Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was born in the Los Angeles Country hospital on June 1, 1926. She was born Norma Jean Baker to Gladys Peal Baker. She spent most of her childhood in foster homes because her mother was mentally unstable and financially unable to care for her. At 16 she was able to escape the foster system by marrying 20 year old James Dougherty.
A year after they married in 1943 he joined the US Merchant Marine. Norma Jean got a job in an airline plant, which was part of the World War 2 factory effort, where she worked first as a parachute inspector then a paint sprayer. The government come to take some promotional photographs of the women working there and Norma Jean learned that she photographed well. She took a modelling course and began working as a part time photographer’s model. Being a success photographer’s model led her to became her dream of being an actress.
1946 she and Dougherty divorced and Norma bleached her hair blond. She signed a one year $125/month contract with Twentieth Century Fox on August 26, 1946. She changed her name to Marilyn and added her grandmother’s last name Monroe. The results with Fox weren’t very good, so the next year she signed a one year contract with Columbia but that wasn’t much better. 1950, Marilyn Monroe posed for full length nude shots and they were sold to be used in a calendar. In the same year she had a bit part in The Asphlt Jungle.
Twentieth Century Fox signed her to a new contract for seven years. She had her first staring role in Niagara and her first singing role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. January 1954 Marilyn married baseball player Joe Di Maggio, but the marriage was short lived they divorced in October. One of the iconic images of Marilyn Monroe was the photograph for The Seven Year Itch film in 1955. She had on a white halter neck dress and her skirt blow up by a draft from a sidewalk grate. After doing The Seven Year Itch, where she played a “dumb blond”, she decided to work on her acting skills. She broke her contract and moved to New York to study at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg.
In 1955 she started her own company with Milton Greene called Marilyn Monroe Productions and signed a new contract with Fox. She did a new movie called Bus Stop in 1956 which wowed her critics, but she had begun to lose herself to self doubt, drugs, alcohol and depression. Marilyn Monroe began taking sleeping pills for her insomnia and regularly seen psychiatrists, she stared arriving late to work and sometimes not being able to work at all. She married a playwrighter shortly after Bus Stop called Arther Miller, and for the marriage converted to Judaism. She lived quietly for two years with her husband. Several miscarriages added to her self doubt and depression, and to her use of drugs and alcohol. Her next movie The Prince And The Showgirl brought mixed reviews. She did a movie called The Misfits written for her by her husband, Arther Miller. She performed well, but during the filming she was often under the influence of alcohol and pills, and was late to set. Marilyn was affected by the death two months after the film was done of co star Clark Gable. 1961 Marilyn and Arther Miller divorced.
During this time she was bothered by rumors of affairs, including one with the president John F. Kennedy, as well as his brother Robert F Kennedy. Filming her next movie Something’s Got To Give, Marilyn’s lateness and addictions led to her dismissal after a month and she was briefly committed to a mental hospital. On August 5 1962, in her home in Los Angeles, Marilyn was found by her housekeeper dead. She had an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her body. Marilyn Monroe’s funeral was planned by Joe Di Maggio and for 20 years he had a dozen red roses delivered to her crypt three times a week.
