Marilyn Monroe: Life, Loss and the Legacy of an Icon

She was found at 3:50 in the morning on the fifth of August, 1962, in a small Spanish-style house in Brentwood, alone, in bed, with an empty bottle of Nembutal on the bedside table.

She was thirty-six years old.

This is the easy bit of her story to write. The bit anyone can find on Wikipedia. The bit that gets repeated in every documentary, every think piece, every late-night television retrospective. Marilyn Monroe died young and beautiful and alone, and the world has been arguing about how it happened ever since.

The hard bit — the bit almost nobody writes well — is the life that came before that morning. The actual human being who walked through three decades of American history and helped shape what fame would mean for everyone who came after her.

That is the story we want to tell. Because we made an album that includes a song about her, and because we believe anyone who arrives at Marilyn Monroe through the public-myth version of her is meeting somebody who never really existed.

The real one — the one called Norma Jeane — is much more interesting.

Origin: Norma Jeane Mortenson, June 1, 1926

She was born in the Los Angeles General Hospital on a Tuesday morning, to a mother she would barely know.

Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe, had been a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries and then RKO Pictures before mental illness pulled her away from work and motherhood both. By the time Norma Jeane was eight, Gladys had been formally institutionalised at the Norwalk State Hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. She would spend most of the rest of her life in psychiatric care.

The father is a more complicated question. The birth certificate listed a man named Martin Edward Mortensen, but Gladys was already separated from him by the time Norma Jeane was conceived, and the truth of who actually fathered her was something Marilyn herself would speculate about for the rest of her life. The most plausible answer is C. Stanley Gifford, a coworker of Gladys at RKO — a man Norma Jeane tried unsuccessfully to contact multiple times as an adult. He refused every attempt.

She was baptised Norma Jeane Baker (Gladys's then-married surname) and shuffled through the early years between foster placements, an orphanage on El Centro Avenue, and a series of guardian families. By her later count, she lived in eleven different foster homes before she was sixteen — some kind, some abusive, all temporary. The orphanage stay in 1935, when she was nine, was particularly painful: she was placed there even though her mother was technically still alive, because Gladys was too ill to take care of her.

She got out of the foster system the only way a working-class American girl of her time and place could: she got married. In June 1942, three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, she married a twenty-one-year-old factory worker named James Dougherty. It was an arranged solution to the problem of what to do with her when her last guardian moved out of state. She did not love him. She did not particularly want to be a wife. But the alternative was another institutional placement, and she had had enough of those.

How a Factory Worker Became a Movie Star

The marriage saved her from the system and then almost immediately stalled her in a different version of it: a young woman in a small Van Nuys apartment, working at a Burbank munitions factory called Radioplane Company, spraying fuselages with fire retardant.

The accident that changed her life was small and bureaucratic. In late 1944, an Army photographer named David Conover was sent to the Radioplane factory to take morale-boosting pictures of women contributing to the war effort. He saw Norma Jeane on the assembly line. He took her photograph. He kept taking her photograph for the rest of the day.

The pictures sold. Conover sent some to a modelling agency. Other photographers wanted her. Within months she had quit the factory and was signing with the Blue Book Modeling Agency.

By August 1946 — when she was twenty — she had her first screen test at 20th Century Fox. They signed her to a contract worth seventy-five dollars a week. The studio's casting director, Ben Lyon, decided "Norma Jeane Dougherty" needed a stage name. She chose Marilyn (after the actress Marilyn Miller). Lyon picked Monroe (her mother's maiden name).

The first films were small and forgettable. Dangerous Years, Ladies of the Chorus, Love Happy — bit parts, walk-ons, the standard contract player's grind. Her marriage to Dougherty ended in 1946; he was Merchant Marine and had been away most of it, and the divorce was friendly. She lived in cheap apartments in Hollywood. She studied acting at the Actors' Lab. She read constantly — Dostoevsky, Whitman, Mann — partly because she loved books and partly because she had been told her whole life that she was beautiful but not bright, and she meant to prove the second part wrong.

The breakthrough was Niagara in 1953 — her first leading role, playing a femme fatale named Rose Loomis. The film was directed by Henry Hathaway and shot in Technicolor at the actual falls. Watching it now, what you notice is not the plot (which is functional) but the camera's helpless, hungry obsession with her face. She was twenty-six. She had been working at this for seven years. The thing she had been building — the screen presence, the breath in the voice, the soft uncertain smile that could turn knowing in a single frame — had finally locked into place.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes came the same year. So did How to Marry a Millionaire. By 1954 she was the biggest box office draw in America.

The Films and the Voice

Across the next eight years she made the films that built the persona.

The Seven Year Itch in 1955 — with the white halter dress and the subway grate — was the moment her image escaped any single film and became the image of an era. Bus Stop the next year proved she could really act; she was nominated by the Golden Globes for it, and Joshua Logan, who directed her, said decades later that she was one of the three or four most gifted performers he had ever worked with. Some Like It Hot with Billy Wilder in 1959 is, depending on your taste, either the funniest American film ever made or a strong contender for it.

She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York. She co-founded her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, when she was twenty-eight — a move so unprecedented for a female star at that time that 20th Century Fox tried to refuse to release her from her contract. She won. She was a businesswoman as much as she was an actress, and she was tired of the studio system telling her what to do.

The singing voice — soft, breathy, intimate, capable of much more than it was usually asked for — turned up in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" sequence is essentially a perfect short film) and in Some Like It Hot (where her version of "I Wanna Be Loved By You" sits at the centre of everything else the movie does). She could sing. She knew she could sing. She wished the studios would let her sing more.

