forget to mail letters.I don't like makeup and don't use it except for work or dress, although my skin is too pale without it.I've been warned against saying what I think. Not that I'm tactless-it just doesn't occur to me to lie. No one can condemn you for being honest if you're honest in your honesty.I like the titles GIs have given me, like Blowtorch Blonde, Miss Flamethrower of '53, or The Miss Girl We'd Like To Come Between Us and Our Wives. This is their version of a wolf whistle-and nowadays aa girl doesn't call the police if a man whistles like a gentleman.I like to lie on the floor while talking on the telephone. It rings often, mainly because I give the number to newspapermen who ask for it. Movie stars aren't supposed to do this. I think it's impolite not to,Besides, I like men.

Marilyn Monroe...A Serious Blonde Who Can Act
_{^{By Rupert Allen}}

Look Magazine
October 23rd, 1951

At lunchtime, an awed hush cancels the noise of guzzle and gossip in Twentieth Century-Fox's studio commissary. Every eye in the place follows with varying degrees of calculation as a specially delineated blonde makes her way, like a cat picking its way across a muddy path to a far table. Oblivious to all, starlet Marilyn Monroe (23 years old; unmarried; 5'5"; 118 pounds; 34" hips, 23" waist; 36" bust) sits down to lunch, calmly opens a book on anatomy. For others, the chatter and staring continue. Monroe is busy studying to be a serious actress.In the commissary or on the screen, Marilyn is a show-stopper. She's even good in a potato sack (above). Her appearances in The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, and the current Let’s Make It Legal and Love Nest, have been tantalizingly brief—but so gratifying to fans that she’s now the brightest star potential among blondes since Lana Turner. Like the great female stars, past and present, Marilyn has other assets at least as important as her impressive dimensions. Her bag of tricks includes a tridimensional walk, a sultry voice with a proximity fuse, and a smile of diversified insinuations.Despite Nature’s bounty, Marilyn works as hard on self-improvement as any other actress in Hollywood. She is a serious girl, and with reason. Orphaned in early childhood, California-born Marilyn (Norma Jean Baker) was brought up by a series of foster parents. At 16, she ran off to be married, but the marriage was a failure. From a job in an aircraft factory, she moved as an artist’s model into the purview of movie scouts. Grabbed by a big studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, she was dropped a few months later. She then met Johnny Hyde, agent, who supported her. Another studio, Columbia, picked her up, then dropped her six months later. Broke and hurt, she returned to modeling to help pay for her dramatic lessons. Marilyn learned a bitter truth: An acting career requires dramatic experience.Now under new contract to Fox, and with a co-starring role in RKO’s Clash by Night coming up, Marilyn puts in long hours at the studio and at home mastering voice exercises, dramatic projection, and other thespian elements.Her serious attitude toward acting was dramatically affirmed by herself. A few months ago at night school she played an emotional scene in which she "tore up the scenery." The next day Marilyn sauntered across the stage where a grip wisecracked to her in the approved fashion of her sex: “And you’re supposed to be an actress!” he sneered. “You should give me one reason to believe you know what you’re talking about.”Even today when she tells the story, she goes wide blue eyes and inquires, “What’s a girl gonna do?”

She's Hard To Figure
_{^{By Hal Boyle}}

Tucson Citizen
June 15th, 1957

Marilyn Monroe, whom gentlemen prefer, says blondes have a woe that other women are spared."If you're blonde," she mused, "it is considered that you have to be told what to do that someone else has to decide things for you."Miss Monroe today certainly has no chip on her shoulder. But she has made it abundantly clear that, whenever her mind is to be made up, she'd like to pitch in and help, too.As Hollywood's/ most shapely producer since Sam Goldwyn gave up barbells, Marilyn is here for the premiere of her first production, "The Prince and the Showgirl," in which she costars with Sir Laurence Olivier."I co-produced this with Olivier,' she said. "I bought the property and brought it to him. He had played the prince on the stage, and I thought he was the only man for the role."In all fairness, he should probably be called the producer. I'm the owner,"But Marilyn says she shouldered her full share of production worries–"and there were a lot of them!"–including the money-spending problems."I was an actress from 6 in the morning until noon," she recalled, "and producer during lunch. Then I was an actress the rest of the afternoon–and a producer from 6:30 until 9 p.m., when we looked over the day's rushes."I had never bothered to look at them as an actress."When I first met Marilyn several years ago, she was an uncertain kid with an unsure foothold on fame, and I couldn't be sure whether she was frightened or amused by what was happening to her.Today I had the same sensation of doubt. It is hard to figure whether Marilyn, who retains: kind of breathless, small girl quality, is scared inside herself–or secretly laughing at you because she's a step ahead of you, and knows it.The interview began on a note of unreality. I was admitted to her apartment by a press agent who confided casually that he was 35 years old, used to be a stockbroker, but sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1951. (I made a quick mental note to ask him why sometime.)A picture of Abraham Lincoln hung on one wall. Among the books scattered around the living room were "The Philosophy of Spinoza," the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, a volume by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and a smaller one entitled "Film Culture," which may have been a mystery.Then Marilyn entered, as tousled and lovely as ever, and said:
"I'd rather not be asked whether I'm pregnant or not, or to discuss anything political or religious. Otherwise, I'll talk about anything."Asked what she thought was the biggest public misconception about her, she laughed and repilled:
“People identify me personally with the parts I play. It isn't so much that I mind, but it just isn't so. But I've played so many different parts by now they must be confused."She said that she and her playwright husband, Arthur Miller, have "no present plans for joint production," adding:
"He isn't writing anything for the screen. He's working on play."She indicated she is still a bit mystified why some critics thought it uproariously funny few years ago when she expressed an ambition to play the role of Grushenka in "'The Brothers Karamasov.""I was asked why I wanted to be highbrow," she recalled, "but I didn't. Most of those who thought my ambition funny had never read the book."Grushenka was an earthy girl. Her name in Russian means ‘juicy pear,' I love that!"I'd still like to play Grushenka, with Marlon Brando playing Dmitri. I'd go see that picture myself."Who says this kid doesn't understand box office?Marilyn feels the recent crowded years haven't basically changed her outlook."The thing I'm scared of most is myself," she said. "But I do feel I've grown both as an actress and a person, and I hope I'll keep growing,"I never tried to be independent just to show my independence. It wasn't so much that I objected to doing one kind of role. I merely wanted the freedom to do other kinds of roles, too."Luxury doesn't mean much to me. Both my husband and I like to live simply."In a childhood of hardship to in which she moved from pillar post, Marilyn knew plenty of rugged lonely years. When asked her if she was broke and friendless again, what she'd miss most in her present life of comfort, she thought hard, then said:"Not jewelry I really don't care for it…Not expensive stockings…I could go bare-legged. Not a car…or fine food or a big house."It's a bed, I guess…a big comfortable bed. I'd hate ever to be so poor again that I didn't have a bed of my own.”

