Marilyn Monroe is an iconic figure across time and space. Few celebrities have captured the public’s attention spanning as many generations as Marilyn. Mention her name to a 90 year old or a 9 year old and they will likely both be familiar, immediately evoking images of platinum blonde curls, beauty marks, and that white dress, flapping in the updraft of a New York City subway grate. But did you know, despite this familiarity, despite being almost universally known, no one really knows the real Marilyn Monroe because she never existed? Marilyn Monroe was less of a person and more of a product, created, invented for public consumption and packaged with a pretty bow. She was a fictional character so unforgettable that her image is still emblazoned in the deepest depths of our minds six decades after her death, while the real person, Norma Jeane, went completely unseen. Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Quick announcement. Many of you probably saw my post on social media but if you didn’t I wanted to share that I’ve started a T-shirt fundraiser for History Fix that runs for 2 more weeks. Some of you may not realize that history fix is not a paid gig. In fact I lose money on this paying for hosting the show on the various platforms, my website, not to mention the hours, I don’t even want to think about how many hours I spend each week researching, writing, recording, editing, and promoting each and every episode. And, don’t get me wrong, I love it. It’s a passion project for me and I find it incredibly fulfilling. But that is time I could be working on my actual business which supports my family of four, don’t tell my husband. So I’m hoping that if you listen to history fix and you get something out of it, maybe you’ll want to give a little back and support the show by buying a t-shirt. It’s a win win. You get to rock an awesome history fix t-shirt and I get to halfway justify all the time I put into this show. There is a link in the description that you can use purchase a shirt. I really appreciate all the support. Okay, now back to the show. 

 

Michelle Vogel is a film historian and author of the book “Marilyn Monroe: Her Films, Her Life.” She summed it up nicely when she said in an interview quote “I don’t think there was a ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe. She was a character and a persona to be played, both on and off the screen. At the heart of it all, Marilyn Monroe was still Norma Jeane… When she acted a part, it was Norma Jeane, playing Marilyn Monroe, playing said role. Not easy.” end quote. “Not easy” runs deep. Because Marilyn’s life was not easy. It’s hard to see that when you look at a smiling image of her. She looks so confident, effortless, beaming in a ray of golden sunshine. But the real story of Marilyn Monroe is so much darker and as soon as you start to dig, to chip away at the shiny facade, the real tragedy starts to reveal itself. 

 

Marilyn was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles in 1926. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker was a film cutter, struggling to make ends meet. And, let’s pause for a minute because I wasn’t totally sure what a film cutter was so I had to look into it and I pretty quickly discovered why I was unfamiliar. It’s basically movie editing but back when films were recorded on like rolls of actual film negatives. They had to physically cut the negatives and arrange them, assemble the reels just so to create the movie. This job was usually done by young, working class women and while it was absolutely imperative to the creation of motion pictures, movies, they got no credit for it and were paid very little. A 1926 Los Angeles Times article said quote “one of the most important positions in the motion-picture industry is held almost entirely by women,” end quote. So that explains why we don’t know about it. According to the Women Film Pioneers Project quote “However, out of the ranks of these film joiners and negative cutters emerged a handful of women who would help to develop the editing techniques that would become the hallmark of Hollywood’s visual style.” end quote. So that’s what Marilyn’s mother did. And, I know she’s Norma right now, I’m just going to refer to her as Marilyn throughout this whole thing to avoid confusion. She never knew her father. His name is listed on her birth certificate as Edward Mortenson but as far as I can tell she never actually met him or knew much about him. 

