Platinum Myth: Episode Two - The Blonde Ambition: Image as Power

She posed nude for fifty dollars — and the men who later built empires on that photo never paid her a cent or asked her permission. This is the story of how Marilyn Monroe engineered the most famous image in the world, and how it became both her greatest weapon and her prison.

Sources:

Before Marilyn: The Blue Book Modeling Years by Astrid Franse and Michelle Morgan

Icon: The Life, Times, and Films of Marilyn Monroe Volume One 1926 to 1956 by Gary Vitacco-Robles

Marilyn Monroe by Maurice Zolotow

Marilyn: The Lost Photographs, The Last Interview by Richard Meryman

Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto

My Story by Marilyn Monroe with Ben Hecht

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli

The Thinking Body by Mabel Elsworth Todd

Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hello, and welcome to That's a Creative Art, a podcast that celebrates classic films, pop culture moments, and fascinating histories that define Hollywood's golden age. I'm your host, Megan Driscoll. And today we continue Platinum Myth, Inventing Marilyn Monroe, with our second episode, The Blonde Ambition, Image as Power. Last episode, we ended in 1953. Norma Jean had completed her transformation into Marilyn Monroe, and three films, Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire, had made her into the biggest star in the world. I told you that she had created a persona, and that the persona would eventually take over her life. But here's what I want you to sit with today. None of it was an accident. The hair, the voice, the walk, the wiggle, the breathless little answers she gave to reporters. Maril Monroe didn't stumble into being a sex symbol. She engineered it, she studied it, built it, maintained it, and deployed it with more strategic intelligence than most studio executives gave her credit for. And at the same time, and this is the part that makes her story so complicated. The very same image she built was constantly being taken from her. Used without her permission, sold without her consent. It made a fortune for everyone else except for the woman whose image it was. And today's episode, we will cover both of these things. Because with Marilyn, both things are always true at once. Calendars. I want you to hold on to that word. Because the story of Marilyn Monroe and the image, the whole story actually, begins with a calendar. In 1949, Marilyn Monroe was 22 years old, going by Marilyn Monroe for about three years now, and her career was going nowhere. Columbia has just dropped her, Fox dropped her before that. Johnny Hyde was working on her behalf, but the big breaks, such as the asphalt jungle and all about Eve, haven't happened yet. She is living off modeling jobs that were getting fewer and farther between. She would forego eating in order to pay for acting classes. Sometimes a man would feel sorry for her and buy her a meal. Donald Spouto claims that Marilyn was a callgirl at this time, but others have dismissed this claim. At this time, she was staying at the Hollywood Studio Club, a boarding house for aspiring actresses that provided a room and meals. Think of it as the 1937 Catherine Hepburn film Stage Door, but just not as dramatic. By the time of this fateful event, depending on which biographer you read, or which story Marilyn has told, she was either behind on her rent and could be evicted, or behind on her car payments and her car was being repossessed. No matter which version, she claimed she needed $50 and she didn't want to ask any other people, such as Johnny Hyde, for help. The photographer for the calendar images was Tom Kelly. Marilyn had worked with him before. She had posed for a few beer advertisements he shot. On multiple occasions, Kelly had told her if she wanted to make some extra money, he could always use a model for what was politely called art photography. To put it plainly, nudes. But for calendars. She always rejected this offer. Nice girls don't do nudes. And Miss Snively had taught her that good models should never pose nude. Let me point out an inconsistency here. Was Marilyn nervous to pose nude? Possibly. Would it be her first time posing nude? Absolutely not. By this time, Marilyn had been posing nude for photographer Earl Moran, whom she met through Blue Book Models for at least three years now. She would pose in multiple positions, bare back to the camera with just some short shorts on, using her hands or arms to discreetly hide her breast, or just plain topless. The reason Marilyn possibly felt comfortable with these images, and why they didn't seem to cause a scandal later on, was because Earl Moran would usually take these photographs as a template to create pastel paintings for pinup magazines or glamour calendars. In a few paintings available online, you can see he would change Marilyn's hair color and some facial features to disguise that it was her. These photos would not be published until a couple decades after Marilyn's death. In all places, Playboy. So it's quite interesting to hear her talk about how uncomfortable she was with the shoot since she's been posing nude for the past few years. However, by