The Rest Is History - 237. Marilyn Monroe

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Actress, singer, model and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe has long been associated with old school Hollywood glamour and American pop culture. But why is she worth studying historically? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Marilyn's relationship to the Mafia, JFK, the Korean War and her persisting relevance today. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. A kiss on the hand maybe quite continental But diamonds are a girl's best friend

A kiss may be grand but it won't pay the rental On your humble flat or help you at the automat. Men grow cold as girls grow old and we all lose our charms in the end. But square cut or pear shaped, these rocks don't lose their shape. Diamonds are a girl's best friend. That, Dominic Sandbrook, was, of course, Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most iconic of all. Tom, nobody's still listening.

There's no point talking. Nobody's still listening. I thought that was a magnificent performance. The most iconic of all Hollywood stars. I realised when I was reading up about her that she is of course the same age as the queen so if she was still alive now she'd be 96 born in 1926 yeah yeah but of course you know in in diamonds are a girl's best friend she famously says men grow cold as as girls grow old but marilyn never grew old she died when she was 36. And so she serves as a kind of undying

icon of femininity. But this is the rest is history. This is not the rest is Hollywood. So what is the justification, do you think, for doing an episode on Marilyn Monroe in a history podcast? Well, Marilyn Monroe is still very unusually for a film star whose career ended 1962 has an enormous amount of pop cultural traction even now doesn't she i mean basically the peg for us doing this is the anna de armas film the netflix film blonde based on joyce carolotes's novel which is out i think has just come out this last week on netflix and some cinemas, but also I suppose Marilyn Monroe, she's a classic example of that sort of 20th century figure who becomes an avatar for,

for all kinds of other things. So I think she's an avatar for the classical age of Hollywood for, for a kind of innocent, well, we'll go on to talk about whether it is innocent for a sense of hedonism and a sort of pre sexual revolution kind revolution kind of pleasure-seeking. But also, of course, I think she's a symbol of 50s America, of Eisenhower's, specifically, I would say, Eisenhower's America, the Cold War, buoyant, optimistic,

intensely consumerist, the world after the Second World War. I think Marilyn Monroe, the very image of her sort of kindles in people's minds, this sort of sense of, and of course, we can unpick all this, this sort of lost paradise of American dominance and of Americanization. And I think that's what she represents as much as anything, don't you? Well, except to the degree that she's also a tragic figure. So she's also, she's an embodiment of the dark side of the American dream. She's been caught up in the style of, you know, what is it, the paranoid style of politics?

What was the... Yes, Richard Hofstadter, the paranoid style in American politics. So the way in which she's become the subject of so many conspiracy theories. Absolutely. So she dies a year before JFK gets assassinated. And of course, she was involved with JFK, although to what degree is furiously debated. So she has been caught up in the snarl of all those conspiracy theories. But also, in a way, she's a kind of icon of a pre-feminist age.

But it's very, very easy to interpret her as a feminist figure, I think, both because she filings of the broader culture of America in that period. She engages with sport in the form of Joe DiMaggio, the great baseball star who she marries, with intellectual life in the form of Arthur Miller, who she then goes on to marry. Arthur Miller is embroiled in the McCarthy investigations, and Marilyn plays a quite heroic role in that, I think. She's a friend of Frank Sinatra, so there's a hint of the mafia there as well. I mean, she's, I think, a really kind of totemic figure historically. So I think, I hope we have justified doing this podcast on her. Well, she has also a dimension that you hinted at a second ago, which we, again, we can perhaps go into later, which is you talked about her suffering. So the Joyce Carol Oates book, Blonde, for example, on which the current film, the Anna

de Armas film is based, is one of a host of sort of pop cultural visions of Marilyn Monroe that casts her as a victim. And actually, whether she was a victim is worth discussing. Of course, we live now in a kind of cultural landscape in which victimhood is highly prized and indeed celebrated. But whether Marilyn Monroe, was she a victim or was she an immensely canny operator who rose from nowhere to get to the top and did so not by suffering, but by being professional, hardworking, remaking herself, all those kinds of things. I mean, that's something else that is worth debating. I think it's possible for her to have been both. I mean, I think she did have quite a traumatic life. Her upbringing was pretty rough. But more traumatic than, say, Audrey Hepburn?

Well, I think there's a kind of Dickensian quality to the role that she mythologised her upbringing. But I think it clearly did leave scars. I think she probably, I don't want to go all psychoanalytical, although Marilyn's engagement with psychoanalysis is another very, very kind of paradigmatic 1950s American thing. But I think she did have, to a degree, daddy issues, perhaps. But I know that both of us hugely admire one book in particular on Marilyn, which was very much a friend of the show, Sarah Churchwell, who did a fantastic episode with us on Gone with the Wind. And she wrote, I think it's her first book, isn't it? The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

Yeah. Gone with the Wind. And she wrote, I think it's her first book, isn't it? The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. It's a book less about Marilyn than about how Marilyn has been understood and presented. And right in the opening page, I'll just read it. So she's talking about the death, which is obviously the most controversial and object of particular fascination. It is hardly news that Marilyn Monroe's death remains controversial. More surprisingly, the mysteries surrounding her death are not the only confusions in her story. Uncertainty is the story of Marilyn's biographical life. We don't know nearly as much about her as people may assume. Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous, most photographed, most written about people in the 20th century, we know less about her for certain than about many far more distant historical figures.

