00:00:49.080So Adrian, what do you know about Marilyn Monroe?
00:00:51.520I mean, I have imbibed her all my life.
00:00:55.000So I feel like I know a great deal and I know very little.
00:00:57.480I'm familiar with many of her movies. I am familiar with her face from art shows and posters and oft-parodied, oft-imitated, oft-sighted visuals.
00:01:11.380The blown-up skirt from The Seven-Year Itch, her performing in something like it hot.
00:01:16.940And also, of course, I'm familiar with the kind of collectivized grief over her.
00:01:21.540Right. I mean, like you can't be a gay man having grown up in the second half of the 20th century without sort of a kind of cult around Marilyn as a kind of wronged woman, as a kind of woman that society sought out to destroy, you know, without that being part of sort of your understanding of what society is like and what fame is like.
00:01:40.460But yeah, she was, you know, an image, a symbol, a model, an actress and a deeply tragic figure died at what, 36? Is that right?
00:02:15.240I must admit, I didn't finish it because I was like, it's a huge bummer.
00:02:20.000And managed to be a huge bummer while being prurient in ways that I felt had characterized so much of my exposure to Marilyn Monroe.
00:02:28.620I'm like, I don't think I'm honoring this person's memory by participating in this yet again.
00:02:33.300Yeah, you know, this is, I think, a decent summation of the Monroe legend, right?
00:02:38.060She is famous precisely because, and her appeal persists precisely because, her beauty and her, like, sexual beauty, her deployment of sexuality is contrasted so deeply with her evident sadness.
00:02:55.720And so there's this fantasy of Monroe as sort of like the impossible woman or the woman who was sort of too pure and punished.
00:03:06.020And this, I think, does both a little bit of an honor to Monroe, the actual person who cultivated that persona very deliberately and sort of understood her own appeal very thoroughly and was able to expertly wield it.
00:03:22.380And also somebody who felt sort of suffocated by and claustrophobic under the weight of that persona and was trying to get out from under it.
00:03:31.520Right. So this is somebody about whom a tremendous amount has already been said.
00:03:37.800When we talk about Marilyn Monroe, we're not just talking about this one figure who was born June 1st, 1926.
00:03:53.160You know, we're not just talking about her.
00:03:54.300We're talking about this sort of vast expanse of imagery and myth that is much bigger than her.
00:04:01.520So I wanted to sort of get a hold on the landscape of Marilyn Monroe historiography, and I learned that more books have been written about Marilyn Monroe than about any other woman.
00:04:16.280When you go looking for figures who have been the subjects of comparable numbers of biographies, you come up with names like Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Jesus Christ.
00:05:12.900But Marilyn was not famous by accident, right?
00:05:16.060She was a crafter of her own persona through a deliberate and I think like really extremely savvy and often somewhat cynical manipulation of her own beauty.
00:05:26.100She is somebody who was doing Marilyn Monroe as a bit, right?
00:05:31.400She was sort of inventing and then parodying this character at the same time.
00:05:36.920I also think that that is a method of interpretation that can be sort of deployed to excess, right?
00:05:45.080There's like one kind of pesky little habit in a lot of feminist discourses, and I think particularly in feminist historiography of the past like 20 years or so,
00:05:52.880that uses agency to eclipse oppression or violence, right?
00:06:18.880And I just don't think that interpretation or the acknowledgement of, you know, Marilyn's own willfulness and deliberateness and savvy actually does require us to acknowledge the constrained circumstances under which she made these choices or the violence that she endured, which was really quite acute, right?
00:06:41.280This is somebody who was indeed made to suffer tremendously and who suffered very acutely.
00:06:47.660So I think we're going to try and thread a needle as we talk about Marilyn Monroe to like neither flatten her into somebody who didn't have control over her own life, nor to sort of excuse or overlook the violences and the sort of, you know, the real bigotry that she encountered and that she understood and resented.
00:07:07.360Because, you know, the sort of yee-haw, like girl bossification of Marilyn Monroe as a person who was able to somewhat subvert a patriarchal demand by using her own sexuality to personal means, that does a little bit of violence to her by ignoring how much she resented and grieved that part of her life as well.
00:07:29.180So this is somebody who really wanted to be more than a sex symbol and was never really allowed to be.
00:07:37.040But, you know, she was actually somebody who had an incredibly keen sense of how to wield celebrity and how to manipulate the public psyche, right?
00:07:56.200And her image has been reproduced, imitated, ripped off, paid homage to, repeated ad nauseum, both because it has become a symbol of a set of, like, aspirations to glamour and to consumption and to sexuality that are, like, much bigger than Marilyn herself, but also because she was so good at identifying and evoking these fantasies in her audiences, right?
00:08:19.060Her charisma still feels kind of singular more than 60 years after her death.
00:08:24.700So, the top lines. She was born, as you may have heard, Norma Jean Mortensen in Los Angeles in a neighborhood called Boyle Heights on June 1st, 1926.
00:08:39.300And she died in another neighborhood in Los Angeles called Brentwood, a little fancier, in August 1962.
00:09:14.520There was a bit of a downward slope at the very end, I believe.
00:09:17.480Her last finished movie was called The Misfits, which was a Western that was written specifically for her and really about her by her third and final husband, Arthur Miller.
00:13:26.000And so she became a symbol of American power at the same time that she herself was like kind of uncomfortable with it and has some critiques of it.
00:13:34.280Right. So like there's this famous story of her asking one of her like agents or assistants about this news story about a like mysterious submarine off of the coast of like northern Europe.
00:13:47.580Right. And he says something like, don't worry about it, dear.
00:13:51.380It was all a mix up. And she goes, I don't know.
00:13:54.840You know, she's like, no, I think the American military regime is doing something fishy.
00:13:59.680And, I mean, we'll talk about her individual movies, but, like, if something like the final line of Some Like It Hot was in the script, she was also fearless in selecting material.
00:14:09.320I mean, that line still, I watched that with a bunch of 19-year-olds for my class a couple of years ago, and, like, people's jaws hit the floor, you know, at that final line.
00:14:20.360Remind our listeners what the final line of Some Like It Hot is.
00:14:23.580So Jack Lemmon has been in drag the entire movie,
00:14:52.920She was so happy she cried. She wants you to have her wedding gown. It's white lace. Yeah, that's good. I can't get married in your mother's dress
00:15:01.980She and I we are not built the same way. We can have it altered. Yeah, I know you don't
00:15:09.960I'm gonna level with you. We can't get married at all. Why not? Well
00:15:15.620In the first place, I'm not a natural blonde1.00
00:16:03.100She thought that her character was too stupid.1.00
00:16:05.900She really hated playing dumb blondes by that point in her career, towards the end of her career.0.99
00:16:10.700And she had to do it because Arthur Miller needed money and she sort of presented it.0.90
00:16:14.660Oh, that takes the sheen off a little bit.
00:16:16.180Yeah, if you watch it as just somebody watching a movie, it's delightful. She plays Sugarcane, the real name of the character, who's this sort of alcoholic, sad, tragic, dissolute, but just so charming and innocent and possessed of like a spark of life.
00:17:59.680She was at the time, you know, now actresses imitate Monroe all the time.
00:18:04.220It's almost like a requirement of any sex pop actress's career that at some point she do a photo shoot in a gown and a blonde wig where she poses as Marilyn Monroe.
00:18:16.960But at the time, Marilyn Monroe was doing Jean Harlow.0.94
00:18:20.560So, like, there's an evolution of this dumb blonde figure, and Monroe had a personal critique of it that comes out more in some of her roles than in others.1.00
00:18:32.220I realized I earlier said that Blown Up Skirt is from Genoa and Prefer Blonde.0.89
00:18:42.460Yeah, they shot that on location on Lixitane Avenue for hours and hours while there was like a big jeering crowd of like New York men yelling at her.
00:18:53.120And then they didn't get any good shoots and they had to do it at a studio lot in Los Angeles a couple weeks later.
00:18:59.240But yeah, that's from The Seven Year Itch, I believe 1955.
00:19:03.880Also Billy Wilder. She loved working with Billy Wilder. She respected him.
00:19:07.100But, you know, we're talking about this image of Marilyn as a stand-in for the promise that Americans can indulge in joy without having to think very much, right?
00:19:17.980This image of Marilyn was, in fact, exported quite deliberately and consciously as a symbol of American-style prosperity at the time.
00:19:26.680So like famously in, I believe it was 1954, she goes to Korea as a USO entertainer and entertains the troops there.
00:19:37.800And it's like February, it's freezing cold and she goes out and says, okay, well, they want to see me as naked as possible.
00:19:46.680So she takes off her fur so that the men can see her as like the symbol of what they're fighting for in this like imperialist war.
00:19:55.760And then, you know, there's her famous role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which came out the year before, in which she is a blonde with her brunette, you know, compatriot.0.98
00:20:10.500And her name is Lorelei Lee, the character.
00:20:13.720And she is literally aboard a cruise liner looking for rich men on her way to Europe, right?
00:20:20.180Jacqueline Rose, who has an excellent essay from 2014 on Marilyn Monroe in her book, Women in Dark Times, compares this literally to the cash transfers of the Marshall Plan, right?
00:20:32.140Like, look at this smiling model of American prosperity going over the ocean to Europe, right?
00:20:44.960So at one point in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev came to the United States.
00:20:48.680He was in California. And he had said one of the things he wanted to do was meet Marilyn Monroe. And the studio execs who are talking to Monroe about this explain, like, well, in the USSR, America means A, Coca-Cola, and B, Marilyn Monroe.
00:21:08.300And she has this, like, famous kind of great line.
00:21:10.480She's like, I guess there's not much sex in Russia, which I kind of love.
00:21:14.920And she goes and she meets him, right?
00:21:16.480She's very aware of being a representative of America.
00:21:20.180Ironically, Billy Wilder made a whole movie about Coca-Cola the same year that I think Marilyn Monroe met Nikita Khrushchev.0.85
00:21:33.840So, like, I think it's interesting that this consumption fantasy that's being offered to the American public in the 1950s is also a sexual fantasy, right?
00:21:45.760One of the things that you're able to consume in this vision of America is women's bodies.
00:21:51.940One of the critiques of the 1950s and the sort of like end of the old left and the rise of McCarthyism that followed the end of World War II is that Americans were offered consumption and consumer goods in place of politics.0.68
00:22:09.540And I think we also have to count in they were offered sex in place of politics, right?
00:22:13.780This is something that was sort of meant to be a compensation for the foreclosure of these other political possibilities in the 1950s.
00:22:21.940So, like, she had this on-screen persona of a dumb blonde, and this is a stage character that influenced a lot of the early biographies and assessments of Monroe's career and, like, shaped our initial understanding of her, right?
00:22:38.680So one of the things that's really interesting to me is a changing shape of Monroe historiography since her death, because her first biographer, almost her first biographer, was none other than friend of the show Norman Mailer.
00:23:08.080I don't like the way, but he's got a way with words.
00:23:10.880Mailer was really the author of this idea that Marilyn Monroe was tragically passive.
00:23:15.080And it's his conviction of her passivity and blamelessness and really stupidity that he then used to invent one of the most persistent myths about Monroe, which is like weirdly tenacious, even though it has absolutely no factual support, which is that her death was not a suicide.0.74
00:23:34.380Oh, that she was murdered by the Kennedys, yeah.0.93
00:23:36.960She was not murdered by the Kennedys, but, you know, I think to have a sex symbol like Monroe to sort of, like, keep her, you can't have her commit suicide, right?
00:23:46.900It implies she didn't like it. It implies a sort of resistance to the objectification that the, like, happy hooker persona that men are really looking for in Monroe can't abide.
00:24:02.620but it also just is an action and a decision.
00:24:06.260Like suicide, for everything else that it is, is volitional.
00:24:58.200Bette Davis as Margot Channing, who's like this flinty, feisty diva on the decline, and then Anne Baxter as the ingenue Eve Harrington.
00:25:06.740The whole point is like they're becoming each other, right?