May 1949, she needed her car, and that's the story we're going with here, in order to go to auditions around town. So the next time Kelly offered, she accepted. But she had conditions. Kelly's wife Natalie had to be present in the studio for the entire session, and she wanted to be shot in a way where she wouldn't be easily recognized. The session took approximately two to three hours. She posed on a spread of red velvet, and Kelly later said she moved with such ease that the whole thing felt less like a nude chute and more like a dance. He would tell Zolitau he played Artie Shaw's version of Begin the Begin during the shoot. Quote, I find it's a good number for getting a naked girl in a sexual mood. In my experience, I know of no other piece of music that can arouse sexual vibrations faster than Artie Shaw's recording of Begin the Begin. After it was finished, she was paid her $50, she signed the mono release Mona Munro, which is interesting because Mona was her niece's name. I still find it fascinating that she gave a fake name. Yes, she wanted to keep her anonymity and avoid a future scandal, but by this time she was already recognizable. She had been on an endless amount of magazine covers, especially men's magazines. And she had recently been second-billed in a small feature film, Ladies of the Chorus, her first major role that got noticed by the critics. Anyone could have made the connection. But seeing that she was not under contract and still wanted to be an actress, it was understandable that she didn't want to jeopardize future opportunities. Kelly took 24 photos and sold two photographs to a calendar company for $500. One of the poses, called Golden Dreams, ended up printed on calendars that hung up in barbershops, garages, and gas stations across America. It became one of the best-selling calendar images of all time. The calendar company made a fortune off of it. Estimates run well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's in 1950. Again, Marilyn's total lifetime earning on this one photograph was $50. So the calendar goes out into the world and nothing happens. Nobody knows the girl on the red velvet curtains. Why would they? She's a nobody. Marilyn gets Asphalt Jungle, then All About Eve, and then she gets her contract back with Fox and starts climbing again. 1950 and 1951 go by, her fan mail starts growing, magazine covers start multiplying, and Fox is starting to realize they might have something. And then in 1952, whispers start going around Hollywood. That nude who's on that calendar, is that Marilyn Monroe? I want to make sure the stakes are clear here. Because in 2026, it's generally hard to imagine a nude photo ending a career. But in 1952, it was apocalyptic. This was an era of morality clauses, of production code, of Hollywood still trembling from scandals it hasn't recovered from. The public image of an actress was an asset the studio owned and policed. A star could be destroyed for a divorce, for a drink, for a neckline. An actual nude photograph? Sold on calendars hanging in gas stations? There was no playbook for this, because no one has ever been so stupid enough to need one. And just to drive home the double standard, let me tell you about Robert Mitchum. In 1948, Robert Mitchum was arrested for marijuana possession in a full-blown sting, photographed mopping floors in jail, the whole circus. His career? Fine. Arguably better. The bad boy thing worked for him, it gave him an edge, and was a career-defying moment. Now let's look at the other actor involved in this scandal. 20-year-old actress Lila Leeds. An MGM contract player who had had a few bit roles. It was her house the police raided, and the press deemed her house a marijuana shack. After being released from prison, no one would hire her. She only did one film before she left acting for good, and that was an exploitation anti-drug film called She Should've Said No, hoping to capitalize on the scandal. But Mitchum became the king of Noir, of course, after starring in a wholesome Christmas film with Janet Lee. So when the rumors reached 20th Century Fox, the executives went into full panic mode, and their solution was a standard one. Deny everything. Say it isn't you. Say it's some other blonde. Kill the story. Marilyn said no. Now, biographer Contradiction Time, who actually made the decision to tell the truth? Donald Spotto and others gave significant credit to Marilyn herself, with her friend, columnist Sidney Skolsky, advising her. Other accounts give credit to the Fox publicity men, Harry Brand and Roy Kraft, who supposedly realized that honesty was the only story they could control. As usual, everyone in the room remembered being the smartest person in it, and as usual, I noticed that the woman whose career was on the line is the one biographers are quick to write out of her own decision. But here's what's not in dispute. The story that went out was hers, and it was a masterpiece. Marilyn sat down with a reporter from United Press named Aileen Mosby and gave her the scoop, exclusively on her own terms. The framing was perfect. She did not apologize, she did not grovel, she did not do a tearful confession. She told the truth, saying she