Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe ( Los Angeles , June 1 , 1926 – August 5 , 1962 ). Born Norma Jeane Mortenson and christened Norma Jeane Baker , she was an American film actress , singer and model. Considered one of the most attractive women in the history of the seventh art .

The figure of Marilyn, with her blond hair, her profiled nose, her sensual mouth and her manner not devoid of naivety, brought with it a new style of beauty and sensuality, in a few years in which the puritanical society of the United States began to shyly abandon his sexual conservatism.

Biographical synthesis

Childhood

Gladys Pearl Baker, mother of Marilyn Monroe, married a Norwegian named Edward Mortenson in 1924 , but the couple separated shortly after. She later found out that she was pregnant. The future actress was born in Los Angeles , California, on June 1 , 1926 .

Although she appeared in the civil registry as Norma Jeane Mortenson, her mother actually named her Norma Jeane Baker because her father was “unknown”, and used her ex-husband’s last name so that her daughter was not illegitimate. It is known that she had several partners while working as a negative cutter at the film production company RKO Pictures .

Gladys could not take care of her daughter due to financial and emotional problems, so she left little Norma Jeane with her adoptive parents, the marriage of Albert and Ida Bolender, who lived in Hawthorne , California. It seems that when, as a child, her dog Tippy was killed, she was the victim of a sudden loss of speech that later resulted in an insurmountable stuttering.

Once Gladys got a home of her own, she took Norma Jeane with her. After a few months, the mother suffered a nervous breakdown, so custody of the girl was handed over to Grace McKee, her best friend. It was she who awakened the girl’s interest in cinema and who encouraged her to become an actress in the future. McKee then married Ervin Silliman Goddard in 1935 and moved to the West Coast of the United States , and the little girl was given into custody to several families. Two years after their wedding, she took the little girl back with her.

However, months later McKee handed custody of the girl to her uncle, Olive Brunings, after the minor accused Gobbard of having sexually abused her. At 12 years old, the girl suffered a new sexual abuse, this time by one of Brunings’ children. The constant change of family would determine a series of disorders and emotional disorders that would never be overcome.

In early 1938 , McKee took Norma Jeane with one of her aunts, Ana Lower. At the beginning of 1942 , Lower began to suffer serious health problems that prevented him from continuing to care for the minor, for which he had to return to live with the marriage formed by McKee and Goddard. The couple moved to Virginia , where the husband had received a lucrative job offer.

To avoid having to go to an orphanage, McKee proposed to 16-year-old Norma Jeane to marry the son of a neighbor of hers, a 21-year-old police officer named James Dougherty, and she agreed. Dougherty and Norma Jeane were married on June 19 , 1942 ; in this way, she abandoned her studies to be able to play the role of wife and housewife.

In 1943 , with the start of World War II , Dougherty joined the navy and was sent as an instructor to Santa Catalina Island , off Los Angeles, and then embarked for Australia . Norma Jeane, left alone, moved to the home of her mother-in-law, with whom she later worked at a munitions factory, Radio Plane in Burbank .

Model

Norma Jeane Baker began working as a model at the age of eighteen, in 1945 , when photographer Henrik Manukyan photographed her while collaborating with her mother-in-law in the munitions factory. Thus, the so-called Norma Jean began her career as a model under the tutelage of agent Emmeline Snively, who suggested she change the color of her hair, which was brown from birth, to the characteristic platinum blonde. During this time, Norma Jean carried out countless advertising campaigns, the ones she did to advertise bathing suits are well remembered. She managed to be listed as a glamor model and was featured on the cover of dozens of magazines.

At the same time, her restless nature and always eager to acquire new knowledge led her to take drama classes at the Actor’s Lab in Hollywood and to attend literature courses at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA).

Film career

the beginning

After divorcing Dougherty in 1946 , she began auditioning for movies and television series. The face of the model was beginning to be well known. His innumerable publicity works made that in 1947 the magnate Howard Hughes , owner of the film company RKO, offered him to do some screen tests in order to know if he could play before a film camera; but Norma Jean preferred to accept an offer from Ben Lyon, one of the Twentieth Century Fox studio executives to work as a film extra for six months. It was he who changed the name to “Marilyn Monroe”: “Marilyn” was chosen in honor of actress Marilyn Miller and “Monroe” for being her mother’s maiden name. In this way, she played a telephone operator in the musical film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim and a waitress in Dangerous Years . The low acceptance that these films received from critics and the public meant that their contract was not renewed in 1947 .

