The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
An unwanted child of a film-lab cutter, raised by foster families, an orphanage and a guardian who drilled her to become "a movie star," Norma Jeane Baker built Marilyn Monroe piece by piece, then walked out on the studio that owned her and won control of her own pictures, while the fear, pills and dependence that came with the creation slowly consumed the woman who made it.
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Critical acts
- 1
Remaking Norma Jeane (1944-1946)
An army photographer told her, in Johnson's words, "You were born to be married to the camera." On August 2, 1945, she signed with Emmeline Snively's Blue Book Agency, paid for its classes against her first job, bleached her brown hair to gold at Snively's urging, and by spring 1946 had appeared on "no less than thirty-three covers."
- 2
Paying for Her Own Training (1947-1952)
She spent her money on lessons. She told the Carrolls that she put everything "into classes, rent and auto maintenance," and studied Odets and the Group Theatre repertoire at the Actors Lab. "All I could think of was this far, far away place called New York," she recalled. "I had never seen a play, and I don't think I knew how to read one very well."
- 3
Owning the Nude Calendar (1952)
Shown the photo, she "nodded yes, 'although I really thought that Tom [Kelley] didn't capture my best angle.'" Then she chose her own confessor. After a scheduled interview she asked the UPI reporter Aline Mosby to stay, dabbed her eyes, and told her: "I earned fifty dollars I needed very bad. That wasn't a terrible thing to do, was it? ...
- 4
Refusing *Pink Tights* (1954)
She did not report. Fox suspended her on January 4, 1954, and her lawyer told the press that she was "not fighting over money. The whole trouble hinges on the fact that the studio has refused to let Marilyn look at the script." She said: "I read the script and didn't like it. The part isn't good for me. It's as simple as that."
- 5
Walking Out of Hollywood and Founding Marilyn Monroe Productions (1954-1955)
She refused the film, moved to New York, and formed a company with the photographer Milton Greene in which she held 50.4 percent and was president. Her lawyers argued that Fox's missed option dates and unwritten bonus had voided the contract (see "The Night She Quit Hollywood").
- 6
Going Back to School at the Actors Studio (1955-1956)
She attended Lee Strasberg's classes from the spring of 1955, went into analysis as Strasberg required of fragile students, and in February 1956 chose to perform the opening of Anna Christie, Garbo's famous role, before the full membership. Maureen Stapleton, her scene partner, said, "This was really a brave thing for her."
Maxims
Choose your own name, and make it your mother's
Given the chance to rename herself, she took Monroe, "the only relatives of which she could be truly certain," and turned a stutter on "Mmmmmm" into a trademark. See "Remaking Norma Jeane."
Spend your last dollar on lessons
When Fox dropped her she put her money "into classes, rent and auto maintenance," and lived off the Carrolls rather than give up the Actors Lab. Banner adds that Hyde told her to study the silent stars, and she built her clown on Chaplin.
When they tell you to lie, confess on your own terms
She refused Fox's denial strategy and gave one sympathetic reporter a tearful confession that made her "the biggest news of the day." See "They Want Me to Deny It's Me."
Read the script before you sign your life to it
"The whole trouble hinges on the fact that the studio has refused to let Marilyn look at the script." The 1955 contract still did not give her script approval, which Banner says "would later return to haunt her."
Bet everything on your own drawing power
She walked out of a contract that ran to 1958, lived on a partner's money for a year, and won. Spoto: "there was no guarantee she could in fact survive without the machinery she had come to detest." See "The Night She Quit Hollywood."
Part IThe Story
Do You Want to See Me Be Her?
She was walking down a New York street with Susan Strasberg, unnoticed, when she saw a few fans in the distance and turned to her friend. "Do you want to see me be her?" Strasberg watched her "make some inner adjustment, something 'turned on' inside her, and suddenly—there she was." Eli Wallach once saw her stop traffic on Broadway with no makeup at all. Her explanation: "I just felt like being Marilyn for a minute."
That small scene holds the whole life. "Marilyn Monroe" was a role the woman born Norma Jeane had written, rehearsed and costumed herself. Donald Spoto concludes that "she could associate with 'Marilyn Monroe,' but she rarely identified with her." Lois Banner makes multiplicity her thesis: "There were many Marilyns, not just one." Monroe said it herself to W. J. Weatherby: "I'm so many people. I used to think I was going crazy, until I discovered some people I admired were like that, too."
She began with almost nothing: the illegitimate daughter of a film-lab cutter who spent most of her life in institutions, boarded with foster families, put in an orphanage at nine, married at sixteen so she would not have to go back, schooled only to the second year of high school. From that she built Marilyn Monroe. Then she walked out on the studio that owned her, founded her own company, and won control of her own pictures. The fear, pills and dependence that came with the creation slowly consumed the woman who made it. She died at thirty-six.