had been broke, needed money. She told Mosby she was behind on her rent, and a photographer she trusted had offered her a job. And then she added, quote, besides, I'm not ashamed of it. I've done nothing wrong. That's it. That's the whole defense. I was poor, I did a job, I'm not ashamed. In America? Well, they agreed with her. The sympathy was immediate and overwhelming. Because what was the actual story once she told it that way? A hungry orphan girl abandoned by every adult who was supposed to protect her, alone in Los Angeles, chose to pose for an art photo over losing the car she needed to survive. Who exactly was supposed to throw the first stone at her? The men who had been buying the calendars? And then she did the thing that turned a survive scandal into a legend. The jokes. A reporter asked her, and you can feel the smirk in the question, what she had on during the shoot. And Marilyn said, I had the radio on. That line went around the world. It's still going around today. And listen to what it's doing. Because this is Marilyn Monroe's one-two punch in its purest form. It sounds like a Ditzy Blonde misunderstanding the question. It's actually a flawless surgical deflection that refuses the shame the question is trying to hand her, delivered with comic timing most professional comedians would kill for. The dumb answer was the smartest possible answer. Nobody ever asked her about shame again. What would be the point? She's already won. Same era, same playbook. A reporter asked what she wore to bed. Answer? Chanel number five. Those words. An entire persona. Coco Chanel should have paid her a commission for the rest of her life. And knowing what we know about Marilyn's luck with compensation, of course she didn't get one. Now here's the receipt that proves the gamble paid off. The calendar story broke in March of 1952. On April 7th, 1952, a month later, Marilyn Monroe was on the cover of Life magazine. The headline, Marilyn Monroe, The Talk of Hollywood. The scandal that was supposed to end her career put her on the cover of one of the most important magazines in America. They even published one of the nudes in the magazine, while pointing out that though she plays a dumb blonde, she's far from it. It would seem many people would gloss over that excerpt. Now Fox, who weeks earlier had been drafting denials, went ahead and gave her Niagara, her first starring vehicle, the film we talked about last episode, the one with the longest walk in cinema history. The scandal didn't survive her. She survived the scandal, ate it, and got stronger. But 1952 wasn't done testing her. Just a couple months later, a columnist named Erskine Johnson broke another story. Marilyn Monroe's mother was alive. This contradicted Fox's biography on Marilyn Monroe. It stated that both of her parents were dead. That was a lie that the studio invented and Marilyn went along with. Now it was unraveling, and the star lied about her dead mother is not a good headline. She ran the same play. She admitted it immediately and plainly. Her statement explained that her mother had spent years in state hospitals, that as a child Marilyn never really knew her, and that she was now helping to support her. Honest, sympathetic, and human. And the story soon fizzled out. Because once you admit everything, there's nothing left to expose. Twice in one year, this 25-year-old woman, whom the entire industry considered a brainless body, had outmaneuvered the scandal machine that had been ending careers for the past 30 years. Color blonde in mid-century America was not just a hair color, it was a brand. It had three decades of accumulated meaning already attached to it. The lineage runs straight to the woman we keep coming back to in this series, Jean Harlow. Remember, Grace had practically raised Norma Jean on Harlow. She was the original. In fact, the term platin literally comes from her 1931 movie of the same name. Harlow's blonde was something new on screen, luminous, almost white, openly artificial. And that artificiality was the point. Nobody believed it was natural and nobody cared. It announced sex from across the room. And then Harlow died in 1937, at the age of 26. After Harlow came Betty Grable, the blonde next door, the GI's pinup, the legs, sweeter, safer, wartime blonde. But by 1950, Grable was aging out and the slot was open. Marilyn applied for the job and then rebuilt the entire office. And layered on top of the hair was the trope, the dumb blonde. That goes back to Anita Luce's 1925 novel, Gentlemen's Prefer Blondes. Yes, the same one. And its heroine, Laura Liley, the Golding Blonde, whose ditziness may or may not be an act. Vaudeville ran on the Dumb Blonde. Radio ran on her as well. By the 1950s, she was a fixed American archetype, beautiful, available, fairly sentient. The assumption baked into the culture was simple, that pretty much beauty and a working brain cannot coexist in the same woman. You must pick one. Marilyn looked at that stereotype and saw something that nobody else saw. She saw a costume, a disguise, possibly the best disguise ever invented. Because if everyone is certain you're stupid, nobody watches what you're actually doing. You can