- Often carried around the book, "The Biography of Abraham Lincoln."
- Was good friends with Judy Garland.
- Ex-husband Joe DiMaggio put fresh roses at her memorial site, for numerous years after her death.
- Fearing blemishes and sweat, she washed her face fifteen times a day.
- When she was told that she was not the star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) she verbally said "Well whatever I am, I'm still the blonde.".
- In 1972, actress Veronica Hamel and her husband became the new owners of Marilyn's Brentwood home. They hired a contractor to replace the roof and remodel the house, and the contractor discovered a sophisticated eavesdropping and telephone tapping system that covered every room in the house. The components were not commercially available in 1962, but were in the words of a retired Justice Department official, "standard FBI issue." It is known that renegade F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover believed that President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy (who was Hoover's boss) were threats to national security because of their dalliances with Monroe and with Judith Exner, who was also a girlfriend of a Mafia boss. This bugging equipment led to Hoover's rumored blackmailing of the Kennedy brothers. The new owners spent $100,000 to remove the bugging devices from the house.
- Was close friends with singer Ella Fitzgerald and helped her rise in her musical career by arranging for her to sing in many upscale nightclubs some of which were segregated during the time of their friendship.
- Monroe was a stutterer, a little known fact that was easily covered thanks to studio vocal coaches who provided her with diction lessons.
- Spent most of her early childhood in foster homes and orphanages because her mother was committed to a mental institution. Later, she lived with her mother's best friend, Grace McKee, and her family. McKee, a big fan of Jean Harlow, allowed her to wear make-up and curl her hair and, when she was 15, it was McKee who pierced her ears for her using a sewing needle. At 16, when McKee could no longer take care of her, she got married to avoid returning to the orphanage.
- Her "Happy Birthday Mr. President" dress sold for $1,267,500.00, a world record for the most expensive piece of clothing ever sold, and is in the Guinness Book of World Records.
- Her personal library contained over 400 books on topics ranging from art to history, psychology, philosophy, literature, religion, poetry, and gardening. Many of the volumes, auctioned in 1999, bore her pencil notations in the margins.
- She tried 9 different shades of blonde hair color before settling on platinum blonde.
- Because the bathing suit she wore in the movie Love Nest (1951) was so risque (for the time period) and caused such a commotion on the set, director Joseph M. Newman had to make it a closed set when she was filming.
- The dress Marilyn Monroe wore to serenade John F. Kennedy, on May 19, 1962 at his birthday celebration was so tight, that it had to be sewn onto her. She had to sit still for approximately an hour.
- Started using the name Marilyn Monroe in 1946, but did not legally change it until 1956.
- Her first modeling job paid only five dollars.
- Learned to play the guitar for her role in River of No Return (1954) and the ukulele for her role in Some Like It Hot (1959).
- She was discovered dead at her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, California. She had a phone in one of her hands, her body was completely nude and face down, on her bed.
- The licensing of Marilyn's name and likeness, handled world-wide by Curtis Management Group, reportedly nets the Monroe estate about $2 million a year.
- Suffered from endometriosis, a condition in which tissues of the uterus lining (endometrium) leave the uterus, attach themselves to other areas of the body, and grow, causing pain, irregular bleeding, and, in severe cases, infertility.
- Married Arthur Miller twice: the 1st time in a civil ceremony, then in a Jewish (to which she had converted) ceremony two days later.
- When she died in 1962 at age 36, she left an estate valued at $1.6 million. In her will, Monroe bequeathed 75% of that estate to Lee Strasberg, her acting coach, and 25% to Dr. Marianne Kris, her psychoanalyst. A trust fund provided her mother, Gladys Baker Eley, with $5,000 a year. When Dr. Kris died in 1980, she passed her 25% on to the Anna Freud Centre, a children's psychiatric institute in London. Since Strasberg's death in 1982, his 75% has been administered by his widow, Anna, and her lawyer, Irving Seidman.
- She left Hollywood to pursue serious acting by studying under Lee Strasberg at his Actors' Studio in New York City.
- Appeared on the first cover of Playboy in December 1953.
- Became pregnant twice (in July 1957 and November 1958) during her marriage to Arthur Miller; on both occasions she suffered miscarriages.
- She was suggested as a possible wife for Prince Rainier of Monaco. But he picked actress, Grace Kelly, to be his wife.
- Although she was perhaps the most famous actress of the 1950s decade, she never made more than $100,000 per picture upfront. Actresses such as Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck were earning significantly more.
- When she wasn't acting, she preferred to wear nothing but a bathrobe and occasionally a bikini.
- Wore glasses.
- The first time she signed an autograph as Marilyn Monroe, she had to ask how to spell it. She didn't know where to put the "i" in "Marilyn".
- Her classic shape, according to her dressmaker, is actually measured at 37-23-36.
- Her last film Something's Got to Give (1962), was finally released in 2003. In the swimming pool scene, Marilyn reveals much more to the camera than she did in her then controversial calendar photo from the early 1950s.
- Was an outstanding player on the Hollygrove Orphanage softball team.
- Although she was an avid buyer of books and owned over 400 of them at her death, third husband Arthur Miller said, "Aside from Colette's Cheri and a few short stories, I had never known her to read anything all the way through. She felt she could get the idea of a book, and often did, in just a few pages.".
