MONROE, Marilyn

(b. 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, California; d. 5 August 1962 in Brentwood, California), actress, model, and legendary sex symbol who, after reaching a career peak in the late 1950s, entered a downward spiral that culminated with her death by drug overdose.

Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortensen, the only child of Gladys Pearl Baker, a film technician, and Edward Mortensen, a mechanic. They were together only briefly, and Mortensen had deserted his wife by the time Monroe was born. When she entered school, Monroe was going by the name of Norma Jean Baker. As revealed in numerous biographies written after she became famous, Monroe's childhood was as bleak as her stardom was glamorous. Both her mother's parents had been committed to mental institutions, and Gladys herself spent so much time in and out of mental hospitals that her daughter had to be raised in a succession of foster homes and orphanages.

Though she attended Van Nuys High School, the sixteen-year-old Monroe dropped out to marry James Edward Dougherty, an aircraft production worker, on 19 June 1942. Her career in modeling began while Dougherty was away in the merchant marine during World War II, a period when Monroe supported herself partly by posing for covers of minor photo magazines. She divorced Dougherty in 1946, cut her hair and bleached it blonde, changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, took a screen test with Twentieth Century–Fox, and signed her first movie contract. After several forgettable pictures, Monroe appeared in John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1950), her first important film. She studied acting with Natasha Lytess in the late 1940s and early 1950s and survived a scandal involving a nude calendar photo taken during a period when she had no acting work. Instead of ending her career, news of the photo only added to her sexual mystique.

By the mid-1950s Monroe was a star, enjoying popular and sometimes critical success with such films as Niagara (1953), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and The Seven-Year Itch (1955). After the last of these movies, Monroe grew weary of the "dumb blonde" image she had long cultivated, an image that had as much to do with her breathy voice and hourglass shape as with her platinum hair. Eager to grow artistically, she studied with Lee and Paula Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York City during 1956, and her efforts paid off in the most impressive performances of her career, including Bus Stop (1956) and Some Like It Hot (1959).

Professional changes accompanied personal ones, as Monroe left one man noted for his athletic prowess and married another who earned his living with his intellect. The first of these husbands was Joe DiMaggio, the great New York Yankees slugger, whom she wed on 14 January 1954 and divorced just nine stormy months later. The other was the playwright Arthur Miller, whom she married on 29 June 1956. (Though she was married three times, Monroe had no children.) She adopted Miller's faith, Judaism, and cultivated an interest in literature: from this period comes a photograph of Monroe reading James Joyce's ponderous Finnegan's Wake.

The Monroe of the late 1950s had reached the pinnacle of her career, but the decline that followed in the early 1960s was almost surreal in its haste. By the time Let's Make Love appeared in 1960 to a tepid critical reception, she had long since begun displaying signs of the behavior that would send her life and career into a tailspin. A sufferer from insomnia, Monroe had become addicted to sleeping pills and compounded the dangers associated with these and other barbiturates by combining them with alcohol, which she had begun increasingly to abuse by the early 1960s. At the encouragement of the Strasbergs, Monroe had entered into psychoanalysis during the late 1950s, a move that initially yielded benefits both professional and personal. As a subscriber to the ideas embodied in the Stanislavski acting method (named for the famed Russian actor and director), Monroe believed in inhabiting a character's personality as fully as possible; in order to do this, it was necessary to understand one's own personality to the fullest. On a more personal level, psychoanalysis helped her confront the pain and loneliness of her childhood as well as the pressure and sense of exploitation that came from being Hollywood's most acclaimed starlet—and from being a subject of the male sexual fantasy.

Although psychoanalysis helped Monroe at first, ultimately it became a crutch. As her personal and professional life spun out of control, Monroe relied on her therapist more and more to get her through each day. Examining and reexamining the painful details of her past was like overscratching an itch: by dwelling on the tendency toward mental illness in the Baker family, Monroe began to fear that she, too, might be mentally imbalanced, or at least that she might be judged so.

The 1950s had been Monroe's decade, so it was fitting that the beginning of her career's end occurred in 1960. First there was Let's Make Love, a dismal picture compounded by a troubled off-screen romance with her costar, Yves Montand. The affair served only to pinpoint the troubles in her marriage to Miller, with whom she had little more than a professional relationship by 1960. Even that would come to an end, along with their marriage, in the aftermath of Monroe's last completed film.

Based on a script by Miller, The Misfits (1961) is the story of a beautiful divorcee and the men who clamor for her affections. Because Miller repeatedly revised scenes while on location, the resulting plot is a mishmash. Despite the challenges, however, John Huston, with whom Monroe had worked on The Asphalt Jungle, turned in an exemplary performance as director. So, too, did Monroe's costars Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, and an actor who rivals Monroe as a great tragic figure, Montgomery Clift. As for the star of the film, however, her contribution was uneven at best. Outward signs of Monroe's disintegration first became apparent during the filming of The Misfits, when she regularly showed up late to the set and sometimes failed to turn up at all.

Gable's death on 16 November 1960, just twelve days after completion of The Misfits, upset Monroe deeply. Two months later Monroe divorced Miller. The film was released the following month, on 1 February, to abominable reviews. Monroe had approximately eighteen months left to live, and she would spend little of it actually filming. Her fears of mental instability came to fruition when, in late 1961, she was confined briefly to an institution. Early in 1962 she moved into a modest bungalow in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles and on 23 April began work on the prophetically titled Something's Got to Give. Monroe's erratic behavior on the set of The Misfits carried over to her current picture, and this time Fox ran out of patience. After only twelve days of shooting, the studio fired her. They even took legal action against Monroe, suing her for $500,000. (She is estimated to have earned $200 million for Fox over the course of her career.)

Nonetheless, they had to finish the film—the first that would contain nude scenes with Monroe—so the studio agreed to reinstate her. Before shooting could resume, however, Monroe was found dead in her Brentwood bungalow. An autopsy showed a deadly quantity of barbiturates in her system, and though her death is widely regarded as a suicide, she left behind no note. DiMaggio made the funeral arrangements, and for three decades, until his own death in 1999, he regularly placed flowers on her grave. Monroe is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Part sex goddess, part little girl, Monroe made herself the most popular actress in history by cultivating an on-screen style that seemed natural, though, in fact, it was the result of considerable effort on her part. She excelled at comedy, as in Some Like It Hot, but could render performances that smoldered with a latent intensity and sense of the tragic, as in Bus Stop. Her persona in that movie seems closest to the popular image of Monroe as at once vulnerable and a paragon of sexuality. Monroe was unquestionably a tragic figure, both at the beginning and at the end of her life. At the start of her long journey was a miserable childhood, with all its horrors in the form of insanity, abandonment, abuse, and poverty. At the conclusion was a death as lonely as her girlhood. Painful as all this tragedy is, it is essential to the Marilyn Monroe story and explains the power she continues to hold over the imagination. The agony at both ends of her existence only makes the glamour in between all the more luminous; without Norma Jean Baker, Marilyn Monroe could never shine as bright as she still does.

There are more than a hundred books on Monroe, including My Story (1974), which Monroe cowrote with the playwright and novelist Ben Hecht a few months before her death, and a series of interviews in Marilyn Monroe in Her Own Words (1983). Among biographies, one of the most reliable is Fred Guiles, Norma Jean (1969), and one of the most popular is Norman Mailer, Marilyn (1973), which draws on the factual information in the Guiles book. Another important source, one that includes photocopies of vital documents, is Robert F. Slatzer, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe (1974). An obituary is in the New York Times (6 Aug. 1962).

Judson Knight