 

So Gladys was a low income single mother which is already hard but to make matters worse, she developed paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to a mental institution in 1934, leaving Marilyn basically orphaned. She spent some time in foster homes and orphanages until Grace Goddard, a friend of her mother’s, became her guardian. But this was not an ideal upbringing. Marilyn faced sexual abuse in at least one foster home and her life with Grace Goddard wasn’t perfect either. Much of this early trauma would come out later as she underwent psychoanalysis as part of an acting class she took. We’ll get into that later. Marilyn found a sense of escape from real life in the cinema. And I have to imagine she was at least somewhat influenced by her mother’s sort of position within the Hollywood movie industry. She loved movies. In a 1951 interview she said quote “In junior high, I was completely movie-struck I used to see movies I liked three or four times when I could afford it.” end quote. She decided at a young age that she wanted to be an actress saying quote “‘I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim ... When I heard that this was acting, I said “that's what I want to be.” end quote. But Marilyn was far from a Hollywood actress at this point, she was a ward of the state and her guardian, Grace Goddard, was about to move out of California. This would have meant being shuffled back into the foster care system or thrust into an orphanage. 

 

Marilyn saw another way out, marriage. She got married at just 16 years old to 21 year old Jim Dougherty which is pretty statutory these days but I think it was very much a marriage of convenience for her because it meant not going back to an orphanage. Jim was a factory worker but he enlisted as a merchant marine in 1944 to serve in World War II. And this was a time in US history when many men went off to fight and women stepped up to do jobs that still had to be done in their absence. Women left the home for really the first time on a large scale. This was a tipping point for women working and being accepted as a valuable labor force. I mean, there was a long way to go yet but it was sort of the beginning of all that, born out of necessity. Marilyn, a regular Rosie the Riveter, went to work in a munitions factory which is where guns and bullets and explosives and such are made. So she is very much helping the war effort. And it was here, in a munitions factory during World War II that she was discovered, so to speak. 

 

A photographer came by the factory one day and, struck by Marilyn’s beauty, commented quote “you’re a real morale booster. I’m going to take your picture for the boys in the Army to keep their morale high,” which ew. I get icky feelings from this. But for Marilyn, it was well received. It was someone valuing her, her appearance, but still, it was a compliment and I don’t think she was used to that. In a May 1952 interview she recalled being teased at school for her looks saying quote “I was tall for my age and scrawny and my hair was short and rather thin and scraggly. The boys used to yell ‘Norma Jeane—string bean!’ and they thought it was so funny that I wanted to be an actress. … Somehow they thought I looked like a boy, I was so straight up and down.” end quote. So this man wanting to take her photo as a morale booster for the men in the army, that was probably validating for a now 18 year old Marilyn. I have this photo on my instagram and my website if you want to see it. She looks pretty different with curly, sort of frizzy red hair. She’s Norma Jeane in this picture, not Marilyn Monroe.

 

This portrait taken in the munitions factory was the beginning of a modeling career that her husband, Jim Dougherty, did not support and it would ultimately lead to the end of their marriage. But it marked something else too. It marked the beginning of the construction of Marilyn Monroe, the character that Norma Jeane was to invent. At this point, she started bleaching her red hair, becoming the iconic platinum blonde we think of today. She took modeling very seriously, saying quote “I wouldn’t settle for second best. I would take home photographs of myself to study how I looked and if I could improve myself posing in front of a mirror.” end quote. She also learned how to be charming. Modeling agent Emmeline Snively remarked quote “she made everyone she talked to feel as if he were the only one in the world.” end quote. 

 

It wasn’t long before Marilyn’s stint as a charismatic pin up model caught the attention of the Hollywood movie industry. 20th Century Fox offered her a screen test in 1946. And I think it was at this point she realized, she couldn’t just look like Marilyn Monroe, she had to become Marilyn Monroe. She wrote in her memoirs quote “I knew how third-rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my god, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve.” end quote. Her initial contract with 20th Century Fox and then with Columbia both fell through. Grant Wong says in a Smithsonian Magazine article called “Who Was the Real Marilyn Monroe” quote “It wasn’t easy to make it big as an actress in 1950s Hollywood. At the time, the film industry was dominated by the “studio system,” an arrangement through which the “Big Five” studios—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Paramount, 20th Century Fox and RKO—monopolized movie production, distribution and exhibition. These male-dominated companies quashed the independent studios where women actors, directors and producers had previously found success.” end quote. 

 

But she didn’t give up. Living out of a suitcase, she made the final leap in 1956 when she officially adopted her screen name Marilyn Monroe, making it her legal name and the transformation was complete. To achieve her childhood dream, to become a Hollywood actress she quite literally had to become a different person, to completely reinvent herself. “Still, Monroe prevailed,” Wong goes on, “Her natural beauty helped her get through the door, but it was her hard work that cemented her rise to superstardom.” end quote. She was rehired by 20th Century Fox and quickly became a full blown movie star. But the image they cast upon her wasn’t exactly what she was going for. She quickly became typecast as a “dumb blonde” persona. And, although those were just roles she was playing in movies, it spilled over into her real life. While Marilyn was glorified for her looks, her figure, her sex appeal, she was rarely praised for her intelligence. Many didn’t know she was an avid reader, hungrily soaking up all the knowledge she could. She also wrote a lot, she wrote poetry and kept journals. These later become a window into the real Marilyn beneath the facade. In one of her roles as showgirl Lorelei Lee in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she says quote “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it,” end quote. And this is meant to be funny, it’s a comedy. But I find it actually really dark. This one line in this one movie that’s meant as a joke is all too real and really sort of sums up what Hollywood has done to her in an almost ironic way. She’s valued for her looks which are mostly artificial, bleached blonde hair and a nose job. She’s forced to sort of bury the real parts of her that actually have value to become what they want her to be to become what sells- a dumb blonde with an attractive figure. 

 

And it works for her so she goes with it. But despite her success we start to see Marilyn unravel. She was described as difficult to work with. She was constantly late to shoots. Those who knew her said she was a completely different person than what appeared on screen. She had severe stage fright. Michele Vogel says in that Smithsonian Magazine article by Grant Wong quote “She was a nervous wreck filming scenes, often breaking out into a rash or being physically ill at the thought of performing.” end quote. And for this anxiety she was prescribed copious amounts of  barbiturates which she began to abuse. 

 

So let’s pause to talk about what barbiturates are because they’re not really a thing anymore but they are a rather important part of this story. Barbiturates are sedative-hypnotic medications that were prescribed for a whole range of reasons, anxiety, insomnia, epilepsy, etc. According to The National Library of Medicine quote “Between the 1920s and the mid-1950s, practically the only drugs used as sedatives and hypnotics were barbiturates” end quote. They are a combination of urea which comes from animal excrement, fun, and malonic acid which comes from apples. They were first sort of discovered by Adolf von Baeyer, a German chemist. He is the one who came up with the name barbiturate but the origins of that name are a bit unclear. There are a few weird theories out there. He apparently had a friend named Barbara so some theorize that he named it after her. Others claim that he celebrated his discovery in a tavern frequented by artillery officers who were celebrating the day of their patron saint Barbara but that seems incredibly farfetched. Finally, some think the name came from the barbed appearance of the crystals which make the most sense to me. Wherever the name came from, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that this stuff really just exploded in the first half of the 20th century. It was prescribed heavily to patients in mental institutions as a sort of sedative but it was also prescribed to average everyday people, mostly women, for nervousness, anxiety, and difficulty sleeping. 

 

According to the Office on Women’s Health, women are twice as likely to be prescribed prescription drugs for anxiety and depression than men. And while, yes, women are more likely to experience anxiety and depression, Taylor Prewitt says in a Vice article called “Take Some Pills For Your Hysteria, Lady” quote “this still doesn't explain the intense level of prescription disparity. Even with disorders that skew heavily male, like ADHD, women are more likely to be prescribed medication… But this isn't unique to today's women. Females have long been targeted by pharmaceutical advertising, and massive disparities in prescription drug use have been around almost as long as prescription drugs.” end quote. This really came about towards the end of the 1800s when women were being prescribed morphine and laudanum AKA opium to treat air quotes female conditions like pregnancy, childbirth, and menstrual pain. And part of what led to this was the temperance movement when people, a lot women really, were against alcohol. Alcohol had always sort of been the drug of choice for self medicating right? But now, it’s not a good look. These respectable housewives do not want to be seen drinking alcohol. But popping pills was another story. They were doctor prescribed, just following doctor’s orders. You still see this today in like the Mormon community where alcohol is a big no no. They have all kinds of prescription drug problems. According to Prewitt, By the end of the 1800s, more than two thirds of the country's opium and morphine addicts were women. Now enter barbiturates at the turn of the century. They worked well for sedating anxious women but on the flip side they were highly addictive, like to the point where you would have withdrawals if you stopped taking them. They were also fairly dangerous because it was pretty easy to overdose. So we have these pills being prescribed to women mostly to treat what was called neurasthenia which if you Google it is quote “an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.” end quote. So they’re just sad and stressed out and their hormones are wacky and instead of fixing the actual root causes of those problems, they’re being prescribed a destructive and highly addictive narcotic to cover it up. Prewitt says quote “Back in the 60s, feminists like Betty Friedan railed against the pharmaceutical industry's generalization of the "problem that has no name"—her label for the kind of fatigue and feelings of emptiness that many housewives were treating with popular tranquilizers—arguing that women's predisposition to nervous illness had less to do with anxiety and depression than their failure to live fulfilled lives.” Yes ma’am. David Herzberg, author of the book “Happy Pills in America” adds quote “If you have a group of people whose life choices you're limiting, they're going to end up less happy, on average." end quote. 

 

So this is the sort of trap that Marilyn fell into as a woman in 1950s America. But despite it all, her career was still on the rise. She married New York Yankees baseball player Joe Dimaggio which was a huge deal, right, this is like Brangelina. We’ll call it Jarilyn. But he was not a fan of her scandalous nature on and off the screen. She was often pulling publicity stunts, wearing super revealing dresses, she once told a reporter that she didn’t wear underwear which like, whatever, but this is the 1950s. And it was actually the subway grate stunt that tanked that marriage. You’ve seen it, she’s wearing a white halter top sort of cocktail dress standing over a subway grate and the dress is flying up exposing her upper thighs, I mean she has like little white shorts on it’s not that revealing but Joe was not with it. I guess he only wanted a seductive sex goddess when she wasn’t his wife. That one did not translate well and the marriage only lasted 9 months. 

 

So Marilyn’s image, her sex appeal, is really carrying her career thus far. I mean people are overlooking some really serious red flags because she was so marketable. They were making a lot of money off of Marylin Monroe. Sweep the mess under the rug and carry on. But Marilyn really did strive for more. She wanted to be a serious actress, not just a Playboy bunny. Despite already being an incredibly successful Hollywood moviestar, she enrolled in acting classes in New York City with acclaimed acting teacher Lee Strasberg. He helped develop method acting which is when you sort of tap into your own emotions and sense memories and bring that to a role. And part of how he got people to tap into their emotions and bring all that to the surface was through psychoanalysis. Marilyn had been introduced to Lee Strasberg through movie director Elia Kazan with whom she had had an affair. But Kazan would later say quote “The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.” end quote. So I’m sensing a bit of an abusive relationship here between Marilyn and Lee Strasberg. He’s like Professor Slughorn in the 6th Harry Potter book. He collects students right, the more famous, the more impressive, the better. And the fact that Marilyn had this underlying low self esteem a lot of which probably stemmed from untreated childhood trauma, only bolstered his control, his power over her. It’s not good. 

 

So Marilyn starts undergoing psychoanalysis as part of her acting lessons. This involves bringing repressed memories and fears to the conscious mind through dream interpretation and free association which is like stream of consciousness style, you just talk without pause about dreams and memories and feelings and random words and it doesn’t have to make sense but the idea is that you’re tapping into your subconscious mind. And part of that was writing everything down, all these memories and emotions that are coming back to her, she’s writing them down and they end up getting left with Lee Strasberg after her death and eventually auctioned off by his 3rd wife and widow for $13.4 million dollars. So we have access to really the inside of Marilyn’s head. But I’m not so sure that the psychoanalysis was good for her. At one point she writes quote “For someone like me its wrong to go through thorough self analisis—I do it enough in thought generalities enough.It's not too much fun to know yourself too well or think you do—everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.” end quote. So they’re dredging all of this up and it’s not sitting well. 