- "Time Magazine" reported in 1973 that Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, the doctor who performed Monroe's autopsy, said that contrary to rumors, Monroe's stomach was never pumped after her death. The level of Nembutal in her bloodstream was 4.5 milligrams per 100, which is the equivalent of 40 or 50 capsules indicating suicide.
- Was originally set to play Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), but Audrey Hepburn played the role instead.
- Richard Widmark on co-starring with Monroe in "Don't Bother to Knock": "She was a vulnerable kid. Murder to work with because she was scared to death of acting - even when she became a big movie actress. We had a hell of a time getting her out of the dressing room. When it was five o'clock , it got irritating: 'C'mon, Marilyn, we want to go home!' She was a movie animal. Something happened between the lens and the film. Nobody knew what the hell it was. On the set, you'd think: 'Oh, this is impossible; you can't print this.' You'd see it, and she's got everyone backed off the screen. Olivier said the same thing. She had that phenomenal something! Nobody knows what it is, but she had it. She certainly was never a professional actress. She always had a coach with her, lurking in the background, giving her signals. And she could never remember three words in a row - so it was all piece-work. Beyond all the technical deficiencies, she was a nice girl. We got along fine.".
- One of the first Los Angeles natives to become a major movie star.
- Read and wrote poetry.
- There are over 600 books written about her.
- Her mother, Gladys Pearl (Monroe), was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, to American parents from Indiana and Missouri, and was a film-cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. Marilyn's biological father has been established through DNA testing as Charles Stanley Gifford, who had been born in Newport, Rhode Island, to a family with deep roots in the state; he was of English descent. From his side, she was descended from religious leader Anne Marbury-Hutchinson, from whom she is related to Lucretia Rudolph (wife of President James A. Garfield), Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, and George W. Bush.
- In order to fall asleep quicker and stay asleep longer she often mixed champagne with sleeping pills.
- Aside from her birth name of Norma Jeane Mortenson, she was baptized and mainly known throughout her life as Norma Jeane Baker. During her modeling days she was also known as Norma Jeane Dougherty (her first marriage name), and also as Jean Norman. When she signed with 20th Century-Fox, studio casting executive Ben Lyon had first chosen the name Carol Lind as her stage name, although she disliked that. Eventually she chose her mother's maiden name of Monroe. Three names were drawn up as possible stage names. The first was Norma Jeane Monroe, although that sounded awkward; the second was Jean Monroe, and the third was Marilyn Monroe, the latter first name being chosen by Lyon who thought Norma Jeane resembled famed stage actress Marilyn Miller. Norma Jeane liked Jean Monroe, for it preserved some of her name, but Lyon convinced her that Marilyn Monroe sounded more alliterative and so it was chosen.
- A 1982 review into the original inquest of Marilyn's death, conducted on its 20-year anniversary, concluded that the actress committed suicide or accidentally overdosed, and was not murdered--rumors that were fueled by the sloppy handling of evidence, the delay in securing the scene and the disappearance of tissue samples.
- Although Monroe's famous nude calender grossed $750,000, the actress only got $50 and a bad cold out of it.
- In 1999, a make-up kit that she personally owned, sold for $266,500.
- According to the book "Flesh and Fantasy" Monroe perfected a Vaseline-based lip gloss.
- Her lifelong bouts with depression and self-destruction took their toll during filming The Seven Year Itch (1955). She frequently muffed scenes and forgot her lines, leading to sometimes as many as 40 takes of a scene before a satisfactory result was produced. Her constant tardiness and behavioral problems made the budget of the film swell to $1.8 million, a high price for the time. The film still managed to make a nice profit. The classic shot of her dress blowing up around her legs as she stands over a subway grating in this film was originally shot on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue at 52nd St., On Wednesday, September 15th, 1954, at 1:00 a.m. Five thousand onlookers whistled and cheered through take after take as Marilyn repeatedly missed her lines. This occurred in presence of an increasingly embarrassed and angry Joe DiMaggio (her husband at the time; the nine-month-old marriage officially ended during the shooting of this film). The original footage shot on that night in New York never made it to the screen; the noise of the crowd had made it unusable. Director Billy Wilder re-shot the scene on the 20th Century-Fox lot, on a set replicating Lexington Avenue, and got a more satisfactory result. However, it took another 40 takes for Marilyn to achieve the famous scene. Amazingly, her very narrow spike heels don't get stuck or break in the subway grating, although this was a universal problem at the time for the countless women wearing that very popular style heel in New York City in that era. An important promotional campaign was released for this mainstream motion picture, including a 52-foot-high cutout of Marilyn (from the blowing dress scene) erected in front of Loews State Theater, in New York City's Times Square. The movie premiere was on June 1, 1955, which was also her 29th birthday.
- Interred at Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California, USA, in the Corridor of Memories, crypt #24.
- When budding actresses Shelley Winters and Marilyn were roommates in the late 1940s in Hollywood, Shelley said that one day she had to step out and asked Marilyn to "wash the lettuce" for a salad they were to share for dinner. When Shelley got back to the apartment, (Marilyn was apparently new to the art of cooking) had the leaves of lettuce in a small tub of soapy water and was scrubbing them clean. She had not heard of the phrase before either, or did not know it's true meaning.
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