negotiate, study, plan, maneuver, all in plain sight, and the room will just still be looking at your neckline. The dumb blonde is a one-way mirror, and Marilyn was the only one who knew which side she was standing on. And the timing, the cultural moment she walked into, could not have been better. Post-war America was having a full-scale nervous breakdown about sex. The Kinsey Report on Men dropped in 1948, the Women's Report in 1953, and the country discovered in clinical print that Americans were doing all the things they were loudly pretending not to do. The whole culture was caught between the picket fence and the pinup. And Marilyn arrived precisely on that fault line. Sexuality so warm, so funny, so seemingly innocent, that it let everyone else off the hook. She made desire feel wholesome. That was the product. Nobody else could manufacture it. Believe me, every studio in town tried. We'll meet the assembly line of imitations later in the series, and the reason you can't name most of them is the whole point. Which brings us to December 1953. And the moment the image proved it can be stolen. There was a 27-year-old man in Chicago named Hugh Hefner. He was working off a card table in his kitchen, trying to launch a men's magazine. He had no money, no name, and no star. What he had was an idea and a checkbook with about enough in it to make one good purchase. And he knew exactly what he wanted to buy. He went to the calendar company and bought the publishing rights to Golden Dreams, the red velvet photo, for $500. In December 1953, the first issue of Playboy hit newsstands. On the cover, Merrill Monroe, waving In a photo from a parade appearance. Inside, as the first ever quote, sweetheart of the month, the nude calendar photo. The issue didn't even have a date printed on the cover. Hugh Hefner was not even sure there would be a second one. However, it sold over 50,000 copies. So there was a second issue. And 700 more. And an empire. The magazine, the clubs, the mansion, all built on the foundation of that first issue. Marilyn was never asked. Marilyn was never paid. Marilyn never consented. Marilyn never even met Hugh Hefner. Not once ever in her life. The most famous men's magazine in history was founded on her body, her image, and the transaction did not involve her at any point. That math again. Tom Kelly got $500. The calendar company made a fortune. Hugh Hefner paid $500 to build an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Marilyn, only $50 in 1949 just to get by. I'm sorry, but I have to tell you the ending of the Hefner story, even though we're gonna jump several decades to it, because it's the most on-the-nos metaphor in this series, and I've refused to sit on it until the end of the series. In 1992, Hugh Hefner bought the burial crypt directly beside Merrill Monrose at Westwood Memorial Park for $75,000. He told the press, quote, spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up. He would die in 2017, and that's where he is right now. The man who launched his fortune off her naked body without her knowledge or consent purchased the space next to that body forever. Again, she wasn't asked this time either. I mean, how could she be? And 64 years after her death, men are still buying real estate on Marilyn Monroe. And they're not asking. Believe me, we'll get to those creeps later. Despite this, Marilyn knew how to manufacture her image. She understood her appeal to the public more than anyone else. Here's how she managed it. First, the image itself was a discipline. People talk about Marilyn like the camera just loved her. Like it was magic, pheromones, luck. Listen to the people who actually worked with her. And a completely different picture emerges, one of relentless, technical, professional study. Remember Emmeline Snively from the last episode? Telling us how she'd never seen a model work so hard? That work never stopped. Marilyn studied her photographs the way a quarterback studies game film. Photographers described her going through the contact sheets, frame by frame, ruthlessly, asking why this angle or this position worked and why this one didn't. She knew her good side. She knew her lighting. I mean, she knew her lighting. Cinematographers told stories about her sensing when the key light was wrong before they ever did. She could feel where the light was on her face. That is not pheromones. That is a craft. Learn the same way that anyone else learns their craft. Years of deliberate obsessive repetition that she let absolutely no one see. Because here's the thing she understood, maybe a decade before anyone else in Hollywood did. The still photograph is an empire. Movies came and went from theaters, but a photograph was forever. Everywhere. Magazine covers, fan walls, locker doors, calendars, my sister's bedroom wall decades later. Marilyn treated the still image as the primary product, with the movies almost as advertising for it. The industry had that exactly backwards. And it's why the industry never understood who she was. And then there's the walk. Last episode I told you that whenever reporters asked Marilyn where the wiggle came from, she gave a different answer every time. She walked that way since childhood, she