So I think that's absolutely true. And Sarah demonstrates it pretty conclusively in her book. But the implications of that for the study of history and biography more generally is really quite destabilizing. So we did an episode on Theodora, the circus performer who ends up marrying Justinian, the Roman emperor. And historians debate, you know, how much of the stories told in the scandalous stories told about how far are they true? But obviously, we cannot know. Because if we can't know key details about Marilyn Monroe's life, then what earthly hope do we have of ever arriving at solid ground when we study the

life, say, of an ancient Roman empress. I think that's absolutely right. When I was reading Sarah Churchwell's book, I was thinking, she reflects quite often about these figures in history who we claim to know. How much do we actually really know? Or how much are we simply, she gives brilliant examples in the book of biographers who repeat other biographers who are actually repeating the original, you know, the stories kind of going around in a circle. And merely because the story is told many times, it becomes enshrined as a fact. But as she says, you know, especially with somebody who sex and romance are such an important part of their image.

But with those kinds of matters, you can never really know what happens between two people or, you know, so much of that. You talked about the Kennedy story. I mean, ultimately, the truth of the Kennedy story is nobody knows or will ever know or can ever know. So Norman Mailer, who I suppose is the kind of polar opposite of Joyce Carol Oates, he's the hard drinking misogynist. Yeah.

But he wrote obsessively about Marilyn. And he said, why not assume that Marilyn Monroe opens the entire problem of biography um Elton John and yeah that idea that Norma Jean is the real Marilyn and that Marilyn Monroe is a fake uh is is a very kind of powerful idea it's what animated Candle in the Wind and a lot of studies but But I think it's slightly more complicated than that, isn't it? I think it is more complicated because, I mean, Sarah Churchwell says in her book, you know, the classic division that biographers make is between Norma Jean, who was authentic and real, and Marilyn Monroe, who was a fake. And this was an example of kind of selling her soul and all this stuff. I mean, actually, of course, changing your name was completely common in 1940s Hollywood, wasn't it? I mean, you think of Cary Grant, you think of any number of stars. John Wayne. John Wayne, right, exactly. I mean, who...

Yeah. I mean, John Wayne doesn't seem to have been unduly traumatized by it. No, I mean, it's absolutely... I don't think she sold her soul in changing her name, nor do I think she lost touch with her original identity or anything like that. She's born Norma Jean Mortensen, isn't she? And Mortensen is not her father. I mean, she's illegitimate. I know you're keen to psychoanalyse her. I mean, obviously you were saying that she does a sort of search for, hunt for a father. I mean, that's something I think that probably male biographers love to ascribe to her. Well, she did call all her husbands daddy. I'm just throwing that out.

She did. But again, Tom tom who knows i know i can honestly say why that is or whether that represents uh some deep-seated lack or is it just a quirk i mean we just don't know these kinds of things it's easy it's tempting for us to speculate but i think to some degree this is a classic example of why it's sometimes actually more fruitful to resist speculation than to admit what you don't know. But what I would also say is that she presented herself in the early years of her fame as an orphan. She wasn't an orphan. Yeah. No.

But she might as well have been. So her mother ends up being committed. She's very mentally distressed. But her mother is called Monroe. That's her maiden name. Yes. She burns through men. So she takes on a lot of different names over the course of her life. And so that I think is, you'd say Mortensen is one of them. Baker is another. And so it goes on. But actually, in a way, Monroe is the most authentic, you know, it's a much more authentic

name than any of the other names that Marilyn was given. So... We did a podcast, Tom, about California many moons ago and we were talking the california podcast about this phenomenon of people from the midwest poor midwesterners moving west to california in search kind of of the promised land i mean to some extent you know people will remember that kind of image from the greats of wrath or something well that's what her mother's story was her mother was a poor midwesterner who's had a wretched life you know, she had constant mental health troubles. As you said, she's sort of in and out of homes and asylums. Marilyn's father, I think it's now generally agreed, was somebody called Charles Stanley Gifford.

He was a video editor, wasn't he? Film editor. Exactly. And the sort of fleeting relationship he had with her mother. They were never, you know never a sort of meaningful couple. And Marilyn never, I think, really knew him. And Marilyn herself was Marilyn. I mean, she's called Norma Jean, of course, at this stage. So she was born in 1926. She grows up in the Depression. The Depression is far worse in the United States than it is in many European countries, much worse than it was in Britain.

So she grows up in a climate of kind of austerity and misery and so on. She's in and out of homes with different kind of foster parents. She's in an orphanage at one stage, isn't she? Yeah, for 21 months. And she, yeah, kind of stories about having to do all the washing up all the time, which is very like Dickens in the bathroom factory. I mean, that's what you say about the Dickens. But of course, what we know about that from her

comes from interviews that she gave many, many years later. Or kind of ghostwritten things. And again, it's very hard to ever get, I mean, how much do you know about somebody's early life from stories they tell decades later? How much do they really know themselves? I mean, these are all, as Norman Whaler would say, these are the fundamental questions of all biographies,

not just biographies of Marilyn Monroe. Yeah, and one of them, of course, one of the key mysteries is whether she was sexually abused, sexually assaulted, on which, again, there have been many interpretations. And because it's seen as being somehow crucially important to explaining the woman that she becomes, people worry at it obsessively. But I think it's one of these things, you know, Sarah Churchill points out that we can't know,