 

In one of these sessions she digs up a incident of sexual abuse from when she was in the foster care system and the humiliation of being punished for it by her great aunt Ida Martin who had been paid by her guardian Grace Goddard to look after her for a few months. Ida was a strict evangelical Christian who chose to shame Marilyn for being a child victim of sexual abuse. After this she wrote quote “Ida—I have still been obeying her— it’s not only harmful for me to do so but unreality because life starts from Now working (doing my tasks that I have set for myself) On the stage—I will not be punished for it or be whipped or be threatened or not be loved or sent to hell to burn with bad people feeling that I am also bad. or be afraid of my [genitals] being or ashamed exposed known and seen— so what or ashamed of my sensitive feeling.” end quote. You can see how it doesn’t really make that much sense, it’s fragmented, it’s stream of consciousness. But she’s stirring all this up for the sake of her acting, in order to tap into these emotions during scenes it isn’t actually being dealt with properly from like a mental health perspective. They are forcing her to bring out her demons and use them. They aren’t helping her banish them. 

 

In one stream of consciousness style poem scrawled on Waldorf Astoria Hotel stationary, she recounts a nightmare in which Lee Strasberg and psychiatrist Margaret Hohenberg are operating on her, performing surgery. And I’m going to read this because I feel like it speaks volumes. So this is a dream she had quote “Best finest surgeon—Strasberg to cut me open which I don’t mind since Dr. H has prepared me—given me anesthetic and has also diagnosed the case and agrees with what has to be done— an operation—to bring myself back to life and to cure me of this terrible dis-ease whatever the hell it is— and there is absolutely nothing there— Strasberg is deeply disappointed but more even— academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much—more than he had ever dreamed possible … instead there was absolutely nothing— devoid of every human living feeling thing— the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust—like out of a raggedy ann doll—and the sawdust spills all over the floor & table and Dr. H is puzzled because suddenly she realizes that this is a new type case. The patient … existing of complete emptiness Strasberg’s dreams & hopes for theater are fallen. Dr. H’s dreams and hopes for a permanent psychiatric cure is given up—Arthur is disappointed— let down” end quote. There is so much to unpack there. She dreams that she is cut open and she is just empty inside. Like all of her, everything that everyone thinks she is is just exterior, just on the outside, a facade. This seems like an extreme case of imposter syndrome and deeply rooted fear that people will discover that she isn’t who she pretends to be. But also, fear of disappointing others. The nightmare part is not that she’s empty inside and sawdust comes out of her like a Raggedy Anne doll, it’s that she has disappointed her teacher and her doctor and her husband by not being who they thought she was. When I say husband, that’s the Arthur she mentioned. Let’s get into that. 

 

In 1956, Marilyn married Arthur Miller who was a famous playwright. I know him because I did theater in high school and we did the Crucible which he wrote. He also wrote Death of a Salesman and some other stuff. He’s quite famous. And she appears to be quite in love with him writing quote “I am so concerned about protecting Arthur I love him—and he is the only person—human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses about—but he [is] the only person … that I trust as much as myself—because when I do trust my- self (about certain things) I do fully.” end quote. But this marriage would not last either. At one point, early in their relationship she writes a poem that almost foreshadows the inevitable demise quote “my love sleeps besides me— in the faint light—I see his manly jaw give way—and the mouth of his boyhood returns with a softness softer its sensitiveness trembling in stillness his eyes… look out wondrously from the cave of the little boy—when the things he did not understand— he forgot. But will he look like this when he is dead oh unbearable fact inevitable yet sooner would I rather his love die than him?” end quote. 

 

Marilyn and Arthur go to England for 4 months. She’s filming a movie with Laurence Olivier. They are living in a huge manor house outside of London. Everything seems perfect. It’s a fairytale. In a Vanity Fair article called “Marilyn and her Monsters” Sam Kashner reports quote “She couldn’t have felt more fulfilled and vindicated as an artist, until a chance discovery undermined her fragile confidence in herself and her trust in her husband. It was at Parkside House that Marilyn stumbled upon a diary entry of Miller’s in which he complained that he was “disappointed” in her, and sometimes embarrassed by her in front of his friends. Marilyn was devastated. One of her greatest fears—that of disappointing those she loved—had come true.” end quote. And I want to add here that Marilyn had suffered three miscarriages during her marriage to Arthur Miller and that must have only added to these feelings of failure, that she had disappointed her husband not only with her behavior around his friends but with her inability to perform this most sacred duty of a wife, of a woman in bearing children. 