Twilight of a Star Series:
Part I: Here's MM, Barefoot and Bubbly
_{^{By Theo Wilson}}

Daily News, New York
August 14th, 1962

The Queen of Hollywood died and, before she was cold, everybody had something to say about her, pouring out in print millions of words that added to the vast confusion. No two people had the same things to say about Marilyn Monroe. No two agreed on anything definitive about Marilyn.The news, beginning today, is writing about Marilyn Monroe in her words–what she herself thought, felt, believed and said only a short time before she was dead. This series contains conversations that Marilyn Monroe had with writer-photographer George Barris, who was working with her on her biography. He was the last writer or photographer she ever spoke to or posed for. She personally checked every word and every picture to be used in this series. is Marilyn Monroe's story–about Marilyn Monroe."The happiest time of my life is now. A far as I'm concerned, can't wait to get to it–it should be interesting! I feel I'm just getting started; I want to do comedy, tragedy, interspersed…I’d like to be a fine actress…”This is Marilyn Monroe speaking.She is sitting in her new home, the one in which she was to die, and she is talking to the last person who ever interviewed or photographed her, a writer-photographer named George Barris.Everything Marilyn told Barris–and there was lots–he showed her later. She read through his copy, and with a pen added comments to what he had written. She took five hours to go through the hundreds of pictures he had taken, crossing out with a red pencil those she didn't like."I'm in your hands now," Marilyn told Barris then. "I trust you.""Don't worry," Barris said. "I'll never hurt you. When this is published, there won't be any changes." It was their last conversation.She Bubbled Over With Gulps of BubblySo, from here on out, this is Marilyn Monroe speaking, in the period between last June 1 (her 36th birthday) and July 18. She speaks of her love life, her childhood, her plans, her ex-husbands, her good memories and her bad ones.It was during a period when she had time on her hands–she had just been fired from the movie "Something's Got to Give"--and she often sat barefooted ("I've always been a barefooted creature"), sipping champagne ("It's so zestful!"), cracking jokes ("I believe in sharing, I share my home with the bank!").These were her champagne days. Champagne was all she drank, and Barris remembers that she would breathe into the glass as if she were taking oxygen, as if she were toasting herself with: "Here's to the future!"She didn't touch it in the morning, and she said: "I had champagne for breakfast only once. I was in love, and I was alone. I don't mean I was in love with myself!"She said: "All I had was my life. I have no regrets, because if I made any mistakes I was responsible. There is Now, and there is the Future. What's happened is behind…So it follows you around–so what?"That was two weeks before she died."I think I'm human," she said another time, when Barris asked her if she were happy or unhappy. "I have my down moments, but I'm also robust, I think more robust than down. I'm human," she repeated.One afternoon during Barris' many interviews, Joe DiMaggio Jr. came by the house on Helena Drive in Brentwood. He had just finished his Marine Corps boot camp training and was first his class."I'm very proud of Joey," Marilyn said after he left. "He was 8 years old when I was married to Joe. I like to keep in touch with all three children (Joe Jr. and Arthur Miller's two). I don't want to be their mother, they have their own mothers, but they're my friends. And at least they know me better than to believe horrible stories about me."What about the people who write those things?
"All I know, it's their problem," Marilyn said. "Those people I don't know, or if we have met, it's been brief." Do the knocks bother you, Marilyn? "Are you kidding?" Marilyn said. "I can take it. Let me put it this way…I'm used to it and there's that old saying–consider the source.”Joe Jr.'s visit got her talking about marriage and her ex-husbands."Things just didn't work out as far as marriage is concerned," she started. "As far as marrying again, it hasn't entered my mind since my last one. I'm all for marriage; when I see a happy marriage, I toast the happy couple."
