The Woman Who Will Not Die

Marilyn Monroe was larger than life. But beneath the soft-spoken movie star and sex goddess was another woman, one far bolder than most people realize. Monroe was an actress ahead of her time, one who was not afraid to stand up to some of the most powerful men in Hollywood - the men she called "wolves". 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh Why Ozzy Media Productions. Marilyn Monroe was called the
Woman who Will Not Die by Glorious Steinham. It's true
the world remains obsessed with Monroe even more than half
a century after her death. One of the most famous
stars in Hollywood history is dead. At thirty six, Marilan

(00:20):
Monroe was found dead in bed under circumstances that were
in tragic contrast to her glamorous career as a comic talent,
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

(00:42):
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.

(01:07):
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

(01:28):
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

(01:51):
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

(02:13):
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.

(02:40):
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.

(03:00):
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.

(03:21):
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

(03:43):
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

(04:03):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:51):
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

(05:12):
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,

(05:32):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:15):
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

(06:39):
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.

(07:03):
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

(07:25):
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

(07:46):
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,

(08:09):
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.

(08:29):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:11):
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

(09:31):
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,

(09:53):
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

(10:16):
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

(10:39):
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

(11:00):
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

(11:22):
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

(11:44):
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

(12:06):
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

(12:29):
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

(12:54):
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

(13:14):
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

(13:37):
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

(13:59):
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

(14:21):
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

(14:41):
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

(15:05):
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

(15:27):
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,

(15:48):
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

(16:09):
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

(16:31):
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.

(16:54):
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

(17:16):
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

(17:42):
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,

(18:04):
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

(18:36):
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

(19:00):
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

(19:20):
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.

(19:41):
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,

(20:05):
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

(20:27):
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.

(20:49):
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

(21:11):
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

(21:34):
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,

(21:57):
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

(22:19):
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

(22:41):
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

(23:03):
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

(23:26):
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

(23:49):
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

(24:10):
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

(24:34):
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

(24:57):
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.

(25:20):
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

(25:48):
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

(26:09):
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