I’m very definitely a woman and I enjoy it. ~ Marilyn Monroe
If you were asked to picture Marilyn Monroe, you’d probably think of a curvy woman with blonde hair, wearing a revealing dress and leaning over a subway grate. The media portrayed singer and actress Marilyn Monroe as just a pretty blonde pop icon. But Marilyn was the opposite of the glamorous movie star she seemed to be.
In 1945, a photographer came to the warehouse where Norma Jean worked. He was photographing women who were helping with the war effort. Mrs. Norma Jeane Dougherty landed on the cover of Yank magazine, a weekly published by the military during World War II.
Shortly after, modeling agencies contacted Norma Jeane, and she quit her warehouse job. Ethel and Jim didn’t agree with Norma Jeane’s career choice, so she moved out and divorced Jim. Norma Jeane’s career began–first as a model, then as an actress and singer. In 1946, she started calling herself Marilyn Monroe–Marilyn after a famous stage actress, Marilyn Miller, and Monroe because it was her mother’s maiden name.
Marilyn worked hard to combat her media image of “dumb blonde.” She appeared in about 30 movies, and most of them showed her as ditzy or murderous. She took acting classes and even started her own production company in an effort to play more serious roles. Marilyn also carried with her a biography of Abraham Lincoln, her hero, and took nighttime literature classes at UCLA. But the public ridiculed Marilyn’s efforts to get an education.
After all the effort Marilyn put into changing her image, People magazine voted her the “sexiest woman of the century” in 1999. Perhaps she’ll always be remembered that way, but she was also a smart woman who put her career ahead of everything else. She once begged an interviewer, “Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe … I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity.”
Marilyn Monroe died at the age of 36 from a sleeping pill overdose. Some think the overdose was an accident, others think it was suicide, and still others think someone forced Marilyn to take the pills.
Excerpts From Media Resource: New Moon Magazine, July-August, 2007
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