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September 9, 1946 - June 6, 2006
© 1975 Neal Preston
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Topic: Happy birthday Marilyn Return to archive
31st May 2006 08:19 PM
Ten Thousand Motels Happy birthday Marilyn
From: By Troy Lennon
June 01, 2006

It is hard to imagine what Marilyn Monroe would have looked like had she lived to the age of 80. That is the milestone she would have celebrated today but for her death in 1962.

The epitome of the "blonde bombshell", she remains as well known in death as she was in her life.
The image of her standing on a vent with her dress being blown upwards is familiar even to people who have never seen The Seven Year Itch, the film from which the classic image came.

Her life was a series of dramatic highs and lows ending in a premature demise. Mystery shrouds not only her death but also her birth.

One thing we know for certain about the baby who arrived on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles is that her mother was Gladys Baker.

The name on her birth certificate was Norma Jeane Mortensen but she was later christened Norma Jeane Baker at the insistence of her grandmother, Della Monroe Grainger. Baker was never sure whether the father of her baby was her second husband Edward Mortensen or Frank Gifford, a man with whom she had an affair.

When Baker lost her job at RKO's film lab and was committed to a mental institution, Norma Jeane spent her time in foster homes and orphanages until she moved in with the family of Grace McKee Goddard. In 1942, the family moved and couldn't take their ward with them. Norma Jeane married neighbour Jim Dougherty to avoid another stay in an orphanage.

Dougherty joined the merchant marines and was posted overseas in 1944. Norma Jeane took a job at the Radio Plane Munitions factory in Burbank, California. A photographer, taking pictures of women involved in the war effort, spotted the vivacious redhead (the blonde hair would later come from a bottle) and used her for the shoot. This brought her modelling jobs, some of them nude, but many of them with reputable magazines. She then started taking acting classes.

When her husband returned in 1946 she was forced to choose between marriage and career. It was not a hard choice since hers was mostly a marriage of convenience. They divorced in 1946. She dyed her hair blonde, changed her name to Marilyn Monroe and scored a contract with 20th Century Fox.

Her first project, a bit part in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, was followed by her first character with a name, in Dangerous Years. Both films were made in 1947. Fox let her contract lapse and she moved to Columbia and RKO before returning to Fox, which gave the starlet her first lead role.

This was as the mentally disturbed Nell in the thriller Don't Bother to Knock in 1952. In 1953, her performance as the scheming young wife plotting to kill her husband in Niagara, rocketed her to stardom. Curiously, instead of being typecast as a psychotic blonde as these roles would suggest, she would go on to become Hollywood's favourite dumb blonde.

She began playing a series of ditzy characters in big-budget comedies with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, both in 1953.

She was the most famous blonde on screen; women tried to imitate her and men lusted after her, helped partly by nude images of her that surfaced and were bought by Hugh Hefner for the first edition of his new magazine Playboy.

Baseball star Joe DiMaggio broke millions of men's hearts by marrying the movie star in 1954. But Monroe could not leave behind a film career for domestic bliss. They divorced after less than a year although DiMaggio carried a torch for Monroe for the rest of his life.

In 1955, the comedy The Seven Year Itch was released. Monroe played an un-named girl living in the same apartment complex as Richard (Tom Ewell).

While Richard's wife is away, he has trouble resisting his voluptuous neighbour but the closest they get to consummation is a brief grapple when they fall over a piano.

Excusing his indiscretion, Richard says "I'm sorry, this has never happened to me before" to which she replies: "That's funny, it happens to me all the time."

It scored Monroe a BAFTA nomination for best foreign actress.

Increasingly dissatisfied with the roles she was being offered, Monroe risked her studio contract by taking off to New York to study acting at the Actors Studio, under Lee Strasberg in 1955. Strasberg introduced her to playwright Arthur Miller. She was attracted to Miller's intellect and he later said he felt "giddy" in her presence. They married in 1956.

Monroe now insisted on choosing her own film projects and having more say in the overall production of her films. The first film she made under this new arrangement was Bus Stop, about a cowboy who impulsively marries a showgirl only to have to kidnap her to take her back to his ranch. The performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination and is considered by many to be one of her best performances.

The Prince and the Showgirl followed in 1957 and although it is not a great film, it paired Monroe with the great Laurence Olivier.

Monroe idolised the Shakespearean great but Olivier derided her for her lack of professionalism. She was said to have been late for shooting and to have struggled with lines.

On the set of Some Like it Hot (1959), Monroe also had trouble with lines, needing dozens of takes for simple sentences and resorting to reading lines. Her marriage to Miller was not going well. She had two miscarriages and several infidelities; the pair realised they were not suited. They divorced in 1961, by which time Monroe was filming The Misfits, written for her by Miller.

Monroe had suffered bouts of depression throughout her life, partly caused by abuse and neglect as a child. By the end of the 1950s drugs and alcohol had become a problem and no doubt contributed to difficulties on her film sets.

The Misfits brought together three of Hollywood's saddest stars: declining matinee idol Clark Gable, tormented closet homosexual Montgomery Clift and Monroe. They would all be dead by 1966.

The film was savaged by the critics when it was released in 1961. Ironically, many people have since seen it as some of the trio's finest acting.

Rumours of an affair with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, tainted the Camelot years, especially after she sang a provocative version of Happy Birthday to JFK before a crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1962.

Monroe tried to make one more film, Something's Got to Give, but was fired because of frequent absences from the set. She was later re-hired but before she could complete the project she was found dead in her home in August 1962, apparently from a drug overdose
1st June 2006 07:02 AM
Factory Girl Happy Birthday, Norma Jean. You were a very talented actress and a great beauty! Thank you.
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