Happy Birthday, Marilyn!

“Hollywood is a place,” Marilyn Monroe once said, “where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.

“I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough, and held out for the fifty cents.”

Had she lived, Marilyn Monroe would have turned 81 today. But she didn’t live. She died 45 years ago, at age 36. Columnist Army Archerd wrote in DAILY VARIETY at the time, “Marilyn Monroe was late for everything – but much too early for death.”

Who was Marilyn Monroe? What does she and her films mean to each new generation? And why and how did she die so young?

For starters, obviously, first, last and always, Marilyn was uniquely beautiful, and tragically vulnerable. As the songs say, and the continuing parade of documentaries show, her voluptuous yet seemingly accessible and innocent image established her as the blonde bombshell against which all others have, and will be measured, and for some time to come. She was unquestionably the sex goddess of the twentieth century. So she wasn’t the most photographed woman in the history of creation for nothing. Our eyes go straight to her in any still photo, and in every movie scene, too. Those external features are simply remarkable, and demand attention.

Our hearts are drawn to her as well, as soon as we learn anything about her true life story. She was the little girl who never knew her father, and whose unstable mother was institutionalized. “I never lived with my mother,” Marilyn revealed in her final interview. As a child, nobody wanted her. She lived in foster homes. “The whole world was always closed to me,” she lamented. That is, until she turned eleven. Then, to her everlasting astonishment, everybody wanted her. What to make of that?

She could never reconcile such extremes in her extraordinary life, or make sense of what happened, or why. She was suddenly this model, and then starlet, who all alone, overcame enormous odds, fighting up hill, to become a movie queen, and marry baseball immortal Joe DiMaggio, in what was surely a storybook romance. Wasn’t it? Storybook? The happily-ever-after kind?

It seemed so, if ever so briefly. Because then, just as suddenly, it all unraveled. Her final movie was called SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE. So it did. Like her life, she never got to finish it.



Hers is an irresistible story, from poignant, disadvantaged childhood innocence, to spectacular success in Hollywood, to tragic, early death. In her wake has come an ever-growing library of books, each telling – but many only inventing -- Marilyn’s inside story, and naturally exploiting her sexual escapades, too. In fact if one is to believe every new “as told to” Hollywood biography written over the past half-century, was there ever anyone pictured in the ACADEMY PLAYERS DIRECTORY back then that she didn’t have sex with?

“They took it, they grabbed it, and they ran,” she said.

If the poor woman herself could not make sense of what happened in her life, how is anyone else supposed to? Yet so many try, with no let up in sight.

Maybe only one thing is certain. With all the pinup shots taken by master photographers, and such classic movies as ALL ABOUT EVE, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, and SOME LIKE IT HOT -- where Marilyn will presumably live forever on screen -- though she left us as a young woman decades ago, it is not likely that her story and her iconic image will even begin to fade from public consciousness. Not for many generations to come, if ever. That combination of innocence and vulnerability together with the kind of world class, luminous sensuality Marilyn had, will doubtless continue to transcend time and cultural barriers. So far, from this remove, it certainly looks that way. And if for no other reason than her looks are that way.

Actor and stage director Lee Strasberg, in his eulogy, made this observation: “Marilyn Monroe was a legend. In her own lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine.”

In her final interview, in words one can hear her speak in this documentary, she explains, “I want to say, that if I am a star, the people made me a star. There was no studio, and no person … but the people did it. It was a reaction that came in, to the studio. I mean, fan mail … you can’t imagine. When (the people) go to see a movie, they judge, for themselves.”



Today, tomorrow, and for a long time to come, everyone knows the verdict.