Her interpreters disagree. Spoto's Marilyn Monroe: The Biography is protective of her and hostile to most of the people around her, especially her last psychiatrist. Banner's Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox argues that childhood sexual abuse shaped her and calls her "a genius at self-creation." Paul Johnson, in Heroes, is short, opinionated and unsympathetic, and wonders whether "heroine" is even the right word. Where they differ, both versions are given here. She is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness because of how much agency she found inside a system built to give her none, and because the record is honest about what it cost.
By the Numbers
The Marilyn Ledger
3,463rdChild admitted to the Los Angeles Orphans Home, September 13, 1935
33Magazine covers by spring 1946, months after she signed as a model
$75Weekly pay on her first Fox contract, August 1946
$50What she was paid to pose nude for Tom Kelley in 1949
17,000Soldiers in the snow when she sang in Korea, February 1954
50.4%Her stake in Marilyn Monroe Productions, of which she was president
$100,000Per picture under the contract she won from Fox at the end of 1955
36Her age at death, August 4–5, 1962
The 3,463rd Child
On September 13, 1935, Grace McKee drove nine-year-old Norma Jeane to the Los Angeles Orphans Home on El Centro Avenue. Grace had just married Doc Goddard, who insisted the girl was an extra mouth to feed. She became the 3,463rd child in the Home's history. In Banner's account she clutched the car door handle, attendants had to "pry her hands off," and she cried, "I'm not an orphan! I'm not an orphan!" In the dining room she stopped crying and began to stutter, a stutter she would control but never overcome.
Spoto insists the Home was "quite decent," and that her later tales of twenty-seven beds and cold-water baths grew "more and more fantastic." Both agree she was lonely. She wrote herself a postcard signed "Mother and Daddy": "Of course nobody believed it. But I didn't care. I wanted to think it was true." From the roof she could see the RKO studio where her mother had worked. "Sometimes that made me cry, because I felt so lonely. But it also became my dream and my fantasy—to work where movies were made. When I told this to Grace, she almost danced for joy." Grace had been drilling her already: "Say: 'a movie star,' baby!"
Grace took her out in June 1937. As the girl climbed into the car, the radio announced the death of Jean Harlow, the star Grace had told her to become.
What happened before the Home is contested. Spoto finds her seven years with the Bolenders "essentially secure," with "no evidence that she was abused or mistreated," though he accepts a drunken "crude and abusive advance" by Doc Goddard and a violent assault by a thirteen-year-old cousin. Banner calls the abuse "formative" and credits Monroe's account of being molested at eight by a boarder she called "Mr. Kimmel." Johnson says she was abused in "at least two" of eleven foster homes.
Married So She Wouldn't Go Back
In 1942 the Goddards moved to West Virginia without her. Jim Dougherty's mother put it to her son plainly: otherwise "she goes back to the orphanage until she's eighteen." Norma Jeane married him three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, "so that she wouldn't have to go back to the orphanage," and left school, an "aborted education" that Spoto says "later haunted her." By 1945 he was overseas and she was working in a war factory.
An army photographer told her, in Johnson's words, "You were born to be married to the camera." On August 2, 1945, she signed with Emmeline Snively's Blue Book Agency, paid for its classes out of her first job, bleached her brown hair to gold, and by spring 1946 had appeared on "no less than thirty-three covers." Dougherty came home to a stranger: "So far as I was concerned, she was turning into another human being." She chose the career over the marriage.
In July 1946 she tested at Fox for Ben Lyon. She flustered the crew by demanding heavy makeup; then "while the camera was in operation, she showed not a trace of distress." Leon Shamroy watched the silent test and said, "This girl will be another Harlow!" Asked to choose a surname, she "did not hesitate: Monroe was the name of her mother's family, the only relatives of which she could be truly certain." Lyon supplied "Marilyn." "Say it," he urged. "Mmmmmm," she tried, stuttering for a moment. She did not make it her legal name, Spoto notes, "until seven years before her death."
Spend It on Lessons
Fox signed her in August 1946 at seventy-five dollars a week. Zanuck approved without enthusiasm, because "she had never acted anywhere—not a single role." A year and two bit parts later she was dropped, with a last paycheck of $104.13. "Well, I guess it really doesn't matter—it's a case of supply and demand."
Hollywood offered a starlet with no money and no family an easier route than talent. Spoto describes Joe Schenck's Saturday poker parties, where young women kept the glasses full ("I was invited as an ornament," she said), and records that she later told friends this "was the first of many times she had to kneel before an executive." Banner writes that a divorced starlet who had posed nearly nude was "an easy mark." She told the Carrolls, who took her in, that she had traded sex for meals.
