Original subtitles

OK.

SHE EXHALES

Rolling? OK.

She is one of the biggest movie stars of all time.

She had looks and sexuality.

She was iconic.

She became the goddess of the silver screen.

People think she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

When the camera starts until it stops,

I want to be perfect.

Marilyn Monroe - blonde bombshell...

Get out the fire hose.

..Hollywood superstar...

Mr President, the late Marilyn Monroe.

..tragic victim.

The story of Marilyn Monroe is an authentic tragedy.

When we talk about Marilyn Monroe,

it's always about "poor Marilyn, poor Marilyn,"

this vulnerable, passive woman who is being destroyed by Hollywood.

That's the way the story frames her.

After a reckoning in Hollywood,

it's time to reframe her story.

Now we can hit pause and roll it back a bit,

and ask ourselves,

"OK, what is it that we think we know?"

She was quite ahead of her time,

and she was very much an architect of her own fame.

You must think I was born yesterday.

Her performances are layered,

they're funny, they're tender, they're human,

they feel modern.

Bingo!

She had a deep inner life.

She was an artist.

She was a poet.

She was a businesswoman.

What a power broker she was, renegotiating her contract,

creating her own production company, getting films made.

It's actually rather frustrating that people can't think about her

in terms of her intellect.

I can be smart when it's important,

but most men don't like it.

Marilyn challenges what it means to have agency as a woman

and what it means to be a feminist.

Marilyn makes us ask, "Is a woman just her body?

"Is it an attitude? Is it a political reaction?

"What is a woman?"

In the end, the way our culture talks about Marilyn Monroe

and thinks about Marilyn Monroe is what it thinks about women.

This is Hollywood.

A place, an industry, a state of mind.

Here, magic carpets fly.

Let's have a good look.

I went to 20th century Fox,

where Ben Lyon was head of casting.

And he says, "Who is this girl?"

In walked the most gorgeous young girl, 20 years old.

And I said, "What's your ambition?"

She said, "To be a film star."

And then they made a Technicolor test, which was unusual.

I think they had high hopes for me.

She was to come in, walk across the room,

sit down and light a cigarette,

and smile.

As soon as that camera started rolling,

something magical happened.

And she has this kind of fresh-faced beauty,

and this kind of luminous prettiness on the screen.

She could manifest that kind of magic.

She came into the world with it.

Ben Lyon was very enthusiastic

that I looked so fresh and young.

They said that I had a three-dimensional quality

having to do with sex.

SHE GIGGLES

Norma Jeane Dougherty lands a one-year contract with Fox.

The studio begins grooming her for stardom.

She was what the studios called a product.

Someone that they could take,

mould, shape, rename,

and create as something

to be consumed by the movie-going public.

I said, "I don't think you can use a name Norma Jeane Dougherty

"if you're going to be a star.

"To me, you're a Marilyn."

But we couldn't find a second name, and she said,

"Mr Lyon, could I use my grandmother's name?"

I said, "What was that?" Said, "Monroe.

"Marilyn Monroe."

Now, that's a perfect name for a movie star.

There's something about "MM."

Those double-M sounds are melodious,

mellifluous.

This is a moment that doesn't get very much attention

in the story about Marilyn, but I think it's incredibly revealing.

I wanted my mother's maiden name

because I felt that rightfully was my name,

and true things rarely get into circulation.

The fact that she chose Monroe shows that she wanted to have agency

and control over her image right from the very beginning.

It's not only her name that gets the Hollywood treatment.

Every studio had a series of publicity men that we call flacks,

who were out promoting the star.

They made up stories about them.

They created opportunities to get their names in the papers.

They were getting them publicised.

And the flacks will create a rags-to-riches story of Marilyn,

the orphan girl.

"Her story is one of struggle, hunger, and perseverance.

"She did a chore of baby-sitting one night and found herself

"guarding the offspring of a talent scout."

That is not actually how it happened.

She was not discovered, and she wasn't baby-sitting.

It's actually a really striking example of turning female ambition

into something which is passive and fluffy and caretaking.

Marilyn was not waiting for powerful men to come find her.

She was pounding on the door of the studio.

She was doing absolutely everything that she could

to break into the movie business.

What's fascinating about the creation of Marilyn Monroe

is that I think she had more of a hand in it than people

want to give her credit for.

The truth about Marilyn's background

is something she's happy to bury.

Marilyn isn't an orphan.

