You know, most people really don’t know me,” Marilyn Monroe told biographer Richard Meryman in the summer of 1962, just days before her untimely death. Now, on what would have been her 100th birthday on 1 June, a new book – I Wanna Be Loved By You, excerpted here in Woman’s Day – reveals 100 snapshots of her legendary life, from her traumatic childhood as Norma Jeane Mortenson and how she became Marilyn, to navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, her famous romances and what happened on the night she tragically died.
Were the Kennedys involved? Was it suicide or simply an accident? I Wanna Be Loved By You by Andrew Wilson ($65, Simon & Schuster)
The first photographs
When Norma Jeane turned up for work on a December day in 1944, she had no idea her life was about to change. She had a job at Radioplane, a factory located at the Metropolitan Airport in Los Angeles. The company manufactured remote-controlled, pilotless aircraft—what we would now call drones. She secured the position through her mother-in-law, Ethel, who also worked at the factory.
The job was monotonous. For 10 hours each day, she inspected, sprayed and packed parachutes, sometimes working on the production line fitting together mechanical parts. Neither was it well paid, but she was doing her bit for the war effort – a “Rosie the Riveter”.
The moment everything changed
The factory was owned by British-born Reginald Denny, who, after serving as a gunner in World War I, established himself as a successful film actor in Hollywood. Fellow actor and future US president Ronald Reagan was running the First Motion Picture Unit at the time. He contacted his friend Reg to help organise a shoot. A small group of photographers and motion-picture crew were then arranged to take publicity shots of female workers at Radioplane. Among the group was army photographer Private David Conover, based at “Fort Roach”, named after the Hal Roach studio in Culver City.
David, then 25, was a shy, awkward man with bifocals and a stutter. He walked down the assembly line, taking a few shots with his Speedy Graphic camera, until he spotted one girl wearing a green blouse, a name tag hanging from the waistband of her grey tweed trousers. It took him a while to realise what he’d just seen – her eyes held something that touched him – but he retraced his steps and, fighting his shyness, told her she should be a model.
The photo that changed everything
He quickly took a photo of Norma Jeane holding a propeller. The colour image, which David thought was merely “a static picture of a pretty girl”, is the first professional shot of the woman who would soon become Marilyn Monroe. If he’d left it at this and moved on, perhaps we would have heard no more of her.
He then asked if it was possible for her to change into a sweater. She went to her locker and returned wearing red cashmere. The result was nothing short of sensational.
David recalled, “Now singled out, and with the attention of camera and cameraman focused deliberately on her, she came alive with such an immediate instinct.”
That serendipitous photoshoot launched her into a modelling career.
Did Norma Jeane give birth when she was a teenager?
It’s a claim made by a number of people, including her friend Amy Greene and also Marilyn’s New York maid/cook Lena Pepitone, who worked for her from 1957 until her death. Lena claims Norma Jeane was living with one of her foster families when, one day, while everyone else was out, the man of the house invited her to have a glass of whiskey.
“Because she had drunk with him before, she didn’t get suspicious of this unusual activity,” writes Lena in her 1979 memoir Marilyn Monroe Confidential.
A childhood marked by abuse
“Then the man started kissing her. At first, it was nice to be held and kissed. No one ever kissed her. But then he wouldn’t stop.”
Still, Norma Jeane kept her composure when she described how the foster parent ordered her to take her clothes off, allegedly telling Lena, “I thought I had to do whatever he said.”
She was used to taking orders. Then he forced himself on her.
“I didn’t scream,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything. It hurt a lot, then I didn’t feel anything. I just lay there. I just cried.”
A difficult discovery
According to Lena, it was when Norma Jeane returned to live with her guardian Grace Goddard and her husband that she discovered she was pregnant. She concealed the secret until it was too late – her only option was to have the baby.
“I was afraid she’d kill me when I told her,” Marilyn reportedly said about Grace.
“But she didn’t get mad at all – she just took me to a doctor. Later on, I went to a hospital, where I had the baby. I was so scared, but it was wonderful. It was a little boy. I hugged and kissed him. “I just kept touching him. I couldn’t believe this was my baby. I had him in the hospital for a few days. But when it was time for me to leave, the doctor and a nurse came in with Grace. “They all looked real strange and said they’d be taking the baby. It was like I was being kicked in the head. I begged them, ‘Don’t take my baby.’ But Grace gave me a dirty look and said I was too young to take care of it. So they took my baby from me and I never saw him again.”
Marilyn & JFK
Rumours of a presidential affair
It’s clear that if Marilyn and John F Kennedy – who had a public image as a family man, despite his philandering nature – were conducting an affair, they’d want to keep it out of the public eye. In various biographies, there have been dozens of witnesses, some more reliable than others, who have testified that Marilyn and JFK had been lovers.
The statements of Marilyn’s friends – such as Henry Rosenfeld, Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg, all of whom confirmed such a relationship between the two – should be taken seriously.
Henry maintained that Marilyn’s relationship with JFK started after he became president – “she was so excited, you’d think she was a teenager” – but that the sexual contact between them was confined to “a very, very few times”.
Plans to return to Washington
According to Henry, the couple used to meet up at a place on 53rd Street in New York and that Marilyn travelled to Washington DC a couple of times, though she never made it into the White House.
The wealthy New York dressmaker claimed, “She would say, ‘I’m going to be with You Know Who again – he’s so important.’ She was going to bed with the president of the United States. She was awed by big names.”
On the Thursday before she died, she phoned Henry and asked him to accompany her to Washington for a pre-Broadway tryout for new musical Mr President – she’d heard that John had been invited to a production on 25 September and was to be accompanied by First Lady Jackie Onassis.