What she did with her money shows who she meant to become. She put everything "into classes, rent and auto maintenance," and paid her own way at the Actors Laboratory, where "she did all her assignments conscientiously." "All I could think of was this far, far away place called New York. I had never seen a play, and I don't think I knew how to read one very well." In 1947 Lucille Ryman found her room "littered with photos of herself she studied day and night," and traced her lateness already to "a dread of looking unacceptable" and "her terror of failure."
With the agent Johnny Hyde's backing she took coaching from Natasha Lytess, whom Fox later paid $500 a week, more than Marilyn earned. "I'm not interested in money," she said. "I just want to be wonderful." She added Michael Chekhov, mime with Lotte Goslar, a UCLA night course in world literature "because I wanted to improve my mind," and, at Hyde's suggestion, the silent stars. Hyde, dying of heart disease, begged her: "Marry me and you'll be a very rich woman." She refused, because "according to her own code she would not wed someone with whom she was not in love." Days before he died in December 1950, he "called in every personal and studio debt at Fox" to get her a new screen test.
The lessons worked, and they left a lasting dependence on coaches. Spoto adds a harder judgment of his own: "she had neither the background nor temperament for the discipline serious acting requires."
Building the Clown
Johnson calls her gift "an ability to interlace herself with the process of photography ... to a degree no other actress has ever possessed." She looked at co-stars' foreheads rather than their eyes, because it made her eyes seem larger. "She already knew all the tricks."
Banner argues that she built "her era's greatest dumb-blonde clown" deliberately, from Marie Wilson, Mae West and Chaplin's Little Tramp. She "parodied herself"; Eve Arnold called her "a practitioner of camp." She insisted on adding a line to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: "I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it." Asked what she wore to bed, she said, "Chanel Number Five."
The clown read. Philippe Halsman counted two hundred books on her shelves in 1952, including, Banner says, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Whitman, Keats and Rilke, though she "wasn't always a diligent reader, but she got the gist of a book." Invited by Jane Russell to a Bible reading, she said, in Johnson's version, "I'm having a reading to myself, with Freud." She wanted to be taught by the men she loved too. Shelley Winters saw her list of men she would like to sleep with or marry, which included "Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller and other intellectuals."
Under it was fear. Johnson describes her as "shy to the point of mania," for whom reaching the set on time "required an effort of courage akin to that demanded of a soldier in the First World War who had gone 'over the top' too many times." Banner records dyslexia, insomnia and "dreams of monsters and witches." Beside the fear was hunger. "She wants to be a star so much she aches," said Sidney Skolsky, and she agreed: "I want to be a big star more than anything. It's something precious." "What she wanted was perfection," Banner writes: take after take of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," fights over costumes, hours at a mirror that Spoto calls "ruthless assessment ... ever dissatisfied with the image she beheld."
When Joan Crawford attacked her gold lamé dress in 1953, she answered in print: "Name calling won't alter the facts, and it is unlikely to change me. I live as I please, and I like it."
They Want Me to Deny It's Me
In 1949, with "no money for food or rent," she had posed nude for Tom Kelley for fifty dollars. In March 1952, as she was becoming a star, the Fox press office learned that the blonde on the "Golden Dreams" calendar was theirs. In the McCarthy era, under a Production Code that could "deny stardom to anyone who threatened the nation's purity by something as wicked as posing nude for a photo," this was dangerous. "The men at Fox were terrified," Spoto writes. They wanted her to deny it.
Shown the photo, she nodded and complained only that Kelley "didn't capture my best angle." Then she chose her own confessor. After a routine interview with Aline Mosby of United Press, she asked Mosby to stay. "Aline, dear, I have a problem, and I don't know what to do." Tears had already formed. "A few years ago, when I had no money for food or rent, a photographer I knew asked me to pose nude for an art calendar. His wife was there, they were both so nice, and I earned fifty dollars I needed very bad. That wasn't a terrible thing to do, was it? I never thought anybody would recognize me, and now they say it will ruin my career. I need your advice. They want me to deny it's me, but I can't lie. What shall I do?"
On March 13 the headline read "Marilyn Monroe Admits She's Nude Blonde of Calendar." She told the press she was "not ashamed," and added: "I want a man to come home after a hard day's work, look at this picture and feel inspired to say 'Wow!'" Of the calendar she said, "I don't want to be just for the few, I want to be for the many, the kind of people I come from."
Spoto gives her the credit: "it was Marilyn herself who devised the successful strategy by which crisis was averted and her image untarnished—indeed, much enhanced." She begged "understanding—not, it must be noted, forgiveness," and "orchestrated a brilliant exposure—not of her nakedness but of her candor and apparent purity of heart." Within weeks she was on the cover of Life and receiving five thousand fan letters a week.
She used the method again when the press found her mother alive. Her statement, written by Skolsky, said, "I am helping her now." Privately she would not visit Gladys. From 1953, when Gladys entered the Rockhaven sanitarium, until 1962, Banner says, Marilyn never went there. "All her demons came out," she told Ralph Roberts. The episode shows both her honesty and her ability to perform it.