She's got a mother who's living in a mental health facility,

but that doesn't necessarily read as well as an innocent orphan girl.

Childhood was very difficult on Marilyn.

She was illegitimate,

and that was a terrible,

terrible sin in the 1930s.

She didn't know who her father was,

and her mother had this horrible condition.

Her mother, Gladys, is institutionalised

when Marilyn is eight years old.

The diagnosis that was given to Marilyn's mother,

of paranoid schizophrenia,

was shameful at that time.

And the idea of somebody being in an asylum is not talked about.

Marilyn is sent to the Los Angeles Orphans' Home.

They had to drag me,

and I kept crying, screaming, "I'm not an orphan."

And I would ask where my mother was, but they said,

"Well, it's better you forget about her.

"She's dead."

But there is one place where the young Marilyn

feels happy and safe.

Movie-going absolutely surged during the Great Depression.

Going is sort of an escape.

And you could get a lot for a dime or a nickel.

I watched all kinds of movies,

like Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert,

and I'd see it over and over, and over and over again.

She would just sort of lose herself in the fantasies,

dashing villains and femme fatales,

and then, it allowed you to dream that

if you could live in those movies,

then your life would be as beautiful and problem-free as they are.

By 1941, Marilyn has left the orphanage for a foster family.

She's 15 years old and coming into her own.

She began to develop a very voluptuous body

and a very pretty face.

She said the world opened up to her,

and she started hearing men call out to her and the wolf whistles,

but she loved it.

Again, this is a little bit of home movie footage

that was taken in Marilyn's last foster home.

What you see is a girl who's moving exactly like

a '30s model in the movies.

We, as women, are constantly constructed.

We construct ourselves. We collude in it.

And you have to, as a woman, negotiate this,

even if it's unconscious,

every second of your life.

Marilyn learned the machinery of womanhood very early.

Marilyn was growing up absorbing

that idea that being a beautiful woman could give you power.

It was the thing that was going to make you rich and famous,

and happy and loved.

Coming into her adult woman body was both a blessing and a curse,

because she knew how to harness that body as a weapon,

but it was also weaponised against her.

And in 1942,

Marilyn's life changes overnight.

When Marilyn was just past her 16th birthday,

she got married to a neighbour named Jim Dougherty,

who she barely knew.

The marriage is the idea of her foster mother, Grace McKee.

Grace arranged it.

She and her husband were going to West Virginia,

and they were going to put me in a home,

or I could marry this boy who was 21.

She was a pragmatist.

She had lived a difficult life, and that makes you a pragmatist.

You look in front of you, and you say, "These are my options.

"That looks like the best one. I'll take that one."

Marilyn doesn't have much time to get to know her new husband.

The die is cast. America is at war.

Jim enlists in the Marines and is sent to the South Pacific.

Across the country, men and women are being asked to serve.

In war towns all over the United States,

women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs.

Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men,

some jobs better.

Marilyn starts working in an aircraft factory

outside of Los Angeles.

There was a photographer who arrived to take pictures

of the pretty girls, sort of morale-boosting shots.

The story that Marilyn told was that he came over to her and said,

"Where have you been hiding?"

I mean, this is like a dream come true to her,

even though she's on the assembly line.

He gets to her, and he takes her picture.

And he kind of stopped and came back,

because she was pew, pew, pew!

And he said, "Do you have another sweater or something?

"Can I photograph you on your lunch hour?"

And she said, "Yes, of course I do."

The association of bombs and bombshells is literal.

What is a bombshell?

It's a hollow ball in which gunpowder is stored to explode.

So, this was explosive.

This was explosive sexuality.

Marilyn now has a calling card and a new ambition.

The rambling Ambassador Hotel, one of the world's great hostelries

and the Los Angeles landmark of good living.

At the iconic Ambassador Hotel,

19-year-old Marilyn tries her luck with the Blue Book Model Agency.

Norma Jeane looked like the girl next door,

and I thought I could make her into something quite marketable

in a short length of time.

She was very beautiful in a clean-cut, American wholesome way.

Marilyn is turning herself into a commodity,

and a part of her, presumably, is also using it to reflect back on

herself some sense of having worth.

What I see is her excitement of being in front of a camera.

This woman is so comfortable in her skin.

It's Christmas, 1945.

Marilyn takes a road trip,

but not with her husband.

