Welcome To The Bitch Barn

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I've often been asked, does it bother you when someone refers to you as a dumb blonde? It never has, you see. I've always known I wasn't. This week we're talking about Marilyn Monroe. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts, and I'm your host, Christina Rose. Hey, witches, bitches, and sluts. Welcome to our first episode. My name is Christina, and this is my bitch barn, aka my garage. Every Monday, I will be posting one main video where we focus on one woman, the label she was given, the story behind it, and the damage it caused. Then on Thursdays, I will be posting a companion episode, which I call the rabbit hole, because it's a result of me going down the rabbit hole, researching the label itself. Where did it come from? And why was it applied to so many women throughout history? If you don't want to miss an episode, please follow us on TikTok or Instagram at the dot wbs.pod. That's the t-dotwot pod. Or hit subscribe or follow. So the opening quote are Marilyn's own words from an interview for the September 1954 issue of Modern Screen Magazine.

Norma Jean’s Childhood And Survival

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And as Marilyn said in her own words, she was labeled a dumb blonde. Before we get to the label, I want to go over some key events in her childhood in case any of you are unfamiliar. Norma Jean Mortenson was born June 1st, 1926. Her mother was Gladys Baker. She worked as a film splicer in Hollywood. Those are the people that actually put together the different strips of film. Her father was listed as Gladys's then husband, but recently DNA tests confirmed suspicions that it was actually Charles Gifford, her mother's boss at the film lab. But neither one of those men played a role in her life, so they're not important. Her mother's family had a history of serious mental illness. Both Gladys's mother and father were institutionalized. And at the time of Norma Jean's birth, Gladys was already suffering her own mental health issues. So she placed her in foster care shortly after her birth. And things were okay at first. She lived with a family called the Bollanders and would even call Mrs. Bullinder mom. But Mrs. Bollander would remind her that no, her mom was the woman who visited occasionally on the weekends. And then in January 1934, when Norma Jean was seven, Gladys got enough money to buy a house and brought Norma Jean in to live with her. But this didn't last long because within the year Gladys had a breakdown and was diagnosed at the time with paranoid schizophrenia. And she spent most of the rest of her life in and out of institutions. I think her family mental history is important, especially when we talk about the later part of her life. So Norma Jean's care was handed over to Gladys' friend Grace McKee, whom Norma Jean referred to as Aunt Grace. Grace did not have legal custody of Norma Jean, so she put her in an orphanage until she could get the paperwork. Once she did that, she brought Norma Jean to live with her and her husband. But very shortly after, Norma Jean went to Grace to tell her that her husband had been molesting her. She was 11, and Grace did not believe her and told her she could not live there anymore. So after that, she was put in foster homes after foster homes, totaling at least 11, sometimes with family members and sometimes in the orphanage. But this is around the time when she started to stutter. In a 1960 interview, she said, first time was in the orphanage and then later in my teens. And then went on to explain, often if I am very nervous or excited, I stutter. Many biographers connect the stuttering as a result of the molestation, but Monroe herself attributed it to her rough childhood in general. But remember the stutter because it comes up later again. In the book To Norma Jean with Love, Jimmy, her first husband recalls, Grace was always grooming her for stardom. She worshipped Jean Harlow and she wanted Norma Jean to be exactly like her. So Monroe herself recalled in her unfinished autobiography that during times of hardships in the Great Depression, Grace would look at her and say, Don't worry, Norma Jean. You're going to be a beautiful girl when you grow up. You're going to be a movie star. So I think it's interesting that she was conditioned to be a movie star from childhood. So

