Speaker 1: Oh Why Ozzy Media Productions. Marilyn Monroe was called the
Speaker 1: Woman who Will Not Die by Glorious Steinham. It's true
Speaker 1: the world remains obsessed with Monroe even more than half
Speaker 1: a century after her death. One of the most famous
Speaker 1: stars in Hollywood history is dead. At thirty six, Marilan
Speaker 1: Monroe was found dead in bed under circumstances that were
Speaker 1: in tragic contrast to her glamorous career as a comic talent,
Speaker 1: Monroe was an icon whose life was cut short. She
Speaker 1: started hits like Some Like It, Hot, The Seven Year Itch,
Speaker 1: and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was said that her films
Speaker 1: had grossed more than two hundred million dollars at the
Speaker 1: time of her death. She acted, she cracked jokes, and
Speaker 1: she sang, I wanna be loved by you, just your else.
Speaker 1: But Monroe's death held in irony, as Gloria Steinham later wrote,
Speaker 1: America's biggest star died alone. On a Saturday night. The
Speaker 1: young actress was found dead in her bed from a
Speaker 1: drug overdose. The rumors were numerous, Monroe biographer Sarah Church Well.
Speaker 1: Of course, as everybody knows, all kinds of conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: have developed around her death. It's been fifty years and
Speaker 1: we are still talking about the rumors surrounding her death.
Speaker 1: Some believe Monroe committed suicide. Others have more elaborate theories.
Speaker 1: So what happens is a lot of people um conclude
Speaker 1: that she must have been deliberately murdered, either by one
Speaker 1: of the Kennedy's, or by Kristov, or by Castro, or
Speaker 1: you know, by aliens landing in Roswell. But of course
Speaker 1: that leaps over an enormous excluded middle, which is known
Speaker 1: as accident, which is how many many things happen in
Speaker 1: real life. Marilan Monroe may have appeared larger than life,
Speaker 1: but she wasn't every woman, one who suffered the same
Speaker 1: misfortune as others, but out in the open for all
Speaker 1: the world to see and without much help. This led
Speaker 1: feminist Glorious Steinem to fixate on Monroe. You know, I
Speaker 1: just was haunted by the idea that that the women's
Speaker 1: movement might have been able to support her enough so
Speaker 1: she would still be with us. But like Gloria Steinham,
Speaker 1: Monroe lived and worked in a world dominated by men,
Speaker 1: and Hugh Hefner, who launched Playboy magazine using Monroe's nude
Speaker 1: image was far from the only one to exploit her
Speaker 1: along the way. Oh hear me, Lord, I could be
Speaker 1: good to love, but then I always discovered the body
Speaker 1: every man. Welcome to the Thread a podcast from Azzi Media.
Speaker 1: I'm Sean Braswell. This season is about the remarkable road
Speaker 1: to the modern day women's movement through one of the
Speaker 1: leaders of that movement, Gloria Steinham. So how does Marilyn
Speaker 1: Monroe fit in this thread? Well? An episode one, we
Speaker 1: heard how Steinham stent as an undercover Playboy Bunny impacted
Speaker 1: her career and her outlook as a young reporter and feminist.
Speaker 1: Then in episode two, we told the story of how
Speaker 1: the Playboy clubs came to be. They all started with
Speaker 1: Hugh Hefner, who had the idea to create a male
Speaker 1: magazine called Playboy, and that magazine's launch was not possible
Speaker 1: without its first nude centerfold, Marilyn Monroe. Now, in episode three,
Speaker 1: how Monroe wound up in Playboy. It wasn't her choice.