learned it in modeling, or maybe it was just the character. So today let's actually line up the competing origin stories because the walk has its own little biography, and naturally, the accounts contradict each other. Story one comes from modeling school. Emmeline Snively claimed that the walk was pure anatomy. According to Miss Snively, Norma Jean was double-jointed in the knees, her knees locked with every step, and the locking threw her hips into that sway. She couldn't walk any other way if she tried. It's a lovely story. Also a convenient one, you'll notice, coming from the woman whose modeling agency got to claim it discovered the most famous walk in the 20th century. Story two comes from Hollywood columnist Jimmy Starr, who claimed that Marilyn manufactured it, that she quote, learned the trick of cutting a quarter of an inch off one heel. One heel was shorter than the other. So every step lands uneven and rolls the hips. In some retellings, the quarter inch grows to a half inch. Because no Maryland story ever shrinks in the retelling. Biographers have argued about this one for 70 years, and I just want to point out by this time, no one has ever produced these shoes. And then there's story three, the one almost nobody told, because it doesn't fit either version of her. Not the Born Bombshell or the Calculating Fake. She read a book. It's called The Thinking Body by Mabel Ellsworth Todd, published in 1937. And it's not a glamour manual, it's an anatomy text. A dense, serious study of the skeletal mechanics, balance, and breath, how the body actually moves bone by bone when it moves well. Dancers studied it, movement teachers still study it today. And so did Marilyn Monroe. It sat in her library, underlined, and she credited it with teaching her how her own body worked. Todd has this image of imagining yourself suspended from above, the whole skeleton hanging free. And you can see it in the way Marilyn seems to float through a room, while everything below the waist is doing something else entirely. I don't know where they get these things, Marilyn would later say. I've never been double-jointed, I've never had an accident, I walk the way I've always walked. I've walked this way ever since I was eleven or twelve. And Arthur Miller would attest to this statement. He believed her walk was completely natural, stating, her footprints on the beach would be in a straight line, the heel descending exactly before the last toe print, throwing her pelvis into emotion. So which is it? The double-jointed knees, the sabotage heel, or the anatomy textbook? Honestly, I think the answer is the same answer this whole episode keeps giving us. Whatever nature handed her, she studied it, she refined it, and weaponized it. The walk the entire world wrote off as God-given, or as a cheap shoe trick, was at least partly the product of a woman alone at night with a 1937 anatomy textbook, deconstructing her own skeleton like an engineer. And while everyone argued about her knees or her heels, no one ever thought to ask what she was reading, which by 1952 was exactly how she liked it. And the proof of that is all in the craft. The single piece of evidence we have is that she can turn it off. There's a story, and it comes in a few versions depending on who's telling it. Susan Strasberg tells it, the actor Eli Wallach tells it, the writer Norman Rostin tells it, which honestly makes me trust it more. Because they're all describing the same phenomenon independently. Marilyn is walking through Manhattan with a friend. No makeup, scarf covering her hair, a regular coat. Nobody recognizes her. Not even a glance. The most famous woman on the planet is invisible on the public street because the woman on the street is essentially Norma Jean. And then she turns to her companion and asks, Do you want to see me be her? And then she changes. The people who saw it struggle to describe exactly what changed. The posture, the walk, something switching behind those eyes. She didn't put on any makeup, she didn't remove the scarf, she just became Marilyn Monroe. And within moments, she was recognized and then mobbed. Traffic was stopping, a crowd was forming, out of nothing. Her. Let's sit with that pronoun for a second. Not do you want to see me be myself? She asked, Do you want me to be her? Marilyn Monroe was a character, and the woman playing her knew it. And she could put her on or take her off like a coat. We'll come back to what that split did to her psychologically in the next episode. But today, understand it as evidence of mastery. Nobody performs a persona on that level on demand on a street corner by accident. Second, she worked the press like an instrument she built herself. Her great ally was Sidney Skolsky, columnist for the New York Post, syndicated everywhere and a genuine Hollywood character. Skolsky famously kept his office not in a studio, but at Swab's drugstore. The same Swab's drugstore where Marilyn heard about the Love Happy audition. That was also her hangout. That's where they became friends long before anyone knew who she was. Skolsky never learned to drive, so Marilyn used to drive him to his appointments around town. Picture that for a second. The