In 1948 , Monroe signed a semi-annual Columbia Pictures deal to play the role of dancer Peggy in the musical Ladies of the Chorus . The film did not do well commercially, so its contract was terminated. However, from then on he only appeared in films produced by Twentieth Century Fox, a studio with which he signed a six-year contract in 1949 .

In 1950 she played Angela, a lawyer’s mistress, in the detective film The Asphalt Jungle (The asphalt jungle). In that same year he also participated in the film All About Eve (Eva naked), where Claudia Caswell, a stage actress, played the role. For his work on these two films, he received positive reviews from various sources.Marilyn Monroe in Fog in the Soul ( 1952 )

In February 1951, he enrolled in the evening classes of art and literature at the University of California . In that year he appeared in several low-budget films, such as Home Town Story , As Young as You Feel and Love Nest , in which he played supporting roles. Career prospects began to improve when they acted in the film drama Clash by Night , from 1952 , with a cast that included Barbara Stanwyck , Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan .

Again his performance received good reviews. He later acted in the films We’re Not Married , where he worked alongside Ginger Rogers and Zsa Zsa Gabor ; Don’t Bother to Knock (Niebla en el alma), where he received positive reviews and shared the scene with Richard Widmark ; and Monkey Business, where it was directed by Howard Hawks and starred alongside Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers .

Recognized actress

His worldwide recognition began to develop after he starred in the musical Gentlemen prefer blondes ( Gentlemen prefer blondes , 1953 ), based on an ingenious novel by Anita Loos and directed by Howard Hawks , told the story of the confrontation of two showgirls, a brunette , the perky Jane Russell , and another blonde, Marilyn, trying to hunt down one of America’s richest and most desirable bachelors .

In this film, full of excellent gags and provocative musical numbers, Marilyn showed that she was, in addition to a good comedy actress, a remarkable singer and dancer, with a personal and highly suggestive style. In fact, the sought-after male character, played by Charles Coburn , ultimately chose to stay with Lorelei Lee, the blonde. It also appeared in the inaugural issue of Playboy magazine .

The third job he did that year was a fairly similar plot film, How to marry a millionaire (How to marry a millionaire), by Jean Negulesco , in which Marilyn and two other actresses, this time Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall , proposed conquer a millionaire at all costs.

Not as exuberant or resounding as the previous one, it was a film that exploited the disparity of physiques and characters of the three female interpreters in a comedy key and, therefore, it was a job very tailored to Marilyn Monroe’s skills. As a result of these sensational works, in 1954 she would be awarded the prestigious Golden Globe for best actress.

She also played the title role in the comedies The Seven Year Itch ( 1955 ) and Bus Stop ( 1956 ), and thanks to the box office success of these films, since then she began to be considered one of the most profitable actresses in the film industry. Her greatest commercial success was Some Like it Hot ( 1959 ), a film for which she won the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy.

After Some Like It Hot , the actress signed a new contract with Twenty Century Fox. She performed in the musical Let’s Make Love , under the direction of George Cukor . The filming of the film was delayed due to Monroe’s physical conditions and because, at her request, the script was rewritten by Arthur Miller.

The changes made by the playwright made Gregory Peck refuse to play the lead role in the film; Cary Grant , Charlton Heston , Yul Brynner and Rock Hudson also turned down the role, so the studio offered it to French actor and singer Yves Montand . Monroe and Miller became friends with Montand and his wife, actress Simone Signoret . When Signoret returned to France to shoot a movie, Monroe and Montand had a brief affair, both of whom were married.

Although she asked him to leave Signoret behind, when filming ended, he returned to his country with his wife. The film received negative reviews and did not do well financially.

During this period, Monroe’s health and emotional state deteriorated markedly. He often phoned Dr. Ralph Greenson, his psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, at night to combat his insomnia. He also visited other doctors when he felt it necessary to prescribe new drugs.

In the year 1960 , Monroe was part of the cast of the film The Misfits ( The Misfits), of John Huston , whose script was written especially by Arthur Miller for her. The actress played Roslyn, a character that her husband traced from situations, dialogues and moments in his life.

The cast included, among others, Clark Gable , Montgomery Clift, and Thelma Ritter . Filming began in July of that year and took place in the Nevada desert . Monroe’s mood was not good; He was frequently absent from filming, had difficulty concentrating, and consumed heavy doses of drugs and alcohol to sleep.

In August, the actress was urgently hospitalized in Los Angeles for ten days. The newspapers indicated that the actress was close to death, but did not reveal the causes of her hospitalization. After this, Monroe returned to Nevada and finished filming the movie. In November, the actress and her husband returned to New York City separately, and she took refuge with Lee Strasberg .

The Misfits was poorly received by critics, although Monroe’s performance, like the Gable, received positive reviews. In an interview, Huston said:Marilyn dug into her own personal experiences to surface something unique and extraordinary. He had no acting technique. It was all true, it was just her.

Over the next several months, Monroe’s addiction to drugs and alcohol brought her to the brink of death again. The 20 of January of 1961 , she divorced Miller. In February, she was admitted to the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic , an experience that she later described as “a nightmare.” Later she managed to communicate with Joe DiMaggio , who had her transferred from that clinic to a normal hospital. His delicate state of health prevented him from working the rest of the year.

In 1962 , Monroe returned to acting starring opposite Dean Martin in the film Something’s Got to Give . At the time of filming, the actress was in very poor health, with frequent sinusitis, bronchitis and increasingly marked symptoms of insecurity. 20th Century Fox relied on this project to clean up its economy, as the company threatened to fail due to the excessive expenses generated by the movie Cleopatra ( 1963 ).

On May 9 of the same year, the gala for the birthday of then US President John F. Kennedy took place in New York , in which Monroe sang ” Happy Birthday Mr. President ” to him. To attend this gala, the actress was absent for seven days from the filming, despite the fact that the studio demanded that she stay to do her job.

Monroe then returned to filming Something’s Got to Give and filmed the scenes in which she was shown nude in a swimming pool. These images later appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Referring to the cover of this weekly, she commented: ” I want to kick Elizabeth Taylor off the covers of magazines .”

Due to her delays and sudden absences from filming, she was fired. Fox tried to complete the film using another actress, but Dean Martin objected, so the film had no choice but to reinstate it.

After being reinstated, Monroe resumed negotiations with the producer to discuss her professional future. The studio planned for her to portray Jean Harlow in a biopic, later filmed by Caroll Baker . He also wanted her to act in the comedies: Irma la Douce , What a Way to Go! , both later starring Shirley MacLaine , and Kiss Me, Stupid , later starring Kim Novak . The agreement they reached established that he would receive a million dollars per film and that he had the freedom to choose a director and co-stars.

Death

The last months of Marilyn’s life present a series of dark areas that will probably never be clarified, such as her relationship with the then president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which seems proven to be of an intimate nature, or later with him. his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy , in which some indications may suggest that it was just friendship. In any case, the names of both appeared then and continue to appear today in the matter of the death by suicide of the actress, who died on August 5 , 1962 due to an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Brentwood , California.

At 3 a.m., Mrs. Murray, her housekeeper, found her in bed in a strange posture, the phone clutched tightly in one of her hands and the lights on. An empty bottle of Nembutal on the table attested to the massive ingestion of pills by the star.

At 4:55 a.m., Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jack Clemmons received a call from Monroe psychoanalyst, psychiatrist Dr. Greenson, who told him that the actress died at home. Officer Clemmons was the first to arrive at the scene.

The first autopsy revealed that he died of a barbiturate overdose, although the causes of his death remain unclear. The police report described the event as a “probable suicide”, but due to lack of evidence, the investigators left open the possibility that she had been murdered. Also other theories suggested that John and Robert Kennedy had something to do with the death of Monroe, it is even said that it was a gangster crime.

It was not the first time that Marilyn had ingested an overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol, since the same had occurred in the spring of the previous year, shortly after Miller’s separation and the premiere of Rebel Lives.

Strangely, the police did not reveal the name of the substance that Marilyn had taken, and seized and refused to make public the telephone company tapes on which the calls she made the night of her death were recorded. This only confirmed the suspicions that Marilyn called someone for help, someone whose high public position did not allow him to face the scandal that would have been involved in such an affair.