we just can't know. No, we can't. And I think what happens with, so the sexual abuse issue is an interesting one, because it sort of opens up two different avenues of inquiry. One is the idea that Marilyn Monroe was always a victim. She was always abused by men. And that obviously is the sort of Joyce Carol Oates vision of her, a very popular vision today. The other is what you might call the sort of slightly more Norman Mailer-ish vision, which is that she's always all about sex. So Norman Mailer has this extraordinary line where he says of her, she was deliverance, a very Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender that even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art

in the dissolving magic of her violin. And this sort of idea that she's steeped in sex from the first minute to the last. Insane sexual musk, it was another phrase he used about her. Yeah, I mean, that's very distasteful now to us. But I mean, there's an element of truth in it. And her image was always obviously deeply wrapped up with sex. And was she abused as a child? And how did that therefore feed into that? I mean, again, this is a classic example of, it's all speculation, isn't it? It's

all projection from the legions of writers who have kind of voyeuristically picked over the details of her story. And I think the most honest thing to say is that we actually don't have the faintest idea. But I think also, I mean, it's indisputable that if you are a very, very beautiful girl without much education from a series of broken homes, gravitate, you know, in Los Angeles, on the margins of Hollywood, there are a lot of very rapacious, predatory men. And Marilyn became, you know, she, Norma Jean,

and then she gets given the name Marilyn by studios. That is, that's clearly part of the world that she was in. And one of the animating things that drives her throughout her career is a deep sense of hostility to the kind of the power that enable her to be cast as a feminist icon. And I guess another would be exactly what you were saying, that she's actually completely unapologetic about her own sexuality. You know, so she begins her career as a pinup, doesn't she? That's right. Yeah. So pinups are quite a new thing. A couple of decades old, really. I mean, obviously hugely popular in World War II. So for American, they will, you know, you'll have pinups in your barracks.

People will paint nubile young girls on the tails of their, on bits of their planes and things like that. And that's how she makes a start, isn't it? But also there's another war connection, isn there because she's she gets into the sort of the pin-up business through being photographed when she's working in a what's she a munitions factory yeah munitions factory in los angeles and she she's married very young i think kind of three weeks after her 16th birthday and her husband is drafted and goes abroad. Both of them are kind of very much involved in the Second World War. The husband is a soldier, she's working in a

munitions factory, and that's where she gets kind of talent spotted. And so she's unapologetic about the pinups. But also, interestingly, she gets photographed nude. And in due course, this becomes a great scandal, because when she's become a star you know the knowledge of these photographs become public and again rather than denying it she's you know she makes no apologies for it whatsoever yeah i mean i think actually uh there's no disgrace in being a pin-up girl so the two big pin-ups of the late 1930s and 1940s rita hayworth and betty grable i mean in way, they're not unrespectable figures. They're enormously popular kind of stars recognized not just in the United States, but all over the world. And that clearly is Marilyn's ambition. She thinks that she can be

a pinup, she can be a film star as they are a sex symbol. And that's when she starts doing things like she straightens her hair. She dyes her hair blonde. Now, again, biographers have sort of taken the dyeing of her hair blonde as this sort of Faustian bargain. Yeah. You know, she's lost touch with her authenticity. But of course, there are thousands upon thousands of women who are doing this at precisely this time because they want to become pinups or because they want to break into Hollywood

or whatever. I mean, what distinguishes her actually is not the fact that she's inauthentic or anything like that. Having a new name, having a new sort of hairdo is completely standard. I think it's that she works so hard. She's harder working than most. She's very, very professional and she's within the sort of boundaries of that world. she is smart. And she, you know, photographers say she's always looking to try and, you know, find the right angle. Yeah. She works harder than others, you know, all of those kinds of things.

Well, again and again, when you read about people who either photographed Marilyn or filmed her, they say there seemed to be nothing particularly impressive about her. And often they'll say she's quite chaotic. You think how on earth has she made it this way? And then they look at the rushes or they look at the stills and they say, she is just transcendently wonderful. There's a kind of amazing quote from Eve Arnold, who was the first woman to join,

I think the Magnum Photos Agency. So, you know, a woman who really knew what she was talking about. And she said that she never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. And clearly it's Marilyn's ability to appear on film that again, I guess, makes her a kind of archetypal figure that in a way she's exploiting the reach of this new technology in a way that no one else can quite equal and quite rival? Well, I mean, that's an interesting one. Can anybody else equal it? I mean, there had been big stars before. I mentioned two of them, Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. There would be other

big stars in the 1950s. I think other people do rival it. And actually, when you look at the sort of, they would do huge surveys of exhibitors, of the people who ran cinemas to see who were the biggest stars, who were the people who actually cinemas to see who were the biggest stars, who were the people who actually got people through the doors. Marilyn Monroe was never higher than fifth, and she only actually appears in the top 10 in two years, 1953 and 1954. So I think she was equaled in a sort of purely cinematic sort of capacity. But I think what makes her different is that she symbolizes more than anybody else, two elements of sort of womanhood that people are looking for in the 1940s during World War II, and then in the transition to kind of Eisenhower era

affluence. And they are a kind of sexual availability and a kind of voluptuousness and stuff. And the other is a kind of innocent girlishness. And obviously, you don't have to be a sort of brain surgeon to be able to locate those to the anxieties that are afflicting people in an era of wartime and dislocation and instability and so on. That men who are separated from their wives, from their families, are kind of craving an idealized kind of girlish but sexually available sort of fantasy figure, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely. But I do also think that the degree to which she remains to this day an icon, far more than any other female or indeed male actor from the period, is due reflection of her ability to look good on film. And I think that that's a quality that has enabled her image to be reproduced. And it's also why she's a key figure, not just in film, not just in magazines, but also in advertising, isn't she?