Her last completed film, The Misfits, was released in 1961. It was written by her then-husband Arthur Miller. She starred opposite Clark Gable. The shoot in the Nevada desert was brutal. Gable died of a heart attack twelve days after filming wrapped. Marilyn's marriage to Miller ended within months. The film was a commercial failure in its first run. Time has been kinder to it: it is now considered one of the great American films, and her performance — vulnerable, knowing, devastatingly self-aware — is one of the great American screen performances.

She started work on Something's Got to Give in 1962. She was fired from it twenty-one days into shooting for what the studio called "chronic absences."

She was dead within ten weeks.

The Loss: August 1962

She was found by her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, at her home on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, in the early morning of August 5, 1962. The official cause of death, ruled by the LA County Coroner several days later, was acute barbiturate poisoning — specifically Nembutal (pentobarbital) and chloral hydrate. The manner was ruled probable suicide.

That ruling has been disputed ever since. The conspiracy theories — Bobby Kennedy, the mafia, FBI involvement — are documented in dozens of books and have never been definitively resolved. The empirical record is what it is: she died from an overdose of two prescription medications she had been taking under medical supervision for years. Whether the dose was self-administered, accidentally fatal, or something darker is something we will never know with certainty.

What is clear, and what most accounts of her death gloss over, is that the woman who died at Fifth Helena Drive that night had been visibly unwell for a long time. The pills had been a problem since at least the Bus Stop era in 1956. Her divorces from Joe DiMaggio (1954) and Arthur Miller (1961) had each left her badly. Her mother had died of complications related to her institutionalisation four months before her own death. She had been treated by multiple psychiatrists for depression and what would now be called complex trauma. She had spent her entire career being publicly described as difficult, unstable, or unprofessional by the same studio executives who had built their fortunes on her.

She had also, in her last completed film, given the performance of her life. She had founded her own production company. She had been planning her own next move, on her own terms, when she ran out of time.

There is a famous photograph of her, taken a few weeks before she died, on the beach at Santa Monica. George Barris took it. She is laughing in the picture. She looks happy. Bert Stern's session for Vogue a couple of weeks earlier was the same — a woman more alive on camera than she had been in years.

The funeral was small. Joe DiMaggio, her second husband, arranged it. He had roses delivered to her crypt three times a week for the next twenty years.

She was thirty-six.

The Conversation: Amy Winehouse on Marilyn

This is the song we wrote about her.

Marilyn opens our album Legends Reborn — eleven tracks in which deceased icons sing tributes to other deceased icons they never got to thank in life. We placed Marilyn first because it sets the emotional register for everything that follows: a song about fame, about being seen but not actually seen, about what the world owes the people it consumes.

The voice that sings to her on the track is Amy Winehouse.

This is not a coincidence. Amy and Marilyn occupy the same impossible position in their respective decades. Both women of extraordinary talent. Both consumed by the machinery of fame. Both described as difficult for the crime of refusing to make themselves smaller. Both treated as symbols before anyone asked if they wanted to be. Both gone before they were thirty-seven — Amy at twenty-seven, Marilyn at thirty-six.

Forty-nine years separate their deaths. Almost nothing else does.

The lyric on our track does not romanticise either of them. It sits beside Marilyn the way a friend sits beside you — honestly, without flinching — and says: I see what happened to you. I've seen it from the inside. And you deserved so much better than that. The chorus lands with the line we keep coming back to in everything we write about this album: Skeleton House would've found you / Would've held you in the world.

The full concept behind Legends Reborn is built on the idea that the conversations these artists never got to have are still worth having — that even at the distance of decades or continents, a song can be a way of saying the thing nobody got to say in life. Marilyn is the prototype for that whole argument. There is nothing we could write about her that would not also feel inadequate. What we could do was write a song in which Amy, who would have understood her completely, finally got to.

Watch Marilyn alongside the full Legends Reborn visual album →

For the full picture of both companion tribute albums — Legends Reborn and its darker mirror Dead Reckoning — the hub for both lives at /tributes. All twenty-two conversations, every artist named on either record, both visual album playlists, and the complete essay series in one place.

The Legacy

Sixty-three years after she died, she is more visible than most living celebrities.

The Andy Warhol silkscreens, produced beginning in the weeks after her death, are among the most reproduced images in the history of art. Marilyn Diptych (1962) hangs in the Tate Modern. The white halter dress, the platinum wave, the breath in the voice — these are visual and aural shorthand for the second half of the twentieth century itself.

The footnotes are endless. Madonna spent a decade rebuilding herself in her image. Nicki Minaj wrote a song called "Marilyn Monroe." Lana Del Rey has built an entire aesthetic on her. Hollywood still cannot stop making films about her, most of them bad, none of them definitive.

What is harder to find in the popular record is the actual Norma Jeane — the bookish, anxious, business-minded, fiercely intelligent woman who built the Marilyn persona deliberately and then spent the rest of her life trying to figure out whether she could ever take it off. The most honest portraits of her are her own self-portraits: the interviews she gave at the end, when she was trying to be taken seriously as an actress; the diaries that were published decades later as Fragments; the photographs by Eve Arnold and George Barris in her last few years, in which she looks tired and watchful and, occasionally, genuinely happy.

She was a person. She lived for thirty-six years. She made twenty-nine films. She left behind a body of work that was treated as disposable in its time and as monumental ever since. She also left behind an enormous unfinished project — the actor she was about to become, the businesswoman she was building, the life she was on the cusp of designing for herself when she ran out of time.

We make music about people like her because we believe the music is what we owe them. Not the headline, not the tribute, not the inevitable arts-page retrospective on the anniversary of her death. The music. Sung in a voice that understood what she carried. Aimed across the distance, addressed to her by name, and saying: we see what happened, and you deserved so much better.

That is what Marilyn is. That is what the rest of Legends Reborn is.

Norma Jeane would have understood.