00:25:09.280They're both capable of growth or decline.1.00
00:25:12.460The dumb blonde is kind of, she's a perfect side character because she doesn't develop in quite the same way.0.99
00:25:18.980That is itself a sexist trope, but it's a sexist trope that in the logic of that genre existed in order to make other gender tropes effective, right?1.00
00:25:27.360Right. You need the whore to have the Madonna. And you also need the Mary Magdalene to have your Saint Martha.1.00
00:25:33.980Like you need the sexualized, frivolous blonde living a kind of unserious life to make the seriousness, the ambition, the dutifulness, the intellectualism of these other women sort of stand out.1.00
00:25:49.540Right. In a way that, you know, you see it in some comedic tropes like the straight man and the goofball.1.00
00:26:18.540Well, a lot of people in Marilyn's life did sort of assume that she was stupid in her real life.0.96
00:26:24.280And I think something that is important for us to note is that in her real life, she was very intellectually ambitious.0.96
00:26:30.160She did not get success in being taken intellectually seriously.
00:26:34.380And this is one of the great tragedies of her life.
00:26:36.780Diana Trilling talks about the cruelty of those who mocked her ambition to be educated and to be seen as educated.
00:26:43.680This was something that sort of became apparent very soon after her death.
00:26:47.460She was not allowed by studio executives really to play anything other than Dumb Blondes after a while, even though she kept trying to bargain for more and more script control.
00:26:57.060She found her sort of actual offers and opportunities really persistently limited in a way that really frustrated her.
00:27:04.620Arthur Miller famously left his wife for Marilyn Monroe.0.99
00:27:08.200And there's a scene in this play he wrote about their marriage called After the Fall that wasn't published or produced until after her death, where the Arthur Miller character, like, writes out all of the ways that he wanted to be with this, like, goddess of a woman and then found that she was kind of, like, stupid and slutty.0.98
00:27:26.720And now he's ashamed for the baseness of his desire for her.0.89
00:27:29.980And then he, like, leaves that notebook out in their shared home for her to find.
00:27:34.900and that scene was taken from life like arthur miller really did write out all of these terrible
00:27:40.080things about how much he hated monroe and looked down on her and then just like left it around0.95
00:27:44.620their fucking house and she found it and had a meltdown she was really really straining to be0.96
00:27:49.220seen as a full person and not as this archetype and she just kind of never got there and it's1.00
00:27:54.620really really tragic she really was very pained at the assumption that she was dumb and she
00:28:01.020rejected it in scripts she hated the way her characters were cast she really wanted to play
00:28:07.780the emotions that she was most familiar with right which were longing and loneliness
00:28:13.900and she was never able to do that because she just had to be you know a pot of honey all the time
00:28:20.460so Marilyn is the author of this certain kind of stylized femininity we're talking so much about
00:28:27.200how she rebelled against this and came to resent it towards the end of her life but she really did
00:28:32.420build it deliberately at the beginning of her career and it was this kind of performance of
00:28:37.980femininity that combined hypersexuality with a kind of like conspicuous almost campy vacuousness
00:28:44.760so like she reminds me i mentioned this before but she does remind me of that 30 rock bit about
00:28:49.260the very sexy baby like tina fey encounters this woman in the park and she goes i'm a very sexy
00:28:54.800baby you know um and this like contrast between women's aspiration to seriousness and what male
00:29:02.520desire and like the sort of romantic economy that they have to participate in to just not be very
00:29:07.620lonely sort of demands of them and i think that is a contradiction that like monroe gets sort of
00:29:14.600cast as almost a scapegoat for this but really she was a victim of this dynamic yeah so by now
00:29:20.220this kind of very sexy baby is a cliche but for Marilyn it really was an invention right this1.00
00:29:26.820bimbo persona was one that she helped invent and cultivated it at the start of her career0.93
00:29:32.560in a really savvy way another thing that is famous about Monroe is this like sort of rags
00:29:39.020to riches story she came from a childhood of poverty anonymity violence abandonment exploitation
00:29:45.820like incredible, like really acute suffering, and became this megastar. And she did that because
00:29:51.240she discovered that she had something men wanted from her and that she could trade on.0.66
00:29:56.140And she got really good at making men like her that way. And then there was this kind of authentic
00:30:02.280self that she felt like she didn't get a chance to express. And that was kind of this other
00:30:07.920Marilyn that was intellectually ambitious, really political, really loyal to the working class,
00:30:14.260really kind of self-conscious about like workers rights in particular she identified with workers
00:30:20.920her whole life in fact one of the big riffs in her last marriage to arthur miller was it like
00:30:25.200you know she had really admired him for not naming names when he got called before the mccarthy
00:30:28.940committee but then later in their time together he was a scab and like broke a writer's strike
00:30:34.860to write for a studio when the other writers were on strike and she was kind of like okay i'm gonna
00:30:39.100cheat on you and started sleeping with one of her co-stars. You know, she had this sort of
00:30:45.180intellect, set of political commitments and a real savvy for other people. Like she was able0.96
00:30:50.620to empathize with other people and understand what they wanted from her. I mean, it's also where like
00:30:55.420the fact that she's born in LA probably matters into working class LA. On the one hand, the
00:31:00.280proximity to the entertainment industry, but understanding that industry as an industry,
00:31:04.520as the main employer, as a place where unions really were central
00:31:09.240in making sure that working people could get a fair shake,
00:31:12.700but also the kind of working-class L.A. that you get in a book like City of Courts
00:31:16.780that really sort of gets displaced only through the 40s and 50s.