So as she does now, so back then, she could sell things to a ferocious degree. So I guess the most famous photo of her is dabbing Chanel No. 5, isn't it, on herself? Chanel, exactly. The fact that she's – well, the pin-up itself is a kind of consumerist – you know, it's a product, right? I mean, you buy pin-ups, you get them in magazines and so on. She's always kind of implicated in the world,

in the sort of booming world of American consumerism. And I do think that it's not just that she's advertising the product, but, of course, she is also the product. Well, I mean, yeah. So the seediest manifestation of that is that the nude photos for which she got paid $50 or something, they get bought by Hugh Hefner. He buys the negatives for $500. He slaps them all over Playboy and he makes millions from them.

So there's a story. Yeah. As we go towards the break, let's just get her into Hollywood, Tom. Yeah, so let's not end on that note. Yes, so she separates from her first husband, divorces him. Yeah.

She gets picked up by a range of talent agents, directors who recognize her talent. She starts to appear in major films. So Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which features the song that I impersonated so magnificently at the start of this episode. So, 1953 is really the year. She's done a few films in the early 50s, but 53, she did Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire. And I guess it's the combination of those three, isn't it? Because that's the first year, 53, in which she appears in this top 10 for the exhibitors.

And this poll based on, you know, who are the big stars of the day? So she's not as big, actually, as, you know, John Wayne or Gary Cooper. And she's not perhaps as... She doesn't have the prestige, nothing like the prestige of a Catherine Hepburn or somebody. But she would get people through the doors, I think, by the end of 1953 in a way that she wouldn't have done a couple of years earlier. And then it's the events that happen after that kind of leverage her to become more than just a film star and make her a cultural icon. So when we come back after the break, perhaps we'll look at that. We'll look at Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, and the Kennedys.

Very good. We'll see you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A,

we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestis rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to the rest is history we're talking about marilyn monroe and tom

you were saying so marilyn monroe is a film star by 1953 having started out as a pin-up but you were saying that it's that it's her associations that make her more than just a film star so the first is is joe dimaggio who she marries in january 1954 so joe dimaggio i mean he's a great baseball star isn't he and as a cricketer yourself you'll know presumably know all about this um of this this version of rounders that is popular in america he uh star star of the new York Yankees, Dominic. Yeah, I don't really follow baseball myself, Tom. No, but I mean, he's a hugely significant figure within baseball.

I mean, kind of massive, massive star. And his presumption when he, I mean, he falls very, very deeply in love with Marilyn. She loves him clearly. And I think always she's looking she seems to be looking for emotional rather than financial support would you say that's fair i mean she's although she plays gold diggers in you know in a whole number of films she clearly wasn't a gold digger um that wasn't what she was about and joe dimaggio is a very very sober, conservative figure, really. And so perhaps embodied, again, I'm kind of veering into

the psychoanalysis, it's almost impossible to avoid when talking about Marilyn, but perhaps she embodied a measure of solidity that she'd always been looking for. But the problem is that it begins to dawn on you that actually Marilyn is becoming a star that is putting his own fame slightly in the shadow. So they go on a tour to Japan where Joe DiMaggio is going to be doing some coaching. And she gets completely mobbed when they land in Tokyo. And at the press conference, it's all about her. It's not about DiMaggio. So you can see he's getting slightly cross about that. And then this is the time of the Korean War. And so Marilyn volunteers to go and entertain the troops in Korea, which she does brilliantly

because she, you said she's incredibly hardworking. I also think she's just a very lovable person. People love her and the troops adore her. And she comes back and she tells her husband, you have no idea what it's like to hear people cheering for you. That's right, yes. And he says, yes, I do. He thinks clearly that he, I mean, he's an old fashioned kind of Italian,

slightly conservative Italian American kind of blue collar guy, isn't he, Jody Maggio? Each of them, I think, thinks of the other as a, it's too harsh to say a sort of trophy spouse but there's an element of that she's the absolute you know the the stunning hollywood starlet that is now his wife from her point of view he is the sort of strong silent as you said the sort of enormously successful sports star and she knew nothing about sport she she knew nothing about she'd basically never heard of him so both of them are slightly challenged i think by the other's fame i mean the most famous

story about the two of them is that uh he's watching in absolute you know in a state of utter fury while she is being photographed in that or filmed in that enormously famous scene that they use to promote the seven-year itch when she's standing on the grating in Manhattan and the wind is blowing up her skirt. I have visited the very spot, Dominic. Have you? The last time I was in New York, I went and saw it. Yeah. And as gratings go, did it delight you?

It was a great grate. Very good. Yeah, but he doesn't like this at all, Jodie Maggio, does he? I mean, there are loads of people watching and he hates the idea of his wife being a kind of, you know, a fantasy for all these other people and a willing fantasy, I suppose. That's what he dislikes about it. And if he's objecting to that, then, I mean, in a way, it's his worst nightmare because, of course, that image, it's the photo shoot not really the film i mean it's a key part of the film but in a sense the fame of that image has been divorced from the

seven-year-age i watched the seven-year-age a couple of nights ago and it doesn't stand up it's a pretty terrible true of just to break off from the chronology isn't that one of the peculiar things about marilyn monroe that most of her films are barely watched today, that she has an afterlife that the films don't. Some Like It Hot, I think, is still watched. Some Like It Hot, I agree with you, is still watched. But do people watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? Do they watch Niagara? Do they watch The Misfits? Do they watch Bus Stop? I would say the answer to all those questions is a very, very firm no. And it's a weird thing that everybody recognizes Marilyn Monroe,