What happened with her and DiMaggio? "It usually takes two to make it work, doesn't it?" Marilyn answered. "Let's be fair."And what happened with Arthur Miller?
"It usually takes two to make it work, doesn't it ?" Marilyn said again, grinning this time. "Let's be fair."She went on:
"My ex-husbands used to say, we're never bothered with in-laws. I tried, on my marriages. I don't blame my career. My marriage came first, or I would have made more pictures. Marriage has to be worked at from both sides, like a garden.”There was a pause and then she added: "Maybe that's why I'm interested in horticulture!"Did she have any advice to couples with marriage problems?
"If you can, try to save your marriage. If it's impossible, don't try too long."What about children?
“| would want children, of course," Marilyn said. (She had two miscarriages during her four years with Miller, and her close friends always said this was the real tragedy of Marilyn's life.)‘I’m Just Mad About Men’"I used to feel that for every child I had, I would adopt another," she said. "I don't think a single person should adopt children. There's no Ma or Pa there."And what about men in general, Marilyn?
"I'm just mad about men," Marilyn said. And then, the sex symbol of America, the gorgeous blonde who didn't have a date with anyone the Saturday night she died all alone, said: "If only there was someone special!"Still talking about men in general, Marilyn said: "I like men more than women. I guess it's Freudian. I trust men more than women. Inevitably!"What about sex, Marilyn? Is it important in your life?
"Sex is important in everyone's life."What makes you happy?
"The same things that make everyone else happy."Marilyn, do you like people?
"Oh sure!" Marilyn said. "Some people, because I've succeeded, didn't remain friendly because I was busy working. I worked six days a week, before the unions changed that to five days, and I didn't get to socializing.”What do you like to do when you're not working? "I like playing around in the garden," Marilyn said. "It's sort of fun. All there is, there's work–and there's love. About work, it's very difficult for me to go from one picture to another, you know from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. I like a breather, and, as you know, I'm 36."(Barris had been On the set of "Something's Got To Give" when she was surprised with a birthday party June 1st by the production crew. There was a huge birthday cake with decorative frosting of Marilyn in a bikini. Fourth of July sparklers in lieu of candles, and champagne. It was the first time he saw her on his assignment and, along with everybody else around, he got a kiss from Marilyn.)She Admired Sandburg VitalityThis got them talking about age, and Marilyn said: "As long as you're alive, you can be vital. But you don't give up until you stop breathing…Carl Sandburg, who's in his 80s, you should see his vitality, what he has contributed. He can play the guitar and sing at 3 in the morning. He likes people. We've met on a few occasions; I like him.”As a photographer, Barris was fascinated with how young Marilyn looked at 36, and he asked her how she stayed so beautiful and slim. He thought other women over 35 would be interested, and Marilyn said: "If I can do it, so can they! Tell them they should take heart, they've gained in wisdom; we're all really silly when we're 20. And how do I keep so slender? I had a gall bladder operation, that's why. About eating…I shouldn't have too many fatty foods, but no one should expect the Eskimos, they need it up there, it’s cold!"I love food as long as it's got flavor," Marilyn said. "I skip dessert unless it's fruit. I don't like the taste of pastries. As a kid I did, but now I hate it. I love champagne and food with flavor."Marilyn said she could cook–”I baked bread, I mad homemade noodles. But I would rather cook for someone when I married."You're living alone now, Marilyn; how do you like it?
“I live alone," Marilyn said, "And I hate it!".

Twilight of a Star Series:
Part II: Marilyn: The Tragic Childhood Days
_{^{By Theo Wilson}}

