Hello the Internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of The Daily Zeitgeist called Gaconograph Iconograph. Instead of looking at the zeitgeist through current events, we're looking at it through the lens of powerful pop cultural hork cruxes that are our icons, pork Brooks. We use these characters to create meaning, to build identity, to know what our grandfathers were jacking off to grandpa, to teach us that when standing on a subway, great, you should just wear a sensible pair
of slacks, much less problems. Uh. And most importantly, we learn how to cure Frank Sinatra's erectile dysfunction. That's right, today we're talking Marilyn Monroe, Nay, Norma Jean. That's the first big one. Do you know our name wasn't even actually Marilyn Monroe.
Dude.
I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host, mister Miles Bray.
How are you?
Hey hey hey hey, hey, hey hey hey Jean.
That's one that's like, I think the only bit of trueba normal Jane is that about her. I think that was the first thing that was my first introduction. My fucking name was dang. There was something like HBO movie where it was like something in like Norma Jean or something, and I was just like, oh, yep, yep, yep, that's and that's the depth of my knowledge of Marilyn Monroe. That and she's buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
I think she's buried in the Westwood Cemetery, West Veteran. Yeah, dammit, Miles.
And it was drugs and we're we're.
Going to talk about it. Oh in our third seat. A t d Z Hall of Famer, one of the very faces on Mount Zeitmore, a brilliant stand up comedian. You've seen on MTV, Comedy Central, NBC, True TV, h You've heard her on Bob's Burgers. You can see her in her hilarious special Life from the Big Dog, and on her podcast spased out with Blair Saki because it is Blair Sockerlair.
What's up? Iconographer's Gang?
What's up?
Miles and Jack Gang?
Hello, Blair Sockey.
I'm so thrilled to be here. You know what I just remembered actually that I did read a gigantic Marilyn Monroe biography, like years and years and years ago.
I had a feeling I had a feeling you had.
Because i'd psychically.
We're all the collective shared consciousness on the icon scale that we use on this show. I feel like Marilyn Monroe is at the tippy top. Einstein's up there, but.
Tupac like where their aura just keeps going for years and years and years and years and years after their death.
But also just like the visual like this, once you see it, it's like it's only one person. Some people are so unwell that they're like, that's me now professionally.
Right, Yeah, there are We talked about how.
There's Elvis impersonators say it to people.
Maryland. Impersonators are a thing. I just the generic T shirt store test you walk down a boardwalk today for our office. One of the shittiest parts of LA the nineteen eighties Times Square of La Not.
To don't know it was recently ranked as like one of the worst tourist spots, like the in America purely.
He officially used German tourists walking around being.
Like, what's so many bummed out?
But I'll tell you what you will find. You might not find what you were looking for, but you will find many T shirt stores with pictures of Marylyn Monroe on them and cardboard cutouts of Marylyn Monroe. She pas the college dorm room wall like first apartment wall test where just like you know, posters photos. The image of her skirt being blown up by the subway grade is one of the most famous moments in film history, though it wasn't in the movie. That was a publicity stunt.
They reshot it on. The thing that we've all seen was from a publicity shoot, and the reshoot that was in the movie is not the same. Also, I'd say one of the most misunderstood figures that we've covered so far, Like that song, which was the first thing I knew about. Goodbye norm Jean talks about her like as kind of this like helpless victim, Like it talks about how Hollywood made her change her name and like Hollywood created a superstar.
She did that shit. Man, She wanted to be a star, and she was like really smart and really good at it. She had to do twice as much to get half as far as the men of her era, and she still became, like I thought she was like famous and then died and became like even more famous. She was the most famous person on the planet, and she was alive, she was a wild I feel.
Like she also started the whole thing where she really like pretended to be a certain way, you know, this soft like sex kitten, but really like the Paris Hilton thing where it's like people had no idea how calculated and intentional she was.
Do you have access to my notes?
Do you shoulder?
Here? Is the same biography though, even though mine was many years ago. YEA fascinated because there's word, there's word of Russell's whispers on the Internet that they think that she might have also been a fellow autistic baddie and so considering it through that lens.
Okay, But in terms of her films, I think that's a very important point that you just brought up, that her she like played the character from her films also in reality and like all of she had like movie lines ready to go for her real life, like it was just like she had she had crackling comedic dialogue in like press conferences. But just in terms of like her films, they grossed two hundred million dollars by the
time of her death. That's the equivalent of two billion dollars today twenty four in.
Back then money too. Yeah, oh my god.
Okay, and then her death is mysterious, like it's not we we did Elvis last week player, And like Elvis's death, he is fairly straightforward, like he was just doing so many drugs and died from doing so so many drugs. But with and And, people were just like, he's not really dead because they just needed that to be true. With Marilyn Monroe, like there is some very real, shady
shit that happened surrounding her death. So we're gonna we're gonna spend more of this episode talking about her death than maybe with past icons.
I wondered if I was gonna bring be the one to bring up that freaky ship.
No, there's a yeah. I mean I ultimately I don't think that she was killed by Frank Sinatra, JFK, RFK and the CIA all at the same time. But uh, there there's just some there's some weird ship that happened. There's some weird shit went down, all right, But should we get into just the bio and yeah, you know when.
Let me know, oh good that that part is from Candle in the Wind. Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah? Yeah, oh yeah, Like.
The whole time I was.
Like, is there a song called Goodbye Normal Jean?
Or isn't that the big part of that.
At the beginning, that's the first line of wind Yeah, yeah, yeah, which.
Is about her every mother's favorite song from nineteen ninety seven.
He should have just kept making songs like because he did it for Princess Die. He should just be that every time someone died. Oh, he could make a lot of mone. I'm just saying he can make a lot of money.
He could have done a Betty White one. Yeah.
I also just saw Goodbye Golden Girls.
You know the people like all her husbands, like they still loved her so much, like after their breakups, like Joe DiMaggio sent her flowers every week.
Obsessed. Oh my god, you're obsessed with me. He was super obsessed, but also a complete fucking monster when they were married. But we're going to get to all of that. We're just so. She was born Norma Jean Mortenson on June first, nineteen twenty six, and the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. She was born very poor. Her mother was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and Norma Jean wound up in various foster homes and orphanages her mom's diagnosis.
I just want to like this gave her, Like her mom always being institutionalized, gave Marilyn a lifelong fear of mental words, and like she would never lock her door, which is gonna come into play in her death, but probably understandable given the state of psychiatric care at the time.
And I just want to give a quick anecdote from her mom's life that I think sets the stage for the world of psychiatry, because that's a big part of her story too, because you know, a lot of the biographies are speculating about like what kind of mental illness she had, and it's tough to tell because it was a time when like women were not trusted at all, and like just them having something to say or a complaint was pathologized. This is just a wild anecdote from
her mom's life. So this is in the Donald Spotto biography Male in Mom Roe. The biography tells the story about how her mom learned that her most recent husband had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Ohio, and it turns out that wasn't true. It was just a guy with the same name with like a similar background, and her husband was still a lot than just being a typical like shit ass absentee husband from the mid
twentieth century. Identity was like a real loose thing back then where they were like Marilyn Momroe Norman Gy like had different names on her birth certificate, on her baptismal certificate, like your name was what you told them at the DMV and they're like whatever you want to call yourself late, right, But so by the time her mom's real husband shows up from you know, being a shit ass Gladys, Marilyn's mom is institutionalized and she gets a call from her
dead husband, which for someone who's been taught not to trust her own mental health, like, she freaked the FuG out. She like, yeah, she tried to like call him back, and the people in the institution are like, she's trying
to call her dead husband. The dame's baby boys get the butterfly nets, and because she freaks out about that, they send her to a high security facility and like people only really know about this, like mind fuck of a thing that happened, because her daughter then goes on to become the most famous person in the world, like otherwise it's just a thing that happened to people at that time was just people diagnosed you and then stop believing anything that you had to say.
Yeah, once that labels on there, right.
Especially the women, I mean like oh yeah, it's kind of analogous to I mean like the Witch's time. Like if one person just said you're a witch, like all this sudden, you're a witch, and if you were like if they're like, oh, she's she has hysteria, she has the vapors, then they're like your toast.
Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is the time of lobotomies where they're like, she's difficult and we're gonna deal with that.
Yeah.
For instance, right, so you know, her mom is in and out of the picture. She goes from foster family to foster family. Most biographers agree she's a toed at age twelve and just has it. Has a really rough upbringing, like she doesn't really have a home ever, and to the point that like one of her maternal figures who like took her to movies and like really helped delay.
The foundation for this also is like I found this guy that I really like in West Virginia, So you're going to marry our neighbor James Doherty, who to her was just mister Doherty. And she is sixteen years old when they marry her off. She's forced to drop out of high school.
To do you imagine how scary that would be.
Yeah.
Wait, so this Carol One maternal figure she had was just like, you're marrying mister Doherty.
You're marrying mister Doherty, our neighbor, because I don't know what else to do with you.
Oh yeah, that she would be taking care of you probably, yeah.
Yeah, And that's at sixteen, okay.
And care yeah, straight up like dark age as shit, where just like you may marrier off that's like the best, the best way to kind of solve this problem. So this is around the time of World War Two. He joins the Merchant Marines and she starts working at a factory, and weirdly enough, she is at the forefront of drone warfare. At this time. She worked in a World War two defense plant for a company called radio Plane, which made small,
remote controlled, pilotless aircraft. And it's straight up like there's a direct line from people who had toy planes, like toy remote controlled planes, to our modern drone warfare because there's an actor named Reginald Denny no no relation, Yeah, another same name. Yeah. So he's a famous actor who's obsessed with remote control airplanes and is like, we could start using these for target practice for the US Army, like I think in nineteen thirty five. And then his
toy plane. He was so into toy planes. He had a factory that gets converted into this like anti aircraft, you know, drill thing that then gets acquired by Northrop Aircraft and becomes essentially Northrop Grumman's autonomous systems that we have today. Wow, she is the very first like public pictures modeling pictures of her are her putting the propellers on these planes that go on to become the first drones.
That's wow.
And another wild anecdote about those first pictures. So this is where she's first discovered. Reginald Denny, the actor, is at his factory and sees her. Says to this military captain that he knew from Hollywood, you gotta get somebody over here to look at the talent, you know what I'm saying, brother, And that captain sends over a photographer who takes these kind of rosy the river at her pictures. Of her that end up getting some attention and like
launching her modeling career. That captain that he like reached out to who hired the photographer Ronald Reagan. Wow, the only.
Picture of them the other day to get there, of Ronald Reagan when he was still like an actor, the.
Only good thing in his legacy, and it required no talent and could have been done by a phone operator. But he is indirectly responsible for basically passing along the message that this actor was horny for this woman who worked in his factory, who ends up being Marilyn Monroe. Wow, so get fucked, Ronald Reagan. This is the only good thing you did, and it required no Okay, yeah, that should have been the end. If only that had been the end of.
This is I'm looking at the picture. Her hair is brown.
Her hair is brown and curly.
And reddish in the beginning kind of yes, yeah, yeah, before she to her famous.
Yeah, this is where we get into So from this very first photo shoot, she is like an immediate savant and also like student of modeling. But yeah, to your point, I don't think I ever like associated her with like getting work done. I thought the work she had done was just like her hair died blonde. She also had a bump removed from her nose, had a silicon line added to her jaw, got her overbite fixed, which was paid for by the head of William Morris, who was
her boyfriend at that time. But she was like kind of a Kardashian before the Kardashians.
I'm crazy. I've always wondered about that because I didn't know that they could do that stuff.
A silicon, a silicon line in your jaw, like a.
Jaw, like you know what people put like filler in their jaw. Now that's some Oh so this is just like yeah, like sharp drawling.
Yeah wow. But just a couple of things from these early stages because like the photographer at the time was he said, blown away by her ability to scan as sex on film. He also claimed they had a steamy affair which is cooperated by him and only that's another thing that just across her whole life. Everybody's like, yeah, everybody the second she dies is like, here's my biography where and I have with Marilyn Monroe.
So everyone becomes the Chris Farley bush Driver character in Billy Maddison.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And the biographers are like, yeah, nobody believes that shit man, So it's kind of a pathetic look. But he talks about how she's able to like flirt with the camera in a way that like seems uncanny. But I just want to read this from there's a newer biography. The Spoto one that I mentioned earlier is kind of the most widely read one, but there's a newer one that I think might correct some of that stuff by Jay Randy Tamborelli, called The Secret Life of
Marilyn Monroe. This quote is about these very first pictures that she takes. Besides the speed of her success, what was also fascinating about Norma Jean's first photo sessions was how quickly she seemed to understand the business of modeling. She was very inquisitive about the process and highly critical
of her appearance. For instance, she asked David Conover, that's the guy who's taking these very first pictures, questions about lighting, about different camera lenses, about how he coaxed his models into giving their best performances in meetings with him. After the sessions, she would study the contact sheets with the kind of careful scrutiny one might expect from a professional model. She wanted to know what she'd done wrong if an
exposure didn't meet with her approval. Again, like right from the start, like in these photographs that are for an army magazine called Yank, which oh my god, double entendre intended, I have to assume like you're yeah, they're like you
jack off to this one. But the point about her being highly critical of her appearance and you know, the stuff we were talking about about her like getting a bump in her nose fixed, and it seems like, first of all very like crazy making to like exist in that, but also she's really good at like viewing herself from outside herself, Like right from the start, she's just immediately like yeah, exactly, she's just like I'm viewing herself as a product and being like how do I fix this.
There's another quote from the Spotto biography from one of her early modeling teachers about again how hard she worked, but also just the weird geometries of beauty that like people talk about in the modeling industry. So she this woman says she was a clean cut American, wholesome girl, too plump, fuck off, but beautiful in a way we tried to teach her how to pose, how to handle her body. She always tried to lower her smile because she smiled too high and it made her nose look
a little long. At first, she knew nothing about carriage posture, sitting, or walking. She started out with less than any girl I ever knew, but she wanted to learn, wanted to be somebody more than anybody I ever saw before in my life. So again, just like a student from the start, but also the shit that she had to study is like horrifying. For they're like, yeah, when you smile like that, it makes your nose look long.
Yep.
Yeah.
And I just think also some of these people, like these icons that impact culture in the way they do, It's like it does feel like this real destined thing because there's just all this certain amount of things that add up into this like completely remarkable alchemy. You know, like she comes from this insane childhood like absolutely nothing. Then she learns how to be basically like ponjure energy in a way that she can seduce like an entire population for yeah, millennia.
Right right, Yeah, I mean to know, like you're to your point of being so early to having that kind of media savvy in such an early phase of like mass media and be like, Okay, I know what I'm gonna know what.
My angles are.
I'm gonna know what a well lit thing looks like because every image that you will cast your gaze upon will be perfected for maximum effect.
Yeah, you guys are absolutely like nailing that. She had this like ability that people were like, she's just got a magic power. I don't know what it is, right, and it comes from like studying. And there's a quote not to jump ahead, but like this continues right into her work on film, Like on the set her co stars would be like, this is a fucking disaster, and
then they would see the movie and be like. There's a quote from her co star in one of her early movies, Richard Windmark, and he said, at first we thought she's not going to get anything right, and we'd mutter, oh, this is impossible, Oh this is impossible. You can't print this. But something happened between the lens and the film, and when we looked at the rushes, which is like the dailies from the she had the rest of us knocked off the screen. And that just like happens over and
over where everyone's like, she's fucking up our movie. And then you look on film and you hear this a lot about like movie stars, where like people are on the set of a movie and they're like, what the fuck was that? Like he appears to be like whispering or like there, you know, you don't see anything happening, And then you actually look what they're doing with the camera and it's like, oh, they know exactly what they're doing.
It's just very subtle, you know, and some people can't appreciate it.
I also think that there's this inherent thing in it still very much exists today, and it's just a psychological bias that if someone's a really gorgeous woman slash blonde, but just women in general, that they can't and like I even catch myself. It's such deep programming for so many thousand, millions of years actually thousands, I don't know where. You can't be that smart, you can't know what you're doing.