but probably of those people who recognize her, 90% have never seen and will never see one of her films. I mean, she's not appearing in absolutely sort of – the films she's appearing in are not top, top films, are they? They're not films that win Academy Awards in the 1950s. They're not necessarily box office sort of chart-topping films. She has a persona that goes well beyond the appeal of an individual picture i would say but again i think it's going back to what eve arnold said about about her ability to use a photograph to use you know the the synergy

between photograph and her image and her understanding of how how to make it work because that image is probably i i mean i would say that's the most famous image from a film would you say yeah i mean i can't think of anything more iconic of her with her skirt yeah it's one of the yeah i suppose it's one of the most famous but again what's that what does that image represent it's a kind of hedonism and available sexual availability it's it's new york as well i think it's new york but there's also a kind of hedonism and sexual availability. It's New York as well, I think. It's New York, but there's also a kind of innocence to it, but it's all obviously from a very, you know,

it's men who like that image, isn't it? I mean, I don't think women sort of line up to have a look at that grating. I think it's men who are titillated by it. Are you saying that I only went to the grate because I was titillated? Not at all, Dominic. It was a tour of midtown New York,

and it was mentioned, so I was titillated. Not at all, Dominic. It was a tour of midtown New York, and it was mentioned, so I went to see it. Tom, frankly, it makes a refreshingly red-blooded change from the tours of Roman walls in car parks, obscure pilgrimage sites, all these kinds of things. It gladdens my heart to hear that you're doing these kinds of tours as well. So talking of the the marriage of beauty and etiolated intellect of course yes she she um so she separates from jojo maggio very much like the dynamic in this podcast tom to be honest she separates she separates from jojo maggio yeah and her she she um she has a bust up with the studios in in um hollywood who have basically been ripping her off and she makes a point she essentially she goes to new york and she pursues interests that she'd never before had the opportunity to pursue so she she wants to become a

better actress i think she's a brilliant actress but she wants she she's always kind of crippled by a sense of insecurity um and so she she takes up method acting but she wants, she, she's always kind of crippled by a sense of insecurity. Um, and so she, she takes up method acting, uh, she takes up psychoanalysis. So these are all absolutely kind of archetypal fifties, New York intellectual pursuits. And it's there that she really starts to get on well with the great playwright of his day, the playwright, Arthur Miller. Um, and they end up together, uh, and it generates one of the great playwright of his day, the playwright Arthur Miller, and they end up together. And it generates one of the great headlines, Egghead Marries Hourglass. Yes.

But it's, so her marriage to Arthur Miller, though, and Dominic, you'll know much more about this than me, embroils her in the anxiety on the part of particularly the Republicans about communist, supposed communist infiltration into Hollywood. And one of the reasons that I guess that Marilyn gravitates towards JFK rather than say to Richard Nixon is that Nixon had been particularly involved with that, hadn't he?

Well, I'm not sure there's an alternative reality in which maybe there is. I mean, what a fantastic, fantastic fantasy that would be, which Marilyn Monroe has a relationship with Richard Nixon, one of the great lost couples of the 20th century. Yeah. So Arthur Miller, I mean, by far his most famous plays, Death of a Salesman, 1949, The Crucible, 1953. So he's already written his greatest works. And as you say, he is largely because of The crucible. He's identified with the sort of anti-McCarthyist, so the McCarthyist movement, the kind of the witch hunts, the red scares, the belief that America is being betrayed and sold out by communist subversives.

By the time she marries him, actually, McCarthyism has kind of passed its peak. So it's a little bit safer than it would have been four or five years earlier. It's still courageous, isn't it, that she stands by him at a time when people's careers are being cancelled? Or, you know, at least, I mean, she must have had the anxiety that it might have been. I think it reflects very well on her. I suppose so. I think you're enormously sort of, you're very keen on Marilyn Monroe. I know, Tom, so I don't want to say anything that will dampen your ardour. Please don't ruin it for me.

I don't think he is under any serious threat in the sort of, what is it, 1956 they get married? Yeah, but he doesn't have to be under serious threat for both of them to think that he is under threat. I suppose so. I mean, i think you're i think you're slightly exaggerating it to be honest i mean he's a hugely popular and respected figure in kind of new york intellectual circles the the great heat of mccarthyism has largely faded okay but fine what she is doing i'll i'll throw a swap to you she is identifying herself i suppose with um a particular american subculture in the mid-1950s yeah i mean he is you know he's jewish uh he's very much a kind of new york intellectual

kind of figure he moves in circles that are utterly different from those that she knew in los angeles in the kind of pit so in the pinup world or indeed the film world so she is sort of i mean to some extent this is part of her sort of crusade of self-improvement isn't it they're doing the psychoanalysis yeah doing the method acting with lee strasberg hanging around with arthur miller and his sort of boffin friends reading dostoevsky and ulysses exactly all of this sort of stuff this is all about this is all part of her upward trajectory people did sneer at it at the time and they laughed at it and they said oh this this this sort of thick dumb blonde but she was never thick she was incredibly smart no and i don't think it's just um my my devotion to marilyn making me say that i mean you can see she's a very very witty

woman and well i mean she's not incredibly smart tom i mean she's she's quite smart she's she's smart and her understanding of the dynamics of the world that she's in is is very very clear so why shouldn't she enjoy dostoevsky well i think that's fine i think there is there's probably a middle ground so i think is it john houston who said of her... Yeah, he thought she was quite smart. The great director, John Huston, he said on the other hand, he said she was tremendously pretentious. She had done a lot of shit-ass studying in New York,

but she acted as if she never understood why she was funny, and that was precisely what made her so funny. Yeah, but Dominic, this is for the same reason you don't like John Lennon. Very similar trajectory, going off to New York, being pretentious. No, I think there's a – I wouldn't put her in the same basket as Lennon, Tom.

