Marilyn Monroe - My Story

It isn’t only punishment I feel. I get thrilled as if I were Norma Jean going to a party and not Miss Monroe. The later I am the happier Norma Jean grows.

People dislike me for such tardiness. They scold me and explain to me it’s because I want to seem important and make a spectacular entrance. That’s partly true, except it’s Norma that longs for importance—and not me.

My social faults such as this one, and also not being able to laugh all the time at parties as if I were swooning with joy, or not being able to keep chattering like a parrot to other parrots—seem less important to me than some social faults I notice in others.

The worst thing that happens to people when they dress up and go to a party is that they leave their real selves at home. They’re like people on a stage playing somebody else. They play that they’re important, and they want you to meet their importance, not themselves. But worse than that is the fact that when people are being “social” they don’t dare be human or intelligent. They don’t dare to think anything different than the other people at the party. The men and women are not only dressed alike but their minds become all alike. And they expect everybody at the party to say only “party things.”

I freeze up when I see people making important faces at me, or when I notice them strutting among the lesser party-lights. I like important people, but I like them when they’re doing important things—not just collecting a few bows from lesser guests.

In party society there are also people who are unable to feel important—even if it’s an important party and their names are going to be in the movie columns the next morning in “among those present.” These people usually just mill around like extras on a movie set. They don’t seem to have any lines or any “business” except to be ornamental space fillers.

But I can’t feel sorry for them because the minute I join one of these extra-groups they all start chattering like mad and laughing and saying things that nobody can understand. I feel that having found someone more ill at ease than themselves—me—they’re out to impress me what a gay and intimate time they’re having.

Hollywood parties not only confuse me, but they often disillusion me. The disillusion comes when I meet a movie star I’ve been admiring since childhood.

I always thought that movie stars were exciting and talented people full of special personality. Meeting one of them at a party I discover usually that he (or she) is colorless and even frightened. I’ve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.

There are three different ways of becoming famous in the movies. The first way more often happens to men than to women. It happens suddenly as the result of a single performance in a movie.

An actor will go along getting jobs and doing good work and getting nowhere. Then all of a sudden, like John Garfield long ago or Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, Jose Ferrer, more recently—he will appear as a lead in a picture and wake up after the reviews as star for the rest of his life.

Occasionally this also happens to an actress, but the occasions haven’t been recent. The actress usually becomes a star in two other ways. The first way is the Studio Buildup. When the Front Office is convinced that one of their contract players has star possibilities in her, a big campaign is started. The Star Possibility is surrounded by various teachers and coaches. Word is sent out to all the Producers in the Studio that the Possibility is the biggest coming box-office attraction in the industry. And all the producers in the studio start fighting to get her as the lead for one of their pictures.

In the meantime the publicity department goes to work on the Star Possibility and floods the press, the wire services, and the magazines with stories about her wonderful character and fascinating oddities and thousands of photographs.

The columnists are bombarded with announcements about the possibilities of every sort, from a half dozen impending marriages to an equal number of starring vehicles.

Pretty soon the whole country gets the impression that nearly all the eligible romantic males of the land are trying to marry the Possibility and that she is going to appear in half the important movies produced in Hollywood.

All this takes a great deal of money and powerful efforts on everybody’s part except the young actress on whose brow the Studio has decided to weld a silver star.

The other way to fame open to the actress is the way of scandal. Sleep with a half dozen famous Don Juans, divorce a few husbands, get named in police raids, café brawls or other wives’ divorce suits, and you can wind up almost as much in demand by the movie producers as a Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh.

The only trouble with becoming famous as a result of a half dozen scandalous happenings is that the scandal-made star can’t just rest on her old scandals. If she wants to keep her high place in the public eye and on the Hollywood producer’s casting list she has to keep getting into more and more hot water. After you’re thirty-five getting into romantic hot water is a little difficult, and getting yourself publicized in love triangles and café duels over your favors needs not only smart press agents but also a little miracle to help out.

I became famous in the movies in none of these three accepted ways. The studio never thought of me as a Star Possibility, and the notion of putting me in as a lead on a picture was as far from Mr. Zanuck’s head as of handing me over his Front Office as a dressing room. It would make a very good one.

Thus I didn’t get a chance to burst upon the public as a Great Talent.

And there was no Studio campaign or buildup. I was never groomed. The press and the columnists were kept in ignorance of my existence. No telegrams and other passionate Front Office communiqués went out about me to the Sales Force or the nation’s exhibitors.

And there was no scandal to my name. The calendar business came after I was already famous everywhere except in Mr. Zanuck’s mind and in the plans of my Studio, 20th Century-Fox.

I had been terrified for a week before the news of my calendar nude broke. I was sure that it would put an end to my fame and that I would be dropped by the studio, press, and public and never survive my “sin.” My sin had been no more than I have written—posing for the nude picture because I needed fifty dollars desperately to get my automobile out of hock.

There are many other ways for a young and pretty girl to make fifty dollars in Hollywood without any danger of being “exposed.” I guess the public knew this. Somehow the story of the nude calendar pose didn’t reflect scandal on me. It was accepted by the public for what it was, a ghost out of poverty rather than sin risen to haunt me.

A few weeks after the story became known I realized that far from hurting me in any way it had helped me. The public was not only touched by this proof of my honest poverty a short time ago, but people also liked the calendar—by the millions.

To return to my unorthodox rise to movie fame, it came about entirely at the insistence of the movie public, and most of this movie public was in uniform in Korea, fighting.

Letters started flooding my studio by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. They were all addressed to me. They came at the rate of thirty-five hundred a week, and then five and seven thousand a week.

I received five times more mail than the studio’s top box-office star of the time, who was Betty Grable.