Marilyn Monroe: 100 years after her birth, new details emerge

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) is the woman who turned herself into gold. She is Hollywood’s first self-made woman.Image: Moviepix

She was adored as much as despised. On the occasion of Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, previously unpublished testimonies reveal the person hidden behind the world’s first sex symbol.

Sitting at the assembly line, Norma Jeane attaches a propeller to a drone, when a young man walks past her and stops. The year is 1944. The United States is at war with Nazi Germany and Japan. David Conover, photographer for the US Army Motion Picture Unit, is on a mission.

His superior, Captain Ronald Reagan, former actor and future president of the United States, wants propaganda photos. Conover must photograph attractive female workers in the arms industry to encourage more women to join the factories essential to the war effort. And there she is: Norma Jeane Mortenson, wife of Dougherty. A line worker in a factory in Burbank, California, a 16-year-old brunette with a stunning smile.

The Gates of Hollywood

She tells him she wants to become an actress. It has been the dream and the vocation since this child, born out of wedlock and placed in foster care, discovered cinema with her favorite aunt. Ever since she sat on the flat roof of her orphanage looking out over the movie studios and the Paramount water tower. On the hill opposite shone the Hollywood sign. There awaited him a life without uncertainties, perhaps even a home. Norma Jeane wants to make films.

Two years after her discovery, in 1946: the 21-year-old model and starlet Norma Jeane Mortenson, future Marilyn Monroe, will soon be unrecognizable.Image: Moviepix

David Conover sees in her what will be confirmed later. As soon as she stands in front of a camera, she shines. Over the next few weeks, he photographed her several times, helped her train as a model, and paved the way for her first contract at 20th Century Fox. Cinema opens its doors to Norma and offers her a new existence. Her husband being opposed to this career, she divorced. Alone, she leaves for Hollywood and launches her career.

In just two years, the young girl with no future, with an unknown father and a mother interned in a psychiatric hospital, becomes the starlet Marilyn Monroe. Barely two years later, she is already the immortal MM, the most photographed woman in the world. She becomes the archetype and founding mother of all sex symbols.

Thousands of stories surround his life and death. In his biographical novel BlondeAmerican author Joyce Carol Oates describes her as “a mechanical doll designed by the entertainment industry”. A toy transformed, through nose surgery and bleaching, from a young brunette with curly hair into a blonde icon.

Marilyn Monroe poses for the press on the sidelines of the filming of Men prefer blondes in December 1952 Ã Los Angeles.Image: Moviepix

Marilyn the desperate, the lost, devoured at the end of her life by three miscarriages, depression and drug dependence. The victim of a film industry dominated by toxic masculinity in the 1950s and 1960s. The insatiable seductress, devourer of men, object of desire who attracted millions of spectators around the world to cinemas, more than any woman before her.

The entry onto the scene of a self-made woman

But there is another story around the Marilyn myth. That of a woman who thinks strategically, of a businesswoman who knows exactly what she wants – and how to get it. She will give the public what the public wants in order to receive what matters to her: recognition. No actress before her, nor after her, has deflected with as much humor, intelligence and self-deprecating the female stereotypes of his time.

She achieves this most brilliantly in what is perhaps the best comedy of all time: Some like it hot (1959). Alongside Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, she plays Sugar Kane, a singer strumming her ukulele, a parody of the cliché of the “brained blonde”: red lips, generous breasts and boys drooling at her feet.

She holds the power and leads men where they reveal themselves. She does it with generosity, with a permanent wink. The caricature is not her. Those who appear distorted to the point of becoming recognizable are the heavy and arrogant boys who surround her. For this role, she received a Golden Globe.

Some like it hot (1959), with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, certainly earned him a Golden Globe – but also the perfidious remarks of Tony Curtis.Image: Moviepix

Marilyn accomplishes this artistic and intellectual performance despite difficult circumstances. During filming, she was so consumed by doubt that she locked herself in her dressing room for hours to learn her lines even better, then better still. With disastrous consequences on the set. Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and director Billy Wilder have to wait – and will make him pay later in interviews with malicious and defamatory statements.

Tony Curtis said:

When Billy Wilder said ironically: “She has a chest of granite and a brain like Swiss cheese, full of holes. She doesn’t even know what time it is. She arrives late and claims she hasn’t found the studio she’s been working in for years.” This kind of contempt follows her everywhere. But the extent to which Marilyn consciously used her delays to exert control remains her secret.

Marilyn Monroe, on her 30th birthday, June 1, 1956.Image: Bettmann

Arthur Miller and his “canary”

However, when she is well psychologically, she is the first self-made woman in Hollywood and the true mistress of her career. New elements support this thesis. They come from previously unpublished conversations between biographer Christopher Bigsby and playwright Arthur Miller. The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own Words a récemment été publié par Cambridge University Press.

Arthur Miller, one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, and one of the greatest actresses in history were married from 1956 to 1961. Marilyn Monroe admired his intelligence and his engaged plays, notably Death of a traveling salesman (Death of a Salesman1949), which earned him the Pulitzer Prize the same year.

