The private Marilyn had some of the same qualities with which she imbued her screen characters—a certain vulnerability, and, as the years progressed a palpable sadness that seeped into her comic roles, giving her cardboard heroines more depth than they deserved. What the public didn’t see, and the movie industry mocked, was a blazing ambition, a genuine toughness, native intelligence, and a desire which was never quenched—not even in her final frantic year of life—to lift herself up, to better herself. Marilyn’s intellectual curiosity, her desire to be a finer actress and worthy of respect, was considered hilarious—she was blonde, she was beautiful, she was a movie star, what more could she want?! What more could any woman want? This put-down was one of the great mysteries of her life, and one which be-deviled her to the end. “Please don’t make me a joke,” she said in her final interview to Life magazine writer Richard Meryman in 1962. She laughed girlishly, but Meryman saw the pain and the weariness beneath the giggle.


The preferred notion of Marilyn Monroe is that she staggered through her life in some drug-addled haze, a miasma of neurosis and helplessness and then—taking everything from her—painting her at the end as the mentally unstable blonde cog in Byzantine murder plots involving, depending on what you read, the Kennedys, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, her therapist, her housekeeper.

What escapes conspiracy theorists and those who prefer Marilyn as a mess in a beaded dress 24/7, is that she was all her life a working woman. From the enforced drudgery of orphanages and foster care (her mentally ill mother could not support her) to a bride and World War II housewife at barely 16, to a factory worker, and then a model. From age 22 to 36, she was an actress. Her mournful childhood—which Monroe would later cleverly embellish to woo female fans startled by her hyper-sexy image—had saddled her with conflicting personality traits. She was torn by crushingly low self-esteem, a resistance to certain kinds of discipline, and an unstoppable desire to be more than her origins predestined. The latter quality won out.