Marilyn Monroe "was never a victim": 7 examples of how she knew how to take control of her career
When 20th Century Fox began publicizing Monroe as a character and using her new name, they completely erased her family history and her active pursuit of a film career and created an origin story easier to sell to the mainstream. public. Studio agents showed her as an orphan discovered while she was working as a babysitter for a headhunter. Not only did she jump on the bandwagon of rewriting her background to make it suitable for all audiences, but she posed for photographs of herself changing nappies and reading stories to children for an article published in 1947 under the headline "A Precious Nanny." ”.
According to Starbuck, “They took pictures of her with huge bows in her hair and changing diapers. All of that was completely made up. But she knew what she had to do to get where she wanted."
She knew how to take advantage of her most powerful allies
Monroe took acting classes and spent many hours surrounded by photographers to learn their best angles and refine her own image on camera. But in the then completely male-dominated world of movie studios, Ella Monroe couldn't get everything she wanted on her own. In the words of Mira Sorvino, who played Monroe in the 1996 film Norma Jean and Marilyn: “I think Marilyn had to accept the fact that she would have to date some men to get her way. And I think he should never have been in the position to choose to do so. But at least it was his decision."
At age 21, after 20th Century Fox decided not to renew her contract, Monroe entered into what the docuseries describes as "an intimate relationship" with powerful movie executive Joseph Schenck. Churchwell explains it this way: “[Monroe] realized that he had two options, either say he didn't like the rules and therefore not play that game, giving up his dream of a career, or acknowledge that those were the rules of the game. game and decide how to manage it”. Schenck later convinced Harry Cohn, head of production at Columbia Pictures, to give Monroe a six-month contract, as Donald Spoto recalls in the book Marilyn Monroe: The Biography.
In the late 1940s, Monroe tied the knot with Johnny Hyde, her agent and lover a few decades her senior. She moved in with him when she was still in her early twenties and he was in his late 50s, and it was he who landed her a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. According to an excerpt from Barbara Leaming's biography:
