From model to movie star to cultural icon — the complete story of how Norma Jeane became Marilyn Monroe, and what it cost her.
During World War II, Jim Dougherty was sent to the Pacific. Norma Jeane took work at a military contractor, Radioplane Company, inspecting and spraying fuselages. It was there that Army photographer David Conover was sent to photograph women working for the war effort. He saw Norma Jeane and could not stop photographing her.
Within weeks, Norma Jeane was a model. By 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers and was one of the most photographed young women in Los Angeles. She was twenty years old.
In 1946, Ben Lyon at 20th Century Fox saw her photographs and signed her for a screen test. The screen test showed an incandescent presence — something that no one at Fox could quite explain but everyone could see. Lyon reportedly suggested the name "Marilyn Monroe" — Marilyn after actress Marilyn Miller; Monroe was her maternal grandmother's surname. Norma Jeane legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
The 1940s studio system traded in the bodies of aspiring actresses as openly as it traded in film reels. Marilyn later spoke obliquely about what it took to get ahead. Joe Schenck, co-founder of 20th Century Fox, became her patron when she was dropped by Fox after her first contract. He was in his seventies. She was in her early twenties. The relationship secured her re-entry into the system.
She said once, with characteristic clarity: "Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."
The roles that made her famous — Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) — cemented the Marilyn persona: breathy, funny, blonde, slightly dizzy, devastatingly beautiful. The persona was a performance. Behind it was Norma Jeane, who was reading Dostoevsky on set and asking her director questions about motivation that he couldn't answer.
In 1955, Marilyn Monroe and photographer Milton Greene co-founded Marilyn Monroe Productions — an act of radical independence by a woman in an industry that owned its talent. She used the production company to renegotiate her contract with Fox: creative approval, director approval, and significantly more money. She won. No actress of her era had done anything comparable.
She moved to New York in 1955 and studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg — the home of method acting that trained Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. Her fellow students were astonished by her raw talent. Strasberg called her "one of the finest actors I have ever worked with — up there with Brando."
"I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don't want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac."— Marilyn Monroe