Modeling, Marriage, And Reinvention

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in 1942, her guardians at the time were relocating and they were unable to take her. So 16-year-old Norma Jean would have to either find a home or go back to the orphanage. So Aunt Grace arranged for her to marry her 21-year-old neighbor, James Doherty, the guy I previously quoted. It was agreed that this was a marriage of practicality rather than romance. During World War II, Doherty was sent overseas and Norma Jean went to work at a munitions factory in Burbank. An army photographer shooting a story there for a military publication noticed her there and began sending her modeling work. At this time, she still had her natural brown hair, but in 1946, her modeling agent told her she needed to bleach and straighten her hair if she wanted steady work, since brunettes had a more limited range. And once she had lightened it, she kept going lighter from there, very similar to her idol Jean Harlow. If you Google Monroe Blue Book Agency, you can actually see photos of her as a brunette before she bleached her hair. Then, within two years of her discovery, she had become a successful model. And at the end of the second year, she had divorced Doherty, bleached her hair, pursued acting, signed with 20th Century Fox, and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. And this was all within a five-month time span. So after she signed with Fox, um, but before she had any real film roles, the studio enrolled her at the actors' lab in Los Angeles so she could study dramatic technique. She described it as my first taste of what real acting in a real drama could be, and I was hooked. Unfortunately, some of the instructors felt that she was too shy and insecure for a future in acting, and that led to Fox not renewing her contract in August 1947. But she continued studying at the actor's lab, paying on her own with her modeling income. Eventually, she gets signed to Columbia Pictures. She does one movie with them, The Ladies of the Chorus, and was let go from them too. But she didn't quit. In 1949, United Artists gave her a minor role in a Groucho Brothers movie called Love Happy. But it wasn't for her acting. They sent her on a cross-country publicity tour for the film. She recounted that her job was to wear a bathing suit and hand out orchids to my favorite male moviegoers. It was during this time that she got the nickname The Mmm Girl because looking at her made men say, Mmm. And if you're listening to the audio, I am rolling my eyes right now. She actually ended up leaving the tour early without giving notice because, in her words, I had seen enough of the world. If you Google Love Happy Marilyn Monroe Photos, you can see many of the photos that were taken during this tour. So when she returned, it was in this stretch of time that she had two very strong influences in her life. One was Natasha Leites, a drama coach that was assigned to her during her brief time at Columbia Pictures. Leites eventually leaves Columbia to work exclusively for Monroe. And multiple sources credit Leitesse with teaching her a breathing and lip movement technique to help manage her stuttering, which laid the foundation for her famous breathy public voice. Monroe later moved into Laitesse's home and relied on her heavily on set, to the dismay of her directors. The other is Johnny Hyde, vice president of William Morris Talent Agency. Stories differ about how they met, but they seem to agree that he discovered her. Hyde secured an audition for her for the Asphalt Jungle, her first dramatic role, and successfully pushed for her consideration in All About Eve, a movie starring Betty Davis. He also reportedly stopped a photographer from taking a photo of her in a two-piece bikini, as she's a serious actor now and will only be taking photos in one-piece bathing suits from now on. But most importantly, he used his industry connections to get her re-signed with Fox, but this time with a seven-year contract. Monroe described him as the first man I'd ever met who really understood me. Sadly, Hyde died of a heart attack in December 1950, just days after securing both roles for her. Following his death, Fox cast her in three comedies in a row, in which biographer Donald Spoto described her roles as essentially a sexy ornament. We'll talk about how her trajectory takes a sharp turn toward dumb blonde after this break. So

From Femme Fatale To Blonde Comedy

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before she became known as a dumb blonde, Fox Studios tried marketing her as a femme fatale. In case you've never heard that phrase before, it is defined as an attractive, seductive, and mysterious woman who leads men into dangerous or compromising situations, often resulting in their downfall or destruction. It is French for fatal woman. In January 1953, Fox gave Monroe the starring role in a movie called Niagara as Rose Loomis, a wife plotting her husband's murder. Fox Marketing described her as a tantalizing temptress whose kisses fired men's souls. The film was a box office hit, credited with establishing her stardom. But studio memos show the original casting plan was different. The role was originally given to her co-star Gene Peters. But studio head Daryl Zanek insisted that Monroe was perfect for this part, not based on anything he knew about her or her talent, just his assumptions. So Monroe was given the part of the scheming rose, and Peters was moved to play Polly, the innocent newlywed. Multiple critics noted that Monroe's performance included a softness atypical of the Femme fatale archetype, a lighter voice quality than the harder delivery associated with actresses like Barbara Stanwick in similar roles. After reading this, I decided to go look for clips of Barbara Stanwick to see what they meant. And my favorite clip that I saw was her in Ladies They Talk About. And I can see that Stanwick was very good at playing the villain. You really did want to hate her. Then I looked up Monroe in Niagara, and I could easily see what they were talking about there too. Monroe made the villain likable, which is not at all what the studio wanted. So she did not play a femme fatale again. Film critic Foster Hirsch theorized that the culture of the era could tolerate a woman's sexual power only paired with harmlessness, but not intelligence or danger. And I actually have some academic research that supports this theory that I share with you in the companion rabbit hole episode. So make sure you check that out. To give you an idea of what was going on in this era that Hirsch was referring to, that same year, 1953 researcher Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, in which he concluded that women might actually like sex. So this was in 1953, which means up until then everyone thought women did not like sex. So that was very interesting to me. Coincidentally, while all of this is happening, we have this new actress who is overtly sexual and likable. So if Congress is literally investigating to stop a report going out that women actually like sex, the studios definitely did not want to be promoting one of those women. So director Howard Hawks convinced Azanik to use her sex appeal for comedy rather than danger. And gentlemen prefer blondes entered production that year, which kick-started the Dumb Blonde label.

