🌹 Marilyn Monroe:
Manufactured Bombshell or Brilliant Businesswoman?
Sometimes a story is carefully planned months in advance. Sometimes an unexpected opening appears in the calendar and the right person seems to walk straight into it.
This week, Famous or Infamous? is making room for a Special.
And perhaps there is no woman better suited to an unexpected entrance than Marilyn Monroe.
She has been gone for more than sixty years, yet the moment someone says her name, most of us can see her.
Platinum blonde hair. ✨️
Red lips. 💋
A white dress rising above a subway grate. 🤍
Diamonds. 💍
That breathy voice. 🌸
Marilyn Monroe became one of the most recognizable women of the twentieth century and one of its most enduring symbols of beauty and sexuality.
But Marilyn Monroe was also, quite deliberately, a creation.
Before Marilyn, there was Norma Jeane.
Hollywood changed the hair, refined the image, promoted the sexuality and discovered that audiences couldn't get enough of the vulnerable, beautiful blonde who seemed just innocent enough not to realize what she was doing to everyone around her.
Except she knew.
Norma Jeane participated in her own transformation. She studied how she photographed, how lighting changed her face, how clothing changed perception, and how movement, expression and voice could turn an attractive young actress into someone audiences recognized instantly.
She paid attention. She learned. She practiced. She improved.
She was learning the machinery from inside the machinery.
And the better she became at being Marilyn Monroe, the more valuable Marilyn Monroe became.
💰 Who owned Marilyn Monroe?
Fox owned her contract and controlled the roles in which Marilyn Monroe appeared.
Photographers owned photographs of her.
Magazines sold her image.
Movie theaters sold tickets to see her.
Advertisers sold the fantasy.
Men told stories about her.
Journalists wrote stories about her.
Audiences projected their own fantasies onto her.
And somewhere in the middle of all of them was Marilyn herself, trying to claim ownership of the same woman everybody else was profiting from.
Eventually, Norma Jeane was no longer simply asking whether she could become Marilyn Monroe.
She was confronting a harder question:
Did the woman who helped create Marilyn Monroe have the right to decide what Marilyn Monroe would become next?
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Before the Bombshell 💋
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles. 🌸
Her childhood was marked by instability, foster homes and time in an orphanage. At sixteen, she married James Dougherty.
During World War II, Norma Jeane was photographed while working at a defense factory. The photographs helped lead her into modeling, and modeling opened the door to Hollywood.
In 1946, she signed her first contract with Twentieth Century Fox.
Norma Jeane began becoming Marilyn Monroe.
Her darker hair became blonde. Her name changed. She learned makeup, lighting, movement, costumes and photography.
Accounts of her early studio years describe her showing up even when she wasn't required, watching how movies were made and asking questions.
She wasn't merely waiting for Hollywood to make her a star.
She was studying how stars were made.
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Written in the Stars ✨️
It would be almost impossible for April Moon Astrology to tell Marilyn Monroe's story without looking up.
Marilyn was born beneath a Gemini Sun and Aquarius Moon, with Leo rising.
Gemini is associated with curiosity, communication, learning and adaptability. That symbolism fits a woman who continually read, studied acting and searched for ways to improve her craft.
Aquarius is associated with individuality, independence and resistance to easy definition. Marilyn spent much of her adult life being defined by other people while repeatedly trying to decide for herself who Marilyn Monroe would become.
And then there is Leo rising: visibility, creativity, performance and the ability to command attention.
That doesn't mean Leo rising made Marilyn famous. Astrology doesn't work that way. A birth chart doesn't erase talent, childhood, opportunity, choices, exploitation or hard work.
But there is something wonderfully fitting about it.
Because Marilyn Monroe was a star long before anyone put her name on one.
Not simply a Hollywood star.
A shining one. ✨️
There are people whose light seems to survive the person who carried it.
Marilyn is one of them.
And more than sixty years later, the light is still hers. 💛
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The Dumb Blonde Who Wasn't Dumb
Hollywood discovered that Marilyn's combination of sexuality, vulnerability and humor could make an extraordinary amount of money.
She became the blonde.
Not merely a blonde.
The blonde.
But the woman playing the supposedly naïve dumb blonde wasn't dumb.
Marilyn possessed remarkable comedic timing. Playing someone who doesn't understand the joke while making an entire theater laugh requires understanding the joke extremely well.
And she never stopped learning.
Her surviving personal library contained hundreds of books covering literature, poetry, psychology, philosophy, art and drama. Even after becoming one of the most famous actresses alive, she went to New York and studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg.
She could have interpreted fame as proof that she had nothing left to learn.
Instead, she kept studying.
The dumb blonde was a performance.
And Marilyn was in on the joke.
That became particularly clear when nude photographs she had posed for before becoming famous resurfaced.
The safe Hollywood response would have been denial.
Marilyn refused.
She admitted they were hers and explained why she had posed for them: she needed the money.
Years later, Playboy published one of those photographs in its first issue. Marilyn had never posed for Playboy and did not control its publication.
That distinction matters.
Marilyn could choose to be sexy, enjoy being sexy and profit from being sexy without controlling everything other people did with her sexuality.
Agency and exploitation can exist in the same story.
With Marilyn, they often did.
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Marilyn Goes to War With Fox
Eventually the bombshell became a cage.