Daily News, New York
August 15th, 1962

In those last days, the private world of Marilyn Monroe was contained within a little, Mexican style house, protected by seven-foot walls, enclosed in a garden, the windows sheltered by decorative wrought-iron bars.The house was white, the front door painted black, no name on the door, only a little black button to press and a small welcome mat in front to greet the visitor.On a Sunday afternoon a visitor rang the bell, and, as he will always remember:
"Out popped a golden head of hair framing the most beautiful, smiling face you ever saw. When she saw who the caller was, she opened the door wider–and the sight of her face and body was really too much."Dressed in a blue terrycloth robe, tied tightly around her waist, barefoot, I don't know, she looked like a beautiful Lolita. She was holding a glass of champagne, and she said, 'Hi, I see you're on time, come on in.' And this is the way I entered the private world of Marilyn Monroe."Starts With Story of Her ChildhoodThe visitor was Marilyn's last biographer, George Barris, and Marilyn gave him a quick tour of the house–the one in which she was found dead a few weeks later. She brought him Mexican beer, she had champagne.They settled down in the cantina overlooking her pool and gardens, with Marilyn sitting on a barrel-shaped chair, and they began the first of the talks that turned out to be Marilyn's last words for the public.Marilyn had promised to tell George anything he wanted to know, and he had promised to let her look over his typed notes. Everything Marilyn told him, she looked over and approved later. She started out, that first day, talking about her childhood."You wouldn't exactly say I had what you could call a normal childhood, could you?" Marilyn said." They say you forget the bad things in your life and only remember the good ones. Well, maybe for others it's that way, but not for me."When I was I guess about 8 years old I lived in this foster home that took in boarders besides me. I remember there was this old man they all would cater to, he was the star boarder."‘It’s Only A Game’ The Old Man SaidMarilyn stopped, Barris remembers, and looked into her champagne full glass as if it were a crystal ball full of pictures. She sipped, brushed her hair back out of her eyes with the hand holding the glass, and put her bare feet more comfortably under her in the big chair.“One day,” she continued, “when I was upstairs on the first floor where his room was…
What was I doing there? I was putting some towels in the hall linen closet.This man, his door was open and he saw me and called me into his room and he bolted the door.He asked me to sit on his lap. He kissed me and started doing other things to me.He said, 'It's only a game.' "He let me go when his 'game' was over," Marilyn said. She looked down into her glass again, and then went on, in that breathy yet ,breathless voice of hers."When he unlocked the door and let me go out I ran to my foster mother and told her what he did to me. She looked at me, shocked at what I told her and then she slapped me across the mouth and shouted at me, 'I don't believe you! Don't you dare say such things!'
"I was so hurt...I began to stammer…she didn't believe me. I cried that night in bed, all night. I just wanted to die. This was the first time I ever can remember stammering. An experience like that can make almost anything happen. I think it made me stutter for the first time."There are very few women who stutter," Marilyn said. "In men, it's considered not unusual they tell me, but in women, very few, do you know?Never Completely Overcame Stuttering"Once afterwards when I was in the orphanage I started to stutter out of the clear blue. I used to say to myself, 'You DON'T stutter', then I'd pick it up again. There were odd times when I did, I couldn't get a word out."Marilyn asked Barris. if he wanted a refill of beer. He said he still had plenty, she refilled her own glass, and went on:"Once in Van Nuys High School," she said, "I was elected secretary of minutes in my English class. I began to stutter, I'll tell you, I just happened to be a new girl in school, you don't know how painful that could be, they had no way of knowing…didn't open my mouth much except in English class, but there I was stuttering."To this day I stutter once in awhile," Marilyn said. "Hardly anyone knows this. It only happens when I get excited and nervous inside."The glow that had been on Marilyn's face when she greeted him, when she showed him the house, and when they toasted her new home her first, only and last home–her first, only and last home–had disappeared, Barris remembers.He said: "She looked like a forlorn little kid." Then, he remembered, she jumped up, went to the picture window, and said, "I hope he's all right. I let him out on the back lawn so he could run around without being cooped up in the house, but he's so quiet, it's not like him."Barris didn't have a clue about all this. Marilyn suddenly said, "Oh there he is," and her face began to glow again.Barris looked out of the window and saw a small ball of white with a little red nose bouncing along the lawn, a miniature white poodle running as fast as his short legs could carry him. When he reached the door he began to bark and jump up and down until Marilyn opened it for him.The poodle, Moff, ran into the room, spotted Barris in the chair with his notebook and pen, made a flying leap and landed squarely in Barris' lap. He looked up at Barris with an expression on that little face which Barris said looked like: "Okay, so interview me!" and Marilyn burst out laughing.To A Little Dog: Go And Have FunShe picked him up, petted him, and told Barris: "You know there used to be a cat around here, but this little monkey frightened her away."She whispered to the tiny dog: "I was worried about you. You can stay outside as long as you're feeling well." She opened the door, patted his backside, and told him: "Go and have fun. But don't get into any trouble and don't go chasing birds."Marilyn sat down again in the barrel-shaped chair and Barris sat on a sofa with his back to the window and the garden.The light was full on Marilyn's face, she had no makeup on, Barris, thinking about the pictures he was going to make (he eventually shot several hundred) was so intrigued by the way her face changed expressions that he wanted to quit taking notes and just look.But Marilyn started remembering again. She said:
"There were other things that were unpleasant when I lived in those foster homes, like being locked into closets, beatings, threats, and the times one of my foster-parents would hold my head under water whenever I was naughty. But you remember the good times, too."I have two good memories of my childhood," Marilyn said, "and I cherish them dearly."She promised Barris she would tell him sometime what these were, but she never did. He thinks one of those "good memories" was of the time she lived with an English vaudeville couple, when she was eight. They paid a lot of attention to her, taught her how to juggle, how to do a hula, how to play rummy–three things she still could do as a grown woman.The other memory, Barris thinks, is of the time her mother was released from the hospital in 1934 and, with the English couple, bought a four-bedroom house where Marilyn lived like a normal little girl–until her mother had to be committed again."The things that shocked me most when I was older." Marilyn said, "were finding out, when I was 15, that I was an illegitimate child, and finding out when I was 16 and was sort of pushed into marriage, about the facts of life…I was frightened of what a husband might do."

