The Woman Who Will Not Die

Monroe was an icon whose life was cut short. She started hits like Some Like It, Hot, The Seven Year Itch, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was said that her films had grossed more than two hundred million dollars at the time of her death. She acted, she cracked jokes, and she sang, I wanna be loved by you, just your else. But Monroe's death held in irony, as Gloria Steinham later wrote, America's biggest star died alone. On a Saturday night. The young actress was found dead in her bed from a

drug overdose. The rumors were numerous, Monroe biographer Sarah Church Well. Of course, as everybody knows, all kinds of conspiracy theories have developed around her death. It's been fifty years and we are still talking about the rumors surrounding her death. Some believe Monroe committed suicide. Others have more elaborate theories. So what happens is a lot of people um conclude that she must have been deliberately murdered, either by one of the Kennedy's, or by Kristov, or by Castro, or

you know, by aliens landing in Roswell. But of course that leaps over an enormous excluded middle, which is known as accident, which is how many many things happen in real life. Marilan Monroe may have appeared larger than life, but she wasn't every woman, one who suffered the same misfortune as others, but out in the open for all the world to see and without much help. This led

feminist Glorious Steinem to fixate on Monroe. You know, I just was haunted by the idea that that the women's movement might have been able to support her enough so she would still be with us. But like Gloria Steinham, Monroe lived and worked in a world dominated by men, and Hugh Hefner, who launched Playboy magazine using Monroe's nude image was far from the only one to exploit her along the way. Oh hear me, Lord, I could be good to love, but then I always discovered the body

every man. Welcome to the Thread a podcast from Azzi Media. I'm Sean Braswell. This season is about the remarkable road to the modern day women's movement through one of the leaders of that movement, Gloria Steinham. So how does Marilyn Monroe fit in this thread? Well? An episode one, we heard how Steinham stent as an undercover Playboy Bunny impacted her career and her outlook as a young reporter and feminist. Then in episode two, we told the story of how

the Playboy clubs came to be. They all started with Hugh Hefner, who had the idea to create a male magazine called Playboy, and that magazine's launch was not possible without its first nude centerfold, Marilyn Monroe. Now, in episode three, how Monroe wound up in Playboy. It wasn't her choice. Throughout her brief life, she endured many things, including many powerful men, and she tried to fight back. Monroe was a star, a wife, a model, and a silence breaker

for all of her accomplishments. Most people only remember Marilyn Monroe for the unforgettable persona she crafted for herself, the good humored, platinum blonde with the ruby lips and a sultry innocence. Few recognized the achievement behind it. Sarah Churchwell, again, she had started with nothing, and she went on to become the most successful actress of her day, the most famous, the best known um. But you know, the biggest movie star in the world, and she remains the biggest movie

star in the world fifty years after her death. And she just wanted people to recognize that as an accomplishment. She wanted people to give her the credit for having achieved that, and they never did. They mostly still don't. Monroe begged to be taken seriously as an actress throughout her career. The frustrated star asked a reporter who interviewed her not long before her death, quote, please don't make

me a joke. That decision to have a very strong brand, as it were, this this iconic lookum did have a lot to do with her success, but of course it also led to her being typecast. It meant that she couldn't break out of that brand identity that she had created and become the kind of actress that she wanted to be. Here's Monroe in a television interview. Well, would it be fair to say that you got rather tired of playing the same kind of roles all the time

and wanted to buy something different. Well, I it's not that I objected doing musicals or comedy. In fact, I read and enjoy it, but I would like to do unto dramatic parts too. Through it all, Monroe's hell bent on self improvement. She took acting classes at every opportunity. Even once she was a star. She pushed back on the stereotype that she was a dumb blonde. As she told one instructor, I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. But few in Hollywood took her seriously,

even Steinham did not at first. Monroe's on screen persona made an impression on the young steinem and it wasn't a positive one. It was a big Hollywood movie, and I was a teenager, I think, and I loved the movies. You know, I was just escaping every Saturday afternoon in the movies. This is Steinham remembering when she saw the nineteen fifty three film. Gentlemen prefer blondes, but watching her

being so vulnerable on screen just made me sad. It's a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle of a crowd, do you know what I mean? And it also made Steinham angry. Steinham later wrote of Monroe, how dare she exposed the neediness that so many women feel but try so hard to hide. How dare she a movie star be just as unconfident as I was? Cheap piggy? A girl like I almost never gets to me really interesting, man, sometimes my brain gets real starting

Steinham walked out of the movie. She was one of the images that I grew up with, and she always seemed so silenced, playing as if she could only come to the public as as a almost a parody of a whispery sexy woman not not has her own self. But as Dynham later discovered, Monroe was more than a whispery sexy woman. She was one of the first women to stand up against the culture of sexual harassment in

Hollywood and to talk about her experiences there. To understand why, we have to go back to Monroe's early days in Hollywood and those famous nude photographs. One of the first cameramen to film Monroe was blown away by her. She was, as he put it, sex on a piece of film. Monroe did not set out to be a model. When she was still a teenager named Norma Jean Doherty, she worked at a parachute factory during World War Two, where she sprayed and inspected parachutes for ten hours a day.

