Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn MonroeMarilyn Monroe: An All-American Sex Goddess or Hollywood Tragedy? When someone mentions Marilyn Monroe, one usually thinks off the seductive all-American sex goddess who captured the world with her woman-childlike charm. Yet not many know her as the illegitimate child who endured a childhood of poverty and misery, sexual abuse, and years in foster home and orphanages. Most people don�t realize that her disrupted loveless childhood may been the main reason to her early death. Norma Jeane Baker�s father, Edward Mortenson, had deserted her mother, Gladys Baker neè Monroe, before she was born on June, 1 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Due to Gladys� instability and the fact that she was unmarried at the time, Norma Jeane was placed in a foster home. At the age of 7, Norma Jeane lived briefly with her mother. Gladys began to show signs of mental depression, and a year later she was admitted to a rest home. Norma Jeane was then placed with a family friend for a year until being placed in another orphanage for another two years. Norma Jeane was once heard to reflect on this time and say: "The world around me then was kind of grim...I had to learn to pretend in order to...I don�t know.. block the grimness. The whole world seen sort of closed to me..(I felt) on the outside of everything, and all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend game." (MarilynMonroe,http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/mmbio3.html) In 1941, Norma Jeane again lived with a family friend when she met Jim Dougherty, who was 5 years older than her. They then married on June 19, 1942. "Grace Mckee (family friend she was living with) arranged the marriage for me, I never had much of a choice. There�s not much to say about it. They couldn�t support me, and they had to work out something. And so I got married." (Marilyn Monroe) Jim joined the Marines in 1943 and was send overseas. Norma Jeane, while working in a factory inspecting parachutes in 1944, was photographed by the army as a promotion to show women on the assembly line contributing to the war effort. One of the photographers asked to take further pictures of her. She began modeling bathing suites and, after bleaching her hair blonde, began posing for pinups and glamour photos. By spring of 1945, she was quickly known as a "photographers dream" and had appeared on 33 covers of national magazines. She then enrolled in a 3 month modeling course, and in 1946, aware of her considerable charm and the potential it had for a career in films, Norma obtained a divorce. "Howard Hughes saw some of her photographs and expressed an interest in giving her a screen test for RKO, but Ben Lyon of 20th Century-Fox beat Hughes to the punch." (MarilynMonroeBiography,wysiwg://main.13/http:www.geocities.com/hollywood/bungalow/9690.bio.html) Ben Lyon arranged a screen test and on August 26, 1946, Norma Jeane signed a $125 a week, one year contract with the studio. Ben Lyon...
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