It's like an either or a Madonna horror situation. Right, you can't be a super intelligent person and also.
Like a sex right yes, and then when you are people are just like, I don't know what they're doing.
Right, Yeah.
Yeah, it's like no, it's like they know what they're doing well.
Shock and surprise, right right right, And it's just it still happens like if I see a super hot person on stage, I'm like, oh, they're not going to say something funny, you know, like it's they're guilty until proven innocent.
Sure, dumb, they're dumb.
Everybody look how hot? Yeah, So the modeling career takes off and then it leads to acting jobs, including parts in John Houston's The Asphalt Jungle. These are all like minor parts, but you know, she starts getting fan mail kind of right away. This is when she changes her
name from Norma Jean Doherty to Marilyn Monroe. So Monroe was her mother's maiden name, and then they were trying to come up with the right first name, and this Fox executive Ben Lyon was like, there used to be this stage actress Marilyn Miller, who you kind of reminded
me of. And he later reveals like he was engaged to her and she died at thirty eight, and he was like, I don't they just like have a similar vibe and also felt like similarly faded to like it's kind of like this haunting confluence of like, well, don't give her that name, man.
Yeah fuck, oh reminder of this woman who died young tragically.
Yeah, but that was also a thing back then. I mean like it sounds like she was wanting this, but like in that specific time period, like these girls would walk into these studios and they'd get these studio deals and they'd be like, Okay, we need to change your name, your voice, you need to get married, so that too for your image, you need to be seen with this person, you know, like they would construct these entire personas from the ground up. It's pretty interesting.
Yeah, totally. And in her case, there's a lot of like studios being involved, but she is like they don't trust her. There's the head of twentieth century Fox, Darryl f Xanik, fired her months before she was in all Abaltiv because she was not photogenic, was what he said.
So she like had to bounce back and forth. And so a thing you see in a lot of biographies is people being like I gave Marilyn Monroe this idea, and I, you know, I taught her how to pose in pictures like that one lady, And it's like well, twenty thousand people can't be responsible.
At a certain point.
We have to at a certain point, we have to look at the common denominator, which is Marilyn Monroe knew exactly what the fuck she was doing and just kept doing it really well all along. So in nineteen forty nine, she's still pretty unknown. She's like has these bit parts in the background of movies, and she's a famous kind of pin up model, and she poses nude for a photographer that and got paid fifty dollars for the shoot,
and she's on the cusp of stardom. And a Chicago publisher includes one of the nude photos in a nineteen fifty one calendar, and then that calendar sells so well that they're just like, that's actually next year's calendar too, And they just keep selling these calendars with nude photos
of Marilyn Monroe in it. And that's something I didn't realize, like what one of the biographies was, basically like her nude photos were more widely available than her movies, Like everybody had kind of seen these because everyone was just I guess that was like the equivalent of a sex tape back then. It was like a calendar with nude women's with nude women's women Okay, and so she had like kind of starred in this underground, successful nude calendar and so I guess in that way again just more
similar to like a Kim Kardashian than I expected. And so her career starts to take off in movies and then Fox is like, oh boy, like they get word that she's in this calendar and she comes in for this meeting and they're like, well, is it you? And she's like, I'm really ashamed. I'm super embarrassed because they didn't really get my best angle. Like she's just like immediately like get dropping like fucking lines from a movie on these studio executives who are like freaking the fuck out. Yeah.
There's also like people later asked her about the photo shoot, like because there's tons of press around this like this is the year that like and this scandal is kind of what breaks her again, like similar to the Kim Kardashian thing where she's famous ish and then this nudity scandal happens and suddenly everybody's like holy shit, like nobody's ever done something like this, and somebody's like, did you have anything Marylynd Maryland, did you have anything on at
all during the shoot? And she's and she said I had the radio on, which is such a good.
Line, and you know, I'm sure she wasn't. I'm sure she's like, whoever, whatever man didn't negotiate for her to get a like percentage or royalties from those being reprinted over and over and over, right, So that yeah, sure landed her, Thank God and movies.
Right exactly, So she does it does help her launch her career, which like very savvy. The way that she handled the quote unquote scandal was she like knew that there was this journalist who was a woman who she was like, I'm going to give you an exclusive interview on this, and like was like, okay, can we go
off the record? Like, look, I did this because I couldn't eat, and like now it's becoming a huge problem for my career, Like do you have any like I needed that money just to be able to actually put food in my mouth? Do you have any advice on like what I could do? Like pretending it was off the record, but she knew for a fact, so they were going to print that she actually used the money to put a down payment on her car, so she's going to lose her car. I know she's so I know,
she's so fucking cool. Oh my god. But that becomes the story. That becomes the story she becomes, like the rags to richest thing kind of becomes a part of her story. And she's just like playing all these angles. She's playing the stew video. You know, they're like we got to be ashamed of her, we got to fire her. And she comes in and is like, no, it's not a big deal, and I'm going to talk to this
woman and make it all right. And she does, and like that makes her this kind of unknown quantity in American culture, which is like still super repressed at this time, like somebody who is not afraid of their nudity or their sexuality and is just like yeah, fuck it.
Like so interesting though, because she moves like the mind of like Ari Ari Gold, what's his name, Ari Gold, Ari Manuel, whatever, I don't know, I'm conflict.
Yeah no, you said Ari Gold based on Ari Emmanuel.
Oh okay, I have no idea about my recall, but like I'm it's just so interesting because I'm like wondering, did she have someone engineering this or these are just all her ideas like Blair.
Period, so we can't question the genius.
Really, I love it's everybody one of the best improvisers I think we've ever seen.
Everybody at the time. And speaking of improvisers, like everybody's like she's really like has amazing comedic timing, She's like witty, she has like her performances. She's playing a dumb blonde, but her performances are like you know actors are like, holy shit, She's got.
Like Sprina Carpenter is like really channeling this. I feel like a.
Lot I think a lot of people have.
Yeah, a lot of people obviously have definitely like so this does seem yeah now, like with the humor and like the sexuality.
And I think Sabrina Carpenter is a great reference for this.
Yeah yeah, but just so much mega watts star power with like the funniness and like the not taking yourself too seriously, with like so much beauty.
Also yes, also like I hadn't realized. I think I think I did maybe know that the first Playboy had Marilyn Mamra on the car, but you have you Hefner bought that calendar photo for five hundred dollars. Marilyn Monroe never got any more than her original fifty dollars, and that is what launched Playboy, was him just putting the calendar photo. Calendar photo, that's the calendar photo is just the one that she got paid fifty dollars. He bought
for five hundred dollars. Uh. And this like massively powerful brand like Playboy, like that is launched by.
Heefner, Like I hate that man.
Yeah, not cool, not cool.
But the other way what happened.
With I know, I was gonna say, like so this ability of him for him to just like pay five hundred dollars for this photograph that launches the entire like this massively powerful brand is fucking crazy. And again it's like this huge brand that launches careers, like I don't know Miles, right, does Jamie loftis Jamie? But that brand doesn't exist exist if it's not right without Maryland that she is like cultivating and like this chess game that she's playing with the public.
That's actually like one of the most damning, the biggest indictment against Playboy as this massive institution is to know that it was launched off the back of him being like, dude, you know that Poppin calendar. Yeah, that's going to be the cover. That's like that's like some NFT ship that yeah, you know what I mean. He's like, yeah, it's just like my fucking art dog. No, you've literally hitched your wagon to this massive star.
That's wild.
I stole her whole ship, like all of his like bunnies kind of like drafted off of her, like look off of her, and like he bought the plot above her in the Westwood Cemetery and was like when you bury me, like bury me above Maryland and then his yeah, yeah, and his surviving wife was like, I'm actually gonna sell that and pay off my mortgage.
Yes, I'm gonna put your ashes in. I'm gonna put your ashes.
In a wonderbread bag and throw it off the ten Freeway.
But this is the stretch where, like, you know how we had those periods where like Elon Musk is just like constantly in the fucking news and you just like can't escape him. Right now, it's like she's just every day people at the time described as just being like every day there's a new Marilyn Monroe story. Everybody's just like obsessed with her. There's this one year where she's like marrying Joe DiMaggio, She's getting emergency surgery for appendicitis.