00:31:19.940So she would have been there while that was shifting.
00:31:22.900Yeah, she saw working people being sort of extracted and exploited0.58
00:31:27.060in this industry that at the same time was creating a fantasy of prosperity, right,0.73
00:31:32.960and of which she wielded so expertly.0.91
00:31:35.100So, you know, we have this sort of bimbo Marilyn
00:31:38.220that is like the established narrative of Marilyn.0.91
00:32:22.560Some of these books you can really tell were written with one hand, you know what I mean?
00:32:25.620And there's this counter tradition now of like feminist Marilyn Monroe studies. Right. Yeah. And like the inaugurator of that was really Gloria Steinem. She wrote this first feminist reconsideration of Marilyn Monroe. It was published in 1986.
00:32:41.060It was published as a coffee table book, but it's like actually a really long and in-depth essay where she talks, among other things, about her own initial resentment of Monroe as sort of the paradigm of a kind of womanhood that feminists of the second wave were trying to like reject and rebel against.
00:32:56.960And she then came to see Monroe's relationship to that gender expression as more ambivalent and complicated.
00:33:03.320Since, by the way, this is an audio medium, I will point out that Moira was just brandishing that book in a gorgeous, what looks to be like the first edition.
00:33:10.140As befits a feminist historian and a person who's been to L.A. a lot recently, you have it. You have it in front of you.
00:33:16.700Oh, yeah. No, I went on a Monroe kick. I should probably admit to listeners that I got obsessed with Marla Monroe earlier this year, realized it was going to be her centennial.
00:33:26.920Actually, this would have been late last year because I was doing this research when I was in Lake Tahoe for Thanksgiving with my wife in November 2025.
00:33:34.020and I just sort of like on a whim reached out to my editor Dave O'Neill at Book Forum and was like
00:33:41.660will you let me write about Marilyn Monroe and he was like yes there's a book coming out for her
00:33:46.600100th birthday and I got to write about her and I read everything I could get my hands on. Wow. I
00:33:51.500recommend the Gloria Steinem book. I recommend with like some caveats this like very thorough
00:33:57.0602012 biography by Lois Banner and I really recommend the Jacqueline Rose who considers
00:34:03.440Marilyn both on her own terms and in a kind of like counterintuitive way in comparison with Rosa
00:34:08.220Luxemburg. Oh, wow. She's like, okay, this is one woman who was thought to be all mind and no body0.90
00:34:13.440and one who was thought to be all body and no mind. Interesting. And like neither of these are
00:34:17.620complete pictures. I cannot believe you have not read the Jacqueline Rose on Marilyn Monroe. It's
00:34:22.260so good. So like there is this kind of robust Marilyn historiography that sort of recuperated
00:34:29.360her from the simplistic dub blonde persona and that's kind of what i'm relying on and i'm going
00:34:34.880to try and like counteract some as i mentioned at the top of the show some of the like simplistic
00:34:40.000accounts of her as uh like a deliberate or like triumphant wielder of you know like sexuality for
00:34:50.580her own ends in this kind of like raw sex positivity way which i think is just sort of
00:34:54.900countered by the evidence of her like evident misery and ultimate suicide right it's like you
00:35:00.460can't be like oh actually she had everything under control and everything happened exactly
00:35:05.180the way she wanted and she was not at all a victim when she was in fact driven to
00:35:08.560suicidal desperation but on the other hand i don't think a feminist analysis of her like
00:35:15.280unfairly constrained circumstances and unfairly derided intellect requires us to have like a0.99
00:35:22.500morally judgmental approach to her sexuality which was also like a really big part of her life0.94
00:35:28.920yeah the thing about marilyn is she was born to a 24 year old named gladys who was already on her
00:35:35.740second divorce she was born out of wedlock it has now been pretty well established that marilyn's
00:35:42.280biological father was a guy who gladys was working for as a negative film cutter at rco pictures oh
00:35:50.200That guy, his name is Charles Stanley Gifford. He never wanted anything to do with Marilyn. He was embarrassed that he had like cheated on his wife and had this baby out of wedlock.