She told him, “I’m going, Henry. I’m going to Washington and I want to go with you!”
Plans for Palm Springs
According to masseur Ralph Roberts, Marilyn called JFK “the Gentleman Caller”. At the end of March 1962, she phoned Ralph to tell him that the president had invited her to spend the weekend of 24-25 March in Palm Springs. Initially, the venue was going to be Frank Sinatra’s house, but this was changed at the last minute to Bing Crosby’s estate.
“I’m not sure I want to go,” Marilyn told Ralph.
“I’ve gotten to know the Gentleman Caller’s sister [Patricia] quite well. She’s a remarkable girl. I think she’s fantastic. We have a lot of laughs together.”
A plan in disguise
The next day, Marilyn rang Ralph again and told him she’d changed her mind – that she was going to travel in disguise, as she often did.
“I’m wearing the black wig, carrying an attaché case. I have an identification card with a picture of me wearing the wig.”
She went on to say that the president was anxious that she might be identified by her trademark sexy walk.
“He says I would be recognised in the deepest part of Africa from it,” Marilyn giggled.
Pill popping
Behind the growing dependence
Despite taking decisive steps to reshape her career, things were slipping out of control behind the scenes. The image of Marilyn the pill addict is fixed in popular consciousness, but it seems unlikely she began to take drugs recreationally. What’s more probable is that she turned to pills as a way of relieving the agonies of her endometriosis.
“She knew that every month when she menstruated, she would have this terrible pain that only drugs could ease,” said her co-star Susan Strasberg.
Her biographer, Maurice Zolotow, recalled visiting Marilyn’s dressing room at the Fox studios. He said he saw as many as 14 different boxes of pills there. Friends remembered her driving when she would suddenly be overwhelmed by pain. She would brake sharply, stagger out of the car, and collapse to the ground in agony.
But how did the addiction to medication begin and what was its particular allure for her? Marilyn reportedly told her friend Amy Greene that she was “only a baby, 18 or 19” when she started taking pills.
The first steps toward sedation
In her autobiography My Story, Marilyn related how, soon after losing her initial short-term contract with Fox, she turned to sleeping pills while suffering the symptoms of a bad cold. She hadn’t slept for several nights and felt she needed something to knock her out. “I don’t usually recommend sleeping pills, but you’ve been having hysterics too long,” a doctor told her.
“A good sleep will not only be good for your cold but cheer you up.”
In October the same year, it’s been reported that Marilyn turned to barbiturates when she was shooting a bit part in the musical comedy You Were Meant For Me (her small role ended up on the cutting-room floor).
It’s not difficult to imagine why sedatives and tranquillisers appealed to Marilyn. Her talent, she said, was to be beautiful. The pills smoothed the sharp edges of anxiety that threatened to claw their way into her world.
They helped her smile when she wanted to scream. They brought sleep in a terrifying world. They functioned as a salve for the deep wound in her psyche. It was a wound that had been left raw and exposed since her experiences of sexual abuse many years earlier.
In an unpublished letter to poet Norman Rosten, Marilyn’s psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson wrote that her habit of taking sleeping pills “was her way of escaping the miseries of life”.
In the same letter, written shortly after her death, he said, “Marilyn was a bottomless well. One could not fill her, with all the deep, deep holes her lack of family had left her with.”
4 August 1962: her last day
The morning of August 4
Marilyn Monroe woke up on her final day on Earth having slept poorly, aggravated by a bitter argument the previous night with her friend Pat Newcomb. Heavy with sleeping pills, Marilyn was groggy when photographer Lawrence Schiller arrived at 10am. He showed her nude shots he had taken on the set of Something’s Got to Give. He hoped to sell the images to Playboy.
Just after noon, Pat emerged from the guest room after 12 hours of sleep – a luxury that deeply enraged the insomniac actress. While Pat ate an omelette cooked by her housekeeper, Eunice Blackmer, Marilyn refused to eat. The two women continued to bicker throughout the morning.
Marilyn spent much of the morning in her bedroom on the telephone, receiving congratulatory calls about the recent Life magazine interview with Richard Meryman that had just come out. At 4.30pm, sounding increasingly depressed, Marilyn called her psychiatrist Ralph, who drove straight to her home. He spent two and a half hours calming her down, as she complained about her insomnia and
her friction with Pat.
The night turned tragic
Before leaving around 7.15pm, a worried Ralph asked Eunice to spend the night and made Marilyn promise to call him the next morning.
However, Marilyn was notoriously neurotic about being disturbed – Eunice knew the actress would become enraged if awakened, so she avoided knocking on the door. According to the official account, Eunice woke around 3.30am and noticed the telephone cord running under Marilyn’s locked door. Afraid of waking her, she went outside to look through the window. She saw Marilyn lying face down and nude on the bed with the lights still on. Panicked, she called Ralph, who rushed over and broke into the bedroom.
Marilyn was dead, the telephone clutched fiercely in her right hand, suggesting she had tried to call him in her final moments. When her physician Dr Hyman Engelberg arrived, he confirmed that rigor mortis had set in. Marilyn’s bedside table was cluttered with pill bottles, including an empty vial of Nembutal that had not been there the previous day.
Hyman revealed he had prescribed the barbiturate, falsely believing Ralph had authorised it. In reality, Marilyn had lied to bypass her psychiatrist. Overwhelmed, the two doctors hesitated, waiting until 4.25am to notify the police. Both ultimately shared the blame as a distracted Hyman had failed to cross-check the lethal prescription.