— Marilyn Monroe to Aline Mosby of United Press, March 1952They want me to deny it's me, but I can't lie. What shall I do?
The Blonde Who Wouldn't Report
By late 1953 she was one of Fox's biggest earners, still on a May 1951 contract paying $1,700 a week in its second year, with no voice over directors or scripts, though "Most major stars had clauses in their contracts" giving them one. Banner shows that she "was regarded as a great moneymaker, so long as she played a blonde sexpot." She had already had to demand a star's dressing room on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: "This is a movie about a blonde ... and I'm the blonde." Now Fox cast her as a showgirl in Pink Tights, a remake of a Betty Grable picture.
She did not report. Fox suspended her on January 4, 1954. Her lawyer said she was "not fighting over money. The whole trouble hinges on the fact that the studio has refused to let Marilyn look at the script." She said: "I read the script and didn't like it. The part isn't good for me. It's as simple as that." Zanuck: "I couldn't believe she'd be this crazy." Ten days later she married Joe DiMaggio, phoning Fox's publicity chief first so the press would be there. "Marilyn had checkmated Zanuck," Banner writes.
People kept underrating her. When Otto Preminger was cruel on River of No Return, she came back from a twisted ankle with it taped, and he turned kinder. Shelley Winters: "Dumb? Like a fox, was my friend Marilyn." The dancer Frank Radcliffe said that "A lot of her so-called temperament was the fact that she knew what she wanted and threatened to pull out of the picture unless she got her way." Banner adds that she sometimes "fabricated illness" as "a bargaining chip with producers." The anger was real. She called it her "monster." Walking past the executive building with Stanley Rubin, she shook her fists: "I'm not just a face in a body. Listen to me, you bastards. I want you to watch me. I'm going to get better and better."
Seventeen Thousand Soldiers in the Snow
In February 1954, honeymooning in Japan, she accepted an invitation to entertain troops in Korea. Banner says Zanuck had refused her earlier request and that Joe "may have tried to stop her"; Spoto quotes friends who say Joe shrugged: "It's your honeymoon. ... Go ahead if you want to."
She changed into a tight lavender dress in freezing wind and sang "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and "Do It Again." She told Ben Hecht: "There were seventeen thousand soldiers in front of me ... It had started snowing. But I felt as warm as if I were standing in a bright sun. ... I felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything. I felt only happy." An army photographer said, "She made thousands of GIs feel she really cared." When her accompanist made a mistake, she told him she was sorry.
Back in Tokyo she ran to her husband. "It was so wonderful, Joe! You never heard such cheering!" He looked away. "Yes, I have," he said calmly.
Friends quoted by Spoto dated the marriage's failure to that honeymoon. Banner says the performances "enraged him." Both biographies record his violence: Banner says he hit her after the subway-grate shoot for The Seven Year Itch, and Rupert Allan told Spoto that "while they were married he had beaten and abused her." She phoned Fox's publicity office again to announce the separation, and her lawyer Jerry Geisler rehearsed her staged faltering on his arm the night before. "A cynical AP reporter wrote that she should receive an Oscar for her performance." She never spoke against him. Allan Snyder never heard her say "an unkind or vindictive word about an ex-husband or a former lover."
The Night She Quit Hollywood
At the end of 1954 she was owed a verbally promised $100,000 bonus for The Seven Year Itch. Fox had refused to lend her to Goldwyn for Guys and Dolls and ordered her into How to Be Very, Very Popular, and insisted her contract bound her until 1958. Spoto says she was "offended by the prospect of another seven years of servitude at Fox." She refused the film, moved to New York, and formed a company with the photographer Milton Greene, holding 50.4 percent as president. Her lawyers argued that Fox's missed option dates and unwritten bonus had voided the contract. Spoto calls it "a major gamble—one with enormous risks, for there was no guarantee she could in fact survive without the machinery she had come to detest."
Her reason was growth. "I want to keep growing as a person and as an actress, and in Hollywood they never ask me my opinion. They just tell me what time to show up for work. ... After all, if I can't be myself, what's the good of being anything at all?"
On January 7, 1955, Greene gathered eighty reporters, friends and possible investors at his lawyer Frank Delaney's house on East Sixty-fourth Street. She arrived an hour late in white satin and a borrowed ermine coat. "We will go into all fields of entertainment," she said, "but I am tired of the same old sex roles. I want to do better things. People have scope, you know." Delaney said she was no longer under contract; Fox insisted she owed four more years. The reporters were sarcastic: diamonds and furs "seemed appropriate for the old Marilyn, not the new one, who was a company president." West Coast executives dismissed the venture as "a typical bit of Marilyn's fey daydreaming."