 

So this was a major blow. She was blindsided and betrayed by this discovery writing in a journal quote “I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.” end quote. She can’t sleep, she’s popping barbiturates left and right, completely unraveling. She scrawls on Parkside House stationary quote “on the screen of pitch blackness comes/reappears the shapes of monsters my most steadfast companions … and the world is sleeping ah peace I need you—even a peaceful monster.” end quote. 

Despite all this, the marriage persists. Marilyn accompanies Arthur to Washington DC when he’s brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee for suspected ties to communism in 1957. And I go into the HUAC in much more detail in episode 26 about Hazel Scott so I won’t rehash it here but you should definitely give that episode a listen if you haven’t already. According to Kashner quote “Many believe that Monroe’s popularity saved him from being destroyed by HUAC’s witch hunt, which blacklisted many show-business people and ruined their lives.” end quote. This was an all male panel by the way so I guess they were Marilyn fans. But Marilyn is not vindicated by this writing soon after quote “I think I am very lonely—my mind jumps. I see myself in the mirror now, brow furrowed—if I lean close I’ll see—what I don’t want to know—tension, sadness, disappointment, my eyes dulled, cheeks flushed with capillaries that look like rivers on maps—hair lying like snakes. The mouth makes me the sadd[est], next to my dead eyes…When one wants to stay alone as my love (Arthur) indicates the other must stay apart.” end quote. She also writes quote “Help help Help I feel life coming closer when all I want Is to die. Scream— You began and ended in air but where was the middle?” end quote. 

 

So she’s discovered that her husband is dissatisfied with her. He now seems to be distancing himself from her. But it gets worse. Arthur starts adapting one of his short stories, “The Misfits” to be turned into a movie. This is about a wounded young woman who falls in love with a much older man. It’s about their relationship, Marilyn and Arthur. It’s about their declining relationship. And Marilyn herself is playing the woman in the film like some sick joke, acting out this devastating reality she’s experiencing on the big screen for everyone to see. It does not go well. She completely unravels on the set and the film ends up being a commercial failure. Arthur does come away with something though. He meets and falls in love with his next wife on the set and divorces Marilyn soon after. 

 

This was a breaking point. She was committed to a psych ward by her psychiatrist against her will. The psychiatrist promises to come back the next day but never shows up. She isn’t allowed to use the phone. She finally gets a letter to Lee Strasberg and he tries to get her out but fails because he’s not family or her doctor. Finally her ex-husband Joe Dimaggio is able to rescue her and removes her from the ward against the objections of the doctors and nurses and this sort of rekindles a friendly relationship between the two. And I don’t know, maybe she really did need to be in there, I don’t know but she’s out and she’s trying to carry on. 

 

After all of this craziness, she meets John F. Kennedy the then president of the United States at the home of his brother in law, Peter Lawford who she has known for a while. She famously sang him happy birthday at a democratic fundraiser at Madison Square Garden in 1962. A photograph taken at the after party is the only image of the two of them together but stil that performance spurred rumors of an affair with JFK and also with his brother Robert Kennedy who is also in the photo. I don’t know. I don’t know if this is true or not and I got sucked into a rabbit hole trying to figure it out. Biographer James Spada who wrote a book about Marilyn seems sure the affair was real saying quote “It was pretty clear that Marilyn had had sexual relations with both Bobby and Jack." end quote. Bobby and Jack being Robert Kennedy and JFK. But, I don’t know. I mean who is this guy? He didn’t know Marilyn. He just researched and wrote about her life after the fact like everyone else. He was 12 when she died. And an affair with the president of the United States is a great way to sell books. So, grain of salt. Apparently a bunch of documents came out in 1997 that were supposed to prove the affair but that ended up being a big hoax. I don’t know. 