Marilyn Monroe and her third husband, the American playwright Arthur Miller. Their marriage lasted five years and ended in fiasco.Image: Bettmann

For his part, Arthur Miller was attracted to Marilyn Monroe because he saw behind her public image a vulnerable and sensitive person. Their extramarital affair, then their official marriage, were both considered a scandal. On one side, the “sex bomb with the IQ of a canary,” as Hollywood’s most powerful society columnist, Walter Winchell, scornfully called her. On the other, a serious and rewarded intellectual. To the public, this union seemed as improbable as a mixture of oil and water.

A “difficult” situation that brought down the system

However, in these interviews with his biographer friend, Arthur Miller speaks of his wife in a radically different way from that of Hollywood producers and actors who despised the “difficult” Marilyn. He describes her on several occasions as “a very intelligent woman, with a wonderful sense of humor, irony and generosity”, a woman of formidable ambition, lucid and hardworking, who knew how to use the Hollywood system to her advantage.

She was not just a movie star, but an independent businesswoman who broke away from the studio system. Frustrated by the scenarios that confined her to the role of naive blonde and sex symbol, she rebelled.

From the beginning of the 1950s, she stood up to the most powerful men in Hollywood as well as her employer, 20th Century Fox. She refused standardized contracts. Even more: it demanded a right of oversight over the distribution of roles and obtained higher fees.

Marilyn Monroe in front of American troops in South Korea in 1954.Image: Bettmann

Marilyn Monroe used her popularity deliberately. In particular, it extended contractual negotiations with the studios in order to put them in competition with each other. She thus obtained exceptionally advantageous conditions for her time. Certainly, she was fully part of a system that sexualized women, but she did not hold back from criticizing it.

Equipped with a keen sense of social justice and aware of ambient racism, in order to support her black friend Ella Fitzgerald with the show organizers, she promised them to attend each of her concerts, sitting in full view in the front row. And she kept her word. When Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson were stigmatized for their homosexuality, she also publicly defended them.

Birth of a true character actress: Bus Stop (1956), which she produced herself. Critics then considered his interpretation of Chérie as the best performance of his career.Image: Moviepix

In December 1954, she took the decisive step. She left Hollywood, renounced the false glitter of fame, sought more substance and began training as an actress at Lee Strasberg’s legendary Actors Studio in New York. His course mates included James Dean and Paul Newman.

Marilyn is her own invention

In New York, she founded her own company, Marilyn Monroe Productions Incorporated, with photographer Milton Greene. She then became one of the four major actresses under contract in Hollywood to treat on equal terms with the studios as an independent commercial partner. The other three are Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Norma Shearer.

20th Century Fox immediately sued him for breach of contract. But Marilyn won this legal battle and now has a say in the choice of scripts and directors. She is no longer a passive puppet in the hands of the studios: she takes back control of her career.

Marilyn Monroe is interested in religion – she converted to Judaism for Arthur Miller -, collects works of art and listens to Beethoven. She wants to understand, learn, educate herself. But it is possible that she has learned nothing with as much rigor as the art of staging her own creation: Marilyn Monroe.

Her friend Amy Greene once told how she could activate this character at will. During a walk on Broadway, Marilyn asks him:

She then seems to activate an invisible switch, changes her gait and her posture – and suddenly the cars slow down, the passers-by turn around and stop. It was this magnetically mysterious presence, the one that had already pushed the military photographer David Conover to stop in front of a 16-year-old worker This unspeakable element that makes her immortal.

Its hundredth anniversary, June 1, is much more than a symbolic date. This is an opportunity to express gratitude to Norma Jeane Mortenson for what she brought to the generations of women who succeeded her.

The major stages in the life of Marilyn Monroe

June 1, 1926

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles, she spent her childhood in foster homes and orphanages.

Image: Archive Photos

1942

First film contract under the stage name of Marilyn Monroe.

Image: Moviepix

1952

She proves her immense presence on screen in Don’t Bother to Knockwhere she plays an emotionally unstable babysitter, and in Clash by Night by Fritz Lang, where she plays a factory worker.

Image: Moviepix

1953

Revelation as a sex symbol in the film Niagara. The invention of MM as a sensual event.

Image: Corbis Historical

1954

Her marriage to baseball star Joe DiMaggio made her the most famous actress in the Western world.

Image: Bettmann

1954

River of No Returna film where a calm and melancholy Marilyn Monroe reveals a new side.

Image: Corbis Historical

1956

In Bus Stopshe gives dramatic depth to the role of the cabaret singer who dreams of Hollywood. Artistic recognition and marriage to Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Arthur Miller followed.

Image: Archive Photos

1959

In Some like it hotwhere she plays the singer Sugar Kane, she is the actress par excellence.

Image: Archive Photos

1961

In Les DésaxésArthur Miller wrote her a very autobiographical role, but Marilyn Monroe felt artistically exploited.

Image: Ernst Haas

1962

Marilyn Monroe died at the age of 36 of an overdose at her home in Los Angeles.

Image: Bettmann

The 10 Most Profitable Actors of All Time

1 / 12

The 10 Most Profitable Actors of All Time

Zoe Saldaña tops the list of the most profitable actors. His films have generated $15.46 billion in revenue.

source: sda/chris pizzello