Twilight of a Star Series:
Part III: MM's Early Grief: A Deserted Mom
_{^{By Theo Wilson}}

Daily News, New York
August 16th, 1962

“A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child. I mean especially when she's not even married to him…”"And when a man leaves a woman when she tells him she's going to have his baby, that must hurt a woman very much, deep down inside.”Marilyn Monroe is speaking and the illegitimate baby she is talking about is herself.She is in her new, partly furnished home and while she is talking–thinking out loud, really–her phonograph is playing a song by Judy Garland called "Who Cares?"Marilyn is talking to George Barris, the photographer-writer who was working on her biography when she died, the last person for whom she posed and to whom she talked while he was planning magazine articles as well as the book.‘It Must Have Hurt Mother Very Much’This particular conversation was in June, while the fabulous blonde was telling about how she grew up. Later she spoke about her career and her plans and her struggles in Hollywood, but now she was talking about her mother."It must have hurt my mother very, very much,” Marilyn said. "I don't think she ever got over this hurt. That's what caused her breakdown; she had to be sent to the hospital for a rest when I was only 5 years old."Her Grandmother Came From IrelandMarilyn said her mother (who was left a $50,000 trust fund in Marilyn's will but is still in an institution) was "a very attractive woman when she was young, but she used to tell me her mother–that's my grandmother–was the real beauty in the family. My grandmother was from Dublin, Ireland, you know, where the girls are all pretty. Her family name was Hogan."My grandfather? He came from Scotland, and I remember my mother spoke with a slight Scotch brogue. I remember it sounded nice, sort of musical. "My father…I was told he was born in Norway," Marilyn said. "They met, I mean my mother and my father, in Los Angeles. My mother's family moved there after World War I." As usual during these days, Marilyn was relaxing, coasting along while awaiting developments following her firing from the picture, "Something's Got to Give." She was furnishing her new home, waiting for deliveries from Mexico, because she had decided to use a Mexican motif through her place.‘Something Like This You Never Forget’"What happened next in my life," Marilyn said, talking about the first time her mother had to go to an institution, "I don't think I can ever forget."My mother's best girl friend was my legal guardian and I was living in her home at that time, but when she remarried all of a sudden the house became too small and someone had to go and you can guess who that someone was."One day she packed my clothes and took me with her to her car. We drove and drove without her ever saying a word that afternoon," Marilyn said."When we came to a red brick building she stopped the car and we walked up the stairs to the entrance of the building. At the entrance there was this sign and the emptiness that came over me–I'll never forget."The sign read: 'Los Angeles Orphans Home' and began to cry, 'Please, please, Barefoot Marilyn perches on don't make me go inside, I'm not an orphan, my mother's not dead, I'm not an orphan, my mother's just sick and can't take care of me...'"And as I was crying and protesting I can still remember they had to use force to drag me inside that place. I may have been only 9 years old, but something like this, you never forget!"Marilyn learned later that the woman who put her in the orphanage, Aunt Grace, cried all day afterward. She said Aunt Grace promised to take her out as soon as possible and used to visit her often."But when a little girl feels lost and lonely and thinks that nobody wants her, it's something she doesn't forget as long as she lives. I think I wanted more than anything in the world to be loved," Marilyn said. "Love to me then and now means being wanted and when my Aunt Grace put me in that place, the whole world around me crumbled. It seemed nobody wanted me, not even my mother's best friend."Marilyn left the orphanage when she was 11, she told Barris, to live with Aunt Grace's aunt, a 62-year-old spinster in a neighborhood where many of the families were on relief."This woman was the greatest influence on my whole life," Marilyn said. "Her name was Miss Ana Lower. I called her Aunt Ana. The love I have today for simple and beautiful things is because of her. Bless her. She was the only person I ever really loved with such a deep love you can give only to someone so kind, so good, and so full of love for me.‘She Rocked Me Like A Baby’"One of the reasons I loved her was because of her understanding of what really mattered in life," Marilyn said. "You know, like the time I was going to Emerson Junior High and one of the girls in my class made fun of a dress I was wearing–I don't know why kids do things like that, it really hurts so–well, I ran home crying."My Aunt Ana was so comforting, she just held me in her arms and rocked me like a baby and said it didn't matter if other children made fun of my clothes or my house or me."Marilyn said her aunt told her to be herself, and she added: "Yes, she was a quite a person. Why, she didn't believe in sickness or disease or death: She didn't believe in a person being a failure either. She believed the mind could achieve anything. She changed my whole life."When I was married just after my 16th birthday, it was Aunt Ana who designed and made my wedding gown, and I was so proud on my marriage certificate to be called her niece!"Marilyn At 13: Curves, LooksMarilyn said she started dating boys at 13, when she first developed the curves and looks that finally made her a Hollywood queen.She said: "The boys knew better than to get fresh with me. The most they ever got was a good-night kiss. When a boy became something special, when we went to the beach I would wrestle with him…everybody wanted to wrestle with me!"When she married Jim Dougherty at 16, he was a 21- year-old worker in an aircraft plant who had been dating her for several months. Aunt Grace instigated the wedding.Marilyn said it was marriage or a foster home, "but it wasn't fair to push a frightened teenager into marriage–what did I know about sex? My Aunt Ana brought me a book with hints for a bride-to-be and I told Aunt Grace I didn't feel confident about being a good wife… I thought I was too young."Later, after the marriage, I've been told Jim said I was a responsive bride, a perfect bride in every respect except in the cooking department!"