future biggest star in the world chauffeuring a gossip columnist around LA. Except, was it friendship or was it strategy? Here's the answer I keep arriving at all along in the series. With Marilyn, it was both. Always, at the same time. She genuinely adored Skolsky, and Skolsky's column also banged the drum for her for years, championing her when the studios wouldn't. Then there were the two empresses, Luella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, rival gossip queens, tens of millions of combined readers, the power to launch or end anyone's career, and a blood feud with each other. Navigating both without being destroyed by either was a diplomatic specialty unto itself. Careers died in that crossfire. But Marilyn managed both for a decade. Parsons in particular stayed warm towards her for years. She ran the orphan girl Cinderella angle constantly. Which, by the way, remember last episode when I told you Marilyn exaggerated the orphan years, made it sound like a Dickens when the superintendent remembered it rather differently. This is where the investment paid in dividends. The sad orphan narrative, she'd been carefully feeding the fan magazines since 1950, is exactly what saved her when the calendar broke. America had already been told her backstory by her on her own terms. The sympathy was preloaded. She built that parachute years before she needed it. I'm not saying she planned it that way. I'm just saying it worked out exactly the way a person who planned it would have wanted it. And at some point in the series, you and I are gonna have to stop calling it luck. Then there was the man on the inside, Roy Kraft. He was one of Fox's publicity men in the room during the calendar crisis. But his real work with Marilyn had started earlier, and it tells you everything about how this woman operated. Kraft was assigned to her as a studio publicist back when Fox barely cared whether she lived or died. When Zanek was using her as set dressing, and the studio's promotional budget for her was essentially a shrug. So Marilyn and Kraft built her own campaign to get her noticed. Quietly and off the clock. She would come in on weekends on her own time, unpaid, to shoot publicity photos. Not for any particular movie, of course, there was no movie, but for her image. It was for holiday cheesecake photos for the wire services. Marilyn in a Santa hat, Marilyn with a 4th of July sparkler, Marilyn as a Halloween witch. There's even one where Marilyn is dressed as a pilgrim, hunting a turkey. All because Kraft understood that newspapers always, always needed a seasonal pinup to fill the page. And Marilyn understood that a girl whose photo runs in 800 papers around the country doesn't need the studio's permission to be famous. Kraft funneled those pictures to the wire services, to the fan magazines, and to the military papers, where the GIs couldn't get enough of her. As I mentioned before, she was collecting titles like crazy. Cheesecake of the Year, Best Blonde Model. These honors were being voted on by soldiers and sailors as well as press photographers. That wasn't fame arriving on its own, it was Kraft's pipeline, working exactly as designed. By the time Zanek looked up from his desk and noticed her fan mail was outpacing everyone else on the lot, the whirlwind he was looking at had been manufactured by his own publicity man and the girl he refused to promote. She gave the press the one thing they can't resist. Good copy, every time. That's what the quib were. The radio, the Chanel number five. Reporters showed up to mock the dumb blonde, but walked out with the best quote of their careers, every single time. And somewhere around the third time it happened, you'd think someone would have done the math on who exactly was generating those lines. A dumb woman does not produce a perfect one-liner on demand under hostile questioning for 10 consecutive years. When the press took a swing at her, she countered punch in pictures. My favorite example, in 1952, a columnist named Edith Gwen sniped that Marilyn looked cheap and vulgar in some low-cut gown she had worn. The gown, Gwynne wrote, was ill-fitting and too tight in all the wrong places with wrong and all caps. She went on, it's black lace over bright red and has a wide red silk ruffle. Everyone isn't born with taste. But surely when a star is born, her studio should see it that the public doesn't see her looking cheap and vulgar. They'd find that a few thousand dollars invested in a wardrobe, hairduce, and charm schooling for Marilyn would pay off. What's documented is the response. Because Fox photographed it. Marilyn in an actual burlap potato sack, tailored by William Trevilla, looking like an absolute million bucks. The photos ran everywhere. A potato farmer in Idaho reportedly sent her a sack of potatoes in gratitude. I'll post the picture online. You've probably seen it without actually knowing the story. It reads as a gag, but it's actually a thesis statement. You cannot embarrass this woman. The dress was never doing the work, and every attack on her becomes free publicity for her. She kept running it, and Hollywood kept falling for it. So that's the machine when she drove it. Now, for the