She'd been married for a few years to a guy that she liked,

but she certainly wasn't in love with,

And here comes this glamorous European photographer

who's a man of the world.

32-year-old fashion photographer Andre de Dienes.

De Dienes is recommended to her,

and he is immediately taken with her.

So, he takes her on a trip all around the Southwest.

They went into the desert.

They went to old cowboy towns.

They took hundreds and hundreds of photographs.

She was working with a photographer to learn how to inject energy

into pictures, not that she was saying "how to make me look pretty,"

but she was saying, "How do we make a good picture?"

And, Marilyn, oh, my God.

She was a pro at it.

Some of Marilyn's best work was when she was just alone

with a photographer she trusted,

and just let herself be free.

There is a bit of a love affair that goes on between

model and photographer.

And you get the idea she was really wanting to give it,

really wanting to turn you on,

make you proud.

They slept together during the trip.

And I think that that shows that she was really looking beyond

her marriage by that point.

She was actually clearly seeing the doors

were opening in front of her.

You kind of see that in these pictures,

these vistas that are opening in front of her.

Six months later, Marilyn serves her husband with divorce papers

and sets her sights on a new, exciting future.

Here you see the world's largest motion picture studio

with its acres of soundstages spread out under the bright California sun.

Now let's enter the gate.

By the end of 1946,

Marilyn is four months into a contract with 20th Century Fox.

In just a year, she's gone from young model

to aspiring starlet.

But if she's going to break out,

she'll need to impress studio head Darryl Zanuck.

In many ways, Daryl Zanuck is the almost cliche

of an old-school movie mogul.

He's short.

He's aggressive.

And he's always chomping on a cigar.

This is somebody who has a reputation as being exacting

and sometimes brutal.

It's difficult to overstate how patriarchal the Hollywood

studio system was in the '30s, '40s, and '50s.

It was absolutely male-dominated.

At the top of every one of the big studios is a very powerful,

controlling man, the people that we call moguls -

Louis B Mayer, Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck.

They're considered despotic monsters and tough, tough businessmen

because they knew that the things the public wanted

were stars and stories.

And they ran it like a factory,

and they rolled those things out,

four, five, six hundred of them a year.

There were only a few large studios,

and those studios made the movies, period.

It was sort of like the mafia, in that they controlled everything.

Studio system operated a pool of aspiring talent,

what they called stock contract players.

Being a contract player didn't mean that you were going to be a star.

You were shuffled from one movie to the next,

and often, you were a glorified extra, essentially.

Hollywood has always been a difficult place for women.

Hollywood treats women as disposable,

as, "You don't bring any talent to the screen.

"You bring beauty."

When you weren't working, they stuck you in front of a camera,

and you posed for all kinds of pin-up pictures.

I didn't really feel specifically like a commodity at the time.

It's only on looking back that I see that,

when I was referred to as "The girl!"

"Put the light on the girl! Move the girl to the left!"

It's only when I look back on it now that I see that perhaps

I was thought of as a commodity.

I'd never heard a women's brain praised in that period.

That was not considered a feminine virtue.

It took a while for women to be appreciated as thinking beings.

To Darryl Zanuck, Marilyn is nothing special.

Darryl Zanuck, basically, he didn't like Marilyn.

He called her "Straw-head".

He never got her message.

And if a studio head doesn't like you,

you got problems, honey.

To begin with, Zanuck sees Marilyn as...

I believe he said that her talent was all

below her navel and above her waist.

Basically, that she was tits and ass, and that was it.

If Marilyn wants to keep her contract,

she will have to fight for it.

She kind of had a, sort of, "Whatever means necessary,

"I will find my way to this."

That meant doing the right photo shoots or taking acting classes.

She wasn't just sitting idly by,

waiting for the studio to tell her what to do.

She was going to Fox every single day.

I said, "Why do you work so hard?

"The other kids that are under contract,

"I call sometimes at 11.00, 12.00,

"they're still sleeping from being out the night before."

She said, "Well, Mr Lyon,"

she said, "I work hard because one day,

"maybe opportunity will knock, and I want to be prepared."

And the knock comes in May 1947.

Marilyn lands a speaking role as Evie,

a waitress with a sharp tongue.

Hi, Evie. Hi, Small Change.

Hey, wait, I got money tonight.

Am I going to see your later?

If I'm not too tired.

But, Evie, I thought we had a date.

Look, this tray weighs a ton.

She has this confidence that is starting to emerge.