Afterward she wanted to hear Frank Sinatra at the Copacabana. Amy Greene said it had been sold out for weeks. "Never mind. If you all want to hear Frank, follow me." Within minutes extra tables were pushed onto the floor; Sinatra stopped, winked and went on. "She knew," Amy said years later, "precisely the power and influence she had." The evening showed both sides of the walkout: a confident gamble on her own drawing power, and a young woman who did not yet sound like a company president. By spring she did. Reporters "were impressed by her knowledge of incorporation, investments, and contracts."
For a year she lived on Greene's money and, Banner says, returned Fox's checks uncashed, because cashing one "would be implicitly giving in." She used her fame for others, too. She asked the Mocambo's owner to book Ella Fitzgerald and promised to sit at a front table every night. "The owner said yes," Fitzgerald recalled, "and Marilyn was there, front table, every night." Spoto credits her with breaking a color bar; Banner quotes Dorothy Dandridge that the obstacle was Fitzgerald's weight, not her race.
Fox gave in. The contract signed on the last day of 1955 gave her $100,000 a picture, only four Fox films in seven years, freedom to work elsewhere, television and recording rights, a corporate tax shelter, and approval of director and cinematographer. Spoto says she also won approval of subject. Banner says she did not get script approval, "but it didn't seem that important at the time. Its absence would later return to haunt her." Still, "Marilyn won almost completely." Spoto goes further: "The eventual collapse of the traditional studio system and its ownership of actors owed much to her tenacity."
— Marilyn Monroe, on leaving HollywoodAfter all, if I can't be myself, what's the good of being anything at all?
No Script on the Table
She was the most famous film actress in the world and, in Hollywood's view, no actress at all. Offered Bus Stop, Joshua Logan objected, "But Marilyn can't act!" At Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, where she studied from the spring of 1955, Kim Stanley admitted the members did not think "she belonged there."
On February 17, 1956, she performed the opening of Anna Christie, Garbo's famous role, before the full membership, with Maureen Stapleton. "This was really a brave thing for her," Stapleton said. Monroe was so fragile that when Stapleton snapped at her over a taxi fare she phoned within minutes: "You really don't want to do the scene with me, do you?" On the night, Stapleton offered the accepted safety net, a script on the table. "No, Maureen—if I do it this time I'll do it for the rest of my life." Afterward: "I couldn't see anything before I went onstage. I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't remember one line. All I wanted was to lie down and die. ... Then I just had to go out and do it."
The Studio's members, Stanley said, "were taught never to clap ... but it was the first time I'd ever heard applause there." Strasberg told Logan that she and Brando stood "way above the rest." That night she wept over what she thought was a bad performance. Spoto warns that the Strasbergs' praise "caused damage enough."
On Bus Stop she chose a shredded, moth-eaten costume over the designer's glamorous one and played Cherie without her famous mannerisms. "Gone are every Lytess-inspired hesitation and every overworked mannerism," Spoto writes. Greene noted, "she wants to let everyone know whose show this is."
In the same year Natasha Lytess, dying of cancer and newly fired by Fox, came to her door. Monroe watched from an upstairs window "without expression" while Lew Wasserman barred the way. "Had she any sense of gratitude for my contribution to her life," Lytess said, "she could have saved my job." Spoto: "With this statement it is impossible to disagree." It was her pattern with guardians: Grace, Ana Lower, Hyde, Lytess, Greene, the Strasbergs, each attached to, each dropped when she moved on.
Two Pills Away
Johnson thinks the Method was a mistake. She was "by nature a natural actress, up to a point," and its teachers "persuaded her that ... she could become one of the greatest actresses who had ever lived." Paula Strasberg replaced Lytess as her on-set coach, which offended Laurence Olivier and, in Johnson's view, ruined The Prince and the Showgirl, her company's London production. At the Plaza press conference announcing it, Olivier had answered every question, including hers. Banner says she had loosened a strap in advance; it snapped, and "Newspaper headlines the next day featured her rather than Olivier."
Her lateness grew, Johnson writes, from "thirty minutes late" to "two, three, four hours late," and "her dependence on medication and alcohol increased pari passu." Since the early 1950s she had carried "a plastic bag filled with pills, including uppers and downers." "It took her five pills to get to sleep," Delos Smith said. "Seven would kill her. For many years she lived two pills away from dying." "I'm a war veteran of the night," she told Susan Strasberg. It was less a tactic than a habit that ran her. Some of what crews cursed was her body: she had endometriosis, and from 1956 her contracts excused her during her period. Robert Mitchum said she was often "in her dressing room immobilized by cramps, suffering and embarrassed."
In April 1957, now allied with Arthur Miller, who looked to her like her childhood idol Abraham Lincoln, she fired Greene over a producer credit Spoto shows had been contracted. Even Miller's lawyer admitted she was "absolutely irrational on the subject of Milton's credit." She miscarried in December 1958 and asked the Rostens, "Could I have killed it by taking all the Amytal on an empty stomach?"