The Voice, The Persona, The Craft

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Okay, so now let's talk about the voice. Remember, Laitesse already taught her how to use breathing and specific lip movements to manage her stuttering. She also showed her how to breathe from her diaphragm to keep calm and speak in a lower register. Her studio vocal coach for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Phil Moore, directed her to use that breathy voice for singing. All of this together becomes the famous sultry Marilyn voice everyone imitates. Moore described her voice to Life magazine as she always sounds as if she's just waking up. And you'd be surprised what kind of effect that has on male listeners. So it's pretty obvious that the studio is deliberately starting to create a persona for her. But she was not a naive victim being manipulated by the studios as many people thought. Susan Strasberg, the daughter of Monroe's later acting coach, recalled that Monroe would ask, Do you want to see me be her? And then she would transform with her signature walk, head tilt, and smile. Eli Wallach, a fellow student at the actors studio in New York, also later in her career, said he watched her go from blending into the crowd on the streets of New York, and then her suddenly switching to Marilyn and a crowd attracted around her. Photographer Sam Shaw also claims he frequently heard her critique her own acting and photos in the third person, treating Marilyn as an alter ego. And I have actually come across this in my research, seeing some of her passages and quotes where she does mention Marilyn, like she is not Marilyn. The stories of Monroe turning Marilyn on and off is further backed up by a story involving photographer Philip or Philippe Halsman. His jumbology project involved photographing people mid-jump. So his theory was in that split second, the photograph revealed the real them as they would be completely unguarded at that time. He had already taken many photos of celebrities, politicians, even some royalty. Monroe declined to participate for five years, which supports the stories that Marilyn is not her unguarded self. She finally agreed to do it in 1959 for the cover of Life magazine. But it took 200 jumps and over three hours to get the photo she approved of. While I do not condone his violence, as we have established, she knew what she was doing. And here's a quote from editor Robert Stein that supports this. My job was to write captions for this ubiquitous starlet who would pose for anything, so that after a while she was more of a joke than a serious figure. But the interesting thing always was if you looked at the pictures, you could see she was in on the joke. So I think we've pretty much established that Monroe was in on creating her sexy bombshell image. But now let's talk about how good she was at playing it. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, both Jane Russell and Monroe play showgirls, and therefore sexiness is a part of both their characters. And now this is my own observation. This was nothing I got from a book or article or any of my research. My own observation. I want to make that clear. Jane Russell's performance feels as though it's like she's aware that there is an audience watching her, almost like. She's saying, Watch me seduce these boys. Whereas Monroe's performance is much more natural. Again, this is my own opinion. But I think people often interpret that as Monroe not being a good actress because they think she's just being herself, the same dumb blonde she is in every movie. But given everything we've talked about, her voice, her costuming, being able to turn Marilyn on and off, this is much more likely a reflection of her acting skills. Plus, she also received praise from her fellow actors. Betty Davis, who was not exactly known for being a nice person, said about working with Monroe on the movie All About Eve. Oh, I knew she had a long way to go. Definitely, no question. I knew she was going to make it. She was a very ambitious girl and knew what she wanted and was very serious about it. I thought she had talent. Then in September 1953, she made her only live television appearance on the Jack Benny Show. It was a live half-hour broadcast with no opportunities for retakes, very similar to Saturday Night Live. Comedian Jack Benny praised her comedic delivery afterward, saying, She realized that for something to seem funny, you had to play it like a drama. And that is very high praise coming from one of the top comedians of the time. And this reminded me of a more recent quote by um Demi Moore in 2025. She was asked about her co-star, Michelle Randolph, who plays a stereotypical dumb blonde on the TV show Landman. And Moore said, you have to be really smart to play dumb. But I highly suggest you search for Monroe's performance with Jack Benny. Um, I was able to find it on a Facebook post, and you can actually do a direct comparison with this one because Jane Mansfield later does the exact same skit with Jack Benny, and that I was also able to find on the internet. So, to recap, what the public sees as a naive woman being played by the industry is actually a very intelligent woman who is fully aware of what the studios were trying to do and knowingly plays along. And

Refusing Roles And Taking Control

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this is even more evident in 1955 when she didn't want to play anymore. Fox had cast her in a movie called The Girl in Pink Tights as yet another dumb blonde. Monroe refused, she didn't even show up for rehearsals, and Fox announced suspension of her contract. Then she announced the founding of Marilyn Monroe Productions. Unfortunately, as a production company, it only made one film, The Prince and the Showgirl, which did not do very well. But just the idea of Monroe starting her own production company scared Fox into a year-long, heated contract renegotiation. And in the end, Monroe got a pay increase from $1,500 a week to $100,000 a film. In today's money, that would be $1.25 million a film. And she got the right to approve all scripts, directors, and cinematographers. Time called her a shrewd businesswoman. The LA Mirror said the negotiation was one of the greatest triumphs won by any actress. So why wasn't that her legacy? We'll get into that after this break.