Speaker 1: Throughout her brief life, she endured many things, including many
Speaker 1: powerful men, and she tried to fight back. Monroe was
Speaker 1: a star, a wife, a model, and a silence breaker
Speaker 1: for all of her accomplishments. Most people only remember Marilyn
Speaker 1: Monroe for the unforgettable persona she crafted for herself, the
Speaker 1: good humored, platinum blonde with the ruby lips and a
Speaker 1: sultry innocence. Few recognized the achievement behind it. Sarah Churchwell, again,
Speaker 1: she had started with nothing, and she went on to
Speaker 1: become the most successful actress of her day, the most famous,
Speaker 1: the best known um. But you know, the biggest movie
Speaker 1: star in the world, and she remains the biggest movie
Speaker 1: star in the world fifty years after her death. And
Speaker 1: she just wanted people to recognize that as an accomplishment.
Speaker 1: She wanted people to give her the credit for having
Speaker 1: achieved that, and they never did. They mostly still don't.
Speaker 1: Monroe begged to be taken seriously as an actress throughout
Speaker 1: her career. The frustrated star asked a reporter who interviewed
Speaker 1: her not long before her death, quote, please don't make
Speaker 1: me a joke. That decision to have a very strong brand,
Speaker 1: as it were, this this iconic lookum did have a
Speaker 1: lot to do with her success, but of course it
Speaker 1: also led to her being typecast. It meant that she
Speaker 1: couldn't break out of that brand identity that she had
Speaker 1: created and become the kind of actress that she wanted
Speaker 1: to be. Here's Monroe in a television interview. Well, would
Speaker 1: it be fair to say that you got rather tired
Speaker 1: of playing the same kind of roles all the time
Speaker 1: and wanted to buy something different. Well, I it's not
Speaker 1: that I objected doing musicals or comedy. In fact, I
Speaker 1: read and enjoy it, but I would like to do
Speaker 1: unto dramatic parts too. Through it all, Monroe's hell bent
Speaker 1: on self improvement. She took acting classes at every opportunity.
Speaker 1: Even once she was a star. She pushed back on
Speaker 1: the stereotype that she was a dumb blonde. As she
Speaker 1: told one instructor, I want to be an artist, not
Speaker 1: an erotic freak. But few in Hollywood took her seriously,
Speaker 1: even Steinham did not at first. Monroe's on screen persona
Speaker 1: made an impression on the young steinem and it wasn't
Speaker 1: a positive one. It was a big Hollywood movie, and
Speaker 1: I was a teenager, I think, and I loved the movies.
Speaker 1: You know, I was just escaping every Saturday afternoon in
Speaker 1: the movies. This is Steinham remembering when she saw the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three film. Gentlemen prefer blondes, but watching her
Speaker 1: being so vulnerable on screen just made me sad. It's
Speaker 1: a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle
Speaker 1: of a crowd, do you know what I mean? And
Speaker 1: it also made Steinham angry. Steinham later wrote of Monroe,
Speaker 1: how dare she exposed the neediness that so many women
Speaker 1: feel but try so hard to hide. How dare she
Speaker 1: a movie star be just as unconfident as I was?
Speaker 1: Cheap piggy? A girl like I almost never gets to
Speaker 1: me really interesting, man, sometimes my brain gets real starting
Speaker 1: Steinham walked out of the movie. She was one of
Speaker 1: the images that I grew up with, and she always
Speaker 1: seemed so silenced, playing as if she could only come
Speaker 1: to the public as as a almost a parody of
Speaker 1: a whispery sexy woman not not has her own self.
Speaker 1: But as Dynham later discovered, Monroe was more than a
Speaker 1: whispery sexy woman. She was one of the first women
Speaker 1: to stand up against the culture of sexual harassment in
Speaker 1: Hollywood and to talk about her experiences there. To understand why,
Speaker 1: we have to go back to Monroe's early days in
Speaker 1: Hollywood and those famous nude photographs. One of the first
Speaker 1: cameramen to film Monroe was blown away by her. She was,
Speaker 1: as he put it, sex on a piece of film.
Speaker 1: Monroe did not set out to be a model. When
Speaker 1: she was still a teenager named Norma Jean Doherty, she
Speaker 1: worked at a parachute factory during World War Two, where
Speaker 1: she sprayed and inspected parachutes for ten hours a day.