Billy Wilder found her "uncooperative, obstructionist, explosive" on bad days. On Bus Stop she had hit Don Murray across the face with her costume. After Some Like It Hot she phoned Wilder's wife: "would you please tell him to go and fuck himself?" Then: "And my warmest personal regards to you, Audrey." Of Miller, after the marriage ended, she said only: "Mr. Miller is a wonderful man and a great writer, but it didn't work out that we should be husband and wife. But everybody I ever loved, I still love a little."
Locked In at Payne Whitney
On February 5, 1961, after the failure of the Miller marriage and the filming of The Misfits, her psychiatrist Marianne Kris drove her to New York Hospital. She signed in as "Faye Miller" and was put in a locked, padded room in the Payne Whitney clinic, where she pounded on the steel door "until her fists were raw and bleeding." When she smashed the glass in her bathroom door, an intern rated her "potentially self-destructive" and asked why she was so unhappy. "I've been paying the best doctors a fortune to find out why, and you're asking me?"
A nurse's aide smuggled a note to the Strasbergs: "I'm locked up with these poor nutty people. I'm sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. ... P.S. I'm on the dangerous floor. It's like a cell." They could do nothing. Allowed one call, she reached Joe DiMaggio, whom she had not seen in nearly six years. He flew in and told Kris he would "take the hospital apart brick by brick." She was moved to Columbia-Presbyterian. Kris kept repeating, "I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing," and was dismissed that day.
Monroe wrote to Ralph Greenson with her wit intact. Asked why she felt different from the other patients, "I decided if they were really that stupid I must give them a very simple answer, so I said, 'I just am.'" Greenson is where Spoto's anger concentrates: he made her "a member of his family," and "wished to keep her frail, collared to dependence on him forever." Banner sees the same pattern from another angle: "she often chose powerful older men as partners, overlooking their domineering ways in her quest for a father."
Something's Got to Give
In June 1962 Fox fired her from Something's Got to Give and sued her for $500,000. She took the fight to the public: a Life interview, sessions for Vogue and Cosmopolitan, the latter with George Barris on Santa Monica beach. Fox was "losing the fantastic publicity from the photos of the swimming scene." On July 25 its studio chief, Peter Levathes, came to her house to rehire her "at a higher salary." She pitched him two new comic scenes, with Pat Newcomb listening behind a bedroom door as her witness.
The Life interview is the nearest thing to a final statement. Asked how she "cranked herself up" for a scene, she bristled. "I don't crank anything—I'm not a Model T. ... I'm trying to work at an art form, not in a manufacturing establishment." On lateness: "Often, I'm late because I'm preparing a scene, maybe preparing too much sometimes." On the studio: "I'm there to give a performance, not to be disciplined by a studio. This isn't supposed to be a military school, after all." On the audience: "even in the slightest scene the people ought to get their money's worth." On the image: "A sex symbol becomes a thing, and I just hate to be a thing. ... I don't look on myself as a commodity, but I'm sure a lot of people have, including one corporation in particular which shall be nameless." On fame: "so long, fame, I've had you! I've always known it was fickle. It was something I experienced, but it's not where I live."
"What the world needs now is a greater feeling of kinship," she said. "We are all brothers, after all—and that includes movie stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs—everyone." It was why she disliked Ernest Hemingway's heroes: "They're afraid of kindness and gentleness and beauty. They always want to kill something to prove themselves!" That year she gave ten thousand dollars to a Mexican children's institute.
— Marilyn Monroe to Richard Meryman of Life, 1962I don't crank anything—I'm not a Model T. ... I'm trying to work at an art form, not in a manufacturing establishment.
The Night of August 4
She died at her Brentwood house on the night of August 4–5, 1962, aged thirty-six. The coroner's preliminary finding was a "possible overdose of barbiturates," amended to "probable suicide" and then "acute barbiturate poisoning—ingestion of overdose."
Spoto rejects suicide. Following the deputy district attorney John Miner, he argues that a sedative chloral hydrate enema, taken after Nembutal she had obtained from another doctor, killed her; that it was given by her housekeeper Eunice Murray on Greenson's orders, by accident rather than design; and that a cover-up of the scene followed. Banner discredits Miner, notes there is "no proof" Murray gave an enema ("Marilyn gave herself enemas"), suspects that Robert Kennedy visited that day and that there was a cover-up, and ends without a verdict: "it is impossible to say what she would do."
On the Kennedys they split sharply. Spoto says she slept with John Kennedy once, "and that was that," and that "Robert Kennedy never shared a bed with Marilyn Monroe." Banner believes "by the spring of 1962 Marilyn was involved with both Kennedys." Both note how many plans she had for the following weeks.
Agency Under Constraint
Johnson's test for a hero is broad: "anyone is a hero who has been widely, persistently over long periods, and enthusiastically regarded as heroic by a reasonable person, or even an unreasonable one." He sets Monroe opposite Mae West, borrowing Shelley Winters's labels: "West the boss-heroine, Monroe the victim-heroine." Her heroism was the daily act of facing a camera she feared. "Each time, it required an act of valor physical, mental, even spiritual, and each time it became more difficult." He ends uncertain: "it is impossible to write adequately of this tragic heroine, raised from nothing to sublimity and then dashed into dust. Perhaps heroine is the wrong word."
The biographies give her more agency. Banner's summary is a list of acts: "she made herself into an actress and a star, she formed her own production company, she fought the moguls to a standstill, and she publicly named the sexual abuse visited on her as a child." She calls the last "an act of great bravery."
The constraints are the measure. No family, no schooling; a studio system of seven-year contracts; "Hollywood patriarchs who regarded her as their toy" and a Zanuck "who regarded her as a 'dumb blonde'"; a Production Code that airbrushed photographs; executives who openly belittled a working-class divorcée. Sheree North said watching Fox men talk about her was "an eye-opener." Her body worked against her too: endometriosis, a stutter, insomnia and, Banner believes, bipolar disorder.
Her own testimony complicates the record. She was startlingly frank about trading sex for meals and about her abuse. She also invented: Lucille Ryman says she claimed "she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven, all of which she later admitted was untrue." The biographers have each chosen which to trust.
⚖
Where the Biographers Part
Spoto and Banner disagree often. Both versions are given.
| Question | Spoto | Banner |
|---|---|---|
| Childhood abuse | Bolender years "essentially secure"; orphanage horrors later inventions; accepts two assaults | Abuse "formative"; credits "Mr. Kimmel," dated to late 1933 |
| Abortions | Her gynecologist: "She never had even one" | "The many abortions she had" |
| Women | Lytess as coach and surrogate parent; no affair | Affairs with women, including Lytess |
| The Kennedys | John once; Robert never | Involved with both by spring 1962 |
| The 1955 contract | Won approval of subject | No script approval |
| The death | Accidental chloral hydrate enema, then a cover-up | Discredits Miner; no verdict |
Part IIThe Playbook
Her lessons are about agency under heavy constraint: how a woman with no family, schooling or contractual power manufactured leverage out of her own image, and how the habits that built the image wore her down. Some of what follows worked. Some is drawn from what killed her.
The principles
- 1.Build the persona as a role, and keep the actor separate.
- 2.Spend your last dollar on lessons.
- 3.When they tell you to lie, confess on your own terms.
- 4.Choose the part or don't take it.
- 5.Become the employer, not the employee.
- 6.Let them underrate you, then outplay them.
- 7.Take the fight to the public when the institution drops you.
- 8.Do it without the safety net, or you'll always need it.
- 9.Outgrow your protectors, but pay them back.
- 10.Don't hand your mind, or your nights, to anyone else.
Principle 1
Build the persona as a role, and keep the actor separate
She chose "Monroe," turned a stutter into a trademark, and assembled the clown from West, Wilson and Chaplin. Because it was a role, she could switch it on ("Do you want to see me be her?"), parody it and bargain with it. The distance Spoto describes, associating with Marilyn but rarely identifying with her, was a source of power. The danger shows in her complaint that a sex symbol "becomes a thing."
Tactic: Design your public identity from parts you have studied, and treat it as a role you play rather than a self you are. The distance is what lets you use it.
Principle 2
Spend your last dollar on lessons
Dropped with $104.13, she paid for the Actors Lab, then Lytess, Chekhov, Goslar, a night course and the silent films. Over fifteen years she assembled a private faculty, adding Phil Moore and Hal Schaefer for singing and Jack Cole for dance. It paid: Hyde's screen test, the applause at the Studio, Cherie. The cost was that she never learned to work without a teacher's approval. Wilder complained she "depended on her approval for everything."
Tactic: When you are out of money, invest in the skill the market says you lack, but aim to internalize what the teacher gives you, or the teacher becomes a permanent operating cost.
Principle 3
When they tell you to lie, confess on your own terms
Fox wanted denial. She chose the reporter, the moment and the frame: no money for food or rent, the photographer's wife present, fifty dollars "I needed very bad." She asked for understanding, not forgiveness, and turned a career-ending scandal into a Life cover. The limit is in the same record: "I am helping her now" was a press line, and she did not visit her mother in nine years.
Tactic: When a damaging truth is about to surface, get in front of it. Choose who hears it first, give the context that makes it sympathetic, and ask for understanding rather than forgiveness.