She's revealed to be the Naked Lady and the nude calendar. There's like some paparazzi are caught like selling nude pictures they took without her permission, Like like that Aaron Andrews story. Do you remember where that like creepy guy was like yeah, like that have to her, like and it's like the whole world is just like obsessed with her in a way that I hadn't really. I just thought I thought because that song was like one of the main first things I just thought. It was like she was this
tragic figure. She was this like massive media mogul who just wasn't getting paid like a mogul, but was like create in terms of like the pop cultural power of what she was creating was just insane. Also, during her appendix surgery, just back to like how women were treated in the medical world, she felt the need to put a post it note on her abdomen as she was going into surgery, being like, please don't botch my surgery and make me infertile. Xx. Marilyn Monroe and the doctor.
The doctor got nervous and like brought in a gynecologist for her appendic surgery because I guess he was planning to botch her surgery up to that point.
I mean, not playing like he was shook after that.
She's so smart. That's what I did. Right before my tumor surgery were like literally right. But as I was going on door, I was like, please don't shave my head.
I know you're not going to shave my head.
Please don't shame begging.
Wait, but is that that was just a technique thing of being able to do the surgery without shaving or having to shave your head.
Well, they had told me for six months they were going to have to shave my head get the tumor out. It's like a big area. And then I woke up and I just had like a little my hair was still there with like a big patch gone.
There you go.
But Marilyn, I have friends who do this too, like who have said before they went under for the C section, like please, and they're like, and I asked the doctor at the last minute, like please make me the smallest scar. And that's why I was such a small scar.
You know, and they go, you know what, for you, I'm going to do something very different this time.
For you. I do this seven times a day.
Her currency you know, yeah, yeah.
Sure, the post it is. And it's also just like, hey, could you please view me as a human being? Yeah? Thank you? That would be so such.
Oh boy, I got a lady in here who doesn't want me to botch her appendixer, she can write boy.
So this is where we start getting like some of her most iconic film performances. There's the movie Gentleman Prefer Blondes, which has the Diamonds or a Girl's Best Friend performance, which is I kind of I hadn't watched it until doing the research for this, and it is essentially like if you've seen the Madonna material Girl music video, it's kind of just a shot for shot remake of the performance. That's where her like pink dress comes from.
I need to watch that. I've never seen it.
But this is also a time like the Women's Club was like a group that would come in and be like, you can't have her on camera looking this good, like she's too This is what we talked about this a lot with Elvis. She was like too hot and America was too horny, and they just felt like they had to protect people from her.
Oh, like they're like.
This is like nuclear atomic energy you're feeling around heart.
This is a time where women can't own property by themselves, don't have credit cards by themselves, probably have there still can't have no fault divorce. Like women are socialized so deeply to believe that their livelihood is being chosen by their man, and then keeping their man to keep their family.
And so when you get this whole new sexual presence, I could see easily how those women all, and it's sad, felt so threatened all of a sudden, you know, and men probably are thinking there's a whole new thing of like, oh this is what's available, Like this could be you know, it is.
A new standard.
Yeah, it's like disrupting in an entire ecosystem.
Right Yeah. So yeah, one of the things they objected to was just her singing a song too seductively in this movie Niagara, that is apparently one of her one
of her better movies. So to your point about just like what was happening sexually at this time between gentlemen prefer blondes and the seven year it the Kinsey Report on Female Sexuality drop and revealed things that apparently like came as a huge shock to Americans at the time that like half of women were not virgins at marriage, a quarter are like having affairs, and like many of them, this is this is weird. They're like, apparently women are enjoying sex.
We must in this.
People were furious and they got mad at Kinsey and they also like basically blamed marilynmm because they were like, see, she's channeling this thing that it kind of reminds like in the Einstein episode. We talked about how he theorized this black hole at the center of the universe and then years later scientific instruments were able to actually observe it. But like his was basically his math, like decades before the scientific observation was able to be there, and it
was like the beginning of her career. She's like channeling this thing and then the research comes out and is like, yeah, that's exactly right, like people, this is what people want.
And she only could have known what was to come about the just ubiquitous porn at any second, everywhere, at all times, right, But.
The av club about her performance in Gentlemen Preferred Blondes notes that the joke of the song is that Monro values diamonds over the subservient men. She's clearly in on that joke, and the movie is ultimately a celebration of
female ingenuity and solidarity. Monroe's dumb blonde character was clearly the creation of a very savvy, intellectual performer, which I guess seems obvious, but like at the time they're just like, she's she's the dumb blonde on on screen, and I think she you know, she also played that in public. She said the act of like posing for photographs in the camera would make her horny, which like everybody just took it face value, but then you know, genius. Yeah, she's just like.
Yeah, it's making her job that is very difficult that she scrupulously studies and is so hard on herself about like acting. Yeah, it's like she's faking an orgasm.
Basically, she's faking an orgasm for She's basically like you, the film viewer, and the person who's looking at you, I'm actually horny for you.
Like essentially, oh, you're right, like I'm actually so horny. Like when I took that picture. You're right, yeah, exactly the.
Like I was stressed. Remind there's this poor hey Luis bourgeous poem about Shakespeare called Everything and Nothing, where his theory of like who Shakespeare was, and like what drove him is that, to quote the poem, there was no one inside him, nothing but a trace of chill, a dream dreamt by no one else. And then like he becomes an actor because quote he had become instinctively adept at pretending to be somebody so that no one would
suspect he was in fact nobody. In London, he discovered the profession for which he was destined, that of the actor who stands on a stage and pretends to be someone else in front of a group of people who pretend to take him for that person. And there's just like tons of I just love that theory of like Shakespeare and like you know, why people create art, and like how interesting and different like the internal interiority of
like different artists might be than we expect. There are so many quotes from her throughout her biography where she's basically saying, Zach that, like she says, I always felt like I was a nobody and the only way for me to be somebody was to be well somebody else, which is probably why I wanted to act. So it's like, I don't know, people are like psychoanalyzing her and being like, well,
she had this personality disorder, this psychiatric disorder. It's like I don't know, like when when somebody theorizes about Shakespeare, it's just like a cool It's just like, wow, that what a cool idea about a cool artist, right? I do? I do feel like I don't know a lot of artists might be you know, empty on the inside and creating their art to give themselves meaning, Like that's kind of cool.
Well, also, I think artists do the work of being honest about things that hold up a mirror for everyone else to experience their own pathos or whatever. But she had so much trauma, and then you know, she's like the equivalent of fame of what a pop star is today, Like the most famous pops are like a Justin Bieber or a Taylor Swift or whatever, that type of level
of fame. I find it almost impossible when you become an industry like that that's so massive and you know, a very solidified idea of what people perceive you to be, which you know, no matter what scale it is a small or incredibly large, no one really knows the interior of you. And I think that's just a very lonely life when it gets to be such a magnitude, because there's no way that you're not misunderstood by a large amount of people at all times. So of course it's
going to impact your mental health. Like, yeah, I don't know how anyone with that level of fame stays like well to yourself anymore.
No, Yeah, you cease to be a person, and you become an infinite number become an infinite number of things to millions of people.
And yeah, and also you have no idea for what reason anyone is interacting with you, Yeah, anymore?
And and multiple like her husbands like buy into that, Like Joe Demaggio first saw her in a photograph of her wearing like a baseball jersey and was like that, that's that's how that's the first way he interacted with her. And he was familiar with the image of this like
childlike no interest in independence woman. And then you know she would marry Demaggio or Arthur Miller and then they'd be like insulted when she would be like, I got to put my career first because I'm like the most famous person on the planet and this is I'm building something here, And then I think she would be shocked and disappointed that they like actually couldn't deal with that, right you know?
Yeah, I think that still very very very much exists today, Like, oh yeah, well, people are are extremely attracted to like a sparkly woman or man, but more so women and all that comes with like the star power and energy and wattage of what makes them that person. But then the reality of what it means to sort of live in that shadow or coexist with that level of stardom is like not sustainable for a lot of people's like hearts and egos.