One day, an Army photographer assigned to take photographs of women at work in the war effort stopped by the factory. He realized her potential right away. You're a real morale booster, he told her, with all of the cheese and sleeves of a red blooded American male in the nineteen forties. Soon marylyn career as a model and morale booster and men's magazines was off to the races. Well, now your picture has been on the cover of almost all popular magazines,

hasn't it. No, it's not the lady's ton journey that you would like. What do you? Men's magazines in the nineteen forties didn't mean what they meant after the Playboy era. Um there was no real nudity to speak of in the magazines that she was modeling in she was wearing bikinis and you know, swimsuits and that kind of thing. Marilyn Monroe enjoyed posing and performing for the camera as a young model, but the job often came with some

additional responsibilities. Models were expected to show their gratitude to the men who controlled the camera and their livelihoods. Things were no different when Monroe started to pursue a career

in acting. She talked later about how even in those early days of modeling, when she was trying to break into Hollywood, that you know, men would would accost her and tell her that they could help her break into the movies and um, and so she was very clear about the fact that there were always men on the make um. She called them wolves eager to become an actress. Monroe tolerated the wolves, but it was not easy to

break into Hollywood without their support. When Marilyn was a struggling actress and starlett she was uh still finding jobs hard to come by and living very much hand to mouth. Monroe struggled to pay her rent. She ate two meals per day. Sometimes she subsisted on peanut butter and hamburger meat. She went to auditions and modeling gigs in one of three dresses, which she washed herself by hand. In the evenings, she would go out stargazing in Hollywood. She would place

her hands in the handprints of the movie stars. She would stand for a few hours in front of Clark Gable's house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her favorite star. The beautiful Monroe didn't have to struggle. She had other options. Many men offered to set her up as their mistress, to pay for her expenses and her apartment in return for shall we say, the pleasure of her company, but

Monroe refused. Eventually, she landed her first big job, a contract with twentieth Century Fox in ninety she was twenty. The following year, she signed a new contract with Columbia Pictures. That didn't stop the unsolicited offers, including at least one alleged experience with me two parallels. There isn't much question that Maryland turned down sexual advances from powerful men in Hollywood.

One of the best known was the producer Harry Cohne, who um ran Columbia Studios, and the story goes that he um he tried to get Maryland on his yacht when she was a contract player for Columbia, and when she refused to go alone with him onto his yacht, he fired her and she never worked for Columbia again.

Monroe persisted even as she grew more contemptuous of the wolves who pursued her, and after one of those offers um, when it became clear to her that that money was really becoming tight, she decided that she would instead take up the offer of a photographer who had been trying to convince her to do some nude photos. It sounds like a risky thing to do for a woman with serious acting ambitions, but remember Monroe is twenty three years old.

She could never have imagined in her wildest dreams she would be one of the most famous women on the planet in a few years. At that moment, she was just a struggling actress who was worried that the bank would repossess the car she depended upon to drive to auditions. She let herself be convinced that the nude photos were no big deal. The photographer had told her that his wife would be present all the way through the shoot. Um he had assured her that that it was above board.

He would pay her fifty dollars and that the images would be tasteful, they weren't pornographic. Monroe agreed. Here's how she described the nude photo shoot in an interview. So we did it, and that's only just to spread up some red velvets and had me lie down in the red. It was very simple drafty. Monroe also joked that she had quote nothing on but the radio. The photographs were then sold to a nude calendar and they started to appear on on walls, on in garages and um, you know,

mechanics workshops. Three years after the nude photographs were taken, Marilyn Monroe was in a completely different orbit. Later, thousands of fans lined up in front of the Stanley Theater, located on Atlantic City's famous boardwalk, where Hollywood's newest sterling arrived for the world premiere of her twentieth century Fox comedy Monkey Business, in which she co stars would carry granted ginger rogers. All in all, it was a day in which Miss Monroe truly won the hearts of these

grateful New Jersey ins. In March ninety two, Maryland was starting to become a star. She'd had a couple of big roles and she was starting to be noticed. She also began dating Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star and you know, kind of national hero. Monroe had only been seeing di Maggio for a few days when the scandal over her nude photographs broke. Many fans started to recognize her nude