Twilight of a Star Series:
Part IV: Above All Else, MM Wanted To Act
_{^{By Theo Wilson}}

Daily News, New York
August 17th, 1962

"I'm not the girl next door. I’m not a goody-goody. I think I’m human,” Marilyn Monroe said, lying full-length on a sofa in a blouse and slacks and looking like anything buyt the girl next door.She was talking about some of the gossip that had been printed about her. She said she couldn’t fo anything about the kind of writing that the gave the public “the wrong impression” of her.There was only one thing she knew she wanted, she said, and that was to become "a fine actress."Marilyn was talking to George Barris, who was taking notes and shooting pictures for a biography of the gorgeous blonde.Originally he had planned to start work at the studio while MM was filming "Something's Got to Give," but she had been fired. She was keeping herself busy meanwhile furnishing her new home in Hollywood, and it was there–only weeks before she died–that she opened up to him her thoughts, memories, and plans.Just Getting Started At 36, Marilyn FeltIt was at this time Marilyn told him she felt, now that she had reached 36, that she was "just getting started."They talked about many things, neither one of them knowing, of course, that these would be Marilyn's last words to the public.She said, for instance, that all of her life she had wanted to be an actress. She thought that her best performance had been in "The Asphalt Jungle," although others had told her they liked her better in "Bus Stop" and "Some Like It Hot.""As an actress, what part would I like to play? "Grushenka, in "The Brothers Karamazov,' she said. "I can think of one more. I can name it, but the price would go up (on the script)."Says Director Fancied Himself a WriterMarilyn, what was the worst part you ever played?
"It was in 'Let's Make Love.' I didn't even have a real part,' Marilyn said. "It was part of an old contract. I had nothing to say, the part of the girl was awful; you just had to rack your brain. There was nothing there, I mean scriptwise."What about the last film, "The Misfits"?
"Some people liked it." Marilyn said, "but me, the only thing, I was disappointed, the director sort of fancied himself a writer and changed it from the original intention of Arthur Miller." (Miller was Marilyn's third and last husband.) "This director," Marilyn continued, "also did 'The Asphalt Jungle' but he didn't fool around with the script. I personally prefer for the script to be left as the writer did it. Mr. Miller, at his best, is a great writer!"(When Marilyn spoke about Joe DiMaggio, her second band, she called him Joe. But when she referred to Miller, it was with a Mr. before his name.)Talking about actors, "I would have liked to work with Gerard Philipe, and I heard he wanted to work with me.” (Philipe, a handsome French stage and screen star, died in 1959 when he was 36; the hero of some of the most successful films of the postwar period.)Greta Garbo Tops in Marilyn’s Book"My favorite actor of all is Marlon Brando," Marilyn said. "I think it would be interesting combination. I’ve been saying this for years about Marlon, but it hasn't worked out. I think of something contemporary, but here I go dreaming again…”She thought Greta Garbo was the greatest actress in the world. Garbo was her idol, but they had never met, and when Barris told her he would try to set up a a meeting for them in New York, he remembered that Marilyn became speechless and wide-eyed with excitement.About Sir Laurence Olivier, with whom she co-starred in "The Prince and the Showgirl," which he was he directed:"I think he's a great actor," Marilyn said. "It's what you get up there on the screen…he wasn't my choice as a director, but he wanted to direct it."Marilyn's word for the combination of Monroe, America's sex symbol, and Olivier, England's great actor, was "incongruous– that's what made it interesting."Barris said he understood "The about Prince and the Showgirl" was not a financial success, but Marilyn said: out."It sure made money. I'm making money off it. It's making money, but that's the crazy thing, I've been asked to sell it to TV but I've refused. I feel it's one of my financial assets and I want to hold onto it. I own it with another company. It did very well in Europe. I got the French and Italian awards."Marilyn said she wasn't much of a television fan, "only the news or good old movies. I was going to do 'Rain,' but the deal just didn't work out. I think it can be a movie for me. I believe in movies…everyone should get out of the house once in awhile, not just sit around with their socks on."Interested In Arts, Never Felt BetterBarris had been drinking a beer and Marilyn went out to the kitchen to get him a cold refill. When she came back, they bounced the conversation around and Barris' notes show they mentioned:
•Religion–Marilyn said: "Everyone should do what he wants. I don't discuss religion."
•Another marriage–Marilyn said: "The right man might help."
•Her health–"I never felt better."
•Other interests–"I'm interested in all the arts. I like to read. I'm interested in people."
"I've painted, too," she added jokingly, "I once painted a whole apartment. I've written a few poems. I keep them to myself; they're personal, just what I observed. I like to read."Diamonds Weren’t MM’s Best Friend•Finances–"I like to work, provided I'm working under decent conditions. I live very simply, I'm not extravagant, I don't think I own a diamond. This is the first house I've ever owned alone."
•Traveling–"I like to stay here (in California) but every once in awhile I get that feeling for New York. Here all I have to do is lock the doors and go. I like ground to stand on. I have an apartment in New York, I have a cook and she keeps up the place, but here I didn't want to live in, hotel after hotel. Although I've never been to Italy, I love Italians. I hear Paris is a marvelous place, too.
"As soon as I can I'd like to take a trip to Europe."Here Barris asked Marilyn if she could speak other languages. She burst out laughing, and said: "I can hardly get along in English!"Do you regret being a motion picture star, Marilyn?
"Only when they try to knock you off," Marilyn said.

