Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem

Author:Gloria Steinem [Steinem, Gloria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480402669
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Fathers and Lovers

“I’m just mad about men. If only there was someone special.”

—Marilyn Monroe

EVEN WHEN SHE WAS unknown, and certainly after she became an international sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe had the good luck and the bad luck to cross paths with a surprising number of the world’s most powerful men. The fragile framework of her life was almost obscured by the heavy ornaments of their names. For those many people who have been more interested in the famous men than in Marilyn, her story often has become a voyeuristic excuse. Like a gossip column:

Marilyn’s career began when she was discovered by an Army photographer assigned “to take morale-building shots of pretty girls” in a defense plant for Yank and Star and Stripes magazines and Marilyn was a pretty eighteen-year-old worker on the assembly line. That photographer’s commanding officer, a young captain who spent World War II supervising this kind of morale-building work from his desk in a movie studio, was Ronald Reagan.

More pinup shots of Marilyn were published in magazines like Laff and Titter, and they caught the attention of Howard Hughes, the actress-collecting head of RKO Studios, as he lay in a hospital recovering from a flying accident. A gossip column report that he had “instructed an aide to sign her for pictures” encouraged a rival studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, to sign her as a starlet. It probably also led to a date between Hughes and Marilyn, from which she emerged with her face rubbed raw by his beard, and the gift of a pin that, she was surprised to learn later, was worth only five hundred dollars.

Marilyn was paid fifty dollars for the nude calendar shots she did under another name, but just one was bought for five hundred dollars once she was an actress and had been identified as the model. The purchaser was an unknown young editor named Hugh Hefner, and that nude greatly increased the appeal of the first issue of Playboy. (A year after her death, nude photos taken on the set during her swimming scene in Something’s Got to Give, her last and unfinished film, would increase Playboy’s sales again.) An original copy of that historic nude calendar also hung in the home of J. Edgar Hoover. Though he accumulated an FBI file on Marilyn, Hoover, whose only known companion for forty years was a male aide, proudly displayed this nude calendar to guests. Originals of that calendar continue to sell for up to two hundred dollars each. For years, a well-known pornographic movie called Apple Knockers and the Coke Bottle was also sold on the premise that Marilyn was the actress in it—but she was not.

Of the two most popular male idols of the 1950s, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra, she married one and had an affair with the other. Of the two most respected actors, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier, she had an affair and long-term friendship with the first and costarred with and was directed by the second. She played opposite

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