Speaker 1: One day, an Army photographer assigned to take photographs of
Speaker 1: women at work in the war effort stopped by the factory.
Speaker 1: He realized her potential right away. You're a real morale booster,
Speaker 1: he told her, with all of the cheese and sleeves
Speaker 1: of a red blooded American male in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: Soon marylyn career as a model and morale booster and
Speaker 1: men's magazines was off to the races. Well, now your
Speaker 1: picture has been on the cover of almost all popular magazines,
Speaker 1: hasn't it. No, it's not the lady's ton journey that
Speaker 1: you would like. What do you? Men's magazines in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties didn't mean what they meant after the Playboy era.
Speaker 1: Um there was no real nudity to speak of in
Speaker 1: the magazines that she was modeling in she was wearing
Speaker 1: bikinis and you know, swimsuits and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe enjoyed posing and performing for the camera as
Speaker 1: a young model, but the job often came with some
Speaker 1: additional responsibilities. Models were expected to show their gratitude to
Speaker 1: the men who controlled the camera and their livelihoods. Things
Speaker 1: were no different when Monroe started to pursue a career
Speaker 1: in acting. She talked later about how even in those
Speaker 1: early days of modeling, when she was trying to break
Speaker 1: into Hollywood, that you know, men would would accost her
Speaker 1: and tell her that they could help her break into
Speaker 1: the movies and um, and so she was very clear
Speaker 1: about the fact that there were always men on the
Speaker 1: make um. She called them wolves eager to become an actress.
Speaker 1: Monroe tolerated the wolves, but it was not easy to
Speaker 1: break into Hollywood without their support. When Marilyn was a
Speaker 1: struggling actress and starlett she was uh still finding jobs
Speaker 1: hard to come by and living very much hand to mouth.
Speaker 1: Monroe struggled to pay her rent. She ate two meals
Speaker 1: per day. Sometimes she subsisted on peanut butter and hamburger meat.
Speaker 1: She went to auditions and modeling gigs in one of
Speaker 1: three dresses, which she washed herself by hand. In the evenings,
Speaker 1: she would go out stargazing in Hollywood. She would place
Speaker 1: her hands in the handprints of the movie stars. She
Speaker 1: would stand for a few hours in front of Clark
Speaker 1: Gable's house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her favorite star.
Speaker 1: The beautiful Monroe didn't have to struggle. She had other options.
Speaker 1: Many men offered to set her up as their mistress,
Speaker 1: to pay for her expenses and her apartment in return
Speaker 1: for shall we say, the pleasure of her company, but
Speaker 1: Monroe refused. Eventually, she landed her first big job, a
Speaker 1: contract with twentieth Century Fox in ninety she was twenty.
Speaker 1: The following year, she signed a new contract with Columbia Pictures.
Speaker 1: That didn't stop the unsolicited offers, including at least one
Speaker 1: alleged experience with me two parallels. There isn't much question
Speaker 1: that Maryland turned down sexual advances from powerful men in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: One of the best known was the producer Harry Cohne,
Speaker 1: who um ran Columbia Studios, and the story goes that
Speaker 1: he um he tried to get Maryland on his yacht
Speaker 1: when she was a contract player for Columbia, and when
Speaker 1: she refused to go alone with him onto his yacht,
Speaker 1: he fired her and she never worked for Columbia again.
Speaker 1: Monroe persisted even as she grew more contemptuous of the
Speaker 1: wolves who pursued her, and after one of those offers um,
Speaker 1: when it became clear to her that that money was
Speaker 1: really becoming tight, she decided that she would instead take
Speaker 1: up the offer of a photographer who had been trying
Speaker 1: to convince her to do some nude photos. It sounds
Speaker 1: like a risky thing to do for a woman with
Speaker 1: serious acting ambitions, but remember Monroe is twenty three years old.