Twilight of a Star Series:
Part V: Marilyn Returns The Fire In Last Tiff With Gossips
_{^{By Theo Wilson}}

Daily News, New York
August 18th, 1962

Marilyn Monroe was dead just a short time, her body still was unclaimed at the morgue, and nearly everybody–and lots of others who hadn’t– started their typewriters smoking with the real reality of MM.Here and abroad, gossip columnists, drama critics, movie reviewers, political pundits, even a sports writer, got into the act, analyzing, explaining, pontificating, dissecting the enigma of a luscious, mixed-up tantalizing blonde.She had great talent. She had no talent. She was developing talent. Her death was not a suicide but a terrible accident. She was on the skids. She was en rout to her brightest future. And so on. And so on. And so on.Reaction to Raps: Consider SourceWhile she was alive, Marilyn always had been up to her elegant derriere in jazz like this. Like most big names, she had learned to live with it, but apparently she never understood why some writers went out of their way to hurt her. She tried to avoid reading anything about her except the writing that she thought would help her do better, such as reviews of her movies.During one of her long. Relaxed conversations in her home with George Barris, the last person to interview and photographer, she remembered, for example, some of the reviews of her movie with Clark Gable, “The Misfits.”She spoke about The New’s review by Kate Cameron, who said Gable had never done anything better on the screen, nor had Miss Monroe. She quoted the Journal-American’s Rose Pelswick, who said rhat Marilyn handled her firsr important dramatic assignment effectively.But when it came to the mishmash of rumor, speculation, scandal and insinuations which were thrown at her all the time, Marilyn had said: “Consider the source!”Barris told her he wanted to do something that might be unpleasant. He wanted to read her some of the columns about her and get her reactions, Marilyn agreed. She re-read and okayed his copy later.And so these remarks of hers, made shortly before she died, can be considered Marilyn’s only answer to all of the things that were written about her after her death.Settling Down–Full Steam AheadTHE PRINTED WORD: Walter Winchell, June 26, 1962, L.A. Herald-Examiner, quoting one of Marilyn Monroe's friends–"Marilyn can sit for hours in front of A mirror admiring her nude beauty."
MARILYN'S ANSWER: "Ho hum ..."THE PRINTED WORD: Sheilah Graham, June 23, 1962, L.A. Citizen News–After all that hullabaloo with Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin, it turns out that only about 70 pages had been written in the new Nunnally Johnson version of 'Something's Got to Give!' MM will be making a couple of business trips to New York this summer, but most of the time she will be settling into her new house and enjoying her new swimming pool in Hollywood."
MARILYN'S ANSWER: "Yes, I'm settling down in my swimming pool! Going full steam ahead."THE PRINTED WORD: Joe Hyams, April 22, 1962, This Week–"More often than not actors and actresses can be drawn into a horoscope reading by flattering their ego. Perhaps the only time Carroll Righter failed was when he met Marilyn Monroe at one of his own parties. (He asked her) 'Did you know you were born under the same (Gemini) sign as Rosalind Russell, Judy Garland and Rosemary Clooney?' Marilyn looked him straight in the eye and answered: 'I know nothing of these people. I was born under the same sign as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen. Victoria and Walt Whitman.' Rigiler tottered off."
MARILYN'S ANSWER: "True, for a change! I really said that to him, except I think George Bernard Shaw was in there." She also remembered telling Righter: "I'll never be able to act. Gemini is the sign of writers!"Puts a Paddle To Swim CriticTHE PRINTED WORD: Sheilah Graham, June 5, 1962, L.A. Citizen News–"Marilyn Monroe's nude swimming scene in 'Something's Got to Give' will never pass the censors. It's not so much the nakedness, but her method of swimming."
MARILYN'S ANSWER: "So I'm a dog paddler. I can also float–f the occasion arises!"THE PRINTED WORD: Louella Parsons, by Dorothy Manners, July 7, 1962, L.A. Herald-Examiner- "It's too bad that her troubles came along just when she was beginning to blossom out, go to parties, ever. Planning to give a few herself in her new home. MM has crawled back in her shell again and hardly sees anyone."
MARILYN'S ANSWER: "I've never been a night-clubber. When I work I never go out, except on my last birthday I did go to dinner with that lovable guy Wally Cox, after making an appearance for multiple sclerosis at the Chavez Ravine baseball park. When I'm not working is when I do go out, usually to friends' house parties, or just visiting friends in their homes, but I just don't, discuss it with the press."THE PRINTED WORD: London Daily Mirror, June 18, 1962 -"She is no longer the star, and Hollywood wonders what she will do next. For the moment she lives in seclusion. Can Marilyn make that comeback film? And the world joins Hollywood in asking yet another question: Can Marilyn really be finished?"‘Come Back From Where? She AsksMARILYN'S ANSWER: "They've always said that since I've done just bit parts. Where was I? Where did I go? Come back from where? Where did I go ?"THE PRINTED WORD: James Bacon, AP movie-TV writer, L.A. Herald-Examiner–"Marilyn Monroe is always late. True. Even when Marilyn was nobody, she was always late for appointments. The reason is that she is basically insecure, fusses with her makeup and worries about her appearance. She is so insecure that producer Arthur Hornblow recalls that when she auditioned for 'The Asphalt Jungle' in 1950, she wore falsies."
MARILYN'S ANSWER: "Those who know me, know me better. Clark (Gable) told me: 'I know actresses who arrive an hour early and are never there. You work when you're there, and when you're there, you're there!"Barris asked her about some other press remarks, and Marilyn wiped them all up with: "Lies! Lies! Lies."