00:35:58.260Gladys, meanwhile, had been like really traumatized by being basically like sold into marriage at 14 by her mom, who also had mental health issues. And she had two children in her first marriage who their father then started beating her.0.55
00:36:12.860She actually won a divorce and custody of her two kids, which is insane for the 1920s.
00:36:18.240But then her ex-husband kidnapped the children and took them to Kentucky.
00:36:22.880And so these kids were like stolen from her, right?0.98
00:36:26.000Gladys descended into madness, was never really stable.1.00
00:36:29.500Marilyn grew up in a series of foster homes and under the care of Gladys's best friend, Grace Goddard, who became her legal guardian after Gladys was institutionalized.
00:36:39.620So over the course of her childhood, Marilyn lived in 11 different foster homes.
00:36:46.340And I think we really have to acknowledge that a lot of men see women's vulnerability and little girls' vulnerability as a sexual opportunity.
00:36:54.680So Marilyn reported her first rape as occurring at the age of eight by a border in one of these foster homes.
00:37:02.620At one point, she was living with Grace Goddard and her husband in their home.
00:37:06.180and grace goddard found her husband molesting marilyn and her response was to get rid of0.99
00:37:13.440marilyn monroe like keep the husband and get rid of the little girl uh norma jean so she takes her1.00
00:37:19.220to the los angeles orphanage oh my god and there's this horrible scene on the sidewalk outside where
00:37:24.540marilyn's going my parents aren't dead i am not an orphan you can't put me in there just like
00:37:28.440really terrified of this abandonment. And then she starts getting, you know, catcalled as a lot
00:37:36.920of little girls do. At 11? Oh, probably before that. I mean, by the time she's 12, by the time
00:37:42.200she's 12, the women who are her guardians are telling her, you have an adult body. You need
00:37:46.000to start thinking about marriage. So she realizes she has something men like, but she's still,0.95
00:37:52.620you know, she's in high school. She's living with Grace Goddard at one point again after the
00:37:57.520into the orphanage great and grace goddard and her molester husband get this like job offer on the
00:38:03.620other side of the country and because of child protection laws they're not allowed to take0.66
00:38:07.100maryland with her so what they say is like okay we're going to just marry you to this neighbor
00:38:10.520boy and this neighbor boy who's 21 is convinced to like as a favor marry this girl who kind of
00:38:17.600needs a home his name is james doherty doherty yeah so he's 21 uh maryland has just turned 16
00:40:29.580There's one here, sort of in these capri pants that she's rolled up, and the whole thing sort of says, like, you've interrupted me mid something else, but something else kind of seems like it might be something athletic.
00:40:39.780Like, there's a person, I don't know, catching a breath after a run or like waiting for a spiked volleyball that's just out of frame or something like that.
00:40:47.100Yeah, or like she's digging for clams or something.
00:47:41.340You know, this gets printed exactly the way she wants it to.0.99
00:47:45.180The calendar sells a bunch more copies and she completely comes out vindicated on the other side because she makes herself look like a little girl.1.00
00:47:55.160Right. And that is the model which she will use for the rest of her career.1.00
00:47:59.940So she really explodes after 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.0.79
00:48:05.900We talked about this a little earlier.1.00
00:48:07.900And then she has this kind of like explosion.0.99
00:48:11.380How to Marry a Millionaire does really well.
00:48:12.920She, like, becomes a cultural icon, and she realizes that she is not really being paid her due.