Speaker 1: She could never have imagined in her wildest dreams she
Speaker 1: would be one of the most famous women on the
Speaker 1: planet in a few years. At that moment, she was
Speaker 1: just a struggling actress who was worried that the bank
Speaker 1: would repossess the car she depended upon to drive to auditions.
Speaker 1: She let herself be convinced that the nude photos were
Speaker 1: no big deal. The photographer had told her that his
Speaker 1: wife would be present all the way through the shoot.
Speaker 1: Um he had assured her that that it was above board.
Speaker 1: He would pay her fifty dollars and that the images
Speaker 1: would be tasteful, they weren't pornographic. Monroe agreed. Here's how
Speaker 1: she described the nude photo shoot in an interview. So
Speaker 1: we did it, and that's only just to spread up
Speaker 1: some red velvets and had me lie down in the red.
Speaker 1: It was very simple drafty. Monroe also joked that she
Speaker 1: had quote nothing on but the radio. The photographs were
Speaker 1: then sold to a nude calendar and they started to
Speaker 1: appear on on walls, on in garages and um, you know,
Speaker 1: mechanics workshops. Three years after the nude photographs were taken,
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe was in a completely different orbit. Later, thousands
Speaker 1: of fans lined up in front of the Stanley Theater,
Speaker 1: located on Atlantic City's famous boardwalk, where Hollywood's newest sterling
Speaker 1: arrived for the world premiere of her twentieth century Fox
Speaker 1: comedy Monkey Business, in which she co stars would carry
Speaker 1: granted ginger rogers. All in all, it was a day
Speaker 1: in which Miss Monroe truly won the hearts of these
Speaker 1: grateful New Jersey ins. In March ninety two, Maryland was
Speaker 1: starting to become a star. She'd had a couple of
Speaker 1: big roles and she was starting to be noticed. She
Speaker 1: also began dating Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star and you know,
Speaker 1: kind of national hero. Monroe had only been seeing di
Speaker 1: Maggio for a few days when the scandal over her
Speaker 1: nude photographs broke. Many fans started to recognize her nude
Speaker 1: pin up and calendars all over the country. Studio executives
Speaker 1: freaked out, and of course, the standard response to that
Speaker 1: kind of scandal up until that point would have been
Speaker 1: to just deny it was you, and that was what
Speaker 1: stars had always done in the studio, would engineer some
Speaker 1: kind of cover up and they would just claim it
Speaker 1: wasn't her. But Marilyn did not do that. She said
Speaker 1: it was her. It was a bold strategy instead of
Speaker 1: being shamed or as we might now say, slut shamed. Um.
Speaker 1: It worked and she managed to make the scandal die down,
Speaker 1: and uh and and people just accepted that it was her.
Speaker 1: The photo shoot was forgotten for the most part until
Speaker 1: Hugh Hefner got his hands on the image and made
Speaker 1: sure that millions more Americans saw her as the first
Speaker 1: Playboy centerfold, the centerfold that launched Heffner's Playboy empire. But
Speaker 1: the same year that Hefner used her nude image to
Speaker 1: launch Playboy. The twenty six year old man Rode did
Speaker 1: something far bolder in another magazine. The article that ran
Speaker 1: in the January nineteen fifty three issue of Motion Picture
Speaker 1: and Television Magazine was called Wolves I Have Known and
Speaker 1: was penned by Monroe. At the time, the young actress
Speaker 1: was fast becoming a household name. In the article, Monroe
Speaker 1: described the different types of men she had met in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: men she called wolves. The article covered multiple examples of
Speaker 1: harassment and proposition from unnamed men, the directors who cornered
Speaker 1: her at parties, the producers who invited her to their
Speaker 1: offices on a Saturday afternoon. Maryland was one of the
Speaker 1: first um to call out the culture of sexual harassment.
