Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of
Speaker 1: The Daily Zeitgeist called Gaconograph Iconograph. Instead of looking at
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist through current events, we're looking at it through
Speaker 1: the lens of powerful pop cultural hork cruxes that are
Speaker 1: our icons, pork Brooks. We use these characters to create meaning,
Speaker 1: to build identity, to know what our grandfathers were jacking
Speaker 1: off to grandpa, to teach us that when standing on
Speaker 1: a subway, great, you should just wear a sensible pair
Speaker 1: of slacks, much less problems. Uh. And most importantly, we
Speaker 1: learn how to cure Frank Sinatra's erectile dysfunction. That's right,
Speaker 1: today we're talking Marilyn Monroe, Nay, Norma Jean. That's the
Speaker 1: first big one. Do you know our name wasn't even
Speaker 1: actually Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker 2: Dude.
Speaker 1: I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host,
Speaker 1: mister Miles Bray.
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 1: Hey hey hey hey, hey, hey hey hey Jean.
Speaker 3: That's one that's like, I think the only bit of
Speaker 3: trueba normal Jane is that about her. I think that
Speaker 3: was the first thing that was my first introduction. My
Speaker 3: fucking name was dang. There was something like HBO movie
Speaker 3: where it was like something in like Norma Jean or something,
Speaker 3: and I was just like, oh, yep, yep, yep, that's
Speaker 3: and that's the depth of my knowledge of Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker 3: That and she's buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Speaker 1: I think she's buried in the Westwood Cemetery, West Veteran. Yeah, dammit, Miles.
Speaker 2: And it was drugs and we're we're.
Speaker 1: Going to talk about it. Oh in our third seat.
Speaker 1: A t d Z Hall of Famer, one of the
Speaker 1: very faces on Mount Zeitmore, a brilliant stand up comedian.
Speaker 1: You've seen on MTV, Comedy Central, NBC, True TV, h
Speaker 1: You've heard her on Bob's Burgers. You can see her
Speaker 1: in her hilarious special Life from the Big Dog, and
Speaker 1: on her podcast spased out with Blair Saki because it
Speaker 1: is Blair Sockerlair.
Speaker 4: What's up? Iconographer's Gang?
Speaker 1: What's up?
Speaker 4: Miles and Jack Gang?
Speaker 1: Hello, Blair Sockey.
Speaker 4: I'm so thrilled to be here. You know what I
Speaker 4: just remembered actually that I did read a gigantic Marilyn
Speaker 4: Monroe biography, like years and years and years ago.
Speaker 1: I had a feeling I had a feeling you had.
Speaker 4: Because i'd psychically.
Speaker 1: We're all the collective shared consciousness on the icon scale
Speaker 1: that we use on this show. I feel like Marilyn
Speaker 1: Monroe is at the tippy top. Einstein's up there, but.
Speaker 4: Tupac like where their aura just keeps going for years
Speaker 4: and years and years and years and years after their death.
Speaker 3: But also just like the visual like this, once you
Speaker 3: see it, it's like it's only one person. Some people
Speaker 3: are so unwell that they're like, that's me now professionally.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, there are We talked about how.
Speaker 2: There's Elvis impersonators say it to people.
Speaker 1: Maryland. Impersonators are a thing. I just the generic T
Speaker 1: shirt store test you walk down a boardwalk today for
Speaker 1: our office. One of the shittiest parts of LA the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties Times Square of La Not.
Speaker 3: To don't know it was recently ranked as like one
Speaker 3: of the worst tourist spots, like the in America purely.
Speaker 1: He officially used German tourists walking around being.
Speaker 2: Like, what's so many bummed out?
Speaker 1: But I'll tell you what you will find. You might
Speaker 1: not find what you were looking for, but you will
Speaker 1: find many T shirt stores with pictures of Marylyn Monroe
Speaker 1: on them and cardboard cutouts of Marylyn Monroe. She pas
Speaker 1: the college dorm room wall like first apartment wall test
Speaker 1: where just like you know, posters photos. The image of
Speaker 1: her skirt being blown up by the subway grade is
Speaker 1: one of the most famous moments in film history, though
Speaker 1: it wasn't in the movie. That was a publicity stunt.
Speaker 1: They reshot it on. The thing that we've all seen
Speaker 1: was from a publicity shoot, and the reshoot that was
Speaker 1: in the movie is not the same. Also, I'd say
Speaker 1: one of the most misunderstood figures that we've covered so far,
Speaker 1: Like that song, which was the first thing I knew about.
Speaker 1: Goodbye norm Jean talks about her like as kind of
Speaker 1: this like helpless victim, Like it talks about how Hollywood
Speaker 1: made her change her name and like Hollywood created a superstar.
Speaker 1: She did that shit. Man, She wanted to be a star,
Speaker 1: and she was like really smart and really good at it.
Speaker 1: She had to do twice as much to get half
Speaker 1: as far as the men of her era, and she
Speaker 1: still became, like I thought she was like famous and
Speaker 1: then died and became like even more famous. She was
Speaker 1: the most famous person on the planet, and she was alive,
Speaker 1: she was a wild I feel.
Speaker 4: Like she also started the whole thing where she really
Speaker 4: like pretended to be a certain way, you know, this
Speaker 4: soft like sex kitten, but really like the Paris Hilton
Speaker 4: thing where it's like people had no idea how calculated
Speaker 4: and intentional she was.
Speaker 1: Do you have access to my notes?
Speaker 2: Do you shoulder?
Speaker 4: Here? Is the same biography though, even though mine was
Speaker 4: many years ago. YEA fascinated because there's word, there's word
Speaker 4: of Russell's whispers on the Internet that they think that
Speaker 4: she might have also been a fellow autistic baddie and
Speaker 4: so considering it through that lens.
Speaker 1: Okay, But in terms of her films, I think that's
Speaker 1: a very important point that you just brought up, that
Speaker 1: her she like played the character from her films also
Speaker 1: in reality and like all of she had like movie
Speaker 1: lines ready to go for her real life, like it
Speaker 1: was just like she had she had crackling comedic dialogue
Speaker 1: in like press conferences. But just in terms of like
Speaker 1: her films, they grossed two hundred million dollars by the
Speaker 1: time of her death. That's the equivalent of two billion
Speaker 1: dollars today twenty four in.
Speaker 2: Back then money too. Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then her death is mysterious, like it's not
Speaker 1: we we did Elvis last week player, And like Elvis's death,
Speaker 1: he is fairly straightforward, like he was just doing so
Speaker 1: many drugs and died from doing so so many drugs.
Speaker 1: But with and And, people were just like, he's not
Speaker 1: really dead because they just needed that to be true.
Speaker 1: With Marilyn Monroe, like there is some very real, shady
Speaker 1: shit that happened surrounding her death. So we're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna spend more of this episode talking about her death
Speaker 1: than maybe with past icons.
Speaker 4: I wondered if I was gonna bring be the one
Speaker 4: to bring up that freaky ship.
Speaker 1: No, there's a yeah. I mean I ultimately I don't
Speaker 1: think that she was killed by Frank Sinatra, JFK, RFK
Speaker 1: and the CIA all at the same time. But uh,
Speaker 1: there there's just some there's some weird ship that happened.
Speaker 1: There's some weird shit went down, all right, But should
Speaker 1: we get into just the bio and yeah, you know when.
Speaker 3: Let me know, oh good that that part is from
Speaker 3: Candle in the Wind. Is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, oh yeah, Like.
Speaker 2: The whole time I was.
Speaker 1: Like, is there a song called Goodbye Normal Jean?
Speaker 2: Or isn't that the big part of that.
Speaker 1: At the beginning, that's the first line of wind Yeah, yeah, yeah, which.
Speaker 3: Is about her every mother's favorite song from nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1: He should have just kept making songs like because he
Speaker 1: did it for Princess Die. He should just be that
Speaker 1: every time someone died. Oh, he could make a lot
Speaker 1: of mone. I'm just saying he can make a lot
Speaker 1: of money.
Speaker 2: He could have done a Betty White one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also just saw Goodbye Golden Girls.
Speaker 4: You know the people like all her husbands, like they
Speaker 4: still loved her so much, like after their breakups, like
Speaker 4: Joe DiMaggio sent her flowers every week.
Speaker 1: Obsessed. Oh my god, you're obsessed with me. He was
Speaker 1: super obsessed, but also a complete fucking monster when they
Speaker 1: were married. But we're going to get to all of that.
Speaker 1: We're just so. She was born Norma Jean Mortenson on
Speaker 1: June first, nineteen twenty six, and the charity ward of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles General Hospital. She was born very poor. Her
Speaker 1: mother was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and Norma Jean
Speaker 1: wound up in various foster homes and orphanages her mom's diagnosis.
Speaker 1: I just want to like this gave her, Like her
Speaker 1: mom always being institutionalized, gave Marilyn a lifelong fear of
Speaker 1: mental words, and like she would never lock her door,
Speaker 1: which is gonna come into play in her death, but
Speaker 1: probably understandable given the state of psychiatric care at the time.
Speaker 1: And I just want to give a quick anecdote from
Speaker 1: her mom's life that I think sets the stage for
Speaker 1: the world of psychiatry, because that's a big part of
Speaker 1: her story too, because you know, a lot of the
Speaker 1: biographies are speculating about like what kind of mental illness
Speaker 1: she had, and it's tough to tell because it was
Speaker 1: a time when like women were not trusted at all,
Speaker 1: and like just them having something to say or a
Speaker 1: complaint was pathologized. This is just a wild anecdote from
Speaker 1: her mom's life. So this is in the Donald Spotto
Speaker 1: biography Male in Mom Roe. The biography tells the story
Speaker 1: about how her mom learned that her most recent husband
Speaker 1: had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Ohio, and
Speaker 1: it turns out that wasn't true. It was just a
Speaker 1: guy with the same name with like a similar background,
Speaker 1: and her husband was still a lot than just being
Speaker 1: a typical like shit ass absentee husband from the mid
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Identity was like a real loose thing back
Speaker 1: then where they were like Marilyn Momroe Norman Gy like
Speaker 1: had different names on her birth certificate, on her baptismal certificate,
Speaker 1: like your name was what you told them at the
Speaker 1: DMV and they're like whatever you want to call yourself late, right,
Speaker 1: But so by the time her mom's real husband shows
Speaker 1: up from you know, being a shit ass Gladys, Marilyn's
Speaker 1: mom is institutionalized and she gets a call from her
Speaker 1: dead husband, which for someone who's been taught not to
Speaker 1: trust her own mental health, like, she freaked the FuG out.
Speaker 1: She like, yeah, she tried to like call him back,
Speaker 1: and the people in the institution are like, she's trying
Speaker 1: to call her dead husband. The dame's baby boys get
Speaker 1: the butterfly nets, and because she freaks out about that,
Speaker 1: they send her to a high security facility and like
Speaker 1: people only really know about this, like mind fuck of
Speaker 1: a thing that happened, because her daughter then goes on
Speaker 1: to become the most famous person in the world, like
Speaker 1: otherwise it's just a thing that happened to people at
Speaker 1: that time was just people diagnosed you and then stop
Speaker 1: believing anything that you had to say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, once that labels on there, right.
Speaker 4: Especially the women, I mean like oh yeah, it's kind
Speaker 4: of analogous to I mean like the Witch's time. Like
Speaker 4: if one person just said you're a witch, like all
Speaker 4: this sudden, you're a witch, and if you were like
Speaker 4: if they're like, oh, she's she has hysteria, she has
Speaker 4: the vapors, then they're like your toast.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is the time of
Speaker 1: lobotomies where they're like, she's difficult and we're gonna deal
Speaker 1: with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: For instance, right, so you know, her mom is in
Speaker 1: and out of the picture. She goes from foster family
Speaker 1: to foster family. Most biographers agree she's a toed at
Speaker 1: age twelve and just has it. Has a really rough upbringing,
Speaker 1: like she doesn't really have a home ever, and to
Speaker 1: the point that like one of her maternal figures who
Speaker 1: like took her to movies and like really helped delay.
Speaker 1: The foundation for this also is like I found this
Speaker 1: guy that I really like in West Virginia, So you're
Speaker 1: going to marry our neighbor James Doherty, who to her
Speaker 1: was just mister Doherty. And she is sixteen years old
Speaker 1: when they marry her off. She's forced to drop out
Speaker 1: of high school.
Speaker 4: To do you imagine how scary that would be.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wait, so this Carol One maternal figure she had was
Speaker 2: just like, you're marrying mister Doherty.
Speaker 1: You're marrying mister Doherty, our neighbor, because I don't know
Speaker 1: what else to do with you.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that she would be taking care of you probably, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's at sixteen, okay.
Speaker 1: And care yeah, straight up like dark age as shit,
Speaker 1: where just like you may marrier off that's like the best,
Speaker 1: the best way to kind of solve this problem. So
Speaker 1: this is around the time of World War Two. He
Speaker 1: joins the Merchant Marines and she starts working at a factory,
Speaker 1: and weirdly enough, she is at the forefront of drone warfare.
Speaker 1: At this time. She worked in a World War two
Speaker 1: defense plant for a company called radio Plane, which made small,
Speaker 1: remote controlled, pilotless aircraft. And it's straight up like there's
Speaker 1: a direct line from people who had toy planes, like
Speaker 1: toy remote controlled planes, to our modern drone warfare because
Speaker 1: there's an actor named Reginald Denny no no relation, Yeah,
Speaker 1: another same name. Yeah. So he's a famous actor who's
Speaker 1: obsessed with remote control airplanes and is like, we could
Speaker 1: start using these for target practice for the US Army,
Speaker 1: like I think in nineteen thirty five. And then his
Speaker 1: toy plane. He was so into toy planes. He had
Speaker 1: a factory that gets converted into this like anti aircraft,
Speaker 1: you know, drill thing that then gets acquired by Northrop
Speaker 1: Aircraft and becomes essentially Northrop Grumman's autonomous systems that we
Speaker 1: have today. Wow, she is the very first like public
Speaker 1: pictures modeling pictures of her are her putting the propellers
Speaker 1: on these planes that go on to become the first drones.
Speaker 2: That's wow.
Speaker 1: And another wild anecdote about those first pictures. So this
Speaker 1: is where she's first discovered. Reginald Denny, the actor, is
Speaker 1: at his factory and sees her. Says to this military
Speaker 1: captain that he knew from Hollywood, you gotta get somebody
Speaker 1: over here to look at the talent, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, brother, And that captain sends over a photographer
Speaker 1: who takes these kind of rosy the river at her pictures.
Speaker 1: Of her that end up getting some attention and like
Speaker 1: launching her modeling career. That captain that he like reached
Speaker 1: out to who hired the photographer Ronald Reagan. Wow, the only.
Speaker 4: Picture of them the other day to get there, of
Speaker 4: Ronald Reagan when he was still like an actor, the.
Speaker 1: Only good thing in his legacy, and it required no
Speaker 1: talent and could have been done by a phone operator.
Speaker 1: But he is indirectly responsible for basically passing along the
Speaker 1: message that this actor was horny for this woman who
Speaker 1: worked in his factory, who ends up being Marilyn Monroe. Wow,
Speaker 1: so get fucked, Ronald Reagan. This is the only good
Speaker 1: thing you did, and it required no Okay, yeah, that
Speaker 1: should have been the end. If only that had been
Speaker 1: the end of.
Speaker 2: This is I'm looking at the picture. Her hair is brown.
Speaker 1: Her hair is brown and curly.
Speaker 4: And reddish in the beginning kind of yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: before she to her famous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is where we get into So from this
Speaker 1: very first photo shoot, she is like an immediate savant
Speaker 1: and also like student of modeling. But yeah, to your point,
Speaker 1: I don't think I ever like associated her with like
Speaker 1: getting work done. I thought the work she had done
Speaker 1: was just like her hair died blonde. She also had
Speaker 1: a bump removed from her nose, had a silicon line
Speaker 1: added to her jaw, got her overbite fixed, which was
Speaker 1: paid for by the head of William Morris, who was
Speaker 1: her boyfriend at that time. But she was like kind
Speaker 1: of a Kardashian before the Kardashians.
Speaker 4: I'm crazy. I've always wondered about that because I didn't
Speaker 4: know that they could do that stuff.
Speaker 2: A silicon, a silicon line in your jaw, like a.
Speaker 4: Jaw, like you know what people put like filler in
Speaker 4: their jaw. Now that's some Oh so this is just
Speaker 4: like yeah, like sharp drawling.
Speaker 1: Yeah wow. But just a couple of things from these
Speaker 1: early stages because like the photographer at the time was
Speaker 1: he said, blown away by her ability to scan as
Speaker 1: sex on film. He also claimed they had a steamy
Speaker 1: affair which is cooperated by him and only that's another
Speaker 1: thing that just across her whole life. Everybody's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody the second she dies is like, here's my biography
Speaker 1: where and I have with Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker 3: So everyone becomes the Chris Farley bush Driver character in
Speaker 3: Billy Maddison.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, And the biographers are like, yeah, nobody
Speaker 1: believes that shit man, So it's kind of a pathetic look.
Speaker 1: But he talks about how she's able to like flirt
Speaker 1: with the camera in a way that like seems uncanny.
Speaker 1: But I just want to read this from there's a
Speaker 1: newer biography. The Spoto one that I mentioned earlier is
Speaker 1: kind of the most widely read one, but there's a
Speaker 1: newer one that I think might correct some of that
Speaker 1: stuff by Jay Randy Tamborelli, called The Secret Life of
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe. This quote is about these very first pictures
Speaker 1: that she takes. Besides the speed of her success, what
Speaker 1: was also fascinating about Norma Jean's first photo sessions was
Speaker 1: how quickly she seemed to understand the business of modeling.
Speaker 1: She was very inquisitive about the process and highly critical
Speaker 1: of her appearance. For instance, she asked David Conover, that's
Speaker 1: the guy who's taking these very first pictures, questions about lighting,
Speaker 1: about different camera lenses, about how he coaxed his models
Speaker 1: into giving their best performances in meetings with him. After
Speaker 1: the sessions, she would study the contact sheets with the
Speaker 1: kind of careful scrutiny one might expect from a professional model.
Speaker 1: She wanted to know what she'd done wrong if an
Speaker 1: exposure didn't meet with her approval. Again, like right from
Speaker 1: the start, like in these photographs that are for an
Speaker 1: army magazine called Yank, which oh my god, double entendre intended,
Speaker 1: I have to assume like you're yeah, they're like you
Speaker 1: jack off to this one. But the point about her
Speaker 1: being highly critical of her appearance and you know, the
Speaker 1: stuff we were talking about about her like getting a
Speaker 1: bump in her nose fixed, and it seems like, first
Speaker 1: of all very like crazy making to like exist in that,
Speaker 1: but also she's really good at like viewing herself from
Speaker 1: outside herself, Like right from the start, she's just immediately
Speaker 1: like yeah, exactly, she's just like I'm viewing herself as
Speaker 1: a product and being like how do I fix this.
Speaker 1: There's another quote from the Spotto biography from one of
Speaker 1: her early modeling teachers about again how hard she worked,
Speaker 1: but also just the weird geometries of beauty that like
Speaker 1: people talk about in the modeling industry. So she this
Speaker 1: woman says she was a clean cut American, wholesome girl,
Speaker 1: too plump, fuck off, but beautiful in a way we
Speaker 1: tried to teach her how to pose, how to handle
Speaker 1: her body. She always tried to lower her smile because
Speaker 1: she smiled too high and it made her nose look
Speaker 1: a little long. At first, she knew nothing about carriage posture, sitting,
Speaker 1: or walking. She started out with less than any girl
Speaker 1: I ever knew, but she wanted to learn, wanted to
Speaker 1: be somebody more than anybody I ever saw before in
Speaker 1: my life. So again, just like a student from the start,
Speaker 1: but also the shit that she had to study is
Speaker 1: like horrifying. For they're like, yeah, when you smile like that,
Speaker 1: it makes your nose look long.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I just think also some of these people, like
Speaker 4: these icons that impact culture in the way they do,
Speaker 4: It's like it does feel like this real destined thing
Speaker 4: because there's just all this certain amount of things that
Speaker 4: add up into this like completely remarkable alchemy. You know,
Speaker 4: like she comes from this insane childhood like absolutely nothing.
Speaker 4: Then she learns how to be basically like ponjure energy
Speaker 4: in a way that she can seduce like an entire
Speaker 4: population for yeah, millennia.
Speaker 3: Right right, Yeah, I mean to know, like you're to
Speaker 3: your point of being so early to having that kind
Speaker 3: of media savvy in such an early phase of like
Speaker 3: mass media and be like, Okay, I know what I'm
Speaker 3: gonna know what.
Speaker 2: My angles are.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna know what a well lit thing looks like
Speaker 3: because every image that you will cast your gaze upon
Speaker 3: will be perfected for maximum effect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you guys are absolutely like nailing that. She had
Speaker 1: this like ability that people were like, she's just got
Speaker 1: a magic power. I don't know what it is, right,
Speaker 1: and it comes from like studying. And there's a quote
Speaker 1: not to jump ahead, but like this continues right into
Speaker 1: her work on film, Like on the set her co
Speaker 1: stars would be like, this is a fucking disaster, and
Speaker 1: then they would see the movie and be like. There's
Speaker 1: a quote from her co star in one of her
Speaker 1: early movies, Richard Windmark, and he said, at first we
Speaker 1: thought she's not going to get anything right, and we'd mutter, oh,
Speaker 1: this is impossible, Oh this is impossible. You can't print this.
Speaker 1: But something happened between the lens and the film, and
Speaker 1: when we looked at the rushes, which is like the
Speaker 1: dailies from the she had the rest of us knocked
Speaker 1: off the screen. And that just like happens over and
Speaker 1: over where everyone's like, she's fucking up our movie. And
Speaker 1: then you look on film and you hear this a
Speaker 1: lot about like movie stars, where like people are on
Speaker 1: the set of a movie and they're like, what the
Speaker 1: fuck was that? Like he appears to be like whispering
Speaker 1: or like there, you know, you don't see anything happening,
Speaker 1: And then you actually look what they're doing with the
Speaker 1: camera and it's like, oh, they know exactly what they're doing.
Speaker 1: It's just very subtle, you know, and some people can't
Speaker 1: appreciate it.
Speaker 4: I also think that there's this inherent thing in it
Speaker 4: still very much exists today, and it's just a psychological
Speaker 4: bias that if someone's a really gorgeous woman slash blonde,
Speaker 4: but just women in general, that they can't and like
Speaker 4: I even catch myself. It's such deep programming for so
Speaker 4: many thousand, millions of years actually thousands, I don't know where.
Speaker 4: You can't be that smart, you can't know what you're doing.
Speaker 4: It's like an either or a Madonna horror situation. Right,
Speaker 4: you can't be a super intelligent person and also.
Speaker 3: Like a sex right yes, and then when you are
Speaker 3: people are just like, I don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like no, it's like they know what they're
Speaker 2: doing well.
Speaker 4: Shock and surprise, right right right, And it's just it
Speaker 4: still happens like if I see a super hot person
Speaker 4: on stage, I'm like, oh, they're not going to say
Speaker 4: something funny, you know, like it's they're guilty until proven innocent.
Speaker 2: Sure, dumb, they're dumb.
Speaker 1: Everybody look how hot? Yeah, So the modeling career takes
Speaker 1: off and then it leads to acting jobs, including parts
Speaker 1: in John Houston's The Asphalt Jungle. These are all like
Speaker 1: minor parts, but you know, she starts getting fan mail
Speaker 1: kind of right away. This is when she changes her
Speaker 1: name from Norma Jean Doherty to Marilyn Monroe. So Monroe
Speaker 1: was her mother's maiden name, and then they were trying
Speaker 1: to come up with the right first name, and this
Speaker 1: Fox executive Ben Lyon was like, there used to be
Speaker 1: this stage actress Marilyn Miller, who you kind of reminded
Speaker 1: me of. And he later reveals like he was engaged
Speaker 1: to her and she died at thirty eight, and he
Speaker 1: was like, I don't they just like have a similar
Speaker 1: vibe and also felt like similarly faded to like it's
Speaker 1: kind of like this haunting confluence of like, well, don't
Speaker 1: give her that name, man.
Speaker 3: Yeah fuck, oh reminder of this woman who died young tragically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that was also a thing back then. I
Speaker 4: mean like it sounds like she was wanting this, but
Speaker 4: like in that specific time period, like these girls would
Speaker 4: walk into these studios and they'd get these studio deals
Speaker 4: and they'd be like, Okay, we need to change your name,
Speaker 4: your voice, you need to get married, so that too
Speaker 4: for your image, you need to be seen with this person,
Speaker 4: you know, like they would construct these entire personas from
Speaker 4: the ground up. It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And in her case, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like studios being involved, but she is like they don't
Speaker 1: trust her. There's the head of twentieth century Fox, Darryl
Speaker 1: f Xanik, fired her months before she was in all
Speaker 1: Abaltiv because she was not photogenic, was what he said.
Speaker 1: So she like had to bounce back and forth. And
Speaker 1: so a thing you see in a lot of biographies
Speaker 1: is people being like I gave Marilyn Monroe this idea,
Speaker 1: and I, you know, I taught her how to pose
Speaker 1: in pictures like that one lady, And it's like well,
Speaker 1: twenty thousand people can't be responsible.
Speaker 2: At a certain point.
Speaker 1: We have to at a certain point, we have to
Speaker 1: look at the common denominator, which is Marilyn Monroe knew
Speaker 1: exactly what the fuck she was doing and just kept
Speaker 1: doing it really well all along. So in nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: she's still pretty unknown. She's like has these bit parts
Speaker 1: in the background of movies, and she's a famous kind
Speaker 1: of pin up model, and she poses nude for a
Speaker 1: photographer that and got paid fifty dollars for the shoot,
Speaker 1: and she's on the cusp of stardom. And a Chicago
Speaker 1: publisher includes one of the nude photos in a nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one calendar, and then that calendar sells so well
Speaker 1: that they're just like, that's actually next year's calendar too,
Speaker 1: And they just keep selling these calendars with nude photos
Speaker 1: of Marilyn Monroe in it. And that's something I didn't realize,
Speaker 1: like what one of the biographies was, basically like her
Speaker 1: nude photos were more widely available than her movies, Like
Speaker 1: everybody had kind of seen these because everyone was just
Speaker 1: I guess that was like the equivalent of a sex
Speaker 1: tape back then. It was like a calendar with nude
Speaker 1: women's with nude women's women Okay, and so she had
Speaker 1: like kind of starred in this underground, successful nude calendar
Speaker 1: and so I guess in that way again just more
Speaker 1: similar to like a Kim Kardashian than I expected. And
Speaker 1: so her career starts to take off in movies and
Speaker 1: then Fox is like, oh boy, like they get word
Speaker 1: that she's in this calendar and she comes in for
Speaker 1: this meeting and they're like, well, is it you? And
Speaker 1: she's like, I'm really ashamed. I'm super embarrassed because they
Speaker 1: didn't really get my best angle. Like she's just like
Speaker 1: immediately like get dropping like fucking lines from a movie
Speaker 1: on these studio executives who are like freaking the fuck out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's also like people later asked her about the photo shoot,
Speaker 1: like because there's tons of press around this like this
Speaker 1: is the year that like and this scandal is kind
Speaker 1: of what breaks her again, like similar to the Kim
Speaker 1: Kardashian thing where she's famous ish and then this nudity
Speaker 1: scandal happens and suddenly everybody's like holy shit, like nobody's
Speaker 1: ever done something like this, and somebody's like, did you
Speaker 1: have anything Marylynd Maryland, did you have anything on at
Speaker 1: all during the shoot? And she's and she said I
Speaker 1: had the radio on, which is such a good.
Speaker 4: Line, and you know, I'm sure she wasn't. I'm sure
Speaker 4: she's like, whoever, whatever man didn't negotiate for her to
Speaker 4: get a like percentage or royalties from those being reprinted
Speaker 4: over and over and over, right, So that yeah, sure
Speaker 4: landed her, Thank God and movies.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, So she does it does help her launch
Speaker 1: her career, which like very savvy. The way that she
Speaker 1: handled the quote unquote scandal was she like knew that
Speaker 1: there was this journalist who was a woman who she
Speaker 1: was like, I'm going to give you an exclusive interview
Speaker 1: on this, and like was like, okay, can we go
Speaker 1: off the record? Like, look, I did this because I
Speaker 1: couldn't eat, and like now it's becoming a huge problem
Speaker 1: for my career, Like do you have any like I
Speaker 1: needed that money just to be able to actually put
Speaker 1: food in my mouth? Do you have any advice on
Speaker 1: like what I could do? Like pretending it was off
Speaker 1: the record, but she knew for a fact, so they
Speaker 1: were going to print that she actually used the money
Speaker 1: to put a down payment on her car, so she's
Speaker 1: going to lose her car. I know she's so I know,
Speaker 1: she's so fucking cool. Oh my god. But that becomes
Speaker 1: the story. That becomes the story she becomes, like the
Speaker 1: rags to richest thing kind of becomes a part of
Speaker 1: her story. And she's just like playing all these angles.
Speaker 1: She's playing the stew video. You know, they're like we
Speaker 1: got to be ashamed of her, we got to fire her.
Speaker 1: And she comes in and is like, no, it's not
Speaker 1: a big deal, and I'm going to talk to this
Speaker 1: woman and make it all right. And she does, and
Speaker 1: like that makes her this kind of unknown quantity in
Speaker 1: American culture, which is like still super repressed at this time,
Speaker 1: like somebody who is not afraid of their nudity or
Speaker 1: their sexuality and is just like yeah, fuck it.
Speaker 4: Like so interesting though, because she moves like the mind
Speaker 4: of like Ari Ari Gold, what's his name, Ari Gold,
Speaker 4: Ari Manuel, whatever, I don't know, I'm conflict.
Speaker 3: Yeah no, you said Ari Gold based on Ari Emmanuel.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, I have no idea about my recall, but
Speaker 4: like I'm it's just so interesting because I'm like wondering,
Speaker 4: did she have someone engineering this or these are just
Speaker 4: all her ideas like Blair.
Speaker 2: Period, so we can't question the genius.
Speaker 3: Really, I love it's everybody one of the best improvisers
Speaker 3: I think we've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Everybody at the time. And speaking of improvisers, like everybody's
Speaker 1: like she's really like has amazing comedic timing, She's like witty,
Speaker 1: she has like her performances. She's playing a dumb blonde,
Speaker 1: but her performances are like you know actors are like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, She's got.
Speaker 4: Like Sprina Carpenter is like really channeling this. I feel
Speaker 4: like a.
Speaker 1: Lot I think a lot of people have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of people obviously have definitely like so
Speaker 4: this does seem yeah now, like with the humor and
Speaker 4: like the sexuality.
Speaker 1: And I think Sabrina Carpenter is a great reference for this.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, but just so much mega watts star power
Speaker 4: with like the funniness and like the not taking yourself
Speaker 4: too seriously, with like so much beauty.
Speaker 1: Also yes, also like I hadn't realized. I think I
Speaker 1: think I did maybe know that the first Playboy had
Speaker 1: Marilyn Mamra on the car, but you have you Hefner
Speaker 1: bought that calendar photo for five hundred dollars. Marilyn Monroe
Speaker 1: never got any more than her original fifty dollars, and
Speaker 1: that is what launched Playboy, was him just putting the
Speaker 1: calendar photo. Calendar photo, that's the calendar photo is just
Speaker 1: the one that she got paid fifty dollars. He bought
Speaker 1: for five hundred dollars. Uh. And this like massively powerful
Speaker 1: brand like Playboy, like that is launched by.
Speaker 4: Heefner, Like I hate that man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not cool, not cool.
Speaker 2: But the other way what happened.
Speaker 1: With I know, I was gonna say, like so this
Speaker 1: ability of him for him to just like pay five
Speaker 1: hundred dollars for this photograph that launches the entire like
Speaker 1: this massively powerful brand is fucking crazy. And again it's
Speaker 1: like this huge brand that launches careers, like I don't
Speaker 1: know Miles, right, does Jamie loftis Jamie? But that brand
Speaker 1: doesn't exist exist if it's not right without Maryland that
Speaker 1: she is like cultivating and like this chess game that
Speaker 1: she's playing with the public.
Speaker 3: That's actually like one of the most damning, the biggest
Speaker 3: indictment against Playboy as this massive institution is to know
Speaker 3: that it was launched off the back of him being like, dude,
Speaker 3: you know that Poppin calendar. Yeah, that's going to be
Speaker 3: the cover. That's like that's like some NFT ship that yeah,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. He's like, yeah, it's just
Speaker 3: like my fucking art dog. No, you've literally hitched your
Speaker 3: wagon to this massive star.
Speaker 2: That's wild.
Speaker 1: I stole her whole ship, like all of his like
Speaker 1: bunnies kind of like drafted off of her, like look
Speaker 1: off of her, and like he bought the plot above
Speaker 1: her in the Westwood Cemetery and was like when you
Speaker 1: bury me, like bury me above Maryland and then his yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and his surviving wife was like, I'm actually gonna sell
Speaker 1: that and pay off my mortgage.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm gonna put your ashes in. I'm gonna put
Speaker 2: your ashes.
Speaker 3: In a wonderbread bag and throw it off the ten Freeway.
Speaker 1: But this is the stretch where, like, you know how
Speaker 1: we had those periods where like Elon Musk is just
Speaker 1: like constantly in the fucking news and you just like
Speaker 1: can't escape him. Right now, it's like she's just every
Speaker 1: day people at the time described as just being like
Speaker 1: every day there's a new Marilyn Monroe story. Everybody's just
Speaker 1: like obsessed with her. There's this one year where she's
Speaker 1: like marrying Joe DiMaggio, She's getting emergency surgery for appendicitis.
Speaker 1: She's revealed to be the Naked Lady and the nude calendar.
Speaker 1: There's like some paparazzi are caught like selling nude pictures
Speaker 1: they took without her permission, Like like that Aaron Andrews story.
Speaker 1: Do you remember where that like creepy guy was like yeah,
Speaker 1: like that have to her, like and it's like the
Speaker 1: whole world is just like obsessed with her in a
Speaker 1: way that I hadn't really. I just thought I thought
Speaker 1: because that song was like one of the main first
Speaker 1: things I just thought. It was like she was this
Speaker 1: tragic figure. She was this like massive media mogul who
Speaker 1: just wasn't getting paid like a mogul, but was like
Speaker 1: create in terms of like the pop cultural power of
Speaker 1: what she was creating was just insane. Also, during her
Speaker 1: appendix surgery, just back to like how women were treated
Speaker 1: in the medical world, she felt the need to put
Speaker 1: a post it note on her abdomen as she was
Speaker 1: going into surgery, being like, please don't botch my surgery
Speaker 1: and make me infertile. Xx. Marilyn Monroe and the doctor.
Speaker 1: The doctor got nervous and like brought in a gynecologist
Speaker 1: for her appendic surgery because I guess he was planning
Speaker 1: to botch her surgery up to that point.
Speaker 2: I mean, not playing like he was shook after that.
Speaker 4: She's so smart. That's what I did. Right before my
Speaker 4: tumor surgery were like literally right. But as I was
Speaker 4: going on door, I was like, please don't shave my head.
Speaker 1: I know you're not going to shave my head.
Speaker 4: Please don't shame begging.
Speaker 3: Wait, but is that that was just a technique thing
Speaker 3: of being able to do the surgery without shaving or
Speaker 3: having to shave your head.
Speaker 4: Well, they had told me for six months they were
Speaker 4: going to have to shave my head get the tumor out.
Speaker 4: It's like a big area. And then I woke up
Speaker 4: and I just had like a little my hair was
Speaker 4: still there with like a big patch gone.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 4: But Marilyn, I have friends who do this too, like
Speaker 4: who have said before they went under for the C section,
Speaker 4: like please, and they're like, and I asked the doctor
Speaker 4: at the last minute, like please make me the smallest scar.
Speaker 4: And that's why I was such a small scar.
Speaker 3: You know, and they go, you know what, for you,
Speaker 3: I'm going to do something very different this time.
Speaker 2: For you. I do this seven times a day.
Speaker 4: Her currency you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Sure, the post it is. And it's also just like, hey,
Speaker 1: could you please view me as a human being? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Thank you? That would be so such.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, I got a lady in here who doesn't
Speaker 3: want me to botch her appendixer, she can write boy.
Speaker 1: So this is where we start getting like some of
Speaker 1: her most iconic film performances. There's the movie Gentleman Prefer Blondes,
Speaker 1: which has the Diamonds or a Girl's Best Friend performance,
Speaker 1: which is I kind of I hadn't watched it until
Speaker 1: doing the research for this, and it is essentially like
Speaker 1: if you've seen the Madonna material Girl music video, it's
Speaker 1: kind of just a shot for shot remake of the performance.
Speaker 1: That's where her like pink dress comes from.
Speaker 4: I need to watch that. I've never seen it.
Speaker 1: But this is also a time like the Women's Club
Speaker 1: was like a group that would come in and be like,
Speaker 1: you can't have her on camera looking this good, like
Speaker 1: she's too This is what we talked about this a
Speaker 1: lot with Elvis. She was like too hot and America
Speaker 1: was too horny, and they just felt like they had
Speaker 1: to protect people from her.
Speaker 2: Oh, like they're like.
Speaker 3: This is like nuclear atomic energy you're feeling around heart.
Speaker 4: This is a time where women can't own property by themselves,
Speaker 4: don't have credit cards by themselves, probably have there still
Speaker 4: can't have no fault divorce. Like women are socialized so
Speaker 4: deeply to believe that their livelihood is being chosen by
Speaker 4: their man, and then keeping their man to keep their family.
Speaker 4: And so when you get this whole new sexual presence,
Speaker 4: I could see easily how those women all, and it's sad,
Speaker 4: felt so threatened all of a sudden, you know, and
Speaker 4: men probably are thinking there's a whole new thing of like,
Speaker 4: oh this is what's available, Like this could be you know,
Speaker 4: it is.
Speaker 2: A new standard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like disrupting in an entire ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Right Yeah. So yeah, one of the things they objected
Speaker 1: to was just her singing a song too seductively in
Speaker 1: this movie Niagara, that is apparently one of her one
Speaker 1: of her better movies. So to your point about just
Speaker 1: like what was happening sexually at this time between gentlemen
Speaker 1: prefer blondes and the seven year it the Kinsey Report
Speaker 1: on Female Sexuality drop and revealed things that apparently like
Speaker 1: came as a huge shock to Americans at the time
Speaker 1: that like half of women were not virgins at marriage,
Speaker 1: a quarter are like having affairs, and like many of them,
Speaker 1: this is this is weird. They're like, apparently women are
Speaker 1: enjoying sex.
Speaker 4: We must in this.
Speaker 1: People were furious and they got mad at Kinsey and
Speaker 1: they also like basically blamed marilynmm because they were like, see,
Speaker 1: she's channeling this thing that it kind of reminds like
Speaker 1: in the Einstein episode. We talked about how he theorized
Speaker 1: this black hole at the center of the universe and
Speaker 1: then years later scientific instruments were able to actually observe it.
Speaker 1: But like his was basically his math, like decades before
Speaker 1: the scientific observation was able to be there, and it
Speaker 1: was like the beginning of her career. She's like channeling
Speaker 1: this thing and then the research comes out and is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right, like people, this is what people want.
Speaker 4: And she only could have known what was to come
Speaker 4: about the just ubiquitous porn at any second, everywhere, at
Speaker 4: all times, right, But.
Speaker 1: The av club about her performance in Gentlemen Preferred Blondes
Speaker 1: notes that the joke of the song is that Monro
Speaker 1: values diamonds over the subservient men. She's clearly in on
Speaker 1: that joke, and the movie is ultimately a celebration of
Speaker 1: female ingenuity and solidarity. Monroe's dumb blonde character was clearly
Speaker 1: the creation of a very savvy, intellectual performer, which I
Speaker 1: guess seems obvious, but like at the time they're just like,
Speaker 1: she's she's the dumb blonde on on screen, and I
Speaker 1: think she you know, she also played that in public.
Speaker 1: She said the act of like posing for photographs in
Speaker 1: the camera would make her horny, which like everybody just
Speaker 1: took it face value, but then you know, genius. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's just like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's making her job that is very difficult that
Speaker 4: she scrupulously studies and is so hard on herself about
Speaker 4: like acting. Yeah, it's like she's faking an orgasm.
Speaker 1: Basically, she's faking an orgasm for She's basically like you,
Speaker 1: the film viewer, and the person who's looking at you,
Speaker 1: I'm actually horny for you.
Speaker 2: Like essentially, oh, you're right, like I'm actually so horny.
Speaker 2: Like when I took that picture. You're right, yeah, exactly the.
Speaker 1: Like I was stressed. Remind there's this poor hey Luis
Speaker 1: bourgeous poem about Shakespeare called Everything and Nothing, where his
Speaker 1: theory of like who Shakespeare was, and like what drove
Speaker 1: him is that, to quote the poem, there was no
Speaker 1: one inside him, nothing but a trace of chill, a
Speaker 1: dream dreamt by no one else. And then like he
Speaker 1: becomes an actor because quote he had become instinctively adept
Speaker 1: at pretending to be somebody so that no one would
Speaker 1: suspect he was in fact nobody. In London, he discovered
Speaker 1: the profession for which he was destined, that of the
Speaker 1: actor who stands on a stage and pretends to be
Speaker 1: someone else in front of a group of people who
Speaker 1: pretend to take him for that person. And there's just
Speaker 1: like tons of I just love that theory of like
Speaker 1: Shakespeare and like you know, why people create art, and
Speaker 1: like how interesting and different like the internal interiority of
Speaker 1: like different artists might be than we expect. There are
Speaker 1: so many quotes from her throughout her biography where she's
Speaker 1: basically saying, Zach that, like she says, I always felt
Speaker 1: like I was a nobody and the only way for
Speaker 1: me to be somebody was to be well somebody else,
Speaker 1: which is probably why I wanted to act. So it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, people are like psychoanalyzing her and being like, well,
Speaker 1: she had this personality disorder, this psychiatric disorder. It's like
Speaker 1: I don't know, like when when somebody theorizes about Shakespeare,
Speaker 1: it's just like a cool It's just like, wow, that
Speaker 1: what a cool idea about a cool artist, right? I do?
Speaker 1: I do feel like I don't know a lot of
Speaker 1: artists might be you know, empty on the inside and
Speaker 1: creating their art to give themselves meaning, Like that's kind
Speaker 1: of cool.
Speaker 4: Well, also, I think artists do the work of being
Speaker 4: honest about things that hold up a mirror for everyone
Speaker 4: else to experience their own pathos or whatever. But she
Speaker 4: had so much trauma, and then you know, she's like
Speaker 4: the equivalent of fame of what a pop star is today,
Speaker 4: Like the most famous pops are like a Justin Bieber
Speaker 4: or a Taylor Swift or whatever, that type of level
Speaker 4: of fame. I find it almost impossible when you become
Speaker 4: an industry like that that's so massive and you know,
Speaker 4: a very solidified idea of what people perceive you to be,
Speaker 4: which you know, no matter what scale it is a
Speaker 4: small or incredibly large, no one really knows the interior
Speaker 4: of you. And I think that's just a very lonely
Speaker 4: life when it gets to be such a magnitude, because
Speaker 4: there's no way that you're not misunderstood by a large
Speaker 4: amount of people at all times. So of course it's
Speaker 4: going to impact your mental health. Like, yeah, I don't
Speaker 4: know how anyone with that level of fame stays like
Speaker 4: well to yourself anymore.
Speaker 5: No, Yeah, you cease to be a person, and you
Speaker 5: become an infinite number become an infinite number of things
Speaker 5: to millions of people.
Speaker 2: And yeah, and also you have no idea for what
Speaker 2: reason anyone is interacting with you, Yeah, anymore?
Speaker 1: And and multiple like her husbands like buy into that,
Speaker 1: Like Joe Demaggio first saw her in a photograph of
Speaker 1: her wearing like a baseball jersey and was like that,
Speaker 1: that's that's how that's the first way he interacted with her.
Speaker 1: And he was familiar with the image of this like
Speaker 1: childlike no interest in independence woman. And then you know
Speaker 1: she would marry Demaggio or Arthur Miller and then they'd
Speaker 1: be like insulted when she would be like, I got
Speaker 1: to put my career first because I'm like the most
Speaker 1: famous person on the planet and this is I'm building
Speaker 1: something here, And then I think she would be shocked
Speaker 1: and disappointed that they like actually couldn't deal with that,
Speaker 1: right you know?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that still very very very much exists today, Like,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, well, people are are extremely attracted to like
Speaker 4: a sparkly woman or man, but more so women and
Speaker 4: all that comes with like the star power and energy
Speaker 4: and wattage of what makes them that person. But then
Speaker 4: the reality of what it means to sort of live
Speaker 4: in that shadow or coexist with that level of stardom
Speaker 4: is like not sustainable for a lot of people's like
Speaker 4: hearts and egos.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is when she marries Joe DiMaggio. They
Speaker 1: are only married for nine months. He is abusive. I
Speaker 1: do just need to read this anecdote from the Spotal
Speaker 1: biography about Joe Demagio and like what he was like
Speaker 1: at that time. He just like watched TV a lot
Speaker 1: and was just thiss, like really boring person, like hung
Speaker 1: out at gentlemen's clubs. But from the Spotal biography, before
Speaker 1: they met, he was hanging around gentlemen's Clubs and best
Speaker 1: Buddies with a guy named George Solitaire. George Solitaire grew
Speaker 1: up in Brownsville and then moved to Bronxville. Claims to
Speaker 1: be the guy who invented calling boring things Dolesville and
Speaker 1: divorces Splitsville.
Speaker 4: I love that you just called Joe Dimaccio boring. That's
Speaker 4: so funny.
Speaker 1: That was That was Her initial response was like, holy ship,
Speaker 1: this guy's so fucking boring.
Speaker 2: I'm hanging out with George Solitaire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, George Solitaire, such a fucking Tim Robinson character.
Speaker 3: Alf own of a name like the Loneliest Mother for
Speaker 3: her too, because you said a repulsive loser.
Speaker 1: Claim to fame, I invented calling boring things Dolesville and
Speaker 1: then and then it's like, I think my the story
Speaker 1: of my authorship of those phrases comes from growing up
Speaker 1: in Brownsville and Bronxville and having.
Speaker 2: My god Dolesville in Splitsville. Yeah, that's how I kind
Speaker 2: of came up with it anyway. Emotions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, George Solitaire, So George South did get over here.
Speaker 1: Why we're solid ditch.
Speaker 2: I thought you're gonna say he created and invented the
Speaker 2: game Solitaire. Nope, you're about to go to Dolesville. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's so funny.
Speaker 3: When I was like, oh, George, Solitaire didn't invent so
Speaker 3: he invented the phrase Splitsville and Dolesville.
Speaker 1: Okay, and we you I saw. I'm gonna cite him
Speaker 1: from now on every time I say, hey, daddy, Owe,
Speaker 1: this place is Dolesville.
Speaker 2: Let's get out of here, shout out to my boy George.
Speaker 1: This is one the seven year itch came out, which
Speaker 1: is the one with the famous photograph of hers or
Speaker 1: her dress being blown up by a subway grate, which
Speaker 1: I watched the first half of this movie. It sucks
Speaker 1: so but it like the premise that she's great, But
Speaker 1: the entire premise is like a middle aged man's wife
Speaker 1: and kid leave town in the summertime and he wrestles
Speaker 1: with the fact that he desperately wants to fuck his
Speaker 1: neighbor who's like wildly out of his league. And that's
Speaker 1: the entire plot, is that this seven y Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's like when when you've been married for seven years. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when a fella's eyes starts to wander, if you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. But Uh, it's yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 1: Like it's a lot of like him talking to himself
Speaker 1: and be like, oh George, oh buddy, you're a good man.
Speaker 2: What'll they say?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the photo shoot, like the one that everybody
Speaker 1: has photographs of of where her skirt is being blown
Speaker 1: up was from. They said that they like were trying
Speaker 1: to film the movie scene on location in New York,
Speaker 1: but I think they basically knew that this would be
Speaker 1: an amazing publicity stunt. Five thousand people showed up and
Speaker 1: it was this like wild, crowded scene to the point
Speaker 1: that they like couldn't use any of the footage because
Speaker 1: everyone was just screeching at the top of their lungs.
Speaker 1: I talked about the movie Saturday Night, where like they
Speaker 1: basically ram a bunch of like SNL lore into like
Speaker 1: one night. They're like, yeah, all of this happened on
Speaker 1: the first night of the filming of Saturday Night Live
Speaker 1: Going Live, and there are like some weird moments in
Speaker 1: this where like a bunch of different things happen. And
Speaker 1: that scene where her skirts being blown up is also
Speaker 1: what caused her and Demaggio's divorce because he was so
Speaker 1: like Walter Winshell brought him because he knew that it was.
Speaker 1: He's like a gossip columnist at the time, and he
Speaker 1: like brought him to the set and Demaggio shouted, that's it,
Speaker 1: I've had it and then stormed off, which is just
Speaker 1: such a funny, old timey guy thing to say. And
Speaker 1: then they were divorced like weeks later Wits Bill because
Speaker 1: Joe DiMaggio turns out a little bit Dolesville.
Speaker 3: You say, George, you're better off Joe that Marilyn was
Speaker 3: Dolesville to the max.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I got that from Brownsville. You can use it.
Speaker 1: But again, incredibly iconic moment. Some people have said it's
Speaker 1: the most iconic shot in film, even though it's not
Speaker 1: in the film. The dress went for five point six
Speaker 1: million dollars in twenty eleven.
Speaker 4: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then Kim kardash you wear that.
Speaker 4: Dress, she wore the diamond, she wore the crystal one.
Speaker 1: That's jf Which that's another kind of weird collapsible moment
Speaker 1: or like everything kind of happening on top of each other.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize the JFK moment happened like two months
Speaker 1: before she died, Like yeah, it was like really soon before,
Speaker 1: which is I guess where some of the suspicion comes from.
Speaker 1: But yeah, she starts studying under the Strasburg Lee Strasberg,
Speaker 1: who's like the founder of the Actors Studio and the
Speaker 1: founder of method acting. And I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people treat her working with them as like an incongruity
Speaker 1: because it's like, this woman plays ditzy blonde is trying
Speaker 1: to be, you know, this method actor. But again to
Speaker 1: the point about her being a really great actor. There's
Speaker 1: this cool anecdote from one of her later films called
Speaker 1: I Think The Duke and the Showgirl or The Prince
Speaker 1: and the Showgirl or something. She's co starring with Sir
Speaker 1: Laurence Olivier, who is also directing her in this movie,
Speaker 1: and he has this famous quote when he's working with
Speaker 1: Dustin Hoffman on Marathon Man and Dustin Hoffman is, I
Speaker 1: don't know, like running marathons to prepare for the role,
Speaker 1: and Olivier is like, have you tried acting, my dear boy,
Speaker 1: like instead of like doing the method thing where you
Speaker 1: like have to inhabit the life of the character. He's
Speaker 1: just like, that's all stupid. What are you doing? And
Speaker 1: he was like a total asshole to Marilyn on set
Speaker 1: and was like, you just need to be pretty? Would
Speaker 1: you stop with this shit. He's like widely regarded as
Speaker 1: the greatest, you know, British actor at the time, so
Speaker 1: he doesn't have time for her bullshit on the set
Speaker 1: of this. He thinks she sucks during the make of
Speaker 1: the movie. Later puts it on for friends after the
Speaker 1: fact and is like, I thought i'd like have a
Speaker 1: good laugh at how shit the movie is, and like
Speaker 1: we'd laugh at her performance. And you know, he had
Speaker 1: directed it, so he thought he knew like what he
Speaker 1: was about to see. But you know, when you're watching
Speaker 1: something with different people, you can maybe sometimes see it
Speaker 1: again with fresh eyes, and like by the end of
Speaker 1: the screening, he's like, oh, she's by far the best
Speaker 1: person in that movie, and like has like gone on
Speaker 1: the record being like she fucking acted me off them
Speaker 1: off the screen, but like, yeah, she gave him notes
Speaker 1: on shots and was like you should like paste this up.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be a comedy and it's like very
Speaker 1: plotting and he just like didn't listen to that and
Speaker 1: was like, well, should you just need to be pretty?
Speaker 1: But she just she just had that thing that great
Speaker 1: film actors have where you see them on set doing
Speaker 1: a thing and you're like, what the fuck is that,
Speaker 1: and then it's just magic on film. How many films
Speaker 1: she in I don't know the count, but.
Speaker 3: Was it did she have like a long run, because
Speaker 3: I my percept like, was it this like all happening
Speaker 3: within a seven year span?
Speaker 2: Less?
Speaker 1: More so this I think her early film work was
Speaker 1: like early fifties and she died in the early sixties.
Speaker 1: So like the second year itch is fifty five and
Speaker 1: she does in the early sixties, so okay, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like she takes off and then there's like a
Speaker 1: six seven year run. Right, she married Demagio. I'm fifty two,
Speaker 1: so she's already like very famous. Then she starts appearing
Speaker 1: in movies, and like those movies do incredibly well, even
Speaker 1: though some of them are just about a rizzless guy
Speaker 1: being like, god, she's hot for like an hour and
Speaker 1: a half. But yeah, she's in a bunch of movies,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of her performances towards the end
Speaker 1: of her career are really like now critically acclaimed, whereas
Speaker 1: they like weren't necessarily at the time, but I do
Speaker 1: think there's something like kind of timeless that she is
Speaker 1: kind of connecting with that you know, people weren't able
Speaker 1: to appreciate at the time, but now you look at
Speaker 1: a fucking Laurence Olivier performance and it's like, why is
Speaker 1: he acting like that? Yeah, and you look at her
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, there goes the most beautiful person
Speaker 1: I've ever seen on camera, just completely popping off. And
Speaker 1: also she looks like she could exist now. You know.
Speaker 1: She also married Arthur Miller, which is how she gets
Speaker 1: the attention of the FBI because Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible,
Speaker 1: which the FBI was like, they brought him before the
Speaker 1: House on American Committee and he wouldn't name names. And
Speaker 1: that was also when he was like, and I'm marrying
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe. And she stuck by him during all this
Speaker 1: even though she was being So there's another like kind
Speaker 1: of in line with the story about her mom and
Speaker 1: the dead husband coming back from the dead. Towards the
Speaker 1: end of her life, therapist who worked with her were like,
Speaker 1: she potentially displaying signs of having like schizophrenic tendencies like
Speaker 1: her mom did, and that there are like some details
Speaker 1: that make it seem like her mom when she was
Speaker 1: committed refused to eat thinking the hospital was trying to
Speaker 1: poison her, and marylyn mom road toward the end of
Speaker 1: her life was like refusing to eat takeout and saying
Speaker 1: she thought that like everybody was trying to poison her.
Speaker 1: And Joe Demaggio was like, there, I just eat the
Speaker 1: food like we're good, and she was like, well, Joe,
Speaker 1: they're not trying to poison you, are they. Hah.
Speaker 4: She probably with what a scandal she was at the time,
Speaker 4: I'm sure she got like death threats and freaky shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah all the time.
Speaker 4: Oh all, So back then it was just like the
Speaker 4: Yellow Pages, like you like, I think that her estate
Speaker 4: in Brentwood was like recently just sold, Like you could
Speaker 4: just walk up to someone's house, like everyone's house was listed,
Speaker 4: like where everyone lived, you know. Bizarre.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she couldn't get away from the cameras, like she
Speaker 1: was there just pop ROSSI following her everywhere. But around
Speaker 1: this time, when she's married Arthur Miller and living in
Speaker 1: New York, there's an anecdote where she like meets up
Speaker 1: a friend and she's like, I'm being followed and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course you are like the most famous. And she's like, no,
Speaker 1: by the FBI, and they're like, okay, fuck, she's lost it.
Speaker 1: And she was being followed by the FBI. She was like,
Speaker 1: I've learned how to like lose them, and like she
Speaker 1: was talking about what she would do to like get
Speaker 1: them off her tail. And it's true, but everybody, of course,
Speaker 1: that's like an in city, Like I feel like a
Speaker 1: lot of our twentieth century icons are followed by the FBI,
Speaker 1: and it's just like such a mind fuck.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you're like I know this is happening, but
Speaker 4: no one believes me because they sound like a psychopath.
Speaker 4: But then back then it was like what was it
Speaker 4: the Red Red Scare?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, all.
Speaker 4: The blacklisted people and if you all those people were
Speaker 4: being followed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she was like hung out with leftist intellectuals
Speaker 1: like those were her politics. She you know, once intervened
Speaker 1: on behalf of El Fitzgerald, who was like, yes, not
Speaker 1: able to check into a hotel or like get booked
Speaker 1: at a club because it was America and raising.
Speaker 4: Her and she like went and she's like all good
Speaker 4: with you. And she walked in and was like you
Speaker 4: need to put her on that stage. Yeah, and I
Speaker 4: was like, go bitch, yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: Which made her very dangerous. To the FBI. They were like, no,
Speaker 1: we don't that's probably not as dangerous as They probably
Speaker 1: underestimated her too, but they did tail her and eventually
Speaker 1: they were like, God, damn it. She hasn't met with
Speaker 1: any Communist officials. What is going on here? But to
Speaker 1: your question about her film career, so towards the end,
Speaker 1: she appears in Some Like It Hot, which I did not.
Speaker 1: Have you guys seen Some Like It Hot?
Speaker 2: Nope, I've seen clips of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like a comedy where her men dress up as
Speaker 1: women and it's that's played for laughs. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: long Yo, Thanks for everything, Julie Numar.
Speaker 3: I just remember Like It Grumpy Old Men when it
Speaker 3: came out and my mom was like, Jack Lemon is
Speaker 3: in Some Like It Hot, and I'm like, I don't
Speaker 3: know what that is. I only know that this is
Speaker 3: the guy from Grumpy Old Men. I don't know if
Speaker 3: he has a career before this film, but that project
Speaker 3: was built around her. She was the first to be cast.
Speaker 3: It was her return to movies after some health issues,
Speaker 3: including a miscarriage and some barbiturate dependency. So she took
Speaker 3: like a two year break, came back with Some Like
Speaker 3: It Hot, and it's been rated as like the best
Speaker 3: filmed comedy you know, brilliance.
Speaker 4: I need to go jeez, I need to watch these
Speaker 4: I need to watch a few movies. I haven't seen
Speaker 4: her movies.
Speaker 2: I mean, I love the guy from Grumpy Old Men, So.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she Producer Victor says, it's not that DVH. Just
Speaker 1: on the subject of like her being witty, there's this
Speaker 1: one anecdote that I didn't see it read anywhere as
Speaker 1: her being witty, but so Joan Crawford, another movie star
Speaker 1: at the time, basically like called her a slut in
Speaker 1: the media as she was rising up, and like Marilyn
Speaker 1: Monroe would never like she was always complimentary about like
Speaker 1: all of her exes, everybody she had relationships with, and
Speaker 1: so on. The Joan Crawford one, though, she like went
Speaker 1: out of her way to pray. She was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't like, that's so crazy that she's mad at me.
Speaker 1: I've like always admired her and especially like what a
Speaker 1: good mother she is. I hear she's like the best mother,
Speaker 1: and like Joan Crawford like turns out like she's the
Speaker 1: subject of Mommy Dearest, So people were just like taking
Speaker 1: it at face value. But I could see it being
Speaker 1: her like knowing some dirt about her family and just
Speaker 1: being like, I just hear she's such a good mom,
Speaker 1: and like I've always wanted to just to be like
Speaker 1: such a that's such a clear woman.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what they call in wrapped now, sneak this, yees.
Speaker 1: Sneak this. I feel like she was sneak this sing.
Speaker 1: But like even even like her modern like one of
Speaker 1: her more modern biographies, was still like it's kind of
Speaker 1: a irony that she went out of her way to
Speaker 1: talk about what a good mother she was because Joan Crawford,
Speaker 1: of course, turned out to be a complete fucking monster.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you're like, wasn't an accident irony at all? Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Crawford's eyes are so fucking scary. Yeah, you know
Speaker 4: there's those eyes like reveal reveal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's the JFKN Sinatra stuff where I like, based
Speaker 1: on most reporting, it seems like she had like one
Speaker 1: encounter maybe with JFK. He was she was like summoned
Speaker 1: to Bing Crosby's house. They hung out for like fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes head sex and then he spent the rest of
Speaker 1: the time complaining about how bad his back hurt. The men,
Speaker 1: like over and over and over again. The men and
Speaker 1: these stories are so pathetic to the point that like
Speaker 1: she called her doctor. This is like one of the
Speaker 1: ways we have it confirmed that they had an affair,
Speaker 1: because like she called her doctor, who was like, oh,
Speaker 1: the vibe was very clear that they had just had sex,
Speaker 1: and she's like, here, talk to John F. Kennedy. First
Speaker 1: of all, imagine being a doctor and getting that call.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it does feel like a lot of her
Speaker 1: energy towards men was like feeling sorry for them, and
Speaker 1: like she like chases these incredibly accomplished men in the
Speaker 1: hopes that one of them won't be pathetic, and they're
Speaker 1: all like immediately just like, oh my.
Speaker 3: Back was George solitarire, Jesus, you hurt my back when
Speaker 3: we were doing it.
Speaker 1: The fuck Wait.
Speaker 4: I didn't realize that she was only thirty six when
Speaker 4: she died. I thought she was forty six.
Speaker 1: No, thirty six, yeah wow, And like God really coming
Speaker 1: not not long after some like it hot, which is
Speaker 1: like her biggest critical.
Speaker 4: At the Apex.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she also had an affair around this time with
Speaker 1: Frank Sinatra. He gave her a Maltese puppy that she
Speaker 1: named Moth, which was short for Mafia, because she was like,
Speaker 1: this guy's hilarious Mafia. She really is.
Speaker 4: She's so she's so funny. I love her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where'd you name the dog? Mafia? We'll call it
Speaker 2: Moth though, so people don't really.
Speaker 4: Tiny little mobster after my mobster boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there this quote about Frank said because apparently
Speaker 1: Frank was dealing with struggling with ed around this time,
Speaker 1: and he credited Marilyn Monroe with during it. But just
Speaker 1: in the same in the same world as George Solitaire,
Speaker 1: just the way men were at the time. From the
Speaker 1: Tamberelli biography, Actually, Frank had been going through this whole
Speaker 1: impotency trip at the time, way too much sauce the
Speaker 1: booze was completely ruining a sex like he's getting too
Speaker 1: old to drink like that, and then expected to also
Speaker 1: perform in the sack.
Speaker 4: Can you imagine your friend saying that in the press
Speaker 4: trick my boy, my boy can't get it off.
Speaker 1: He's on an inpotity trick.
Speaker 2: Bro, He's washed. Bro. He can't hit the bottles and
Speaker 2: the booty in one night.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And also I love them back then, being like,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, it's just the woman that's the issue. These
Speaker 4: chicks just aren't hot enough.
Speaker 2: If that was nothing to do with his alcoholism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, But the stories from that relationship, a lot
Speaker 1: of her relationship, it does feel like she's like kind
Speaker 1: of playing the role of that she plays on screen,
Speaker 1: and like also the like of a woman in a
Speaker 1: modern like porn like that she's just doing what she feels.
Speaker 1: Like these men who she feels very sorry for want
Speaker 1: and she's like good at just like reading that and
Speaker 1: like doing whatever they want. And this is around the
Speaker 1: time that she does the Happy Birthday to You performance
Speaker 1: for JFK, which is, first of all only I first
Speaker 1: found out about that from Mike Myers doing it in
Speaker 1: Wayne's World, which is much less cool. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: this happens like a couple months before she dies. And
Speaker 1: it's also like apparently it was a surprise to everyone
Speaker 1: that she went that hard, So I think that's probably
Speaker 1: like unconsciously why some people are like that's kind of weird.
Speaker 1: She like put that out there right before she died,
Speaker 1: and like this was a person who is having like
Speaker 1: crazy affairs all the time.
Speaker 4: Did you see this about her IQ now that she
Speaker 4: reportedly I don't know how this is proven or not,
Speaker 4: so I don't know for a fact if this is true.
Speaker 4: But apparently they said that she had an IQ of
Speaker 4: once sixty eight when Einstein's was one sixty. Do you
Speaker 4: think that's true?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean I could definitely. I think
Speaker 1: she is like a genius in many ways, and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't surprise me to hear that she because like everything
Speaker 1: that I found in this research was just like she
Speaker 1: is playing chess while these guys around her are just
Speaker 1: playing marbles. Yeah, more exactly.
Speaker 4: And that they retrospectively like think that she had autism
Speaker 4: spectrum disorder.
Speaker 1: That was uh yeah, but they just had no concept
Speaker 1: of what that could be, let alone like in the
Speaker 1: package of Marilyn Monroe. You know. But the JFK Marilyn
Speaker 1: affair has become a big deal over the years. The
Speaker 1: people claim that it was carried out by secret tunnels
Speaker 1: in New York's Carlisle Hotel, which I do know that
Speaker 1: he did use tunnels underneath like New York hotels to
Speaker 1: have affairs. I don't know if those included her.
Speaker 4: That is so creepy to meet these ideas, this.
Speaker 1: Perpetual sneaking people in in LA.
Speaker 4: And tunnels, like there's always the sock up tunnels and
Speaker 4: I know they're real, and it's so scary to me.
Speaker 4: I think, I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I don't know, so the ones in LA, Like, there
Speaker 1: were also rumors that they dug a tunnel from the
Speaker 1: Beverly Hilton Hotel to Monroe's house so that she could
Speaker 1: get there, which people have looked back and that would
Speaker 1: have cost three billion dollars to construct, so probably didn't happen.
Speaker 1: It has like gone down as lore. There's a scene
Speaker 1: in a white house down where Channing Tatum and Jamie
Speaker 1: Fox they're like trying to escape the white house. He's like, good,
Speaker 1: there's a series of tunnels that lead out to the street.
Speaker 1: JFK used them to sneak Maryland. And he's like, I
Speaker 1: thought those were a myth. He said, actually they're not.
Speaker 2: They're not.
Speaker 1: Let's go why as people are attacking you, why would
Speaker 1: you give that backstory?
Speaker 2: Because it's a movie, babe.
Speaker 1: All right. So this is when she is found dead
Speaker 1: in her home August fifth, nineteen sixty two. The Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Police concluded that it was caused by a self
Speaker 1: administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of
Speaker 1: death is probable suicide. The suicide rate in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: spikes by like fifty percent in the month after her death. Yes, crazy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then people immediately kind of are like, what happened?
Speaker 1: They don't want to believe it. But then there is
Speaker 1: this theory of the Kennedy's involvement, and like a lot
Speaker 1: of our conspiracy theories, like you can look to where
Speaker 1: it was started, and there's there was a nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: four self published pamphlet, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe,
Speaker 1: which conspicuously came out during an election year when RFK
Speaker 1: was running for Senate, and it basically it sed Munroe
Speaker 1: had surrounded herself with communist and communist sympathy, and the
Speaker 1: person who wrote it is just like a you know,
Speaker 1: psycho right wing person, Frank A. Cappel. And then one
Speaker 1: of the books that I read was Marilyn Monroe biography
Speaker 1: by Donald Spado, and he has this theory about her
Speaker 1: housekeeper Eunice Murray and her doctor Ralph Greenson that seems
Speaker 1: like the most likely of the conspiracy theories, so I'm
Speaker 1: just going to go through some of the details. The
Speaker 1: official story is that she is talking to Peter Lawford
Speaker 1: on the phone. She says, say goodbye to Jack sagobye
Speaker 1: to Pat say goodbye to yourself too, because you're a
Speaker 1: nice person. And he can tell she's like very you know,
Speaker 1: out of it and on drugs, and those sound like
Speaker 1: the last words of someone who's planning to die or
Speaker 1: knows they're dying. Lawford got that was like, damn, that
Speaker 1: can't be a good sign. Calls her housekeeper, who calls
Speaker 1: her doc who the doctor. Actually, Lawford doesn't call the housekeeper.
Speaker 1: He calls like his person because Lawford is weirdly rfk's
Speaker 1: brother in law. The last person she's on the phone
Speaker 1: with is rfk's brother in law, which also is like,
Speaker 1: that's kind of weird, as bro exactly. But he instead
Speaker 1: of calling directly the police or anything, he calls like
Speaker 1: her manager because he's like, I don't this could be
Speaker 1: bad for the Kennedys if I'm attached to this. Manager
Speaker 1: calls doctor, doctor, calls the housekeeper. Housekeeper is just like
Speaker 1: she's fine, and this is like when when that call
Speaker 1: is made, she's in her room dying. So like there
Speaker 1: there are some things. The official story is just she
Speaker 1: took too many pills, whether on purpose or by accident
Speaker 1: and died. And but there's like some really so the
Speaker 1: weird stuff that's kind of shady is just like the
Speaker 1: behavior of the like the timeline doesn't make sense of
Speaker 1: like when she found and not. But I just want
Speaker 1: to just going through the most famous conspiracy theories. The
Speaker 1: first one is the Kennedy angle. Joe DiMaggio later said,
Speaker 1: I always knew who killed her, but I didn't want
Speaker 1: to start a revolution in this country.
Speaker 4: Okay, So she's apparently called her a psychiatrist and hairdresser
Speaker 4: and both said that she was in distress about betrayal
Speaker 4: by men in high places right there.
Speaker 1: So all of that, there's tons of shit. So like
Speaker 1: this that theory, there's like it became an entire what
Speaker 1: once that pamphlet came out, It became a huge industry
Speaker 1: to like write tell all stories about this stuff, right
Speaker 1: and I don't know who's Yeah, Like some books say
Speaker 1: she was calling the White House a lot at that time,
Speaker 1: and like Kennedy was just like could you stop. She
Speaker 1: did like to call people late at night.
Speaker 4: So but she claimed she claimed to the doctor that
Speaker 4: RFK had visited her her and yelled at her that day.
Speaker 4: According to the Vanity.
Speaker 1: Fair right, but he was in San Francisco the whole day,
Speaker 1: so that probably didn't happen. Like he was at a
Speaker 1: family people people are like he who was in California, Okay,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, he was in San Francisco at
Speaker 1: a thing with like his whole family, and I don't have.
Speaker 5: The spatial awareness or critical things. So that's nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 4: Right, you know what I can't bear like And I
Speaker 4: know this sounds absolutely insane for two people who host
Speaker 4: a podcast largely about politics, But I cannot bear that
Speaker 4: like these men JFK and RFK presented as like these
Speaker 4: wonderful leaders of the country and then did this stuff
Speaker 4: behind closed doors. Like my autistic brain cannot hold deal
Speaker 4: both of that. Both of those can be true, Yeah right,
Speaker 4: I really can't. It's like, yeah, breaks my brain.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's definitely a difference between the image that they
Speaker 1: were projecting and then who they were behind closed doors,
Speaker 1: especially with groats to how they treated women. But the
Speaker 1: mysterious detail. Like there's tons of like really mysterious, like
Speaker 1: people claiming that she wrote letters to Jack and threatened
Speaker 1: to reveal her secret.
Speaker 4: Everyone knew the secret, Yeah, everyone knew what the birthday
Speaker 4: and the whisper in the dress.
Speaker 1: I think I had a feeling they knew what was
Speaker 1: going on. There's like this famous red diary where she
Speaker 1: could supposedly like took down sensitive information, but like none
Speaker 1: of that stuff's corroborated. The one like really weird detail
Speaker 1: is that there was no pill residue in her system,
Speaker 1: like in her stomach, which people have pointed to is
Speaker 1: like weird and would suggest that she was like killed
Speaker 1: with an injection, but there was no injection point on
Speaker 1: her body, which would have still been there. I do
Speaker 1: think it's very weird that the last person she called
Speaker 1: was Peter Lawford, who was RFK Junior's brother in law.
Speaker 1: That's like who she was on the phone was when
Speaker 1: she died, and.
Speaker 4: The empty pill bottles, Like and she's found face down
Speaker 4: with like the empty pill bottles.
Speaker 1: And then there's no pills in her stomach, yeah, and.
Speaker 4: Then the phone is in her hand, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The weird thing is that like her I think
Speaker 1: lawyer is called at midnight and told she's dead, and
Speaker 1: they don't call the police until four in the morning.
Speaker 1: And when the police show up at four in the morning,
Speaker 1: her housekeeper is doing laundry, which is fucking weird behavior.
Speaker 4: What's tampering with the crime scene.
Speaker 1: Right, And for so there's like a four hour window
Speaker 1: there where it's like her housekeeper and this guy doctor Greenson,
Speaker 1: who was like this really controlling psychiatrist who was like
Speaker 1: not letting certain people see her at this time. And
Speaker 1: there's also reports that at the scene he was heard
Speaker 1: yelling like damn it. Hyde gave her a prescription I
Speaker 1: didn't know about. So one theory, like if the scene
Speaker 1: was staged, which a lot of people thought it looked staged,
Speaker 1: one theory would be that he like had plans that
Speaker 1: night and told the housekeeper to give her like a
Speaker 1: enema of this medication that he had given her before,
Speaker 1: and that's what gave her the fatal overdose, which is
Speaker 1: why there was no pill residue in her stomach. But
Speaker 1: then they were like, oh shit, we killed Marilyn Monroe,
Speaker 1: and so they like created this whole story and it
Speaker 1: was suicide, but it was suicide.
Speaker 4: Like a Michael Jackson doctor type of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, medical malpractice, huh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, my Michael Jackson doctor, Elvis doctor. Like that's
Speaker 1: a thing that just seems to happen over and over
Speaker 1: with these uh like incredibly famous people. The one thing
Speaker 1: is that, like, so that's the theory from the Spoto biography,
Speaker 1: and then like the more recent one, they like have
Speaker 1: a lot more evidence, a lot more anecdotes of like
Speaker 1: the fact that she was like really doing a lot
Speaker 1: of drugs at the time and was also like self
Speaker 1: administering injections and stuff, and so it could have also
Speaker 1: been that she just self administered the dose that killed her,
Speaker 1: whether because she was trying to do that or it
Speaker 1: was accidental, but she was very like kind of fucked
Speaker 1: up on drugs towards the gym.
Speaker 4: Was also a deep shit with endometriosis, which they knew
Speaker 4: nothing about then. It was growing all over her body.
Speaker 4: She had several miscarriages when she really wanted children so badly,
Speaker 4: and like not to mention that like all mixed with autism,
Speaker 4: like the the what endometriosis does. It's so harsh on
Speaker 4: your buddy, Like scientists are now like that now that
Speaker 4: they're just starting to do research on it. They're like
Speaker 4: saying it should be classified as cancer. Is how gnarly
Speaker 4: it is, yeah, and like that really affects your hormones
Speaker 4: so intensely. It is like an all consuming disease, and
Speaker 4: especially for her, like when she had very bad thin
Speaker 4: like it's almost impossible to be thin as well when
Speaker 4: you have endometriosis, because it's you know whatever, and oh
Speaker 4: my god, Yeah, I think she was like so much pain.
Speaker 4: She's on, she can't sleep, she's on like diet pills
Speaker 4: like upers downers, like all this stuff. Like she's involved
Speaker 4: with like every major.
Speaker 1: Person in the world exactly, Like yeah, so it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of impossible to know. I do, my my, if
Speaker 1: I had to guess, I think the scene was staged
Speaker 1: by the housekeeper and the doctor either because they didn't
Speaker 1: want her to look bad. And like I guess the
Speaker 1: drug that she oded on would cause your body potentially
Speaker 1: to expel stuff, so that could be why she was
Speaker 1: like doing the laundry. It was just so that like
Speaker 1: they didn't find her like covered in shit or whatever.
Speaker 1: But I think it could also be that they were
Speaker 1: covering their own ass and like that there was a
Speaker 1: Walter White breaking bad situation where she died in front
Speaker 1: of them and they were like fuck were yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't do enough and were too scared to do anything,
Speaker 1: and so they then like concocted this story like there's
Speaker 1: there's a thing where the official narrative is that she
Speaker 1: went to check on her and her door was locked,
Speaker 1: and then she called the doctor to come over and
Speaker 1: he had to like break a window, but like the
Speaker 1: door didn't have a lock on it. And also Marilyn
Speaker 1: Monroe like never locked her door because of her intense fear.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so can you imagine how insane that is though
Speaker 4: to be Marilyn Monroe and not lock your door?
Speaker 1: I know, ye yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they didn't have security back then, right, Like I
Speaker 4: don't know, it just seems like you could just knock
Speaker 4: on every like someone's door in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Right. So the premise of Calendar Girl, the great Jason
Speaker 1: Priestley movie that nobody fucking remembers. That's that's one weird thing,
Speaker 1: so real quick. Just like in terms of her overall
Speaker 1: like legacy, the Warhol painting, like we've talked about how
Speaker 1: much her dress is sold for the Warhol painting shot
Speaker 1: Stage Blue Marylyn was auctioned for one hundred and ninety
Speaker 1: five million dollars in twenty twenty two. If you just
Speaker 1: like put a dollar figure on her iconography with like
Speaker 1: Playboy high Art, like Box Office Success two billion, Madonna's iconography,
Speaker 1: Like I think this Piggy's character is like built out
Speaker 1: of her, like all the ads that still feature her
Speaker 1: to this day, Like she's probably number one, you know, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: they use her in ads, and she was like at
Speaker 1: the forefront or her estate was at the forefront of
Speaker 1: like you know, making money off of somebody's brand, you know,
Speaker 1: Like what's the name of the company that did it?
Speaker 1: A CMG Worldwide who just specialized in managing the estate
Speaker 1: of dead celebrities and they just cash in on this.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety six alone, the licensing of Marilyn Monroe's
Speaker 1: name and image has pulled in over thirty million dollars
Speaker 1: in revenues. That's just in ninety six, just like a
Speaker 1: random year.
Speaker 4: Oh, I was going to say, I was like, that
Speaker 4: seems unbelievably low, But that's one year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's one year. Yeah. Twenty sixteen, we got a
Speaker 1: Snicker's commercial that she appeared in where like Willem Dafoe
Speaker 1: plays her on the set of seven Year Itch.
Speaker 4: And then like all the and imagine even all the
Speaker 4: unplaned like that they don't even yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I do think it's interesting that like the
Speaker 1: one place she doesn't really live on is in like
Speaker 1: movies about her, Like people keep trying. There's Blonde Arsne Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Armists. Uh. There there is one called My Week
Speaker 1: with Marylyn starring Michelle Williams, like who I think is
Speaker 1: one of the best actors of like her generation. HBO's
Speaker 1: Norman Gyena Maryland of course, nineteen ninety three's Calendar Girl,
Speaker 1: where Jason Priestley and Jerry O'Connell drive to la and
Speaker 1: just stalk Marilyn Monroe. That's the entire They should have
Speaker 1: just marked it as a horror movie. But I do
Speaker 1: think that it's just because of that thing she had,
Speaker 1: like the thing that the guy was like between the
Speaker 1: lens and the film, Like there's just this magic that
Speaker 1: she had because of her talent and like how hard
Speaker 1: she worked at it that like you can't really do
Speaker 1: her justice by having somebody else play her, right, So
Speaker 1: like there's just that's the one place that her star
Speaker 1: is not as bright as like anyone else trying to
Speaker 1: be her so and I just don't think you can
Speaker 1: do it because she was so good at what she did.
Speaker 1: And that's that's it. Love you, Marilyn, Love you, Marilyn,
Speaker 1: Love you.
Speaker 2: George Solitaire my favorite side characters.
Speaker 1: So George Solitaire is great, isn't it.
Speaker 4: This podcast was the opposite of Dolesville. I'll tell you
Speaker 4: what riveted start to finish and Jock, you really did
Speaker 4: an incredible research.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you so much. This is what he does.
Speaker 1: I was reminded multiple times during the researching of her
Speaker 1: life of the phrase you smoked too tough, you're swag
Speaker 1: too different, your bitch is too bad, don't kill you.
Speaker 1: I was like, this is about her, she except she
Speaker 1: is the bitch that's too bad at this podcast.
Speaker 4: That is my ship. I can't wait to listen like
Speaker 4: I love like this is my dream podcast to listen to.
Speaker 2: Well, we'll have to pick another icon.
Speaker 4: Yes, I can't wait to listen to this. Not my
Speaker 4: episode I lived it, I mean the other episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I live. How many if we don't we don't like?
Speaker 1: Is this our sixth seventh?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Are they out right.
Speaker 1: Now, Yeah, they're they're out there all right, Blair Sackey.
Speaker 1: Such a pleasure of having you.
Speaker 4: I love you, guys. Thank you so much as you
Speaker 4: for doing that. I love Maryland. Okay, I love you
Speaker 4: Zichang Iconography Gang. Listen to my podcast and come see
Speaker 4: me on my show dates I put on my social media.
Speaker 1: There you go, Miles, thank you for doing it.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. As usual, We're.
Speaker 1: Going to take a quick break, and then I'm going
Speaker 1: to come back and give you my no no, no
Speaker 1: no notebook dump where I talked about the stuff, the
Speaker 1: best stuff that I forgot to tell Blair and Miles.
Speaker 1: Oh right. That was our Marilyn Monroe episode with blair sake.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Blair and thanks to JM McNabb for the
Speaker 1: research help on this one. Here are a few interesting
Speaker 1: things we didn't get to from our research. That's right,
Speaker 1: it's time for the no no, no, no oh book.
Speaker 1: Don't don't do a thing I've come up against in
Speaker 1: the last two episodes. Actually, Elvis in this one. That's
Speaker 1: just an interesting portal into how weird history was and
Speaker 1: just how different the world used to be. Has to
Speaker 1: do with names and identity. I mentioned that her mom's
Speaker 1: husband was presumed dead because someone who just happened to
Speaker 1: have his same name and like fit his general description
Speaker 1: died in a motorcycle accident in Ohio, like states away.
Speaker 1: And obviously we talked about her famous name change. That
Speaker 1: was just one of her name changes. She was born
Speaker 1: as Norma Jean Mortenson. By the time she was baptized,
Speaker 1: her mom was going with Norma Jean Baker, and that
Speaker 1: first last named Mortenson, the Spoto biography points out, was
Speaker 1: spelled differently at different times by her and her grandparents,
Speaker 1: just like depending on how they were feeling that day,
Speaker 1: I guess. And going back to the Elvis episode, apparently
Speaker 1: a big part of the Elvis wasn't really dead faked
Speaker 1: his own death conspiracy was that his name was misspelled
Speaker 1: on his tombstone. His middle name was spelled Aaron a
Speaker 1: Ron in life, and then Aron to quote the key
Speaker 1: and peel sketch on his tombstone or vice versa. Who
Speaker 1: gives a shit? But like you know, according to Elvis
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists, that was done as a clue. You know,
Speaker 1: all right, we faked my death chosen the most embarrassing
Speaker 1: death possible, by the way, having me die on the
Speaker 1: toilet for some reason, we've swapped my body with a
Speaker 1: look alike who we presumably had to murder, then paid
Speaker 1: off the doctors to make sure nobody will ever know.
Speaker 1: Just one thing left to do, that's right. The clues
Speaker 1: to steal a bit from the stand up comedian Nick
Speaker 1: Mullen talking about nine to eleven conspiracies worth going to
Speaker 1: check out that YouTube clip. But yeah, it turns out
Speaker 1: that wasn't a intentionally planted clue by Elvis. There's even
Speaker 1: a song I think called like the Name on the
Speaker 1: Stone that was supposedly a song by Elvis being like
Speaker 1: and that's that's why I put the name misspelled on
Speaker 1: the stone, was because I wanted you guys to pick
Speaker 1: up on the fact that I faked my death and
Speaker 1: did all that stuff. But yeah, it turns out Elvis,
Speaker 1: like Marilyn Monroe and her ancestors, just spelled his name
Speaker 1: differently at different times. There's examples of him and his
Speaker 1: handwriting spelling it with two a's and with one a.
Speaker 1: And there's just all sorts of interesting historical stories that
Speaker 1: hopefully we keep intersecting with in these Icon episodes. About
Speaker 1: people just not having a sing name and using that
Speaker 1: to their advantage, showing up in a town and claiming
Speaker 1: to be someone famous, you know, a princess who died,
Speaker 1: or people just leaving town and starting over with a
Speaker 1: new name. It's just a different world now. Everything's so
Speaker 1: particular and standardized. My name has an apostrophe in it,
Speaker 1: and it ruins my ability to like register for anything
Speaker 1: or be found in any database, because you know, the
Speaker 1: operating systems can't deal with apostrophes sometimes, and so I
Speaker 1: leave it out, and then that just becomes a completely
Speaker 1: different name when the apostrophe is not there. And I
Speaker 1: think they had it better. You know, who cares about
Speaker 1: a little mistaken identity here and there? You get to
Speaker 1: just live free. You get people coming back from the dead.
Speaker 1: What's better than that? Another thing. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: spend too much time focusing on the relationships and all
Speaker 1: the famous people that Marilyn Monroe slept with, because I
Speaker 1: feel like that was the stuff I knew coming in,
Speaker 1: and I feel like most people know about I don't
Speaker 1: feel like most people realize what a genius she was.
Speaker 1: But she did have a lot of ill fated relationships,
Speaker 1: not just with her husbands, but depending on the biographer,
Speaker 1: she also had a lot of sex. Some suggest she
Speaker 1: worked as a sex worker for a stretch of her
Speaker 1: early career, and a lot of biographers and podcasters tend
Speaker 1: to like psychoanalyze her and say that her solicitous relationship
Speaker 1: with men was caused by psychiatric pathologies and early abuse,
Speaker 1: and she was abused early in her life. But I
Speaker 1: will just say that a lot of how she interacted
Speaker 1: with men seemed to be having sex with the ones
Speaker 1: she was interested in, or for forwarding her career, or
Speaker 1: early in her career for self preservation, And I just
Speaker 1: feel like it's the sort of thing that if it
Speaker 1: was a man building his career by having sex with
Speaker 1: the most beautiful and impressive women in the world, we'd
Speaker 1: just be like that guy was cool. And the fact
Speaker 1: that people felt the need for her behavior to come
Speaker 1: from some deep trauma might be more specific to the
Speaker 1: era than like something wrong with her. But anyways, we
Speaker 1: talked about how the conspiracies about rfk's involvement and her
Speaker 1: death came from a propaganda pamphlet from a right wing
Speaker 1: ideologue who hated the Kennedys. I always just find it
Speaker 1: interesting to note how so many of the conspiracies we
Speaker 1: have today started as purposefully planted propaganda, like the KGB
Speaker 1: helped create the moon landing conspiracy, helped gas some of
Speaker 1: the early JFK conspiracy theories. Here we have the other
Speaker 1: engine of misinformation in the twentieth century and really speeding
Speaker 1: up in the twenty first century, which is the fascist
Speaker 1: right wing in America who would spread rumors and they
Speaker 1: also would actively sabotage and murder people or make them
Speaker 1: think they were crazy in this case, which just a
Speaker 1: recurring theme in our icons. Yet another one of our
Speaker 1: icons who died with a very thick FBI file on her.
Speaker 1: Russian state media also used her as propaganda inside the
Speaker 1: USSR at the time of her divorce from Arthur Miller,
Speaker 1: saying that the most American things are apple pie, gum, baseball,
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Monroe. Well, she just discarded Arthur Miller after
Speaker 1: he wrote her a few movies, because I think he
Speaker 1: was a bit of a hero inside Russia for not
Speaker 1: being completely hostile to the idea of socialism and being
Speaker 1: targeted by the Red Scare. I would just say that
Speaker 1: he might have gotten something out of the deal. Being
Speaker 1: married to the most beautiful and most famous person on earth.
Speaker 1: And just as for the husbands, we talked about Demaggio,
Speaker 1: who was just kind of boring. We just watched TV
Speaker 1: fish she was just like, God, damn, this is boring.
Speaker 1: Arthur Miller much cooler, smarter, more impressive figure to me,
Speaker 1: but he also pulled some of the same bullshit as Demaggio.
Speaker 1: He announced they were going to get married before he
Speaker 1: confirmed that with her publicly, and at one point he
Speaker 1: told the press that she would start making fewer movies,
Speaker 1: stating she will be my wife. That's a full time job.
Speaker 1: Imagine marrying the most famous person on the planet and
Speaker 1: thinking that's how it was going to be. Presumably she
Speaker 1: was effective at making it look like an accident to everyone,
Speaker 1: and so I guess they were surprised when it required
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of work and that she was not
Speaker 1: just willing to give that all up to be missus.
Speaker 1: Arthur Miller, all right, that is going to do it
Speaker 1: for or Marilyn Monroe probably my favorite one to research
Speaker 1: thus far. Our next icon goes a completely different direction,
Speaker 1: particularly with marriage. Mary's one guy who's basically a nobody,
Speaker 1: and then he's her writer die from day one. One
Speaker 1: week from today, we'll be dropping our episode about the
Speaker 1: icon Dolly Parton with guest Lydia Popovich, and you can
Speaker 1: check back then and many more TDZ episodes in between.
Speaker 1: All Right, we'll talk to you all then Bite