Principle 4
Choose the part or don't take it
With no contractual veto, absence was her veto. She refused Pink Tights and took the suspension, then refused How to Be Very, Very Popular and left town, and her lawyer made sure the public saw the principle: not money, the script. Radcliffe's reading is the honest one: she threatened to pull out unless she got her way. Banner's footnote is the darker one: sometimes the illness was fabricated.
Tactic: If you have no formal veto, your willingness to walk away is your veto. Use it on the decisions that define you, say plainly why, and be ready to absorb the cost.
Principle 5
Become the employer, not the employee
The walkout was a restructuring. She formed a company, held 50.4 percent, found the legal opening in Fox's missed options, lived a year on her partner's money, and returned checks uncashed rather than concede.
✒
What the Walkout Won
The 1955 contract compared with the one she left.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| $1,700 a week | $100,000 a picture |
| Cast at the studio's direction | Four Fox films in seven years; free to work elsewhere |
| No voice over directors or scripts | Director and cinematographer approval; script approval disputed |
| Salary paid to her personally | Salary paid to her company, taxed at corporate rates |
| No rights outside film | Television and recording rights |
The partnership broke in 1957, when she fired Greene over a credit he had been contracted to receive. The precedent outlived it.
Tactic: When an institution owns your output, don't just negotiate a better wage. Change the structure so it contracts with an entity you control, and read every clause, because the one you skip will haunt you.
Principle 6
Let them underrate you, then outplay them
Preminger, the West Coast executives who saw "fey daydreaming," the reporters at the 1955 launch, Olivier at the Plaza: each misjudged her and lost the round. Spoto says her company worked "at least in part because it took Hollywood by surprise." Within months the woman who "didn't seem to know much about MMP" was impressing reporters on incorporation and contracts.
Tactic: If people insist on underestimating you, don't spend energy correcting them. Use the room their misjudgment gives you to get competent at the thing they think you can't do.
Principle 7
Take the fight to the public when the institution drops you
Her real power base was never the studio. It was "the ordinary people, the working class," the many she said she wanted to be for. Fired and sued in 1962, she went to Life, Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and within weeks the studio chief was at her door offering more money. She kept a witness behind the bedroom door when the terms changed.
Tactic: Know where your leverage actually lives. If it lives with your audience rather than your employer, go to the audience when the employer turns on you, and have a witness in the room when terms change.
Principle 8
Do it without the safety net, or you'll always need it
"No, Maureen—if I do it this time I'll do it for the rest of my life" is a theory of habit, and the rest of her life proved it. The crutches she did accept became permanent: a coach on every set, analysts who arbitrated her business, pills to sleep. Korea shows the other side: facing the audience directly, she "felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything."
Tactic: When you are offered a safety net for a hard first performance, weigh not just tonight's risk but the habit you are about to form.
Principle 9
Outgrow your protectors, but pay them back
Her rise was a chain of patrons, each dropped when she moved on. That is a real strategy for someone who starts with nothing, and it produced the worst moment in her record: Lytess, dying and fired, turned away while Monroe watched from a window. She was capable of the opposite. She stayed devoted to Miller's father and children, never spoke ill of an ex-husband, and sat at a front table every night so Ella Fitzgerald could play the Mocambo.
Tactic: It is fine to outgrow the people who launched you. It is not fine to leave them stranded. When you move on, settle the debt.
Principle 10
Don't hand your mind, or your nights, to anyone else
The pattern ended with Greenson, who in Spoto's view wanted to keep her "collared to dependence on him forever." One psychiatrist arbitrated her business; another put her in a padded cell; an ex-husband had to get her out. The pills were the same surrender in chemical form: five to sleep, seven to die. However one reads her death, it came out of that margin.
Tactic: Get help, but keep authority over your own decisions. Any adviser or substance that makes you more dependent over time is not working for you.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Choose your own name, and make it your mother's. She took Monroe, "the only relatives of which she could be truly certain," and turned a stutter on "Mmmmmm" into a trademark.
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Spend your last dollar on lessons. Dropped by Fox, she put her money "into classes, rent and auto maintenance," and built her clown on Chaplin.
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When they tell you to lie, confess on your own terms. One sympathetic reporter and a tearful confession turned a scandal into sympathy.
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Read the script before you sign your life to it. The contract she won still lacked script approval, and its absence "would later return to haunt her."
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Bet everything on your own drawing power. She walked out of a contract that ran to 1958, lived on a partner's money for a year, and won.
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Do it without the script, or you'll always need it. "If I do it this time I'll do it for the rest of my life."
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Don't confuse the cheering with love. "You don't know what it's like to have all that I have and not be loved and know happiness."
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Pay back the people who made you. Lytess said she could have saved her job "had she any sense of gratitude." This one is drawn from the failure.
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Don't hand your mind to your healers. Even from a locked ward she saw her doctors were "interested only in something they studied in books."
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Two pills is not a margin of safety. She lived, a friend said, "two pills away from dying."
