LISTEN · EPISODE 2
Marilyn Monroe: "You have to be smart to play dumb"
This episode discusses child sexual abuse, domestic violence, mental illness, involuntary psychiatric confinement, drug use, and suicide.
"I've often been asked, does it bother you when someone refers to you as a dumb blonde? It never has. You see, I've always known I wasn't." Marilyn Monroe said that in 1954. Seventy years later, the label still gets used about her.
This episode of Witches, Bitches, and Sluts asks how a woman who owned more than 400 books, many with her own notes in the margins, ended up as the most famous "dumb blonde" in history.
The studio tried something else first
Before she was a dumb blonde, 20th Century Fox tried to make her a femme fatale. In Niagara (1953) she played a wife plotting her husband's murder, and the film was a hit. The problem, critics noticed, was that Monroe made the villain likeable. Film critic Foster Hirsch later argued that the culture of the era could tolerate a woman's sexual power only when it came paired with harmlessness, not intelligence or danger. So the studio moved her into comedy with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the label took hold.
She was in on it
Monroe was not a naive victim of the studio system. Friends watched her switch "Marilyn" on and off in public, and she sometimes asked, "Do you want to see me be her?" The breathy voice grew out of techniques a drama coach taught her to manage a childhood stutter. When photographer Philippe Halsman wanted to catch her unguarded mid-jump, she refused for five years, then took 200 jumps to get a shot she approved.
When the studio cast her as yet another dumb blonde in The Girl in Pink Tights, she refused, was suspended, and founded Marilyn Monroe Productions. Fox renegotiated. She came out with $100,000 a film and approval over her scripts, directors and cinematographers. Time called her a "shrewd businesswoman."
What the label cost her
She never received a single Academy Award nomination. Biographer Norman Mailer described her as "a lover of books who did not read," though by his own admission he never met her. And in 1961, when she checked herself into a psychiatric clinic expecting rest, she was placed in a padded cell until her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio got her out.
Why it stuck
In the 1950s, the public had nothing to go on but her roles and studio publicity. People made the mistake psychologists call the fundamental attribution error: they judged the actor by the character. But the biggest reason may be the simplest one. As the episode puts it, everyone gets to want her, and nobody has to respect her.
Sources behind the episode
Read or download the Episode 2 source list (PDF).