pin up and calendars all over the country. Studio executives freaked out, and of course, the standard response to that kind of scandal up until that point would have been to just deny it was you, and that was what stars had always done in the studio, would engineer some kind of cover up and they would just claim it wasn't her. But Marilyn did not do that. She said it was her. It was a bold strategy instead of

being shamed or as we might now say, slut shamed. Um. It worked and she managed to make the scandal die down, and uh and and people just accepted that it was her. The photo shoot was forgotten for the most part until Hugh Hefner got his hands on the image and made sure that millions more Americans saw her as the first Playboy centerfold, the centerfold that launched Heffner's Playboy empire. But the same year that Hefner used her nude image to launch Playboy. The twenty six year old man Rode did

something far bolder in another magazine. The article that ran in the January nineteen fifty three issue of Motion Picture and Television Magazine was called Wolves I Have Known and was penned by Monroe. At the time, the young actress was fast becoming a household name. In the article, Monroe described the different types of men she had met in Hollywood,

men she called wolves. The article covered multiple examples of harassment and proposition from unnamed men, the directors who cornered her at parties, the producers who invited her to their offices on a Saturday afternoon. Maryland was one of the first um to call out the culture of sexual harassment. She doesn't use that phrase, but um, but that's what she's talking about. And to really um call attention to the fact that it was indemic, that it was pervasive.

Her whole point was to say this happens over and over and over. Monroe wrote, quote, there are many types of wolves, summer sinister. Others are just good time Charlie's trying to get something for nothing, and others make a game of it, so she wasn't necessarily naming names, she wasn't identifying a single individual, but that was the point. She was talking about a culture in which women were unsafe, in which women were treated as sexual objects, and she

was starting to speak out very early. The Hollywood that Monroe was challenging was extremely powerful, but once Monroe had star power, she used it to help other women in Hollywood, and not just in her magazine story. Actress Joan Collins remembers in a television interview how Monroe helped her when she met her at a party and then she told me, she said, watch out for the wolves in Hollywood, honey. And I said, well, I've been in British films for

three years. I can handle wolves. And she said, well, not the power busses, honey. And she said, if they don't get what they want, they'll drop you here contract. So clearly it was always there, It was always in the air. There was no protection. Women had to look out of themselves. In her unfinished autobiography, Monroe wrote of the wolves, quote, Phoniness and failure were all over them.

But they were as near to the movies as you could get, So you sat with them listening to their lies and schemes, and you saw Hollywood with their eyes, an overcrowded brothel, a merry go round with beds for horses. The sad truth is that even Monroe could not avoid the Hollywood merry go round forever. She once admitted, I've slept with producers. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't. For Monroe and many other actresses, it was a constant struggle both to fend off the wolves and

to get them to take you seriously. What I'd like to do, that is what I would like to accomplish. I would like to be a good actress. Denied shelter in respect in her career, Monroe sought them elsewhere. Twice. She put her career on hold at the peak of her startom to marry a prominent man, first based all star Joe DiMaggio in and two years later renowned playwright

Arthur Miller. Marilyn married to symbolic men. But I think that one of the one of the things that drew her two men like this was the feeling she felt great respect for them for their achievements, and the feeling unconsciously perhaps that that sense of respect might get transferred to her. Unfortunately for Monroe, it didn't, and Monroe often struggled to find satisfaction or happiness. Uh do I feel happy in life? Um? Um, let's see. Let's say I

hope I'm finding happiness right. Well for me, if I can realize certain things in my work, I come the closest to being happy. Monroe constantly saw satisfaction in her career, and she gave up a lot just to have one up. Next, we find out just how far Monroe was willing to go to launch her career, and we go back to the moment when Norma Jean transformed into Marilyn Monroe. Without this period in her life, when she fought for her freedom,

the world would never have had its biggest star. Maril Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles in n Her troubles began early on her mother, Gladys, struggled to care for her young daughter. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic when Marilyn was a young girl, and Marilyn never knew who her father was, and the result of that was that she became a ward of the state of California and throughout the nineteen thirties. One, of course, it

was the Great Depression. Maryland was sent to a number of foster homes and UM and she was at one point also sent to an orphanage, which she found a very traumatic experience because she knew that her mother was alive and um she wasn't an orphan, but she was being treated as one, and things only got worse. Monroe would later claim that she had been molested more than once in the foster home she stayed in as a child.