I mean, I wouldn't do that. Anyway, listen. I mean, by my standards, that is – High praise indeed, yes. Very high praise. So anyway, she returns to – oh, she has a disaster trip to England. She goes to London toon to um the prince and the showgirl with lawrence olivier so it's a terrorist erratic and play and olivier absolutely

despises her doesn't he let's be honest i mean he he has no time for it at all yes he is sexy dear marilyn he doesn't have any time for method acting olivier um as he famously said to dustin hoffman dustin hoffman was doing marathon man him and explaining how he ran marathons all the time and he did all this to practice for it and all this. And he got into the character and Olivier supposedly said to him, my dear boy, have you never thought of acting? I don't think it's Marilyn's method acting that annoys him. I think it's the slight quality of the chaotic that he finds infuriating. But again, it's this kind of magic that she has that when they, again, when they look at the rushes

and they put the film together, her performance is transcendent and much, I think, much better than Olivier's. Well, Olivier says that himself. But she, I think, acts him off the screen. Well, he says that later on, he put on the film for friends thinking they would all laugh at it and laugh at her and he said by the time it was over you know it was very clear that she'd been by far the best person in it and um and he admits

that himself to do him credit so i don't think it's yeah um there is definitely a degree of kind of auteur from him when she comes over this sort of American blonde bombshell. Ha ha ha. She's saying big words that she doesn't understand. But to do him credit, I think he came to recognize

his own mistake. Anyway, she goes back to... Well, no, hold on, Dominic. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

Because also she meets the Queen. Born in the same year, of course, 1926. Born in the same year. And supposedly she

had a lesbian fling with Brigitte Bardot at the reception for the Queen. That's absolutely balderdash, isn't it? That's one of those stories that's completely made up. I know, but I just thought I'd put it out there. Yeah, I knew you'd love a story like that.

No, not at all. But it's all about the intersection of royalty and Hollywood and French sophistication. And the intersection point makes a story like that irresistible so i think that that's kind of interesting demonstration of how when you have the ingredients people just can't resist mixing them all up and generating a fantastical concoction i just throw that out there fantastical concoction so by this point actually the funny thing is that by this point 1956 1957 i mean she's probably more famous than she's ever been. And yet you could argue that there were the shining exception of Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder film get bums on seats in American cinemas. And actually, Some Like It Hot is the only film that she has yet to make

that anybody ever watches today. I mean, that's pretty much right, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. She's got about six years to live. But actually, those six years are pretty unhappy years one way or another. I mean, she's becoming increasingly dependent on pills and drugs the lateness the endless demanding endless retakes you know it's actually a fairly it's it's a sort of you don't have to see it through the lens of her death and to you know with this sort of teleology

knowing that the sort of her doom is fast approaching to see it as actually a pretty standard holly Hollywood story of somebody who's had this tremendous rise, this peak, and now the decline begins. Or do you think I'm being too harsh, Tom? No, I don't think so. She makes this film, The Misfits, that's been written by Arthur Miller. And it's a kind of pretentious Western, I guess would be the best way to describe it. And she doesn't really like it.

She doesn't like the script and she doesn't like the, because it's clearly it's Miller's portrayal of his wife and she doesn't like the portrayal. And we should say as well that while in England, she's supposedly seen a diary entry that miller had written um criticizing her which is conventionally cast as a kind of mortal blow to her relationship and and the misfits was kind of designed to be the film that would showcase her as a kind of great tragic actress and it doesn't really work and it's part of of the, it contributes to the disintegration of her marriage to Miller.

And so they separate. And so she's back on her own again. Would you go so far as to say that she is, she doesn't like being alone? I mean, she's nervous of being alone. I think she's needy. I think most people say that she's quite a needy person, which is not unreasonable. I mean, there are lots of needy people. And I mean, to delve once more into the sort of murky waters of amateur psychology. is quite a needy person which is not unreasonable i mean there are lots of needy people and i mean

to delve once more into the sort of murky waters of amateur psychology yes well that's what i was worrying that you'd accuse me of doing but it's fine when i do it tom i mean well yes go ahead um no but i mean she's somebody who's had a troubled or or a background with a pretty high degree of instability so it makes sense that she would crave a degree of stability. And you're right, she's not good at being on her own. Her health is pretty awful. She's popping pills like nobody's business by this point. Yeah, and she suffers quite badly from endometriosis, for example.