 

What I do know is that Marilyn died 3 months after singing happy birthday to JFK of an apparent barbiturate overdose at the age of just 36. But it’s not that cut and dry. According to Spada quote “What happened to Marilyn Monroe is one of the great mysteries of the 20th century,” end quote. Some think it was an accidental overdose, some think she committed suicide, and then a handful think there was foul play involved relating to the Kennedy family and some sort of elaborate cover up. She did seem to be somewhat afraid of this Peter Lawford guy, JFK’s brother in law who introduced her to him writing way back in 1956 quote “about being afraid of Peter he might harm me, poison me, etc. why—strange look in his eyes—strange behavior in fact now I think I know why he’s been here so long because I have a need to be frighten[ed]—and nothing really in my personal relationships (and dealings) lately have been frightening me—except for him—I felt very uneasy at different times with him.” end quote. And he was apparently the last person to speak to her on the phone before her death. 

 

According to a People Magazine article by Tierney McAfee quote “witnesses claim to have heard a disturbing tape from the bugged Monroe home the night of her death, on which the voices of Lawford, an angry Bobby and a screaming Monroe are audible. During a 1983 BBC interview that Monroe biographer Anthony Summers conducted with the actress' former live-in housekeeper, Eunice Murray, he said there was a "moment where she put her head in her hands and said words to the effect of, 'Oh, why do I have to keep covering this up?' I said, 'Covering what up, Mrs. Murray?' She said, 'Well, of course Bobby Kennedy was there [on Aug. 4], and of course, there was an affair with Bobby Kennedy.'" end quote. Spada too believes there was a Kennedy related cover up but not that they murdered her saying quote “The Kennedys could not risk this coming out because it could have brought down the president. But the cover-up that was designed to prevent anyone from finding out that Marilyn was involved intimately with the Kennedy family has been misinterpreted as a cover-up of their having murdered her," end quote. 

 

Joe Dimaggio certainly blamed the Kennedys for Marilyn’s death, supposedly saying in an interview with a biographer quote “The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it. They'll be getting away with it a hundred years from now. I always knew who killed her, but I didn't want to start a revolution in this country. She told me someone would do her in, but I kept quiet. They did in my poor Marilyn. She didn't know what hit her.” end quote. So that’s a whole can of worms I can’t even begin to try to sort through. There is not enough evidence to support any of these claims of an affair or a cover up or a murder or any of that. Form your own opinions of course but this one is purely speculative and without some kind of smoking gun it will likely remain that way. 

 

A tragic end to a tragic life. Despite her outward appearance as a Hollywood moviestar, celebrity, most beautiful woman in the world, uber confident, inspiration, it was all a facade. Inside, Marilyn struggled with her mental health, authentically connecting with people, confidence which eventually led to her life being cut short at just 36 years old. But it wasn’t all her fault. In a lot of ways Marilyn was a victim. She was a victim of child abuse and neglect. She was a victim of misogynistic Hollywood that stripped her down to a pretty face and a busty figure. She was a victim of Lee Strasberg in his quest to perfect method acting who pushed her into psychoanalysis without any regard for her mental wellbeing, whose heirs continue to rake in millions of dollars each year licensing her image. She was a victim of public consumption, a morale booster for the army, a sex icon for pin up collectors and movie goers, a scandal to entertain the masses. Marilyn Monroe was a product not a person. But there was a real person inside, not just saw dust. There was a real person that no one could see, that no one chose to look for, a real woman who came from nothing and climbed tooth and nail to the very top, striving for change and equality in a male dominated field, even successfully starting her own production company in order to have creative control over the characters she played, trying desperately to get out from under the “dumb blonde” role they had forced her into. In an interview with Life magazine editor Richard Meryman just before she died, Marilyn had one request, saying quote “Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one. I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity,” end quote. Those words were never published. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from Smithsonian Magazine, Vanity Fair, Tatler, The Indian Express, People Magazine, the Women Film Pioneers Project, The National Library of Medicine, and Vice. Links to these sources can be found in the show notes.