She commands the screen when she's on it.

So, Miss...?

She certainly has poise.

You can see the beginnings of a bombshell,

but nothing like the bubbliness that you would see later on.

Two double Cokes. Who's paying?

I told you I got money.

And now, you're blowing it on two Cokes.

Double. My, my.

It's now up to Darryl Zanuck to decide

whether to keep Marilyn under contract.

There's a lot of beautiful girls in the world,

and Marilyn is still just a bit player.

He's not that interested in her.

He thought she was just another pretty face and a dime a dozen,

and he had literally hundreds of girls he thought

were just as pretty.

Darryl Zanuck, a great spotter of stars, said no.

And he dropped her.

When Marilyn was dropped by Fox, she was devastated,

but she was tenacious and vowed that she would work even harder.

Released by 20th Century Fox,

21-year-old Marilyn Monroe decides to pursue

another one of Hollywood's biggest players.

Joe Schenck had a huge estate,

and he would just hold Saturday night parties,

and a lot of people from Hollywood would be there.

And Marilyn is invited to his parties.

A lot of contract girls are.

It was understood tacitly among the studio heads that these girls

were there for the men at the studios to date.

And then, once their contract was up, they'd be discarded,

and in would come a fresh new crop.

As a pretty young girl,

you learn that there's a lot of predatory men out there.

Bottoms were patted.

We were - "Oh, sweet little thing, cute little thing."

Passes were made.

This was completely normal in Hollywood.

It was something that happened all the time.

It happened openly.

I think Marilyn accepted that she was going to have to date people

in order to get what she wanted.

And I don't think she ever should have had to choose that.

But at least there was a decision in it on her part.

Marilyn knew that this party put on by Joseph Schenck

could be an opportunity to get ahead in her career.

Joseph Schenck was a very, very prominent,

powerful man in Hollywood.

And he understood how to make a female movie star.

Schenck loved Marilyn, thought she was amazing.

And she became his favourite girl.

Marilyn knew that this was a very powerful connection to make.

And the two ended up forming a sort of intimate relationship.

She understood that you either said, "I don't like these rules,

"and therefore I'm not playing your game,"

and therefore you give up your dreams of a career,

or you recognised that those are the rules of the game,

and you decide how you're going to deal with it.

Schenck is on the board at 20th Century Fox,

but, instead of pulling strings with Darryl Zanuck

to get Marilyn her job back,

he puts in a word with another pal...

..the boss of a rival studio.

Harry Cohn, who was the head of Columbia Pictures,

introduced, understood, and manipulated

the star-making process.

Cohn offers Marilyn a six-month contract,

but he insists on big changes

before he'll cast her in a movie.

I think the platinum blonde was inspired by Jean Harlow.

It was the ultimate Hollywood look, the ultimate star image.

It's almost unearthly.

It's almost like an angel with, like, glowing hair.

Blondeness is hugely valued in American movies

and culture of the time.

Often associated to purity and innocence,

but also associated to sexiness,

and sometimes even pornography.

For Marilyn, the platinum was the step into a different

stratosphere of, like, "I am now this kind of created persona."

Cohn's same formula had transformed Spanish dancer Margarita Cansino

into Hollywood star Rita Hayworth in the 1930s.

She was what they would've called "ethnic" in those days,

meaning she was Latina,

and they dyed her hair.

She underwent electrolysis to raise her hairline,

so she looked more Waspy.

And it turned her into a huge box office star.

Hollywood studios are pressuring people to meet an ideal.

In some cases, it's about enhancing beauty.

In other cases, it's about wiping away ethnic traces.

For Marilyn, going blonde,

it was like the Hollywood star-building machine,

and she saw what it could do for her.

It gave Marilyn an extra charge in her looks.

It took her to another level.

Now that she looks the part,

Marilyn will make sure that she can play it.

Most of the stories that are told about Marilyn's career,

particularly in the early years,

are about the role that powerful men played in her story.

But there were a couple of important women in her life, as well.

She was introduced to Natasha Lytess,

the head of drama at Columbia Pictures,

and they just instantly hit it off.

I think Natasha, bringing with her a wealth of knowledge about theatre,

was very enticing to Marilyn.

She wanted to get this kind of serious education about acting,

about theatre, and Natasha was able to do that for her.

She really saw something special in her as an actress.

She just thought that Marilyn had what it takes.