00:48:20.520Famously, she finds out that her co-star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is being paid about 10 times as much as she is.
00:48:28.680She goes, the movie's called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and after all, I'm the blonde.0.84
00:48:33.420Later, it would be a clause in her contract that no other women on the set of any of her movies were allowed to have hair a lighter shade than hers.
00:48:41.860This became like an actual problem on the set of Some Like It Hot, where there's this whole like ensemble band who are all blondes and she had to be the blondest.0.78
00:48:50.040Was really mad at the advent of Brigitte Bardot and Jane Mansfield.0.84
00:48:54.100She's like, they're stealing my bit, right?
00:48:55.560She was like guarding her market share.
00:48:57.620But she gets in a fight with Fox in 1954 and quits.
00:49:02.540She's like, you guys aren't paying me.
00:49:04.000I'm going to go start my own production company.
00:49:06.380She takes a break from acting, moves to New York, marries Joe DiMaggio.
00:50:23.560She started taking a lot of barbiturates at this point because she is unhappy in her relationship with Joe DiMaggio and starts experiencing insomnia.
00:50:32.100And she also enrolls at the actor's studio with Lee Strasberg, where she becomes very devoted to the method.
00:50:42.280Do you want to gloss the method for us really quick?
00:50:44.580Well, method acting basically is about kind of trying not to portray a role, but to sort of get yourself in the headspace and then kind of have the emotions genuinely come.
00:51:06.360She really has tried to fuse with her onscreen persona, right?
00:51:11.900One of the things that you will hear in some like pop historical accounts of Marilyn Monroe, particularly from men, honestly, is like, oh, well, there was Marilyn Monroe and then there was Norma Jean and these are different people.
00:51:21.960I think that's a little too pat, especially when you consider the way she worked, which is very emotionally involved, very, very psychically taxing on her.
00:51:29.600Yeah. And that's also, I mean, I'm sure you're going to get to that, but like the conflict between her and Sir Laurence Olivier over the prince and the showgirls often cast as like, well, he's a great actor. She was not. The conflict was over the method, that he's just not a method actor. And he's like, why is this person like emoting like crazy in front of me? We are actors. This is supposed to be a job. What are we doing here? Right? Like that's the ultimate source of that. Like he wasn't criticizing her for not being able to act. They were just coming from totally different acting traditions. And he's like, I can't work like this.
00:51:59.020Yeah, also she really resented him for how condescending he was to her.
00:54:10.460She actually really remains close with Arthur Miller's father for the rest of his life.
00:54:15.100She also was always close with her husband's children.
00:54:17.960But towards the end of their marriage, she makes Some Like It Hot, which I think is far and away her most famous film.
00:54:24.600And something that you have to account for when you're talking about Marilyn Monroe is that, you know, one of the sort of pop lines about Marilyn Monroe that I received a lot when I was growing up as like a millennial woman was like Marilyn Monroe was a size 14.
00:54:39.280It was this kind of, like, body positivity idea that her, like, body was desirable.
00:54:45.880This is the maximally desirable person, and she was not stick thin.0.91
00:54:48.900And she never was stick thin, but her weight gain was noticed, and she was mocked for it.0.98
00:54:54.100So her weight gain in Some Like It Hot was the object of some really cruel press clippings.
00:55:01.400So it was widely known that she had suffered multiple miscarriages during her marriage to Arthur Miller of, like, very badly wanted children.
00:55:10.760Like, there's one story of, like, her after one of these miscarriages where she would just start hanging out at this playground in New York City near where she had an apartment.0.91
00:55:19.380She would, like, put on, like, a scarf and glasses and ask these random women if she could hold their babies.
00:55:24.880And one woman, like, gave this interview where she was like, yeah, we all knew this was Marilyn Monroe.
00:55:30.100Like, she introduced herself as Mrs. Miller, but we knew who she was.
00:55:33.300And she just didn't seem like a starlet.
00:55:35.460She just seemed really wounded and lonely.
00:57:47.300And it was not going well. It wasn't much of a movie. But, like, she knows she's under threat of getting fired, right? She gets the letter saying, we're thinking about firing you the morning that she is in New York to sing Happy Birthday, Mr. President, to JFK, with whom she does have an affair as well as with his brother.