She's taking a lot of pills. Again, these things are not – because she dies in 1962, we read everything backwards so we say oh she's popping pills therefore she's on a downward spiral that will end in disaster but of course lots of people are taking a lot of pills barbiturates are very common in hollywood and in new york um at the turn of the 1960s so that doesn't make her tremendously unusual i would say no no but and and also you say that i mean after some like it hot her films slightly go off the boil but her ability to situate herself in the kind of the crosshairs

of american life remains unexampled so she becomes very close to uh to frank sinatra probably the the biggest name in music in the world at the time, and the Rat Pack, and of course, Rumored Affairs with Bobby Kennedy, the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Okay, so this obviously transforms her historical reputation, doesn't it? Her posthumous reputation. I mean, we see her entire life now through the lens of those Kennedy, supposed Kennedy relationships. Here's what I think about those. John F. Kennedy was a man who had an enormous number of affairs, whether he was, you know, people have different sort of theories about why actually, is it because he suffers from Addison's disease and his horrendous kind of health complaints, and

therefore he's trying to blot out the pain? Is it because has this kind of do I just say new year yes or is it just that he's you know an extremely good-looking kind of slightly oversexed sort of bloke in 1960s America Marilyn Monroe I think without any doubt had a liaison with him or multiple liaisons it almost certainly wasn wasn't a love affair. There's no reason to believe that it was. And there's no reason to believe that there's anything especially, actually, even that exciting about it. It's only a sort of prurient voyeurism that has elevated this into something. I don't think it's just voyeurism though, is it? It's the conspiracy theory. It's the sense that there are deep truths and the fact that she then dies. Yeah, I know. But I mean, Sarah Churchill is very good about this. She sort of says, that there are deep truths and the fact that she then dies yeah i know but i mean sarah churchill

is very good about this she sort of says maybe they were just having an affair because you know they quite fancied each other and you know saw each other a few times and and that's an end to it that's not unheard of in the history of the human race of course but but because she's having an affair with kennedy and with sinatra and so not you know she goes having an affair with Kennedy and with Sinatra, and she goes to hang out with Sinatra in places that are clearly funded by the mafia. So Sinatra gives her a dog and she calls it Math after the mafia. So she's very much aware of all this. So she is an intersection point between the mafia and JFK. And that, I think, is why it's become part of the broader narrative

generated by Kennedy's assassination the year after Marilyn's death. And what about Bobby Kennedy? I've always found that story a tiny bit more implausible, actually. It's actually the more common one that people tell. So people get very excited about the thought that she had an affair with the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. And, in fact, you will often read in this sort of more exploitative biographies that they were this tremendous love affair and they were this sort of couple that was separated by fate and all this

kind of thing. I mean, you could hardly think of two more different personalities than Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Robert Kennedy was a very controlled, intense, serious kind of man, who was his brother's hatchet man, actually, this time in his career, as sort of in JFK's campaign in 1960, and then as his attorney general. Robert Kennedy also had a colossal amount of children within a very short period of time, because he's a very kind of serious Catholic. So he's got about 27 kids. I mean, just a preposterous number of children. I don't know i think the the trouble the thing about the affair with robert kennedy is there is literally no evidence at all so all

there is is gossip that is so that's constantly sort of you know recirculated and all the different biographies but there's no kind of documentary evidence that they had this relationship it's just that pure supposition but but the same is true of roswell of course well yeah yes it's about the same level as roswell i think it's fair to say tom i think that's a very good comparison yeah yeah and so that's that this is the background kennedy's sinatra that is providing the context for the years the months the days that leads up to her death. Right. I mean, the big thing that happens in the run up to her death that everybody will remember is she sings happy birthday to Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. His birthday, he has this sort of premature birthday celebration.

And I think it's the 19th of May, 1962. And she is squeezed into this incredibly sort of sexy figure hugging-hugging dress and she sings in a very sort of breathy kind of way breathy exactly it was a breathy way i mean it's just a very um this sort of you know overtly sexualized way happy birthday mr president and for everybody in the know i mean it's they think it think it's quite close to the bone. It's quite on the nose. It's quite funny that she's almost publicly flaunting the fact that they've had a relationship.

But again, had she not died several months later, and had he then not died and had a second term as president and been embroiled in Vietnam, would this be this sort of doomed moment i mean obviously it wouldn't be but but it did and so it is i mean yes fair enough fair enough that's that's the whole point i mean the point entirely taken but she does die and she kind of dies she dies at the age of 36 the same age that byron died um and and it's that that enables her to you know she doesn't grow old but but what don't you think that what you think of the death colors the entire story of course absolutely you back project it absolutely completely you back project the

whole thing or if you think that she committed suicide because she's so miserable and unhappy of course she's been a victim all her life she's being murdered by by bobby kennedy or jfk or the mafia or i mean of course absolutely i mean you but listeners will not be surprised that i do not think she was murdered by the mafia do you think it was bobby kennedy then i don't think she's murdered by the kennedys donald spoto one of her biographers, has a complicated theory about that basically is that it boils down to it being an accident. Sarah Churchwell, I think, thinks it was probably an accident. That seems as likely as anything to me. I mean, the truth is, again, we cannot know. So anybody who tells you they know is wrong, is just wrong, because we

cannot know. But i think the most likely thing is that she's taking an awful lot of pills of various kinds and she probably takes an accidental overdose i mean again it's hardly uncommon among hollywood film stars rock stars and so on of the 1960s and 1970s is it i mean but i said so people compare her to Elvis or to Jim Morrison or whatever, you know, famous people who die young. But I think that she's much better thought of as part of that nexus of weird conspiracy. So I mentioned Roswell. I think it's not. I think she has become part of that kind of industry of conspiracy theories. But because she, you know, she, it's not just that she was intimate with key, key, you know,

Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra. I mean, these are titanic figures in the culture of mid-century America. But also that she is so beautiful and she dies young. And I think I'm right that the first of the screen prints that Warhol does is of Marilyn. So she sets the blazes the path for all the other Chairman Mao's and Elizabeth II and all the other ones that he'll go on to do. Sarah Churchill is brilliant on this, on how the moment she dies and maybe even before she's died the myth is cannibalizing her the real marilyn and and so it has always done and and i think that the degree you know the the fact that um someone can be cannibalized to the degree that she has been tells us a lot about the evolution of

of popular culture and media over the decades that have followed her death, don't you think? I think that's true. I think the timing is really important. So she dies in 1962, in the summer of 1962. Kennedy dies in the autumn of 1963. So they're quite compressed. Robert Kennedy dies in 1968, the same year as Martin Luther King.