Funeral

On August 8 , Joe DiMaggio, her second husband, held the funeral in private. Lee Strasberg delivered the following parting words:I can’t say goodbye to Marilyn, she never liked to say goodbye. But, adopting his particular way of changing things in order to face reality, I will say ‘goodbye’. Because we will all visit the country to which she has departed one day.

His remains are in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles , California.

Love relationships

Throughout her short life, Marilyn Monroe was married three times. Her three husbands were James Dougherty, a big guy who ended up as a retired cop; Joe DiMaggio , a sportsman who became ill with jealousy until the marriage turned into hell; and finally Arthur Miller , the revered playwright.

His early relationship with James Dougherty, whom he married the 19 of June of 1942 , abruptly ended four years later, but during those early years had become a professional model posing for photographs aimed at propaganda of the army.

The 14 of January of 1954 married the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio, one of the first American athletes whose popularity was comparable to that of a movie star. The wedding was one of the biggest social events of that year, but only a few months later, on October 27 , DiMaggio and Marilyn divorced. Despite this, and according to the testimony of friends of the actress, Joe DiMaggio was, of the three husbands she had, the only one she really loved.

On 29 June as as 1956 she married playwright Arthur Miller, for what must have been previously converted to Judaism. Miller, a serious writer and playwright, hailing from the Jewish intellectual elite, from openly leftist ideological positions, was marrying a woman who was supposedly the antithesis: superficial, frivolous, without ideas of his own and who regularly appeared on the front page of the yellow press.

And those who predicted the worst, were right, since this third and last marriage was a new personal failure. The carefree and naive Marilyn Monroe did not agree with the exclusive circle of New York intellectuals in which Miller developed, and although they did not divorce until January 1961 , they soon became irremediably estranged.

It is assumed that they also played with their collectors feelings of beautiful and famous like Frank Sinatra or Robert Kennedy , and that she slept with numerous men; perhaps because, as she herself declared with her dazzling superficiality

:Sex is a part of nature, and I am on the side of nature.

His irrepressible frankness was precisely the cause of many of his misfortunes, the failure of his marriages and the discomfort he caused among the powerful in Hollywood .

Filmography

Due to her fruitful acting career, the American Film Institute considers her among the ten best female stars of all time. In 1995 she was voted by the readers of the English Empire magazine as the sexiest film actress of all time; the same magazine, in 1997 , ranked her as the eighth biggest movie star (male and female) of all time; and in 1999 , the American People Magazine considered her the sexiest woman of the 20th century .

• The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947)
• Dangerous Years ( 1947 )
• Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! ( 1948 )
• Love Happy ( 1949 )
• Ladies of the Chorus (1949)
• Right Cross (1950)
• The Fireball (1950)
• La jungla de asfalto , ( The asfalt jungle , 1950)
• Naked Eve , ( All About Eve , 1950)
• A Ticket to Tomahawk ( 1950 )
• Home Town Story (1951)
• Love Nest (1951)
• As Young As You Feel (1951)
• Let’s Make It Legal ( 1951 )
• Fog in the Soul, Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)
• Four Pages from Life, O. Henry’s Full House (1952)
• Clash by Night (1952)
• I feel rejuvenated , Monkey Business (1952)
• We are not married , ( We’re Not Married , 1952)
• Niagara , (Niagara, 1952 )
• Gentlemen prefer blondes , ( Gentlemen prefer blondes , 1953)
• How to marry a millionaire , ( How to marry a millionaire , 1953 )
• River of no return , ( River of no return , 1954)
• Footlights , ( There’s No Business Like Show Business , 1954 )
• Temptation lives above , ( The seven year itch , 1955 )
• Bus Stop , ( Bus Stop , 1956 )
• The Prince and the Showgirl , ( The Prince and the Showgirl , 1957 )
• With skirts already crazy , ( Some Like It Hot , 1959 )
• The billionaire , ( Let’s Make Love , 1960 )
• Rebel Lives , ( The Misfits , 1961 ): Directed by John Huston and with the script of Marilyn’s still husband, Arthur Miller, it was an elegiac film, touched with the rare quality of the unrepeatable, which united three great actors on the screen, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe, three stars who were also going through some particularly delicate personal moments for different reasons. A story of losers, so much to Huston’s taste, that in a last twilight they will find at least a place where they can rest and share their experiences with someone. Her heartfelt portrayal of the divorced Roslyn Taber, who finds a new love in the character played by Gable, was highlighted again in 1962 with a new Golden Globe .