“The Hollywood icon is one of the most famous women in history. Here are some lesser-known facts about the screen legend”
MARILYN’S MYSTERY
“The Hollywood icon is one of the most famous in history. Here are some lesser-known facts about the screen legend”
So much is already known about Marilyn Monroe, who would have celebrated her 100th birthday on June 1, that you may be surprised at how many things you still don’t know
Monroe, the star of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ and Some Like It Hot’, was born Norma Jeane Mortenson. She lived with foster families after her paranoid schizophrenic mother Gladys was institutionalised; was a natural brunette; married three times, and had multiple affairs, including with former US President John F Kennedy and his brother Robert. She died of a barbiturate overdose — some say murdered — at the age of 36.
But did you know these scintillating details of her life?
- Monroe’s famously breathy voice was the result of her learning to overcome a childhood stammer with the help of a speech therapist. The speech impediment reappeared under great stress and disastrously returned when she was filming her last movie, ‘Something’s Got To Give, as her personal life spiralled out of control.
She struggled to deliver her lines and was ultimately fired from the film, which was never completed. - Though considered one of the world’s greatest beauties, Monroe was insecure about her looks. She secretly had plastic surgery in 1950 before her career soared, at the urging of her agent Johnny Hyde, to reshape the end of her nose and add a chin implant. Eight years later, she visited another cosmetic surgeon who treated her for a ‘chin deformity’ after the original implant deteriorated.
She wore ‘falsies’ to boost her bust on occasion. While preparing her for burial, undertaker Allan Abbot recalled finding her with them. In her coffin, her bra was also stuffed with cotton wool.
Monroe also wore a platinum blonde wig in her casket, because her own bleach-dried hair had been further damaged by the coroner during her autopsy. - Despite singing ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’, she mostly wore costume jewellery. At her death, her only real gems were a 35-baguette eternity ring given by her second husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio and a pearl necklace from her advisor and acting coach Paula Strasberg.
- Monroe was 12 years old before learning that she had a half-sister, Berniece, after which they became close. She never knew who was father was.
Her mother’s second husband Edward Mortenson was named (but misspelled) on Monroe’s birth certificate. Monroe believed that her father was her mother’s lover, Charles Stanley Gifford, who repeatedly denied paternity. DNA testing of relatives later confirmed that Gifford was indeed father. - Monroe was investigated by the FBI for suspected communist leanings during America’s infamous Red Square. Her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, was also targeted during this time.
- She suffered terrible stage fright during live performances, inducing shaking hands, a nervous stomach and throwing up. Even while working on movies, she often struggled to remember her lines.
“The joke was, she couldn’t make two sentences meet,” said her Bus Stop co-star Don Murray. “I think it was a lack of confidence.
“For somebody who the camera loved, she was still terrified of going before the camera and broke out in a rash all over her body,” Murray recalled. - Monroe was author Truman Caopote’s first choice to play Holly Golightly in the movie version of Breakfast At Tiffany’s, a role which went to Audrey Hepburn instead. “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey,” complained Capote.
Monroe’s acting coach Paula Strasberg had also advised her against “playing a lady of the night”, Hepburn’s biographer Sam Wasson later said. - Monroe was constantly undervalued by Hollywood. She received one-tenth of Jane Russell’s salary when they co-starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. On her final unreleased film, 1962’s Something’s Got to Give, her $100,000 salary was one-tenth of what Elizabeth Taylor received the following year for Cleopatra.
- She wanted to have an affair with Elbert Einstein, according to her friend and former roommate, the actress Shelley Winters. The famed physicist was on a list of men Monroe dreamed of bedding, and she also kept a framed and signed photo of Einstein on her piano.
- Despite her ‘dumb blonde’ image, Monroe was an avid reader, with a library of more than 400 books, including classics by Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, DH Lawrence, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Flaubert, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Proust and Lucretius. She introduced Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to his childhood idol Charlie Chaplin, and on a meeting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, discussed her desire to star as Grushenka in an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov.
- She was a good cook, famed for her bouillabaisse. Her hand-written recipe for turkey stuffing survives, with 18 ingredients including three varieties of nuts and three different meats, and the instruction: “No garlic.”
- Monroe was plagued with illness and mental health issues. She suffered from endometriosis, endured miscarriages and battled insomnia, anxiety and depression on barbiturates.
- She left one quarter of her estate to her psychiatrist, Dr Marianne Kris, to be used for charitable causes. Kris had put Monroe in a mental hospital the year before her death, much to the star’s horror. Dr Kris ultimately left her share of the star’s estate to the Anna Freud Centre in London. The rest of Monroe’s estate was intended to be divided between friends, but much ended up being auctioned.
- A decade after her death, Monroe’s house in Brentwood, Los Angeles, was renovated by new owners who found the walls in every room riddled with recording devices and a phone wiretapping system. John F Kennedy believed that the FBI and CIA had bugged the house hoping to bring down the president and his brother.
- Monroe’s estate earned millions more after her death than she ever did while alive. Even now, a century after her birth and 64 years since her demise, Monroe’s estate continues to earn around 7.5 million pounds a year in licensing and merchandising.
DAILY MIRROR
ECONOMIC TIMES 7/6/26