Yeah. So this is when she marries Joe DiMaggio. They are only married for nine months. He is abusive. I do just need to read this anecdote from the Spotal biography about Joe Demagio and like what he was like at that time. He just like watched TV a lot and was just thiss, like really boring person, like hung out at gentlemen's clubs. But from the Spotal biography, before they met, he was hanging around gentlemen's Clubs and best Buddies with a guy named George Solitaire. George Solitaire grew
up in Brownsville and then moved to Bronxville. Claims to be the guy who invented calling boring things Dolesville and divorces Splitsville.
I love that you just called Joe Dimaccio boring. That's so funny.
That was That was Her initial response was like, holy ship, this guy's so fucking boring.
I'm hanging out with George Solitaire.
Yeah, George Solitaire, such a fucking Tim Robinson character.
Alf own of a name like the Loneliest Mother for her too, because you said a repulsive loser.
Claim to fame, I invented calling boring things Dolesville and then and then it's like, I think my the story of my authorship of those phrases comes from growing up in Brownsville and Bronxville and having.
My god Dolesville in Splitsville. Yeah, that's how I kind of came up with it anyway. Emotions.
Yeah, George Solitaire, So George South did get over here. Why we're solid ditch.
I thought you're gonna say he created and invented the game Solitaire. Nope, you're about to go to Dolesville. Yeah, that's that's so funny.
When I was like, oh, George, Solitaire didn't invent so he invented the phrase Splitsville and Dolesville.
Okay, and we you I saw. I'm gonna cite him from now on every time I say, hey, daddy, Owe, this place is Dolesville.
Let's get out of here, shout out to my boy George.
This is one the seven year itch came out, which is the one with the famous photograph of hers or her dress being blown up by a subway grate, which I watched the first half of this movie. It sucks so but it like the premise that she's great, But the entire premise is like a middle aged man's wife and kid leave town in the summertime and he wrestles with the fact that he desperately wants to fuck his
neighbor who's like wildly out of his league. And that's the entire plot, is that this seven y Yeah, well, it's like when when you've been married for seven years. Yeah, yeah, that's when a fella's eyes starts to wander, if you know what I'm saying. But Uh, it's yeah, it's wild. Like it's a lot of like him talking to himself and be like, oh George, oh buddy, you're a good man.
What'll they say?
Yeah, So the photo shoot, like the one that everybody has photographs of of where her skirt is being blown up was from. They said that they like were trying to film the movie scene on location in New York, but I think they basically knew that this would be an amazing publicity stunt. Five thousand people showed up and it was this like wild, crowded scene to the point that they like couldn't use any of the footage because everyone was just screeching at the top of their lungs.
I talked about the movie Saturday Night, where like they basically ram a bunch of like SNL lore into like one night. They're like, yeah, all of this happened on the first night of the filming of Saturday Night Live Going Live, and there are like some weird moments in this where like a bunch of different things happen. And that scene where her skirts being blown up is also what caused her and Demaggio's divorce because he was so like Walter Winshell brought him because he knew that it was.
He's like a gossip columnist at the time, and he like brought him to the set and Demaggio shouted, that's it, I've had it and then stormed off, which is just such a funny, old timey guy thing to say. And then they were divorced like weeks later Wits Bill because Joe DiMaggio turns out a little bit Dolesville.
You say, George, you're better off Joe that Marilyn was Dolesville to the max.
Yeah, yeah, I got that from Brownsville. You can use it.
But again, incredibly iconic moment. Some people have said it's the most iconic shot in film, even though it's not in the film. The dress went for five point six million dollars in twenty eleven.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
And then Kim kardash you wear that.
Dress, she wore the diamond, she wore the crystal one.
That's jf Which that's another kind of weird collapsible moment or like everything kind of happening on top of each other. I didn't realize the JFK moment happened like two months before she died, Like yeah, it was like really soon before, which is I guess where some of the suspicion comes from. But yeah, she starts studying under the Strasburg Lee Strasberg, who's like the founder of the Actors Studio and the
founder of method acting. And I think a lot of people treat her working with them as like an incongruity because it's like, this woman plays ditzy blonde is trying to be, you know, this method actor. But again to the point about her being a really great actor. There's this cool anecdote from one of her later films called I Think The Duke and the Showgirl or The Prince
and the Showgirl or something. She's co starring with Sir Laurence Olivier, who is also directing her in this movie, and he has this famous quote when he's working with Dustin Hoffman on Marathon Man and Dustin Hoffman is, I don't know, like running marathons to prepare for the role, and Olivier is like, have you tried acting, my dear boy, like instead of like doing the method thing where you like have to inhabit the life of the character. He's
just like, that's all stupid. What are you doing? And he was like a total asshole to Marilyn on set and was like, you just need to be pretty? Would you stop with this shit. He's like widely regarded as the greatest, you know, British actor at the time, so he doesn't have time for her bullshit on the set of this. He thinks she sucks during the make of the movie. Later puts it on for friends after the fact and is like, I thought i'd like have a good laugh at how shit the movie is, and like
we'd laugh at her performance. And you know, he had directed it, so he thought he knew like what he
was about to see. But you know, when you're watching something with different people, you can maybe sometimes see it again with fresh eyes, and like by the end of the screening, he's like, oh, she's by far the best person in that movie, and like has like gone on the record being like she fucking acted me off them off the screen, but like, yeah, she gave him notes on shots and was like you should like paste this up.
It's supposed to be a comedy and it's like very plotting and he just like didn't listen to that and was like, well, should you just need to be pretty? But she just she just had that thing that great film actors have where you see them on set doing a thing and you're like, what the fuck is that, and then it's just magic on film. How many films she in I don't know the count, but.
Was it did she have like a long run, because I my percept like, was it this like all happening within a seven year span?
Less?
More so this I think her early film work was like early fifties and she died in the early sixties. So like the second year itch is fifty five and she does in the early sixties, so okay, you know, it's like she takes off and then there's like a six seven year run. Right, she married Demagio. I'm fifty two,
so she's already like very famous. Then she starts appearing in movies, and like those movies do incredibly well, even though some of them are just about a rizzless guy being like, god, she's hot for like an hour and
a half. But yeah, she's in a bunch of movies, and like a lot of her performances towards the end of her career are really like now critically acclaimed, whereas they like weren't necessarily at the time, but I do think there's something like kind of timeless that she is kind of connecting with that you know, people weren't able to appreciate at the time, but now you look at a fucking Laurence Olivier performance and it's like, why is
he acting like that? Yeah, and you look at her and you're like, oh, there goes the most beautiful person I've ever seen on camera, just completely popping off. And also she looks like she could exist now. You know. She also married Arthur Miller, which is how she gets the attention of the FBI because Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, which the FBI was like, they brought him before the House on American Committee and he wouldn't name names. And that was also when he was like, and I'm marrying
Marilyn Monroe. And she stuck by him during all this even though she was being So there's another like kind of in line with the story about her mom and
the dead husband coming back from the dead. Towards the end of her life, therapist who worked with her were like, she potentially displaying signs of having like schizophrenic tendencies like her mom did, and that there are like some details that make it seem like her mom when she was committed refused to eat thinking the hospital was trying to poison her, and marylyn mom road toward the end of her life was like refusing to eat takeout and saying
she thought that like everybody was trying to poison her. And Joe Demaggio was like, there, I just eat the food like we're good, and she was like, well, Joe, they're not trying to poison you, are they. Hah.
She probably with what a scandal she was at the time, I'm sure she got like death threats and freaky shit.
Yeah all the time.
Oh all, So back then it was just like the Yellow Pages, like you like, I think that her estate in Brentwood was like recently just sold, Like you could just walk up to someone's house, like everyone's house was listed, like where everyone lived, you know. Bizarre.
Yeah, she couldn't get away from the cameras, like she was there just pop ROSSI following her everywhere. But around this time, when she's married Arthur Miller and living in New York, there's an anecdote where she like meets up a friend and she's like, I'm being followed and they're like, yeah, of course you are like the most famous. And she's like, no, by the FBI, and they're like, okay, fuck, she's lost it.
