This annoyance stems from the fact that these images people make of her have literally nothing to do with the actual person. Although I understand that c'est la vie when it comes to the controversial and famous, I still cannot help but feel somewhat sorry for such a misunderstood icon. So, consider this a Marilyn Monroe re-education post. (I'll probably do another in-depth on her history).
(This blog post, in itself, is rather incomplete, and mainly addresses some facts that may not be known by the general populace. It is based on my own research and on the tools and sources at my disposal. As with much of her life, there are some things based on evidence and some based on hearsay, the latter of which I tried my absolute best to identify and remove).
Last Spring, I wrote a paper comparing Marilyn Monroe to Sylvia Plath, analyzing themes within their poetry and some significant life events. It yielded some interesting results, to say the least. For example, how many people actually knew that Monroe wrote poetry? And it's good poetry, as well, for being unpublished and unedited. It holds a certain confessional feel to it, hence the comparison to Plath. They are all untitled and she writes about what the reader can presume to be her childhood. She describes her feelings of isolation and her proclivity toward death in rough yet poignant prose that can sometimes be heart-wrenching. You should all read them; in fact I feel like these poems of hers should be relevant.
Did you know she worked in a factory during WWII? That was actually where she was first photographed and discovered. After this, she ended up a model before eventually moving onto the silver screen. Marilyn would eventually create her own production company.
She was actually married three times: the first to James Dougherty, the second to Joe DiMaggio, and the third to Arthur Miller. Her first husband was a merchant marine, and from what I understood, she married him out of desperation as her foster parents were due to move and her other option was to live in an orphanage. Her other two husbands were pretty famous in their own right, so there's no real need to explain about the baseball legend and the playwright. I'm not too familiar with her marriage to Miller, but I do know that she had several miscarriages whilst married to him. Also, I did find out DiMaggio paid for all of Monroe's funeral expenses, buried her in the "Cadillac of caskets" and would continue to send her flowers to her grave twice a week for two decades. Later, it was reported that his final words were "I'll finally get to see Marilyn."
Marilyn Monroe was also incredibly well-read and pretty educated. She supposedly read James Joyce's Ulysses and would take literature classes at night in UCLA. Reportedly, she owned over four-hundred books. She was also a huge fan of Dostoyevsky. She actually wanted to play the role of Grushenka in a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," an ambition which she missed twice and was eventually unable to fulfill. In one anecdote, after asserting that she would play this role, one reporter had the gall to ask her if she had even read the book. Sadly, this is a theme throughout her career, as she was ridiculed for any intellectual ambitions which she pursued.
As you all know, Marilyn Monroe died on August 5th, 1962. RIP.