Speaker 1: She doesn't use that phrase, but um, but that's what
Speaker 1: she's talking about. And to really um call attention to
Speaker 1: the fact that it was indemic, that it was pervasive.
Speaker 1: Her whole point was to say this happens over and
Speaker 1: over and over. Monroe wrote, quote, there are many types
Speaker 1: of wolves, summer sinister. Others are just good time Charlie's
Speaker 1: trying to get something for nothing, and others make a
Speaker 1: game of it, so she wasn't necessarily naming names, she
Speaker 1: wasn't identifying a single individual, but that was the point.
Speaker 1: She was talking about a culture in which women were unsafe,
Speaker 1: in which women were treated as sexual objects, and she
Speaker 1: was starting to speak out very early. The Hollywood that
Speaker 1: Monroe was challenging was extremely powerful, but once Monroe had
Speaker 1: star power, she used it to help other women in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: and not just in her magazine story. Actress Joan Collins
Speaker 1: remembers in a television interview how Monroe helped her when
Speaker 1: she met her at a party and then she told me,
Speaker 1: she said, watch out for the wolves in Hollywood, honey.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, I've been in British films for
Speaker 1: three years. I can handle wolves. And she said, well,
Speaker 1: not the power busses, honey. And she said, if they
Speaker 1: don't get what they want, they'll drop you here contract.
Speaker 1: So clearly it was always there, It was always in
Speaker 1: the air. There was no protection. Women had to look
Speaker 1: out of themselves. In her unfinished autobiography, Monroe wrote of
Speaker 1: the wolves, quote, Phoniness and failure were all over them.
Speaker 1: But they were as near to the movies as you
Speaker 1: could get, So you sat with them listening to their
Speaker 1: lies and schemes, and you saw Hollywood with their eyes,
Speaker 1: an overcrowded brothel, a merry go round with beds for horses.
Speaker 1: The sad truth is that even Monroe could not avoid
Speaker 1: the Hollywood merry go round forever. She once admitted, I've
Speaker 1: slept with producers. I'd be a liar if I said
Speaker 1: I didn't. For Monroe and many other actresses, it was
Speaker 1: a constant struggle both to fend off the wolves and
Speaker 1: to get them to take you seriously. What I'd like
Speaker 1: to do, that is what I would like to accomplish.
Speaker 1: I would like to be a good actress. Denied shelter
Speaker 1: in respect in her career, Monroe sought them elsewhere. Twice.
Speaker 1: She put her career on hold at the peak of
Speaker 1: her startom to marry a prominent man, first based all
Speaker 1: star Joe DiMaggio in and two years later renowned playwright
Speaker 1: Arthur Miller. Marilyn married to symbolic men. But I think
Speaker 1: that one of the one of the things that drew
Speaker 1: her two men like this was the feeling she felt
Speaker 1: great respect for them for their achievements, and the feeling
Speaker 1: unconsciously perhaps that that sense of respect might get transferred
Speaker 1: to her. Unfortunately for Monroe, it didn't, and Monroe often
Speaker 1: struggled to find satisfaction or happiness. Uh do I feel
Speaker 1: happy in life? Um? Um, let's see. Let's say I
Speaker 1: hope I'm finding happiness right. Well for me, if I
Speaker 1: can realize certain things in my work, I come the
Speaker 1: closest to being happy. Monroe constantly saw satisfaction in her career,
Speaker 1: and she gave up a lot just to have one up. Next,
Speaker 1: we find out just how far Monroe was willing to
Speaker 1: go to launch her career, and we go back to
Speaker 1: the moment when Norma Jean transformed into Marilyn Monroe. Without
Speaker 1: this period in her life, when she fought for her freedom,
Speaker 1: the world would never have had its biggest star. Maril
Speaker 1: Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles in
Speaker 1: n Her troubles began early on her mother, Gladys, struggled
Speaker 1: to care for her young daughter. She was diagnosed as
Speaker 1: schizophrenic when Marilyn was a young girl, and Marilyn never
Speaker 1: knew who her father was, and the result of that
Speaker 1: was that she became a ward of the state of
Speaker 1: California and throughout the nineteen thirties. One, of course, it
Speaker 1: was the Great Depression. Maryland was sent to a number
Speaker 1: of foster homes and UM and she was at one
Speaker 1: point also sent to an orphanage, which she found a
Speaker 1: very traumatic experience because she knew that her mother was
Speaker 1: alive and um she wasn't an orphan, but she was
Speaker 1: being treated as one, and things only got worse. Monroe
Speaker 1: would later claim that she had been molested more than
Speaker 1: once in the foster home she stayed in as a child.