question this whole episode has been circling, the one I promise at the top. If she's this smart, this strategic, this in control, was she actually in control? After reading endless amounts of biographies about her, I've gone back and forth. And here's where I've landed. Yes, but also no. And the refusal of that question to resolve is not a flaw in the book. It's the actual answer. The case for yes, you've just heard. The calendar, the mother story, the press, the potato sack, the street corner transformation, a woman who outthought every man who tried to handle her, who took the most condescending stereotype in American culture and wore it as Omr. Who survived twice scandals that could have ended her career, and she converted them into life covers. Now for the case for No. She played the Dumb Blonde brilliantly, and the industry responded by only ever casting her as Dumb Blonde, no matter what she asked for, no matter what she proved. We saw the start of that with Zanek in the last episode, and it gets much worse. The image made millions for Fox, for the calendar company, for Hefner, for everyone holding a piece of her. And while she only made $500 a week. The image could be taken and sold without her, at any time, and was over and over, and the law of 1953 had absolutely nothing to say about it. The image had a clock on it. She knew better than anyone that Hollywood's interest in a woman's body came with an expiration date, and that nobody was building a second act for the dumb blonde. Compare her for a second to Marlon Brando, her exact contemporary, the other most famous method adjacent star of the 50s. Brando fought the studios, made demands, behave indefinitely worse on set by every measure. But the press wrote him as an artist, a rebel, a genius too big for the system. Marilyn asked for script approval and got called a difficult bimbo with delusions. The same town, the same decade, the same behavior. But the man got mythics and the woman got mocked. And if you want to know what the image cost her, that's the receipt. She had built a persona so successful that no one, not the studio, not the critics, not the public, would ever be willing to let her be anything else. She even said it herself in her very last interview That's the trouble. A sex symbol becomes a thing, and I just hate being a thing. A thing. Her word. She knew exactly what had happened. She had made the thing, the thing made everyone else rich, and then the thing replaced her. There's a line in her autobiography where she talks about Hollywood. Quote, It's a place where they pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. A thousand dollars for a kiss, fifty cents for her soul. Again, she did the math in her head every single day of her career. Because she was the one who taught them that a kiss was worth a thousand in the first place. So was Marilyn in control of her image? She was the smartest person in every room she ever stood in, and she owned almost nothing she built there. She was the author of her image as well as its hostage. Empowered and exploited are not opposites in her story. They're the exact same fact, wearing two faces, and any book that tells you it was simply one or the other is telling you a simpler woman than the one who actually lived. The real one is harder. The real one was winning and losing the same game at the same time. For 16 years straight, and she knew it the whole time. That knowing is the tragedy. It's also proof of the intelligence everyone swore she didn't have. Because here's the question her own joke should have planted in everyone's minds back in 1952. The question nobody in America wanted to ask because the fantasy was too profitable and too much fun. If she's so dumb, why does she keep winning? Somebody was getting played for the better part of two decades. I don't think it was her. And the woman who knew it wasn't her, the one who read the contact sheets and the contracts and did the math and turned her on or off on the street corner like a light switch. That woman is the one nobody got to meet. Well, almost nobody. Because some people did meet her. They saw her bookshelves, they read the poems, they got the 3 a.m. phone calls, and what they tell us about the private Norma Jean living inside the public Maryland is the saddest, most fascinating, most human part of this entire story. Join us next time, where we ask the question, the image was built to keep everyone from asking. Who was Marilyn Monroe when the cameras were off? Please remember to support your local bookstores and libraries. See you soon. This has been That's a Creative Arc. Please rate, review, follow, and recommend this podcast to others. Follow us on Instagram at CreativeArk Podcast and find us on Facebook by searching for That's a Creative Art. You can also email us at CreativeArk Podcast at gmail.com. If you personally want to follow me, just search Megan Driscoll on Letterboxd. This episode was written, edited, produced, by yours truly, your host, Megan Driscoll. All the sources for this episode are listed in our show notes. The cover art as well as the theme music were created by me using the AI programs Google Gemini and Suno. Thanks again, and goodbye.