00:58:04.160but she goes back to the set to try and work again and she's supposed to shoot this scene
00:58:11.560where her character is skinny dipping but she is in a nude bikini right and what she does is she
00:58:16.720takes the bikini off and this is like kind of her last ditch effort to like give the people what
00:58:22.220they want from her and try to like you know get back in their good graces right so as much as1.00
00:58:26.980Marilyn really hates being you know what she called an erotic freak right she hates being1.00
00:58:33.560rejected more oh wow and she kind of seems to have only one thing that people ever really want1.00
00:58:38.200from her and not long after that she's like fired and then rehired but not long after that she
00:58:46.080has what has by then become a pretty routine incident for her which is that she's at home
00:58:53.460late at night she's got a live-in housekeeper who's basically really working for her psychoanalyst at
00:58:59.820this point but she is drugged into this stupor she's been drinking a lot and the sort of
00:59:06.720volitionalness of her death is really ambiguous right like whether this was an accidental overdose
00:59:14.880or deliberate overdose both of which she had had in the past is really unclear yeah but she dies
00:59:20.880and she's 36 years old and then she is metabolized almost immediately yeah into the sort of like
00:59:28.440image and the pop culture figure that she had tried to be something other than, right? That
00:59:33.840becomes all that she is. Like, I think the sort of inaugural image is Andy Warhol. Yeah. Who
00:59:39.740produces his first set of 10 screen prints of Marilyn Monroe in 1967. That's only five years
00:59:46.580after her death. Yeah. And already she's being used to evoke this past and as sort of a stand-in
00:59:52.940for all of these promises that weren't kept for her. And I think that that's really unfair and
00:59:58.400I think that she deserved better. Yeah. So like one of the questions raised by Marilyn's life
01:00:04.960is what did receiving that kind of maximal amount of male desire do for her? She kind of won and
01:00:12.560succeeded at this one version of being a woman, right? In fact, she kind of defined the terms of
01:00:17.660that version of femininity. And like, did she want it? What did she hope it would get her?0.74
01:00:23.820once she had it did it make her happy like is being desired a source of power is being desired
01:00:30.140a source of fulfillment and honestly i think marilyn's life answers pretty clearly and
01:00:36.020heartbreakingly in the negative right yeah she wasn't stupid or innocent the way she pretended
01:00:41.700to be but she really did suffer terribly and it was a suffering that she was always trying to cure
01:00:47.060by being alluring to men by seeking out men's love and i really don't think you can blame her for
01:00:52.720trying, right? Like one of the things that Gloria Steinem says is that she initially used to resent
01:00:58.180Marilyn because of how evidently Marilyn wanted men's companionship. But I mean, the desire to be
01:01:05.760loved, to be appreciated, to be cherished, I really don't think you can demonize that desire.
01:01:12.480It's just too human. But you can see pretty clearly if you look at her life that her roots
01:01:18.980towards his aspiration never really worked and so like this is the tension in maryland the thing
01:01:23.760that makes her really compelling is the fact that she both like defined and embodied a successful
01:01:28.600model of heterosexual womanhood and also that this model delivered on none of its promises to her
01:01:34.580this is the central conflict of post-war sexual politics right this heterosexuality
01:01:39.320is making these great demands on women and offering them all this glamour but a successful
01:01:45.680gambit in that model of femininity doesn't deliver the promise winnings yeah it's also
01:01:52.260this like this is the broader cruel optimism of post-war america under this like fracturing and
01:01:58.900increasingly extractive neoliberal economy right maryland is not just a metaphor for being a good
01:02:03.660straight woman she's also a metaphor for being a good worker a good consumer a good american for
01:02:08.360doing everything right and succeeding by every metric and still finding that the promises are
01:02:13.220not kept, that happiness and security are not delivered, that this, like, hole of needfulness
01:02:18.320and terror in her soul could not be filled.
01:02:20.960And that's where I think Marilyn's persistence as a symbol comes in, why she makes such an
01:02:25.200iconic screen for the likes of Andy Warhol and Kim Kardashian.
01:02:29.140She is a symbol of sex, who's also almost necessarily a symbol of America writ large.0.88