Twilight of a Star Series:
Part VI: 'That Was A Pro': MM Was a Gal To The Camera Born
_{^{By Theo Wilson}}

Daily News, New York
August 19th, 1962

In a tangerine bikini, in California air so chilly that her teeth were chattering and that fabulous skin almost blue, Marilyn Monroe was posing for pictures on the beach near her home in July.She picked up a batch of seaweed, threw it over her it over her shoulder, pulled it over her halter, laughed–and the photographer clicked away, amazed at the way she was able to do just the right thing in front of the camera.He gave her a big beach towel, told her to "do something with it." and she wrapped it around her, snuggled her chin into it and made a face at him.Then stretched it taut in front of her., arm out wide, and pressed against it so that every lovely curve was outlined–but subtly.Marilyn stood in the surf on the breezy, deserted beach, her bikini plastered against her body, her hair flying. She bundled herself in a bulky sweater and looked just as sexy as she had in the bikini.‘She Couldn’t Do Anything Wrong’"She just couldn't do anything wrong in front of a camera," the photographer, George Barris, said later, "and she stayed out there posing and working for hours, so cold that she actually was shivering. That was a pro…”Marilyn suggested angles, she gave him ideas for shots, she worked as if she were on both sides of the camera at once, as if. Barris said, "Marilyn Monroe was photographing Marilyn Monroe."Barris was the photographer who took the last shot of Marilyn before she died, out there on the beach that day. He was working with her on her story and pictures, and at their last meeting in July, about two weeks before her death, she took a magnifying glass and spent five hours analyzing and selecting the pictures she wanted him to use.Neither of them knew it, but the instructions she gave him about the pictures–she marked some "good," crossed off other ones–and about the notes he took during their conversations were the last she would give to anybody on an assignment like this.Marilyn, in these last conversations, spoke a lot about her future, some about her past, and often about just anything that popped into her mind.The one thing I hate more than anything else is being used,” she said once. "I think I had as many problems as the next starlet keeping those Hollywood wolves from the door…but no one was going to use me.Choosy About Dates and Proud of ItI’ve never gone out with a man I didn’t want to, no one. Not even the studios could force me to ate someone. The only acting I wanted to do was for the motion picture camera,” Marilyn said.“If there’s one thing in my life I’m proud of,” she added, “It’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.”Another time Marilyn said:“Listen, Hollywood can be a cruel place. Some of these men that take advantage of a starving and lonely girl trying to make the grade as an actress should be shot.“There are plenty of the other kind (of girls) around, so you get to wonder why they are always tempting someone with a contrar so she’ll be nice..,“Love is such a beautiful thing,” Marilyn said, “and characters like that try to make it meaningless and dirty. Of course, they’re sick. They try every trick they can thinking of. For a girl just starting out, it can be a terrible experience.“I never liked playing their game and I don’t think any girl has to, either, once she’s made her mind up,” Marilyn said.Talking about her own struggles on the way up Marilyn said she lived on unemployment compensation, she would give friends IOUs on loans, she took modeling jobs.And Now She Tells About The Calendar“One thing, though,” she said, “I never stopped taking drama lessons, even when I was hungry. I would ask myself, what would make me an actress, acting lessons or hamburgers, and no one had to tell me what todo. My mind was made up.”Then she told me about the famousnude calendar picture she posed for, which was brought to light just when she was becoming famous as a movie actress.“Well, modeling jobs were few and far between then, and I really was broke. I had some modeling jobs, but not enough to pay the bills. There was this photographer I had worked for and he kept telling me he would pay me $50 if I would pose in the nude as a calendar girl. I kept telling him no thanks, I'd work for the usual $5 and $10 fees."Not that there was anything wrong in posing for a calendar, it just wasn't something I could do. But when I really had no work and no money, out of desperation I called up the photographer, Tom Kelley, and said, 'Well, I need that $50, but promise you won't tell anyone.' Mr. Kelley promised me no one would know expect his wife, who was his assistant.Marilyn said Kelley and his wife were at his studio when she got there. They draped her in red velvet."I think I must have worked for about two hours and when I signed the model release that day, May 27, 1949, the name I signed was Mona Monroe." Marilyn said, explaining she was "nervous, embarrassed, and didn't want my name on the release.Talking another time about her famous way of walking, Marilyn said she remembered a time when she applied for a job in a Marx brothers film after she heard they were looking got a sexy blonde for a non-speaking part.She Walks, And There Is Smoke"Actually, it was just a walk-on, but the walking was important," Marilyn said…"Groucho asked me if I could walk in a way to make smoke come out of his head."I told him I never had any complaints," Marilyn said. "I walked across the room and, when I turned around, there was smoke coming out of Groucho's head!"On the last day at the beach, when Barris was taking hundreds of pictures, Marilyn kept running out into the water until he protested she was going out too far.“Oh, take your shoes off,” Marilyn shouted at him, and Barris kicked them off at the water’s edge, rolled up his trousers, and got into the water too, for closer shots.They got back to the beach and discovered that one of his shoes was gone, apparently carried away by the tide.Marilyn, sitting on the sand and snuggled into the sweater, said: “What can you do with only one shoe?” and Barris threw the remaining one into the water.Marilyn laughed, picked up her champagne glass, and upended it, letting the last few drops fall into the sand.“Well,” she said, “you can’t take it with you.”