The Celebrity Collector: Marilyn Monroe

What Marilyn Monroe collected: records and Frank Sinatra

Asked what she liked to collect, Marilyn Monroe gave a one-word answer: “Records.” Her favorite singer was Frank Sinatra. When she listed her hobbies she put collecting records second, after swimming and before reading and dancing, and added a qualifier anyone with a busy schedule will recognize: “when I have time.”

The answers here are hers, gathered from interviews she gave during her lifetime and arranged as a single conversation. They show a side of Monroe that her screen image hid. Her spare time, she said, went mostly to books: “What little there is I spend in reading and studying.” She knew this did not match the public picture of her. “That’s the trouble,” she said, “a sex symbol becomes a thing.”

She wanted to be judged as a performer. “I want to be known as a good actress,” she said, and she could not picture any other line of work: “It’s funny, but I’ve never thought of being anything but an actress.” Her worst fault, by her own account, was lateness. “I probably have many, but my worst is my difficulty in remembering that there are only 60 minutes in an hour. I’m invariably late, but I can’t break myself of it.”

Norma Jeane Baker and an orphanage near RKO

Monroe was born in Los Angeles and spent much of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage. She explained her birth name this way. Her mother’s first husband was named Baker and her second Mortensen, and her mother was divorced from both by the time she was born. Asked for a name, her mother said Baker, and the girl became Norma Jeane Baker in all her school records. As a child she was told her father had died in a car crash in New York before she was born.

From the orphanage window she could see the RKO studio sign above the roofs, where her mother worked as a cutter. “At night, when the others were sleeping, I’d sit up in the window and cry,” she said. Years later, in 1951, when she went to RKO to make Clash By Night, she tried to spot the orphanage from the lot, but too many tall buildings stood in the way.

Her memories of the place were exact. The children got up at six and did their chores before public school. Each had a bed, a chair and a locker, kept clean for inspection. She worked in the kitchen, and with a hundred children there, that meant a hundred plates plus the spoons and forks. She slept in a room with 27 beds, where good behavior could earn the “honor bed.” She reached it once, then lost it the morning she was late tying her shoes and the matron sent her “Back to the 27th bed.”

She counted eleven foster families. The first, in a small town near Los Angeles, kept her until she was about seven and was harsh, disciplining her with a leather strap. When that came out she was moved to an English couple, where life was “pretty casual and tumultuous.”

Marilyn Monroe’s stutter at Van Knight High School

Few people watching her films would have guessed that Monroe once stuttered. It began, she said, on the day she was brought to the orphanage. She was crying and screaming as she was pulled into a large dining room where a hundred children sat eating, and they all turned to stare. She stopped crying at once, and the stutter followed.

It came back in her teens. At Van Knight High School she was elected secretary of the English class, and reading the minutes aloud became an ordeal. “Every time I had to read the minutes I’d say, ‘Minutes of the last m-m-m-meeting.’ It was terrible,” she recalled. “That went on for two years, until I was 15.” She won no popularity awards, she added, “but I did have a number of good friends.”

At 15, turning 16, she married James Dougherty in a match arranged by Grace McKee. California allowed a girl to marry at 16, and Monroe described the choice plainly: go to a home until 18, or get married.

From the dope room to the camera

During World War II Monroe worked in a factory making remote-controlled target airplanes. Her job was in what workers called the dope room, painting dope onto the fabric. She earned twenty dollars a week for ten-hour days on a concrete floor.

When photographers came to shoot the factory, she modeled for several days. One of them, David Conover, told her she should be a model and could easily earn five dollars an hour. Conover is remembered as the first photographer to spot the young Norma Jeane. After the war ended she left the factory, signed with an agency and started out slowly with ads and calendars.

Studio contracts did not make her a star overnight. Fox dropped her, and so did Columbia, though Columbia at least put her in Ladies of the Chorus. “It was dreadful,” she said. “It was a terrible story and terribly badly photographed, so they dropped me. But you learn from everything.”

Night classes at UCLA and thoughts on fame

As she became known, people wondered why she skipped previews, premieres and parties. She had never finished high school, so while she played small parts by day, she took night classes at UCLA in the history of literature and the history of the United States. A professor, Mrs. Seay, did not know who she was and was puzzled that boys from other classes kept peering through the window. Told that the student was a movie actress, the professor said she had taken her for a young girl just out of a convent. Monroe called it one of the nicest compliments she ever got.

She held her fame loosely. “If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle,” she said. Of the pressure of her image she said, “I am content to be Marilyn Monroe, to the best of my ability. Being one’s self is a twenty-four hour a day job anyway, isn’t it?” And on what she wanted for herself: “I want to grow old without facelifts. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made.”

Collecting Marilyn Monroe: covers, stills and photographs

Monroe appeared on the covers of hundreds of magazines around the world, and those covers, along with publicity stills such as those from Monkey Business, school pictures and rare candid photographs, are the backbone of many Monroe collections. A Marilyn Monroe postage stamp has its own place among them. One detail collectors use to place an image in time: in her earlier photos, Monroe had no mole.

Studio-era portraits of stars like Monroe are a collecting field of their own, covered in the golden age of Hollywood celebrity photos. Other screen actresses with collections include Ursula Andress, Lana Wood and Yvonne Craig, television’s Batgirl.