Speaker 1: She said that she was living in a boarding house
Speaker 1: at one point in her childhood and that a man
Speaker 1: she called Mr. Kimmel Um offered her some money. He
Speaker 1: was asking her for some kind of sexual favor. As
Speaker 1: a child, Monroe told her foster mother what had happened.
Speaker 1: She slapped her and told her not to say such
Speaker 1: things about such a nice man. People didn't believe her,
Speaker 1: and then this was was only compounded by her later biographers,
Speaker 1: who mostly also didn't believe her. Of course, now we're
Speaker 1: all too aware of how frequently women historically have been
Speaker 1: disbelieved when they came forward with stories about sexual assault,
Speaker 1: um or molestation. Monroe's life grew even harder when she
Speaker 1: faced a difficult choice as a teenager, the orphanage or
Speaker 1: an arranged marriage. Her foster family announced that they were
Speaker 1: moving to West Virginia, and basically that she wasn't moving
Speaker 1: with them. She and her husband were going to West
Speaker 1: Virginia and they were going to put me in a
Speaker 1: home or you know, like I've been before, or I
Speaker 1: could marry this boy who was twenty one. So I'm married.
Speaker 1: That twenty one year old was a neighbor named Jim Doherty.
Speaker 1: In the span of just a few months, Monroe went
Speaker 1: from being a fun loving teenager to a devoted housewife.
Speaker 1: She even dropped out of high school to focus on
Speaker 1: her marriage, a decision she would regret for the rest
Speaker 1: of her life. They didn't know each other, they weren't
Speaker 1: in love. Um. Jim Doherty, by all accounts, was a
Speaker 1: perfectly um, a nice decent man um. But you know,
Speaker 1: this was not a marriage that was going to last.
Speaker 1: You know, it was again, it was two. So he
Speaker 1: expected her to stay home and you know, cook his
Speaker 1: dinners and um, you know in mendes socks. Doherty enlisted
Speaker 1: in the Merchant Marine when America entered the war. He
Speaker 1: was overseas for months at a time. Monroe started her
Speaker 1: job at the parachute factory, then became a model. She
Speaker 1: enjoyed being a working woman and being a model mint.
Speaker 1: She was one step closer to her real dream, and
Speaker 1: then Monroe had to make another hard decision. She had
Speaker 1: signed with a modeling agency run by a professional agent.
Speaker 1: That agent was frank with her young client. Hollywood was
Speaker 1: not interested in married starletts. No studio wanted to invest
Speaker 1: in a woman who could get pregnant and leave her
Speaker 1: husband wanted to start a family when the war was over.
Speaker 1: He didn't understand Monroe's dream. Hollywood is full of beautiful girls,
Speaker 1: he informed her, what makes you think you're any better
Speaker 1: than them. Monroe was just nineteen years old, confronted with
Speaker 1: the realization that she could not have a career and
Speaker 1: a husband, so she chose a career. Maryland clearly felt
Speaker 1: that it would be easier for her to pursue her
Speaker 1: modeling and acting career if she were single. In May
Speaker 1: and Row packed her bags. Maryland went to Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: where they had in the nineteen thirties. They had loosened
Speaker 1: the divorce laws and if you were a resident in
Speaker 1: Nevada for six weeks you could get a divorce, which
Speaker 1: was much more difficult to get anywhere else in the country.