And she was being followed by the FBI. She was like, I've learned how to like lose them, and like she was talking about what she would do to like get them off her tail. And it's true, but everybody, of course, that's like an in city, Like I feel like a lot of our twentieth century icons are followed by the FBI, and it's just like such a mind fuck.
Yeah, yeah, you're like I know this is happening, but no one believes me because they sound like a psychopath. But then back then it was like what was it the Red Red Scare?
Yeah, exactly, all.
The blacklisted people and if you all those people were being followed.
Yeah, and she was like hung out with leftist intellectuals like those were her politics. She you know, once intervened on behalf of El Fitzgerald, who was like, yes, not able to check into a hotel or like get booked at a club because it was America and raising.
Her and she like went and she's like all good with you. And she walked in and was like you need to put her on that stage. Yeah, and I was like, go bitch, yes, yeah.
Which made her very dangerous. To the FBI. They were like, no, we don't that's probably not as dangerous as They probably underestimated her too, but they did tail her and eventually they were like, God, damn it. She hasn't met with any Communist officials. What is going on here? But to your question about her film career, so towards the end, she appears in Some Like It Hot, which I did not. Have you guys seen Some Like It Hot?
Nope, I've seen clips of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like a comedy where her men dress up as women and it's that's played for laughs. I think, yeah, long Yo, Thanks for everything, Julie Numar.
I just remember Like It Grumpy Old Men when it came out and my mom was like, Jack Lemon is in Some Like It Hot, and I'm like, I don't know what that is. I only know that this is the guy from Grumpy Old Men. I don't know if he has a career before this film, but that project was built around her. She was the first to be cast. It was her return to movies after some health issues,
including a miscarriage and some barbiturate dependency. So she took like a two year break, came back with Some Like It Hot, and it's been rated as like the best filmed comedy you know, brilliance.
I need to go jeez, I need to watch these I need to watch a few movies. I haven't seen her movies.
I mean, I love the guy from Grumpy Old Men, So.
Yeah, she Producer Victor says, it's not that DVH. Just on the subject of like her being witty, there's this one anecdote that I didn't see it read anywhere as her being witty, but so Joan Crawford, another movie star at the time, basically like called her a slut in the media as she was rising up, and like Marilyn Monroe would never like she was always complimentary about like all of her exes, everybody she had relationships with, and so on. The Joan Crawford one, though, she like went
out of her way to pray. She was like, Oh, I don't like, that's so crazy that she's mad at me. I've like always admired her and especially like what a good mother she is. I hear she's like the best mother, and like Joan Crawford like turns out like she's the subject of Mommy Dearest, So people were just like taking
it at face value. But I could see it being her like knowing some dirt about her family and just being like, I just hear she's such a good mom, and like I've always wanted to just to be like such a that's such a clear woman.
Yeah, that's what they call in wrapped now, sneak this, yees.
Sneak this. I feel like she was sneak this sing. But like even even like her modern like one of her more modern biographies, was still like it's kind of a irony that she went out of her way to talk about what a good mother she was because Joan Crawford, of course, turned out to be a complete fucking monster. I'm like, you're like, wasn't an accident irony at all? Yeah.
Yeah, Crawford's eyes are so fucking scary. Yeah, you know there's those eyes like reveal reveal.
Yeah, there's the JFKN Sinatra stuff where I like, based on most reporting, it seems like she had like one encounter maybe with JFK. He was she was like summoned to Bing Crosby's house. They hung out for like fifteen minutes head sex and then he spent the rest of the time complaining about how bad his back hurt. The men, like over and over and over again. The men and these stories are so pathetic to the point that like
she called her doctor. This is like one of the ways we have it confirmed that they had an affair, because like she called her doctor, who was like, oh, the vibe was very clear that they had just had sex, and she's like, here, talk to John F. Kennedy. First of all, imagine being a doctor and getting that call.
But yeah, it does feel like a lot of her energy towards men was like feeling sorry for them, and like she like chases these incredibly accomplished men in the hopes that one of them won't be pathetic, and they're all like immediately just like, oh my.
Back was George solitarire, Jesus, you hurt my back when we were doing it.
The fuck Wait.
I didn't realize that she was only thirty six when she died. I thought she was forty six.
No, thirty six, yeah wow, And like God really coming not not long after some like it hot, which is like her biggest critical.
At the Apex.
Yeah, she also had an affair around this time with Frank Sinatra. He gave her a Maltese puppy that she named Moth, which was short for Mafia, because she was like, this guy's hilarious Mafia. She really is.
She's so she's so funny. I love her.
Yeah, where'd you name the dog? Mafia? We'll call it Moth though, so people don't really.
Tiny little mobster after my mobster boyfriend.
Yeah, but there this quote about Frank said because apparently Frank was dealing with struggling with ed around this time, and he credited Marilyn Monroe with during it. But just in the same in the same world as George Solitaire,
just the way men were at the time. From the Tamberelli biography, Actually, Frank had been going through this whole impotency trip at the time, way too much sauce the booze was completely ruining a sex like he's getting too old to drink like that, and then expected to also perform in the sack.
Can you imagine your friend saying that in the press trick my boy, my boy can't get it off.
He's on an inpotity trick.
Bro, He's washed. Bro. He can't hit the bottles and the booty in one night.
Yeah, And also I love them back then, being like, oh yeah, it's just the woman that's the issue. These chicks just aren't hot enough.
If that was nothing to do with his alcoholism.
Yeah, right, But the stories from that relationship, a lot of her relationship, it does feel like she's like kind of playing the role of that she plays on screen, and like also the like of a woman in a modern like porn like that she's just doing what she feels. Like these men who she feels very sorry for want and she's like good at just like reading that and
like doing whatever they want. And this is around the time that she does the Happy Birthday to You performance for JFK, which is, first of all only I first found out about that from Mike Myers doing it in Wayne's World, which is much less cool. Yeah, but yeah, this happens like a couple months before she dies. And it's also like apparently it was a surprise to everyone that she went that hard, So I think that's probably like unconsciously why some people are like that's kind of weird.
She like put that out there right before she died, and like this was a person who is having like crazy affairs all the time.
Did you see this about her IQ now that she reportedly I don't know how this is proven or not, so I don't know for a fact if this is true. But apparently they said that she had an IQ of once sixty eight when Einstein's was one sixty. Do you think that's true?
I don't know. I mean I could definitely. I think she is like a genius in many ways, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that she because like everything that I found in this research was just like she is playing chess while these guys around her are just playing marbles. Yeah, more exactly.
And that they retrospectively like think that she had autism spectrum disorder.
That was uh yeah, but they just had no concept of what that could be, let alone like in the package of Marilyn Monroe. You know. But the JFK Marilyn affair has become a big deal over the years. The people claim that it was carried out by secret tunnels in New York's Carlisle Hotel, which I do know that he did use tunnels underneath like New York hotels to have affairs. I don't know if those included her.
That is so creepy to meet these ideas, this.
Perpetual sneaking people in in LA.
And tunnels, like there's always the sock up tunnels and I know they're real, and it's so scary to me. I think, I don't know why.
I don't know, so the ones in LA, Like, there were also rumors that they dug a tunnel from the Beverly Hilton Hotel to Monroe's house so that she could get there, which people have looked back and that would have cost three billion dollars to construct, so probably didn't happen. It has like gone down as lore. There's a scene in a white house down where Channing Tatum and Jamie
Fox they're like trying to escape the white house. He's like, good, there's a series of tunnels that lead out to the street. JFK used them to sneak Maryland. And he's like, I thought those were a myth. He said, actually they're not.
They're not.
Let's go why as people are attacking you, why would you give that backstory?
Because it's a movie, babe.
All right. So this is when she is found dead in her home August fifth, nineteen sixty two. The Los Angeles Police concluded that it was caused by a self administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of death is probable suicide. The suicide rate in Los Angeles spikes by like fifty percent in the month after her death. Yes, crazy, Yeah, And then people immediately kind of are like, what happened?