She had been in the gate, and she was ready to run.

Within a month of signing with Columbia Pictures,

21-year-old Marilyn Monroe lands her first starring role

as a burlesque dancer in a low-budget musical.

This was the most demanding role that she'd had yet,

and it required her both to sing and dance.

# We're the ladies of the chorus

# Here to sing and dance for you... #

Marilyn just loved getting into the trenches there

and working on her skills.

During a musical number, I tried to be more outgoing

because that's what I have to express.

# Anyone can see I love you

# Anyone can see I care... #

It was the first time Marilyn sung on screen,

and she is quite remarkable.

Marilyn plays chorus girl Peggy Martin,

who's courted by a lovestruck fan.

You'll be sure to send this right away, won't you?

Wouldn't you rather deliver it in person? No, thanks, I...

Ms Martin. Yes.

It's a very sweet role...

Well, aren't you going to give me the orchid?

The orchid? Oh, yes, yes, the orchid.

..in spite of the fact that she's a sexy striptease artist.

# He asked me

# How come a baby doll...

One of Marilyn's biggest numbers in "Ladies of the Chorus"

is somewhat of a creepy song.

# Every baby needs a da-da-daddy

# To keep her worry-free...

She's being positioned as a gold digger.

So, the idea is that every woman needs a man support her.

# But where's the one for me?

What's interesting about wanting a daddy is it's twofold.

It's, "I'm brazenly sexual,

"but I'm really just a little girl."

# Every baby needs a da-da-daddy

# Could my da-daddy be you?

She manages to be sexually attractive,

and the object of the male gaze in all of the ways that

she needs to be, but she's also making fun of it.

# Yes, we feel just like Red Riding Hood

# Cos the wolves are awful hungry in the neighbourhood...

And that is the moment at which Marilyn discovered

how this performance was going to work for her.

# Could my da-daddy be you? #

APPLAUSE

Shortly after finishing "Ladies of the Chorus,"

Marilyn is summoned to a meeting

with the head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn.

Although it was just a B-movie, it was a movie,

and she had the main role.

And so, I think she probably thought that it was going

to be her big break.

But renewal of her contract comes at a price.

Harry Cohn invited her onto his yacht.

And that is not a code that anybody even today

requires any help deciphering.

Cohn was a major womaniser.

Oh, my goodness, par excellence.

He often exploited young women,

and if they didn't return his affections,

then he would make their lives hell.

She knew that if she said no to him,

that she would be thrown out,

but she had integrity.

She just asked him, "Will your wife join us?"

It was very pointed, and he was furious,

and he threw her out of the office.

And I think that's why he didn't renew her contract

at the end of the six months.

"This is the patriarchy. This is how we do things.

"Well, girl, you want to be famous?

"You know, play with me."

It is not the case that she was simply sleeping with

any powerful man that she encountered in order to get

where she wanted to go,

because she turned down Harry Cohn,

who was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.

It's not until four years later...

..that Marilyn will find the courage to speak out.

In 1952, she co-authors an article with journalist Florabel Muir

called "Wolves I Have Known."

It's a great title, and that'll show you,

a woman that came up with that title? That's a poet.

"The first real wolf I encountered should have been ashamed of himself

"because he was trying to take advantage of a mere kid."

SINISTER CHUCKLE Kiss me.

Wolves are sexual predatory men, and the drawing of a wolf,

it's often, like, the tongue hanging out, the eyeballs bulgy,

very open about the sexual desire.

HOWLING

She already understands the idea of being hunted.

I don't think that sexual harassment was a term

in anyone's vocabulary in the 1950s.

It was just something that you put up with.

WHISTLING Bring on the women!

There's something very accurate

about the feeling of being

pursued by a wolf.

How dangerous that...that feels.

"He gave me a script to read and told me how to pose

"while reading it.

"All the poses had to be reclining."

"Although the words I was reading didn't seem

"to call for that position."

She really could have faced a serious backlash because,

of course, the powerful men didn't want to be called wolves,

and they didn't want their behaviour to get called out.

She exposed fissures in the cracks of society like nobody else.

And that, to me, is a trailblazing accomplishment.

She said, "Watch out for the wolves in Hollywood, honey.

"If they don't get what they want, they'll cancel your contract."

I drove down to headquarters.

That's the way a lot of us think about Schwab's drugstore.

Kind of a combination office, coffee klatch, and waiting room.

Immortalised in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard,

Schwab's drugstore is a Hollywood hang-out every actor knows well.

It was a place where people who wanted to break into movies

could hang around, interact, exchange gossip.

They would handle mail for people.

People could leave messages for each other.

We were young and struggling.

We used to sit in Schwab's drugstore and fantasise about the future,

having glorious careers and Oscars.

Marilyn was at Schwab's one day,

you know, kind of waiting for a break.

And somebody told her that Groucho Marx

was casting for a new movie.

She ran to the phone booth and got on the phone,

found the producer, and said, "I hear you're casting.

"I want to get a chance at this part."

Groucho Marx said that he wanted an actress who could

"make my elderly libido rise".

LOUD KNOCKING

He tested three different actresses...

Come in.

..and Marilyn fit the bill.

STEAM WHISTLES

She entered the room with so much awareness of her sexuality

and willingness to have it out there.

Her role is 40 seconds,

and her job is to make everyone's jaw drop.

Is there anything I can do for you?

What a ridiculous statement.

Mr Grunion, I want you to help me.

I have a little sand left. What seems to be the trouble?

Some men are following me.

Really? I can't understand why.

She was a product of the times.

You couldn't show sex in any of its, sort of, natural form.

I advise you to leave.

I'll take you down to the bus station.

Oh, if I'm not back tonight, go ahead without me.

So, you got it in this exaggerated, unnatural form.

That's been the history of all my romances.

She was letting the world know she carried this aura of sexuality,

and everybody got it and went, "Wow! Who's that?"

Eager to capitalise on Marilyn's scene-stealing potential,

the producers send her on a publicity tour to promote the film.

This was to happen during the summer on the East Coast,

but Marilyn wasn't aware that during the summer,

it does get very, very hot on that side of America.

She believed that it would be snow on the ground.

Marilyn arrives to the sweltering heat of New York

wearing a thick, wool suit.

Marilyn and the publicity agent

decided to make the most of her faux pas.

Gave her some ice creams to hold and a fan,

and photographers captured her peeking out of the train.

On the tour, she knows exactly how to present herself

and when to be funny.

She's extraordinary.

She's very, very smart about publicity and very funny.

Marilyn always seemed to know what publicists wanted,

what photographers wanted.

So, whenever she was presented with an opportunity,

she made the most of it.

She's just slowly walking up the ladder of success.

Before leaving New York,

Marilyn finds time to meet with an old friend,

photographer Andre de Dienes.

Marilyn and Andre happened to be in the same place at the same time,

so they went to the beach, and they just

took photographs in the surf.

Since their road trip four years earlier,

Marilyn has transformed.

She's no longer a naive young model.

She is a rising star.

I see pure joy.

You can just sort of see the comet,

little light up there in the sky, is starting to twinkle.

There's something unique,

something in the way she and the camera related to each other.

The camera was her lover, truly.

People talk about these pictures as the moment

when she was becoming Marilyn.

"Creating Marilyn" might be a more active way of putting it.

She was finding her power.

She was finding her talent.

She was learning how to own her career.

Becoming Marilyn means that she's about to get

everything that she had ever wanted.

Becoming Marilyn is not a tragedy.

It's a triumph.

Next on Reframed: Marilyn Monroe...

Her performances are like watching magic.

She became the biggest actress in the world,

and the biggest star in the world.

She was just so comedically gifted.

She began to understand that comedy could be one of her powers,

if she could fuse it with sex.

I said, "Are you sure they won't recognise me?"

It could've ended her career.

She ended up being the first centrefold of Playboy.

Those nude shots actually titillated the audience into wanting

to know more about her.

100,000 screaming fans.

It's J-Lo before there was J-Lo.

Romance that thrills the world - the marriage of Marilyn Monroe

and Joe DiMaggio.

Joe DiMaggio felt that once they were married,

her sexual appeal belonged to him,

and it didn't belong to other men.

Her third husband was playwright Arthur Miller,

and they, too, separated.

Marilyn takes off to New York.

She had a date with the president.

And it's just like, "Oh, my God."

She was to sing happy birthday.

I think she was playing with him.

She stood up to the old Hollywood guard.

Women didn't make their own movies.

Are you crazy?!

I have director approval, and that is true.

She got everything she wanted,

which was unheard of at the time.

She was at the height of her success,

and all of a sudden, the curtain came down.

It's like, "Wait a minute. The movie's not over."