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    LIFE Remembering Marilyn
    LIFE Remembering Marilyn
    LIFE Remembering Marilyn
    Ebook168 pages1 hour

    LIFE Remembering Marilyn

    By The Editors of LIFE

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    About this ebook

    Remembering the iconic star through intimate photos and essays

    More than fifty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains as famous as ever. Rediscover the screen legend with dozens of intimate photos from the archives of LIFE magazine. Insightful text reveals Monroe's journey from Norma Jeane to international star and American icon. Includes special access to the famous "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" performance for John F. Kennedy as well as the more than 30 movie roles that made her an icon. Some Like It Hot . . . The Seven-Year Itch . . . Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . . . The Misfits . . . these classic movies and her performances in them made her one of Hollywood's most glamorous stars. Her personal life, with marriages to Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio, and rumored affairs with John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, made her fascinating. LIFE Remembering Marilyn lets readers see Monroe's remarkable life both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLife
    Release dateJul 7, 2017
    ISBN9781683301806
    LIFE Remembering Marilyn

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      Book preview

      LIFE Remembering Marilyn - The Editors of LIFE

      them.

      INTRODUCTION

      Marilyn and Myth

      SAM SHAW/SHAW FAMILY ARCHIVES

      The term screen legend has been applied to Marilyn Monroe perhaps more often than to any other star in the vast Hollywood firmament. That is proper, for legend implies a story not only larger than life but also in some ways unbelievable. Chapters in her biography are certainly that. Even after the life story of Marilyn Monroe has been retold a thousand times, we are not absolutely sure which parts are precisely true and which are not, what really happened and what did not, what is fact and what is hyperbole or even fiction. Monroe willingly contributed to the legend herself; just as one example, she certainly pumped up the woebegone-orphan aspect of her childhood. And studio publicists were only too happy to heap on enough additional baloney to satisfy the hungriest lunchtime patrons at Schwab’s. Some episodes that have clung stubbornly to the Marilyn Monroe narrative like so many barnacles are about as real as the color of her platinum blonde hair.

      To look at the end of the tale here at the beginning, let’s consider her death: At age 36 in 1962, Marilyn Monroe died in what the coroner ruled was a probable suicide. Many of her fans insist it was an accidental drug overdose, while many others hold that it was murder, and a subset is sure the Kennedys were involved. They say there are tape recordings, made by the FBI or a private detective hired by someone else, that prove this.

      Let’s look at her marriages, which together represent another biographical item that you would think we would have a firm handle on by now. We know there were three: The first was an affair either strictly of convenience or at least somewhat of the heart, depending on whom you believe; the second involved a baseball star; the third was to an esteemed playwright. But some people say there was a fourth, and even the most often cited biographies don’t agree on this.

      Some film fans think that biographer Anthony Summers came closest to the true Marilyn. Some side with Donald Spoto, some with Barbara Leaming, some with Fred Lawrence Guiles. Some say that Norman Mailer captured her best in his impressionistic rendering.

      Our purpose in these pages is not to settle the matter; such an effort would prove futile. We will in our text and captions present the facts as they are known to be true and allude to the controversies as they crop up. We will be as accurate as possible.

      More important, in keeping with LIFE’s tradition and mission, we will present a beguiling and intimate photographic biography of this singular, beautiful, spirited, unfailingly generous and endlessly compelling movie star. We are, in one way, in a fortunate position: Although people sometimes lie, pictures don’t. In these pages, Norma Jeane Mortensen Baker (Marilyn) Monroe, as she lived her life day to day from infancy until death, is reborn. As you gaze at these pictures and look into Marilyn’s eyes, you are seeing her—the happiness, the sadness, the joy, the sorrow. You are reliving a life and spending time with the very real woman beyond the myth.

      Norma Jeane

      HULTON/GETTY

      The infant Norma Jeane is about six months old in this photograph. She is by now being raised by her first foster parents, Albert and Ida Bolender, in Hawthorne, California.

      Her story is hazy from the first and involves at the outset a troubled mother and an absent father. Gladys Monroe, who would give birth to Norma Jeane at Los Angeles General Hospital on June 1, 1926, was herself the product of an unstable home. She was born in 1902 and, as a little girl, witnessed the mental erosion of her father when syphilis attacked his brain and sent him to the hospital where he died, according to Donald Spoto’s Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. Gladys was thereafter raised by a mother who eventually suffered from hallucinations and displayed erratic behavior, perhaps also caused by a physical illness. Gladys married for the first time at age 14; this husband, Jasper Newton Jap Baker, was more than a decade her senior. Together they would have two children, a boy called Jackie and a girl named Berniece. After Gladys divorced Jap, he kidnapped the children and took them to his native state, Kentucky, to raise them. Jackie would die young, and Berniece would not see her mother again for 20 years.

      Gladys then married Martin Edward Mortensen in 1924; she left him in early 1925, and their divorce was finalized in 1928. The question of who Norma Jeane’s father was is one that still lingers. Although it is unlikely that Mortensen sired the actress—Marilyn Monroe said she always imagined another man, whose photograph was once shown to her by her mother, as her father—Gladys had the surname Mortenson written in on Norma Jeane’s birth certificate, compounding the confusion by misspelling it. Then, on Norma Jeane’s baptismal certificate, Gladys gave her child the surname Baker, after her first husband.

      Therefore: Norma Jeane Mortensen Baker, who one day would take her mother’s maiden name and alliteratively become Marilyn Monroe.

      By the time Norma Jeane was born on that summer morning in 1926, Gladys was working in a lab cutting film

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