Speaker 1: Doherty was blindsided. In an interview before his death in
Speaker 1: two thousand five, he recalled the moment he found out
Speaker 1: his wife was in Vegas. One day, I was sitting
Speaker 1: in the Yanksty River waiting to go into Shanga. I
Speaker 1: had a mail come aboard, and there's a dear job
Speaker 1: and it was set by her attorney from Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: and she wanted a divorce. Monroe made plans to stay
Speaker 1: with the aunt of one of her former foster mothers
Speaker 1: in Las Vegas. She was not too thrilled to put
Speaker 1: her modeling career on hold to spend a hot summer
Speaker 1: in Nevada, but she knew it was necessary. Six weeks later,
Speaker 1: on j Monroe sped away from Las Vegas in her
Speaker 1: Ford coupe to Los Angeles. She was a free woman
Speaker 1: in more ways than one. A week after she returned
Speaker 1: from Vegas, Monroe landed a meeting with Ben lyon, the
Speaker 1: head of talent at twentieth Century Fox. The impressed executive
Speaker 1: scheduled a screen test for her, and they agreed that
Speaker 1: the young Norma Jean needed a new name. That night,
Speaker 1: the newly christened Marilyn Monroe stood in front of a
Speaker 1: mirror at home. She picked up some red lipstick and
Speaker 1: wrote a seven word manifesto on the mirror. It read,
Speaker 1: this is the end of Norma Jean. We are now
Speaker 1: halfway through the second season of The Thread. In the
Speaker 1: first three episodes, we traced a path through history that
Speaker 1: connects the lives and careers of three American icons, Gloria Steinen,
Speaker 1: You Heffner, and Marilyn Monroe. To recap Merril, Monroe poses
Speaker 1: for her one and only nude photography session as a
Speaker 1: young model in nineteen forty nine in order to pay
Speaker 1: the bills. Four years later, a bowl Chicago entrepreneur named
Speaker 1: Hugh Hefner gets his hands on one of those photos,
Speaker 1: turning Monroe, now a Hollywood star, into the first centerfold
Speaker 1: for his new Playboy magazine. That magazine, thanks to Monroe's
Speaker 1: star power, becomes a hit. It spawns an entire Playboy empire,
Speaker 1: including a series of Playboy clubs. An aspiring journalist named
Speaker 1: Gloria Steinem walks through the doors of one of those
Speaker 1: clubs in New York. Ten years later. Her experience there
Speaker 1: will lead her to write a stunning expose of Playboy
Speaker 1: and kick start her own career as an activist and feminist.
Speaker 1: Next episode, Our Thread continues not with a person, but
Speaker 1: with a place, the place where Monroe came for the
Speaker 1: quickie divorce that launched her career. Monroe was far from
Speaker 1: the only woman who came to Nevada to seek a
Speaker 1: newly san life. During the nineteen thirties and forties, the
Speaker 1: state became a wild West of marriage, divorce, gambling, and reinvention.
Speaker 1: You know, I know how friendly you are so far.
Speaker 1: I'm not going too far being nice and make me
Speaker 1: a star being nice, and make me a start being
Speaker 1: nice and make me up. Stop the Threat is produced
Speaker 1: by Libby Coleman and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered
Speaker 1: Our Show special thanks to Cindy Carpian, Tracy Moran, and
Speaker 1: James Watkins. This episode features the song Prayer and the
Speaker 1: Bad in every Man, performed by Elvi Yost. To learn
Speaker 1: more about the Thread, visit Ausi dot com, Slash the
Speaker 1: Thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
Speaker 1: the Thread on Apple Podcasts. Check us out at Aussie
Speaker 1: dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising,
Speaker 1: engaging stories from history. Look no further than the flashback
Speaker 1: section of ausi dot com. That's o z y dot
Speaker 1: com with gable wind, that rehearsing while