They don't want to believe it. But then there is this theory of the Kennedy's involvement, and like a lot of our conspiracy theories, like you can look to where it was started, and there's there was a nineteen sixty four self published pamphlet, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, which conspicuously came out during an election year when RFK was running for Senate, and it basically it sed Munroe had surrounded herself with communist and communist sympathy, and the
person who wrote it is just like a you know, psycho right wing person, Frank A. Cappel. And then one of the books that I read was Marilyn Monroe biography by Donald Spado, and he has this theory about her housekeeper Eunice Murray and her doctor Ralph Greenson that seems like the most likely of the conspiracy theories, so I'm just going to go through some of the details. The official story is that she is talking to Peter Lawford
on the phone. She says, say goodbye to Jack sagobye to Pat say goodbye to yourself too, because you're a nice person. And he can tell she's like very you know, out of it and on drugs, and those sound like the last words of someone who's planning to die or knows they're dying. Lawford got that was like, damn, that can't be a good sign. Calls her housekeeper, who calls her doc who the doctor. Actually, Lawford doesn't call the housekeeper. He calls like his person because Lawford is weirdly rfk's
brother in law. The last person she's on the phone with is rfk's brother in law, which also is like, that's kind of weird, as bro exactly. But he instead of calling directly the police or anything, he calls like her manager because he's like, I don't this could be bad for the Kennedys if I'm attached to this. Manager calls doctor, doctor, calls the housekeeper. Housekeeper is just like she's fine, and this is like when when that call is made, she's in her room dying. So like there
there are some things. The official story is just she took too many pills, whether on purpose or by accident and died. And but there's like some really so the weird stuff that's kind of shady is just like the behavior of the like the timeline doesn't make sense of like when she found and not. But I just want to just going through the most famous conspiracy theories. The
first one is the Kennedy angle. Joe DiMaggio later said, I always knew who killed her, but I didn't want to start a revolution in this country.
Okay, So she's apparently called her a psychiatrist and hairdresser and both said that she was in distress about betrayal by men in high places right there.
So all of that, there's tons of shit. So like this that theory, there's like it became an entire what once that pamphlet came out, It became a huge industry to like write tell all stories about this stuff, right and I don't know who's Yeah, Like some books say she was calling the White House a lot at that time, and like Kennedy was just like could you stop. She did like to call people late at night.
So but she claimed she claimed to the doctor that RFK had visited her her and yelled at her that day. According to the Vanity.
Fair right, but he was in San Francisco the whole day, so that probably didn't happen. Like he was at a family people people are like he who was in California, Okay, and it's like, well, he was in San Francisco at a thing with like his whole family, and I don't have.
The spatial awareness or critical things. So that's nineteen sixty two, you know.
Right, you know what I can't bear like And I know this sounds absolutely insane for two people who host a podcast largely about politics, But I cannot bear that like these men JFK and RFK presented as like these wonderful leaders of the country and then did this stuff behind closed doors. Like my autistic brain cannot hold deal both of that. Both of those can be true, Yeah right, I really can't. It's like, yeah, breaks my brain.
Yeah. There's definitely a difference between the image that they were projecting and then who they were behind closed doors, especially with groats to how they treated women. But the mysterious detail. Like there's tons of like really mysterious, like people claiming that she wrote letters to Jack and threatened to reveal her secret.
Everyone knew the secret, Yeah, everyone knew what the birthday and the whisper in the dress.
I think I had a feeling they knew what was going on. There's like this famous red diary where she could supposedly like took down sensitive information, but like none of that stuff's corroborated. The one like really weird detail is that there was no pill residue in her system, like in her stomach, which people have pointed to is like weird and would suggest that she was like killed with an injection, but there was no injection point on
her body, which would have still been there. I do think it's very weird that the last person she called was Peter Lawford, who was RFK Junior's brother in law. That's like who she was on the phone was when she died, and.
The empty pill bottles, Like and she's found face down with like the empty pill bottles.
And then there's no pills in her stomach, yeah, and.
Then the phone is in her hand, you know.
Yeah. The weird thing is that like her I think lawyer is called at midnight and told she's dead, and they don't call the police until four in the morning. And when the police show up at four in the morning, her housekeeper is doing laundry, which is fucking weird behavior.
What's tampering with the crime scene.
Right, And for so there's like a four hour window there where it's like her housekeeper and this guy doctor Greenson, who was like this really controlling psychiatrist who was like not letting certain people see her at this time. And there's also reports that at the scene he was heard yelling like damn it. Hyde gave her a prescription I
didn't know about. So one theory, like if the scene was staged, which a lot of people thought it looked staged, one theory would be that he like had plans that night and told the housekeeper to give her like a enema of this medication that he had given her before, and that's what gave her the fatal overdose, which is
why there was no pill residue in her stomach. But then they were like, oh shit, we killed Marilyn Monroe, and so they like created this whole story and it was suicide, but it was suicide.
Like a Michael Jackson doctor type of thing.
Yeah, medical malpractice, huh.
Yeah, exactly, my Michael Jackson doctor, Elvis doctor. Like that's a thing that just seems to happen over and over
with these uh like incredibly famous people. The one thing is that, like, so that's the theory from the Spoto biography, and then like the more recent one, they like have a lot more evidence, a lot more anecdotes of like the fact that she was like really doing a lot of drugs at the time and was also like self administering injections and stuff, and so it could have also been that she just self administered the dose that killed her, whether because she was trying to do that or it
was accidental, but she was very like kind of fucked up on drugs towards the gym.
Was also a deep shit with endometriosis, which they knew nothing about then. It was growing all over her body. She had several miscarriages when she really wanted children so badly, and like not to mention that like all mixed with autism, like the the what endometriosis does. It's so harsh on your buddy, Like scientists are now like that now that they're just starting to do research on it. They're like
saying it should be classified as cancer. Is how gnarly it is, yeah, and like that really affects your hormones so intensely. It is like an all consuming disease, and especially for her, like when she had very bad thin like it's almost impossible to be thin as well when you have endometriosis, because it's you know whatever, and oh my god, Yeah, I think she was like so much pain. She's on, she can't sleep, she's on like diet pills
like upers downers, like all this stuff. Like she's involved with like every major.
Person in the world exactly, Like yeah, so it's it's kind of impossible to know. I do, my my, if I had to guess, I think the scene was staged by the housekeeper and the doctor either because they didn't want her to look bad. And like I guess the drug that she oded on would cause your body potentially to expel stuff, so that could be why she was like doing the laundry. It was just so that like they didn't find her like covered in shit or whatever.
But I think it could also be that they were covering their own ass and like that there was a Walter White breaking bad situation where she died in front of them and they were like fuck were yeah, you know, they didn't do enough and were too scared to do anything, and so they then like concocted this story like there's there's a thing where the official narrative is that she went to check on her and her door was locked, and then she called the doctor to come over and
he had to like break a window, but like the door didn't have a lock on it. And also Marilyn Monroe like never locked her door because of her intense fear.
Yeah, so can you imagine how insane that is though to be Marilyn Monroe and not lock your door?
I know, ye yeah, oh my god.
Yeah, they didn't have security back then, right, Like I don't know, it just seems like you could just knock on every like someone's door in Hollywood.
Right. So the premise of Calendar Girl, the great Jason Priestley movie that nobody fucking remembers. That's that's one weird thing, so real quick. Just like in terms of her overall like legacy, the Warhol painting, like we've talked about how much her dress is sold for the Warhol painting shot Stage Blue Marylyn was auctioned for one hundred and ninety
five million dollars in twenty twenty two. If you just like put a dollar figure on her iconography with like Playboy high Art, like Box Office Success two billion, Madonna's iconography, Like I think this Piggy's character is like built out of her, like all the ads that still feature her to this day, Like she's probably number one, you know, so, yeah, they use her in ads, and she was like at the forefront or her estate was at the forefront of
like you know, making money off of somebody's brand, you know, Like what's the name of the company that did it? A CMG Worldwide who just specialized in managing the estate of dead celebrities and they just cash in on this. In nineteen ninety six alone, the licensing of Marilyn Monroe's name and image has pulled in over thirty million dollars in revenues. That's just in ninety six, just like a random year.
Oh, I was going to say, I was like, that seems unbelievably low, But that's one year.