She said that she was living in a boarding house at one point in her childhood and that a man she called Mr. Kimmel Um offered her some money. He was asking her for some kind of sexual favor. As a child, Monroe told her foster mother what had happened. She slapped her and told her not to say such things about such a nice man. People didn't believe her, and then this was was only compounded by her later biographers,

who mostly also didn't believe her. Of course, now we're all too aware of how frequently women historically have been disbelieved when they came forward with stories about sexual assault, um or molestation. Monroe's life grew even harder when she faced a difficult choice as a teenager, the orphanage or an arranged marriage. Her foster family announced that they were moving to West Virginia, and basically that she wasn't moving

with them. She and her husband were going to West Virginia and they were going to put me in a home or you know, like I've been before, or I could marry this boy who was twenty one. So I'm married. That twenty one year old was a neighbor named Jim Doherty. In the span of just a few months, Monroe went from being a fun loving teenager to a devoted housewife. She even dropped out of high school to focus on her marriage, a decision she would regret for the rest

of her life. They didn't know each other, they weren't in love. Um. Jim Doherty, by all accounts, was a perfectly um, a nice decent man um. But you know, this was not a marriage that was going to last. You know, it was again, it was two. So he expected her to stay home and you know, cook his dinners and um, you know in mendes socks. Doherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine when America entered the war. He was overseas for months at a time. Monroe started her

job at the parachute factory, then became a model. She enjoyed being a working woman and being a model mint. She was one step closer to her real dream, and then Monroe had to make another hard decision. She had signed with a modeling agency run by a professional agent. That agent was frank with her young client. Hollywood was not interested in married starletts. No studio wanted to invest in a woman who could get pregnant and leave her husband wanted to start a family when the war was over.

He didn't understand Monroe's dream. Hollywood is full of beautiful girls, he informed her, what makes you think you're any better than them. Monroe was just nineteen years old, confronted with the realization that she could not have a career and a husband, so she chose a career. Maryland clearly felt that it would be easier for her to pursue her modeling and acting career if she were single. In May and Row packed her bags. Maryland went to Las Vegas,

where they had in the nineteen thirties. They had loosened the divorce laws and if you were a resident in Nevada for six weeks you could get a divorce, which was much more difficult to get anywhere else in the country. Doherty was blindsided. In an interview before his death in two thousand five, he recalled the moment he found out his wife was in Vegas. One day, I was sitting

in the Yanksty River waiting to go into Shanga. I had a mail come aboard, and there's a dear job and it was set by her attorney from Las Vegas, and she wanted a divorce. Monroe made plans to stay with the aunt of one of her former foster mothers in Las Vegas. She was not too thrilled to put her modeling career on hold to spend a hot summer in Nevada, but she knew it was necessary. Six weeks later, on j Monroe sped away from Las Vegas in her Ford coupe to Los Angeles. She was a free woman

in more ways than one. A week after she returned from Vegas, Monroe landed a meeting with Ben lyon, the head of talent at twentieth Century Fox. The impressed executive scheduled a screen test for her, and they agreed that the young Norma Jean needed a new name. That night, the newly christened Marilyn Monroe stood in front of a mirror at home. She picked up some red lipstick and wrote a seven word manifesto on the mirror. It read, this is the end of Norma Jean. We are now

halfway through the second season of The Thread. In the first three episodes, we traced a path through history that connects the lives and careers of three American icons, Gloria Steinen, You Heffner, and Marilyn Monroe. To recap Merril, Monroe poses for her one and only nude photography session as a young model in nineteen forty nine in order to pay

the bills. Four years later, a bowl Chicago entrepreneur named Hugh Hefner gets his hands on one of those photos, turning Monroe, now a Hollywood star, into the first centerfold for his new Playboy magazine. That magazine, thanks to Monroe's star power, becomes a hit. It spawns an entire Playboy empire, including a series of Playboy clubs. An aspiring journalist named Gloria Steinem walks through the doors of one of those

clubs in New York. Ten years later. Her experience there will lead her to write a stunning expose of Playboy and kick start her own career as an activist and feminist. Next episode, Our Thread continues not with a person, but with a place, the place where Monroe came for the quickie divorce that launched her career. Monroe was far from the only woman who came to Nevada to seek a

newly san life. During the nineteen thirties and forties, the state became a wild West of marriage, divorce, gambling, and reinvention. You know, I know how friendly you are so far. I'm not going too far being nice and make me a star being nice, and make me a start being nice and make me up. Stop the Threat is produced by Libby Coleman and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered Our Show special thanks to Cindy Carpian, Tracy Moran, and

James Watkins. This episode features the song Prayer and the Bad in every Man, performed by Elvi Yost. To learn more about the Thread, visit Ausi dot com, Slash the Thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the Thread on Apple Podcasts. Check us out at Aussie dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history. Look no further than the flashback section of ausi dot com. That's o z y dot com with gable wind, that rehearsing while