Marilyn wanted dramatic roles, better compensation and greater control over her career. Fox kept returning to the enormously profitable image it had helped create.
So Marilyn did something dangerous.
She walked away.
In 1954, she left Hollywood for the East Coast. With photographer Milton Greene, she formed Marilyn Monroe Productions and began studying acting in New York.
Fox could suspend her. It could criticize her. It could try to pressure her back into line.
But Fox had a problem.
It had spent years convincing audiences that there was only one Marilyn Monroe.
And now Marilyn understood exactly what that meant.
Eventually, Fox returned to negotiations. Marilyn secured substantially better compensation and greater control over her career.
The woman Hollywood had sold as a beautiful idiot had just played hardball with Hollywood.
And she won meaningful concessions.
They had taught her exactly how valuable she was.
Perhaps they simply hadn't expected her to believe them.
This is where Marilyn's story becomes deliciously complicated.
She didn't destroy the blonde bombshell.
She leveraged her. ⚡️
Without the bombshell, Marilyn may never have gained enough power to challenge Fox. She took the very image that threatened to become her cage and used it as a bargaining chip.
She didn't suddenly control Hollywood.
She found the place where the power could move.
And she pushed.
Marilyn Monroe Productions represented something almost perfect:
Marilyn Monroe attempting to produce Marilyn Monroe.
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Brilliant Businesswoman?
We don't need to manufacture another Marilyn while trying to rescue the first one.
She wasn't a flawless executive who effortlessly outsmarted everyone around her.
Milton Greene was an important business partner. Marilyn relied on advisers. Marilyn Monroe Productions experienced conflict. She could also be late, miss work and struggle professionally and personally.
Those things belong to her story too.
She could be disciplined about some things and chaotic about others, like a real woman living in a real, complicated world.
Human beings are terribly inconvenient that way.
What makes Marilyn's fight interesting isn't that she became completely untouchable.
She didn't.
It is that she recognized her own market value in an industry dominated by powerful men and attempted to turn visibility into authority.
Beauty opened doors.
Marilyn discovered that walking through the door didn't mean she owned the room.
So she fought for a bigger piece of it.
She didn't defeat the bombshell.
She taught the bombshell to negotiate.
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🌸 Norma Jeane Versus Marilyn Monroe 🌹
It is tempting to imagine two women.
Norma Jeane was real.
Marilyn Monroe was fake.
But that isn't quite fair.
Marilyn was real because Norma Jeane created her. She performed her, refined her, sometimes enjoyed her, sometimes resented her and eventually became inseparable from her.
Perhaps the interesting question isn't which woman was real.
Perhaps it is what happens when the character you create becomes more powerful than the person who created her.
Marilyn spent years trying to answer that question.
Then, suddenly, she ran out of years.
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August 1962
Marilyn Monroe died at her Brentwood home in August 1962.
She was thirty-six years old.
The official medical finding was acute barbiturate poisoning, and her death was classified as probable suicide.
Almost immediately came the theories.
Suicide. Accident. Murder. The Kennedys. Organized crime. Doctors. Secret diaries. Missing tapes. Intelligence agencies. Cover-ups.
But unanswered questions and evidence of murder are not the same thing. A later Los Angeles County review reported finding no credible evidence supporting a murder theory and found reasonable support for the original conclusion.
People continue to debate her death.
But perhaps the cruelest part came afterward.
Marilyn had spent years trying to gain control over Marilyn Monroe.
In death, she lost any ability to do so.
Everyone else could keep producing her forever.
And we have.
Marilyn the sex goddess.
Marilyn the victim.
Marilyn the intellectual.
Marilyn the feminist.
Marilyn the addict.
Marilyn the murdered woman.
Marilyn the brilliant businesswoman.
Marilyn the fragile Norma Jeane.
Every generation seems to manufacture another Marilyn.
Some contain truth.
None contains all of her.
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Famous or Infamous?
Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most beautiful and recognizable women in modern history. 🌹
But beauty may be one of the least interesting things about her.
She was curious, ambitious, funny and hungry to learn. She could be disciplined and chaotic, powerful and vulnerable, commercially shrewd and personally overwhelmed.
She lived in a world that could adore a woman's face while dismissing her mind, profit from her sexuality while policing it, and make a fortune from her image while questioning her right to control it.
Maybe Marilyn's intelligence is best seen not in pretending she already knew everything, but in her insistence on learning.
Maybe her strength wasn't that nobody ever controlled her.
Plenty of people tried.
Her strength was that she kept trying to take herself back.
The product was valuable because she was inside it.
Hollywood helped manufacture Marilyn Monroe.
Then Marilyn Monroe Productions appeared on the other side of the negotiating table.
The woman Hollywood had sold as a beautiful idiot had learned exactly how valuable that beautiful idiot had become.
She didn't destroy the bombshell.
She leveraged her. ⚡️
Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe. Hollywood sold her. Marilyn learned to sell her back.
And after she died, the rest of us never stopped buying.
So who was Marilyn Monroe?
☯️
A manufactured bombshell? A brilliant businesswoman? A serious actress hidden beneath an image the world preferred? A complicated woman trying to own herself in a world where nearly everyone wanted a piece of her?
Perhaps Marilyn herself spent her entire adult life trying to answer that question.
Always, the verdict belongs to you. 💋✨️
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