Yeah, that's one year. Yeah. Twenty sixteen, we got a Snicker's commercial that she appeared in where like Willem Dafoe plays her on the set of seven Year Itch.
And then like all the and imagine even all the unplaned like that they don't even yeah.
Yeah, but I do think it's interesting that like the one place she doesn't really live on is in like movies about her, Like people keep trying. There's Blonde Arsne Yeah, the Armists. Uh. There there is one called My Week with Marylyn starring Michelle Williams, like who I think is one of the best actors of like her generation. HBO's Norman Gyena Maryland of course, nineteen ninety three's Calendar Girl, where Jason Priestley and Jerry O'Connell drive to la and
just stalk Marilyn Monroe. That's the entire They should have
just marked it as a horror movie. But I do think that it's just because of that thing she had, like the thing that the guy was like between the lens and the film, Like there's just this magic that she had because of her talent and like how hard she worked at it that like you can't really do her justice by having somebody else play her, right, So like there's just that's the one place that her star is not as bright as like anyone else trying to be her so and I just don't think you can
do it because she was so good at what she did. And that's that's it. Love you, Marilyn, Love you, Marilyn, Love you.
George Solitaire my favorite side characters.
So George Solitaire is great, isn't it.
This podcast was the opposite of Dolesville. I'll tell you what riveted start to finish and Jock, you really did an incredible research.
Oh, thank you so much. This is what he does. I was reminded multiple times during the researching of her life of the phrase you smoked too tough, you're swag too different, your bitch is too bad, don't kill you. I was like, this is about her, she except she is the bitch that's too bad at this podcast.
That is my ship. I can't wait to listen like I love like this is my dream podcast to listen to.
Well, we'll have to pick another icon.
Yes, I can't wait to listen to this. Not my episode I lived it, I mean the other episode.
Yeah, I live. How many if we don't we don't like? Is this our sixth seventh?
Yeah?
Are they out right.
Now, Yeah, they're they're out there all right, Blair Sackey. Such a pleasure of having you.
I love you, guys. Thank you so much as you for doing that. I love Maryland. Okay, I love you Zichang Iconography Gang. Listen to my podcast and come see me on my show dates I put on my social media.
There you go, Miles, thank you for doing it.
Thank you for having me. As usual, We're.
Going to take a quick break, and then I'm going to come back and give you my no no, no no notebook dump where I talked about the stuff, the best stuff that I forgot to tell Blair and Miles. Oh right. That was our Marilyn Monroe episode with blair sake. Thanks to Blair and thanks to JM McNabb for the research help on this one. Here are a few interesting things we didn't get to from our research. That's right, it's time for the no no, no, no oh book. Don't don't do a thing I've come up against in
the last two episodes. Actually, Elvis in this one. That's just an interesting portal into how weird history was and just how different the world used to be. Has to do with names and identity. I mentioned that her mom's husband was presumed dead because someone who just happened to have his same name and like fit his general description died in a motorcycle accident in Ohio, like states away. And obviously we talked about her famous name change. That
was just one of her name changes. She was born as Norma Jean Mortenson. By the time she was baptized, her mom was going with Norma Jean Baker, and that first last named Mortenson, the Spoto biography points out, was spelled differently at different times by her and her grandparents, just like depending on how they were feeling that day,
I guess. And going back to the Elvis episode, apparently a big part of the Elvis wasn't really dead faked his own death conspiracy was that his name was misspelled on his tombstone. His middle name was spelled Aaron a Ron in life, and then Aron to quote the key and peel sketch on his tombstone or vice versa. Who gives a shit? But like you know, according to Elvis
conspiracy theorists, that was done as a clue. You know, all right, we faked my death chosen the most embarrassing death possible, by the way, having me die on the toilet for some reason, we've swapped my body with a look alike who we presumably had to murder, then paid off the doctors to make sure nobody will ever know. Just one thing left to do, that's right. The clues to steal a bit from the stand up comedian Nick Mullen talking about nine to eleven conspiracies worth going to
check out that YouTube clip. But yeah, it turns out that wasn't a intentionally planted clue by Elvis. There's even a song I think called like the Name on the Stone that was supposedly a song by Elvis being like and that's that's why I put the name misspelled on the stone, was because I wanted you guys to pick up on the fact that I faked my death and did all that stuff. But yeah, it turns out Elvis, like Marilyn Monroe and her ancestors, just spelled his name
differently at different times. There's examples of him and his handwriting spelling it with two a's and with one a. And there's just all sorts of interesting historical stories that hopefully we keep intersecting with in these Icon episodes. About people just not having a sing name and using that to their advantage, showing up in a town and claiming to be someone famous, you know, a princess who died, or people just leaving town and starting over with a
new name. It's just a different world now. Everything's so particular and standardized. My name has an apostrophe in it, and it ruins my ability to like register for anything or be found in any database, because you know, the operating systems can't deal with apostrophes sometimes, and so I leave it out, and then that just becomes a completely different name when the apostrophe is not there. And I think they had it better. You know, who cares about
a little mistaken identity here and there? You get to just live free. You get people coming back from the dead. What's better than that? Another thing. I didn't want to spend too much time focusing on the relationships and all the famous people that Marilyn Monroe slept with, because I feel like that was the stuff I knew coming in, and I feel like most people know about I don't feel like most people realize what a genius she was.
But she did have a lot of ill fated relationships, not just with her husbands, but depending on the biographer, she also had a lot of sex. Some suggest she worked as a sex worker for a stretch of her early career, and a lot of biographers and podcasters tend to like psychoanalyze her and say that her solicitous relationship with men was caused by psychiatric pathologies and early abuse,
and she was abused early in her life. But I will just say that a lot of how she interacted with men seemed to be having sex with the ones she was interested in, or for forwarding her career, or early in her career for self preservation, And I just feel like it's the sort of thing that if it was a man building his career by having sex with the most beautiful and impressive women in the world, we'd
just be like that guy was cool. And the fact that people felt the need for her behavior to come from some deep trauma might be more specific to the era than like something wrong with her. But anyways, we talked about how the conspiracies about rfk's involvement and her death came from a propaganda pamphlet from a right wing
ideologue who hated the Kennedys. I always just find it interesting to note how so many of the conspiracies we have today started as purposefully planted propaganda, like the KGB helped create the moon landing conspiracy, helped gas some of
the early JFK conspiracy theories. Here we have the other engine of misinformation in the twentieth century and really speeding up in the twenty first century, which is the fascist right wing in America who would spread rumors and they also would actively sabotage and murder people or make them think they were crazy in this case, which just a recurring theme in our icons. Yet another one of our icons who died with a very thick FBI file on her.
Russian state media also used her as propaganda inside the USSR at the time of her divorce from Arthur Miller, saying that the most American things are apple pie, gum, baseball, and Marilyn Monroe. Well, she just discarded Arthur Miller after he wrote her a few movies, because I think he was a bit of a hero inside Russia for not being completely hostile to the idea of socialism and being targeted by the Red Scare. I would just say that
he might have gotten something out of the deal. Being married to the most beautiful and most famous person on earth. And just as for the husbands, we talked about Demaggio, who was just kind of boring. We just watched TV fish she was just like, God, damn, this is boring. Arthur Miller much cooler, smarter, more impressive figure to me, but he also pulled some of the same bullshit as Demaggio.
He announced they were going to get married before he confirmed that with her publicly, and at one point he told the press that she would start making fewer movies, stating she will be my wife. That's a full time job. Imagine marrying the most famous person on the planet and
thinking that's how it was going to be. Presumably she was effective at making it look like an accident to everyone, and so I guess they were surprised when it required a tremendous amount of work and that she was not just willing to give that all up to be missus. Arthur Miller, all right, that is going to do it for or Marilyn Monroe probably my favorite one to research thus far. Our next icon goes a completely different direction,
particularly with marriage. Mary's one guy who's basically a nobody, and then he's her writer die from day one. One week from today, we'll be dropping our episode about the icon Dolly Parton with guest Lydia Popovich, and you can check back then and many more TDZ episodes in between. All Right, we'll talk to you all then Bite