Both Marilyn Monroe and John F kennedy died before the 60s took you know what in sort of narrative terms are their sort of dark downward turn so they both die before the war in vietnam really comes to dominate the headlines they die before the civil rights movement before the sort of the the marches and the martyrdom give way to kind of to the riots in 1967, 68. Yeah, and assassinations until violence comes to dominate the headlines, rather than, let's say, justice, if you like. So I think... Do you think that that gets back projected, the sense that there is a kind of violence within American public life that devours its own. I mean, I think to some degree, to some degree, I suppose you could say that violence was always there,

simmering below the surface. But I think you're right that these are sort of, these now in the sort of standard pop cultural narrative become kind of great harbingers of doom, don't they? The death of Marilyn Monroe and the death of John F. Kennedy. So if Marilyn had lived, if it was an accident and the accident had not happened, what would her life have looked like in the later 1960s and 1970s? She would presumably have done other films, but not probably very successful films. She would have been yesterday's woman. She'd have been left behind by, I don't know, Faye Dunaway or younger kind of stars

who were very different kind of image of sexuality. Well, I think you look at Elizabeth Taylor, don't you think? Yeah, exactly, Elizabeth Taylor. So what happens to Elizabeth Taylor would have been her, Marilyn's parabola, I guess. Yeah. I mean, this may annoy some listeners who are very attached to Marilyn Monroe, but you can imagine the future in which she'd,

she's walking around in 1972 and it's, she's kind of blousy. There's a lot of booze. She hasn't made a film in five years. Directors say she's impossible to work with. You know, she's thrown off a flight. The story kind of writes itself.

She's got off with Richard Nixon at last. Yes. The couple that was meant to be. Yeah, I mean, I think because she's cut down when she is in 1962, she becomes the symbol of a kind of lost innocence, I suppose, doesn't she? Because, of course, this is the point up to the 1960s, sexuality and sort of sex is framed very much in terms of kind of increasing availability and visibility and so on. And this sort of, there's no sense or very much less of a sense of it being politically conflicted as it becomes later in the 1960s and then the 1970s. So you talked earlier

about her as a sort of feminist figure, but really that sort of 60s feminism has yet to get underway by the time of her death. And it's interesting to think about how she would be perceived. How would she have adapted to that world? Would she have continued to kind of improve herself, as it were, and to sort of ride the wave? Or would she have been left behind? Would she have been a relic of a sort of slightly discredited, shop-soiled kind of 50s world? Well, I suppose the brutal truth is that people probably wouldn't care what she thought, actually. Do people care what Elizabeth Taylor thought?

Probably not. The weird thing is that she wouldn't be the icon that she is now, right? I mean, if the blousiness and the being kicked off Concord had happened in 1976, you know, Gap or, I mean, Gap used her image in the 1990s. Would they have used it in the 1990s no of course they wouldn't because they don't use elizabeth taylor now no i agree but that's i mean that and so that's why she was so you know why the um candle in the wind could so readily be adapted by elton john to the death of diana as well i mean i think in some ways the funny thing about

marilyn munro is that she's become so confused with the Kennedy story, hasn't she? Oh, with the Kennedy story. With Diana as well, yeah. Do you know, I mean, she's, well, I mean, that's the interesting thing about Marilyn Monroe, that we could talk for sort of three hours

and there are lots of different kind of angles into the story. But actually the funny thing is, what is so often missing, what we struggle to get a sense of is actually the woman herself, isn't it? Because a lot of what we've talked about in this podcast has been about iconography, about symbolism. But the actual, the reality of the woman is really hard to get at, I think.

Well, I called her lovable. Every biography of her I've read, whenever she's allowed to speak in her own voice, she comes across as very smart, very funny, very likable. I mean, clearly quite difficult. I mean, she was a Hollywood diva. But I think the most kind of personally attractive of all Hollywood stars, all the big Hollywood stars. You think so? I do. Yeah, I do.

You'd rather go for dinner with Marilyn Monroe than with Grace Kelly, Tom? I think I probably would, yeah. Okay. Well, on that, you and I would differ. So I suppose, Dominic, I mean, essentially, you know, if we want to sum up what this episode's been about, in a very real sense, she was like a candle in the wind. Is that what you'd say? Oh, Tom, that's painful. That's painful. I think she's a fascinating... She's an example of the challenges of biography on the one hand, and trying to make sense to fit into a historical narrative, the life of a complicated individual. But she's also a brilliant way to talk about 50s and 60s America. And actually,

we will be coming back almost exactly a year from now. So that's a long time for listeners to wait, but we will be finally returning to the subject of the Kennedy assassination in won't we, in 2023 for the anniversary. And I'm really looking forward to that because we can go into it in depth and talk about all the conspiracy theories. All of you who listen, who espouse one particular theory or other, you'll all find something to offend you and to, as we dismiss all the theories. As we reveal the truth.

And we reveal the real truth. Frank Sinatra killing JFK because he'd murdered Marilyn. The truth will out. The truth is out there and we will reveal it. Thanks very much for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

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