Welcome to the "Marilyn Monroe Story" webpage.
Please play our short music video to the left and hear Marilyn sing. Below is the Marilyn Monroe Storybook.
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Al Young
Producer
Email: alyoung2007@yahoo.com
Tucson, Arizona
MARILYN MONROE STORYBOOK
Introduction
Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson
(June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2023). Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon.In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in a total of 12 foster homes and an orphanage before marrying James Dougherty at age sixteen. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career, which led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. After a series of minor film roles, she signed a new contract with Fox in late 1950. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including “As Young as You Feel” and “Monkey Business” and in the dramas “Clash by Night” and “Don't Bother to Knock”. Monroe faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photographs prior to becoming a star, but the story did not damage her career and instead resulted in increased interest in her films.
By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars. She had leading roles in the film noir Niagara, which overtly relied on her sex appeal, and the comedies “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “How to Marry a Millionaire” which established her star image as a "dumb blonde". The same year, her nude images were used as the centerfold and cover of the first issue of Playboy magazine. Monroe played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, but felt disappointed when typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), one of the biggest box office successes of her career.
When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe's contract, she founded her own film production company in 1954. She dedicated 1955 to building the company and began studying method acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Later that year, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in “Bus Stop” (1956) and her first independent production in “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957). She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in “Some Like It Hot” (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama “The Misfits” (1961).
Monroe's troubled private life received much attention as she struggled with addiction and mood disorders. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicized; both ended in divorce. On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her Los Angeles home.
Life and career
1926–1943: Childhood and first marriage
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson
on June 1, 1926, at the Los Angeles General Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker (1902–1984), was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico to a poor Midwestern family who migrated to California at the turn of the century. At age 15, Gladys had married John Newton Baker, an abusive man nine years her senior. They had two children together, Robert (1918–1933) and Berniece (1919–2014). She successfully filed for divorce and sole custody of her two oldest in 1923. Following the divorce, Gladys worked as a film negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. Her second marriage occurred in 1924 when she married Martin Edward Mortensen, but they separated just months later and divorced in 1928. In 2022, DNA testing indicated that Monroe's father was Charles Stanley Gifford (1898–1965) a co-worker of Gladys, with whom she had an affair in 1925. Monroe also had two other half-siblings from Gifford's marriage with his first wife, a sister, Doris Elizabeth (1920–1933), and a brother, Charles Stanley Jr. (1922–2015).
Although Gladys was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, Monroe's early childhood was stable and happy. Gladys placed her daughter with evangelical Christian foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in the rural town of Hawthorne. She also lived there for six months, until she was forced to move back to the city for employment. She then began visiting her daughter on weekends. In the summer of 1933, Gladys bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved seven-year-old Monroe in with her. They shared the house with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie. In January 1934, Gladys had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After several months in a rest home, she was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals and was rarely in contact with Monroe. Marilyn Monroe became a ward of the state, and her mother's friend Grace Goddard took responsibility over her and her mother's affairs.
Over the next four years, Monroe's living situation changed often. For the first 16 months, she continued living with the Atkinsons, and may have been sexually abused during this time. Always a shy girl, she now also developed a stutter and became withdrawn. In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Grace and her husband Erwin "Doc" Goddard and two other families. In September 1935, Grace placed her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home #2, Hollygrove. The orphanage was "a model institution" and was described in positive terms by her peers, but Monroe felt abandoned. Encouraged by the orphanage staff, who thought that Monroe would be happier living in a family, Grace became her legal guardian in 1936, but did not take her out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937. Monroe's second stay with the Goddards lasted only a few months because Doc molested her. She then lived for brief periods with her relatives and Grace's friends and relatives in Los Angeles and Compton.
Monroe's childhood experiences first made her want to become an actress: "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 ... Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it."
Monroe found a more permanent home in September, 1938 when she began living with Grace's aunt Ana Lower in the west-side district of Sawtelle. She was enrolled at Emerson Junior High School and went to weekly Christian Science services with Lower. She excelled in writing and contributed to the school newspaper, but was otherwise a mediocre student. Owing to the elderly Lower's health problems, Monroe returned to live with the Goddards in Van Nuys in about early 1941.
The same year, she began attending Van Nuys High School. In 1942, the company that employed Doc Goddard relocated him to West Virginia. California child protection laws prevented the Goddards from taking Monroe out of state, and she faced having to return to the orphanage. As a solution, she married their neighbors' 21-year-old son, factory worker James Dougherty, on June 19, 1942, just after her 16th birthday. Monroe subsequently dropped out of high school and became a housewife. She found herself and Dougherty mismatched, and later said she was "dying of boredom" during the marriage. In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was stationed on Santa Catalina Island, where Monroe moved with him.
1944–1948: Modeling and first film roles
In April 1944, Dougherty was shipped out to the Pacific, where he remained for most of the next two years. Monroe moved in with her in-laws and began a job at the Radioplane Company, a munitions factory in Van Nuys. In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover, who had been sent by captain Ronald Reagan, then working in the U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, to the factory to shoot morale-boosting pictures of female workers. Although none of her pictures were used, she quit working at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends. Defying her deployed husband, she moved on her own and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945.
The agency deemed Monroe's figure more suitable for pin-up than high fashion modeling, and she was featured mostly in advertisements and men's magazines. To make herself more employable, she straightened her hair and dyed it blonde. According to Emmeline Snively, the agency's owner, Monroe quickly became one of its most ambitious and hard-working models; by early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek. As a model, Monroe occasionally used the name Jean Norman.
Through Snively, Monroe signed a contract with an acting agency in June 1946. After an unsuccessful interview at Paramount Pictures, she was given a screen-test by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, but he gave her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe's contract began in August 1946, and she and Lyon selected the stage name "Marilyn Monroe". The first name was picked by Lyon, who was reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller; the surname was Monroe's mother's maiden name. In September 1946, she divorced Dougherty, who opposed her career.
Monroe spent her first six months at Fox learning acting, singing, and dancing, and observing the film-making process. Her contract was renewed in February 1947, and she was given her first film roles, bit parts in Dangerous Years (1947) and Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948). The studio also enrolled her in the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, an acting school teaching the techniques of the Group Theatre; she later stated that it was "my first taste of what real acting in a real drama could be, and I was hooked". Despite her enthusiasm, her teachers thought her too shy and insecure to have a future in acting, and Fox did not renew her contract in August 1947. She returned to modeling while also doing occasional odd jobs at film studios, such as working as a dancing "pacer" behind the scenes to keep the leads on point at musical sets.
Monroe was determined to make it as an actress, and continued studying at the Actors' Lab. She had a small role in the play Glamour Preferred at the Bliss-Hayden Theater, but it ended after a couple of performances. To network, she frequented producers' offices, befriended gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, and entertained influential male guests at studio functions, a practice she had begun at Fox. She also became a friend and occasional sex partner of Fox executive Joseph M. Schenck, who persuaded his friend Harry Cohn, the head executive of Columbia Pictures, to sign her in March 1948.
At Columbia, Monroe's look was modeled after Rita Hayworth and her hair was bleached platinum blonde. She began working with the studio's head drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would remain her mentor until 1955. Her only film at the studio was the low-budget musical “Ladies of the Chorus” (1948), in which she had her first starring role as a chorus girl courted by a wealthy man. She also screen-tested for the lead role in “Born Yesterday” (1950), but her contract was not renewed in September 1948. “Ladies of the Chorus” was released the following month and was not a success.
1949–1952: Breakthrough years
(Will be posted next week)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe