"I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night- there must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest."
"I knew nothing about acting. I had never read a book about it, or tried to do it, or discussed it with anyone."
"There was this secret in me - acting. It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said "This Way Out."
"I went to sleep hungry and woke up hungry. And I thought all actors and actresses were geniuses sitting on a front porch of paradise - the movies."
"I've never read anything about the Hollywood I knew in those first years. No hint of it is ever in the movie fan magazines. If there are any books on the subject, I must have skipped them, along with the few million other books I haven't read."
"The drugstores and cheap cafes were full of managers ready to put you over if you enrolled under their banner. Their banner was usually a bed sheet."
"I met them all (these managers). Phoniness and failure were all over them. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes - an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses."
"The people in Hollywood, the phonies and failures, were more colorful than the great men and successful artists I was to know soon."
"You sit alone. It's night outside. Automobiles roll down Sunset Boulevard like an endless string of beetles. Their rubber tires make a purring high-class noise. You're hungry, and you say, 'It's not good for my waistline to eat.' There's nothing finer than a washboard belly."
"When you're a failure in Hollywood, that's like starving to death outside a banquet hall, with smells of filet mignon driving you crazy."
"I vividly remember the day I finally made up my mind. I wanted to be an actress and I was not going to let my lack of confidence ruin my chances. I thought to myself I'm going to be a great movie star some day. When they first named me Lynn Miller it just didn't fit me. Then I got a new name, Marilyn Monroe. I had to get born, and this time better than before."
"I spent my salary on dramatic lessons, on dancing lessons and singing lessons. I bought books to read. I sneaked scripts off the set and sat up alone in my room reading them out loud in front of the mirror. And an odd thing happened to me. I fell in love with myself - not how I was, but how I was going to be."
"I was to go to a number of fancy Hollywood parties, and stand among the glamorous figures dressed as well as any of them, and laugh as if I were overcome with joy, but I never felt any more at ease than I did the first time I watched from the hallway."
"The reason I went to parties...was to advertise myself."
"There was also the consideration that if my studio bosses saw me standing (at a party) among the regular movie stars, they might get to thinking of me as a star also."
"As soon as I could afford an evening gown, I bought the loudest one I could find. It was a bright red, low cut dress, and my arrival in it usually infuriated half the women present. I was sorry in a way to do this, but I had a long way to go, and I needed alot of advertising to get there."
"Men who tried to buy me with money made me sick. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up."
"I was young, blonde and curvaceous, and I had learned to talk huskily like Marlene Dietrich, and to walk a little wantonly and to bring emotion into my eyes when I wanted to. And though these achievements landed me no job, they brought a lot of wolves whistling at my heels."
"A movie job hunter without a car in Hollywood was like a fireman without a fire engine."
"You sat in the waiting room of the Casting Department. An assistant came out of a door, looked over the assembled group and said, "There's nothing today."
"I think if other girls know how bad I was when I started they'll be encouraged. I finally made up my mind I wanted to be an actress ~ and I was not going to let my lack of confidence ruin my chances."
"There were dozens of us on the set, bit players, with a gesture to make and a line or two to recite. A few were young and had nice bosoms; but I knew they were different from me. They didn't have my illusions. My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third-rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve. I didn't want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act. I strove to look like Betty Grable, but I thought Alice Faye had more class to her looks."
"My first contract with 20th Century-Fox was like my first vaccination. It didn't take."
"It was the opinion of the studio that I was not photogenic."
QUESTION: "If 50 percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?"
"I will do whatever you tell me."
"I kept driving past the theatre with my name on the marquee. Was I excited. I wished they were using 'Norma Jeane' so that all the kids at the home and schools who never noticed me could see it." ~ MM on the release of Ladies of the Chorus,1948.
"In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo. You're judged by how you look, not by what you are."
"Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents."
"I hear you're looking for a sexy blonde to play with the Marx Brothers. Would you like to see me. I'm blonde and I'm sexy."
"I think cheesecake helps call attention to you. Then you can follow through and prove yourself."
Reporter: "Didn't you have anything on?"
"I've given pure sex appeal very little thought. If I had to think about it, I'm sure it worild frighten me."
"I used to say to myself, 'What the devil have you got to be proud about, Marilyn Monroe?' And I'd answer, 'Everything, Everything' and I'd walk slowly and turn my head slowly as if I were a queen."
"If I had observed all the rules, I'd never have gotten anywhere."
"I asked her where she lived, and when she said at the Studio Club, I was impressed because I knew that a girl who looked like that could have the biggest house in Beverly Hills, she could have whatever she wanted because men would give it to her. Therefore, if she lived at the Studio Club it was because she had character."
"It's Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep, all rolled into one." ~ Groucho Marx
The first national U.S. magazine to publish a feature on Marilyn, in its September 8, 1951 issue. In his introduction to "Hollywood's 1951 Model Blonde," journalist Robert Cahn writes, "She's fildom's Marilyn Monroe; Miss Cheesecake to GIs, whistlebait in the studios--and an actress on her way up. . . . Marilyn Monroe is not a girl anyone quickly forgets."
"She was so young and pretty, so shy and nervous on that picture, but I remember the scene where she was supossed to be sunning in the backyard of the apartment house we all lived in. When Marilyn walked on the set in her bathing suit and walked to the beach chair, the whole crew gasped, gaped and seemed to turn to stone. They just stopped work and stared; Marilyn had that electric something -- and mind you, movie crews are quite used to seeing us in brief costumes. They've worked on so many musicals and beach sequences. But they just gasped and gaped at Marilyn as though they were stunned. In all my years at the studio, I'd never seen that happen before. Sure, the crew gives you the kidding wolf-whistle routine, but this was sheer shock."
"Marilyn was one step from oblivion when I directed her in The Asphalt Jungle. I remember she impressed me more off the screen than on…there was something touching and appealing about her."
The MM Encyclopedia also had this blurb, found under the heading for Harry Brand, who was Fox's head of publicity:
"The first national feature on Fox's latest star, which appeared in Collier's magazine in September 1951, quotes Brand as saying, "She's the biggest thing we've had at the studio since Shirley Temple and Betty Grable," even though at that time Marilyn had yet to play a lead role."
Your going to be a great movie star.
It's hard for a star to get a eating job, a star is only good as a star. You don't fit into anything less. Yes, it's there. I can feel it. I see a hundred actresses a week. They haven't got what you have. Do you know what I am talking about?
Johnny was more than twice my age, a gentle, kind, brilliant man, and I had never known anyone like him. He had a great charm and warmth. It was Johnny who inspired me to read good books and enjoy good music.
Johnny Hyde gave me more than his kindness and love. He was the first man I had ever known who understood me. Most men (and women) thought I was scheming and two-faced. No matter how thruthfully I spoke to them or how honestly I behaved, they always believed I was trying to fool them.
He not only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane too. He knew all the pain and all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like that. I wished with all my heart that I could love him back..it was like being with a whole family and belonging to a full set of relatives.
"My bit was cut out of the picture Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay. I didn't mind when I heard about it. I would be better in the next picture. I'd been hired for six months. In six months I'd show them."
MM: "Look, if 100 percent told me that, all 100 percent would be wrong." ~ MM to a friend, circa late 1940s.
MM to Natasha Lytess, upon their first meeting, 1948
~ MM to Lester Cowan on the casting of Love Happy, 1949.
MM: "Oh yes. I had the radio on."
MM, when asked about posing for her nude calendar.
Marilyn's 1947 20th Century-Fox contract - click to read
"I always thought that movie stars were exciting and talented people, full of special personality. Meeting one of them at a party I discover usually that he (or she) is colorless and even frightened. I've often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people."
What Others Said
"I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson, when a movie star had to look beautiful, and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow."
~ Leon Shamroy, on MM's 1946 screen test.
~ Ben Lyon on his 1946 meeting with Norma Jeane Dougherty.
~June Haver on Marilyn, during Love Nest -
~John Huston
Johnny Hyde
~Johnny Hyde to MM
~ Johnny Hyde to MM
~MM on JH
~MM on JH
~MM on JH