How The Label Damaged Her Legacy

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So let's talk about the damage this label caused. Despite all the evidence of her acting skills, including the praise of some of her co-stars, Monroe received zero Academy Award nominations. And we're not even talking about awards, we're talking about nominations. She did not get one. Despite international recognition from Italy, France, the BAFTAs, and three Golden Globe wins. Film historian Richard Barrios, in his 2023 book on Marilyn Monroe, theorized that she was dismissed as a phenomenon rather than a serious actor. And by the way, his book was called Revolutionary for focusing on her acting skills as opposed to her sex appeal. And this was 2023. So while I was doing my research, I kept seeing a pattern of people referring to Monroe as witty, but not smart. I always thought you had to be smart to be witty, so I had to look into this more. And here's what I found. So to call someone witty, that's easy. She makes a joke, people laugh. Oh, she's witty. No one's gonna argue with you. But to call someone intelligent, that requires proof. And people didn't want to acknowledge that part of her. Like the 400 plus books in her personal library, spanning everything from philosophy to psychology to poetry, and with Monroe's own notations in the margins. Even if people didn't witness her intelligence, why did they have to say she was witty but not smart? Why do they have to add the not smart? And I think it goes back to what that film critic theorized: that sexy and witty is harmless, but sexy and intelligent is threatening. Biographer Sarah Churchwell addresses that in her book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. She says, the biggest myth is that she was dumb. The second is that she was fragile. The third is that she couldn't act. But she was very smart indeed and very tough. She had to be both to beat the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s. She was very witty with an acidic sense of humor. The dumb blonde was a role. She was an actress, for heaven's sake. I also found a claim that her IQ was 168, which would make her a genius, by the way. And the archivist of her personal collection said there is no record of an IQ test anywhere. Unfortunately, making up a fake IQ number is just as damaging because if you truly believed she was intelligent, you wouldn't have to fake your evidence. So I'm gonna take a moment to admit that I actually did not want to do Marilyn Monroe at first. It was suggested to me, and my first reaction was that she's overdone. There is so much out there about her and so many podcasts. But then I watched the 2006 documentary Marilyn Monroe Still Alive and was so enraged that I was determined that she would be my first episode. The film relies a lot on one of her biographers, Norman Mailer. In it, he describes Monroe as not overbearingly bright. He goes on to call her a lover of books who did not read. I found this quite interesting because, by his own admission, he never actually met her. And there is actually a famous photo of Monroe reading the book Ulysses by James Joyce in a Long Island Park. You can actually Google it. The photographer Eve Arnold said that Monroe already had the book in her car and had been reading it for a while before Arnold even showed up. Monroe told Arnold that she loved the sound of the language and read it aloud to herself to work through it. So I wanted to find out more about the book Ulysses, and this is how Google AI summarized it. Ulysses is notoriously challenging. Its difficulty comes from the stream of consciousness writing, sudden shifts between first and third person narration, and dense unannounced references to Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare, and Irish politics. The book is an auditory musical experience. First, that book does not sound like an easy read. And second, I thought it was interesting that she had told the photographer she liked reading it aloud. I wonder if she knew it was better read aloud or if that was something she discovered on her own. But also, when Christie's auctioned her personal library in 1999, and this was that 400-plus book library I previously mentioned, people who went through the books described real annotations and underlined passages. They say she had specific sharp opinions about what she read, too. She called Hemingway's tough guy characters, quote, so sick, they aren't even all that tough. And novelist Dame Edith Sitwell came away from an actual conversation with her about a specific philosophy book Monroe had been reading at the time, describing her extremely intelligent. If you want to know more about Monroe's personal library, um, they do talk about it on her collections website. That's at the MarilynMunro Collection.com. So all of this makes me wonder why a person who wrote a biography of her and is being interviewed as the main voice of a documentary, Norman Mailer, got the impression that she couldn't or didn't read. So here's the story he told on the documentary himself. And it's really long, but I think it's important that I use his own words. I never met Marilyn. I had a number of friends who knew her. It was that was most frustrating to me. I spent years thinking what a wonderful conversation we'll have if we ever meet. And then finally one day, I had the opportunity to meet her. It was at Actor's Studio, and she was sitting a couple rows in front of me. And it was a period of her life that was very bad for her. Things were going wrong. She was on opiates and she looked awful that day. She was wearing a babushka around her head, you know, a scarf tied. She had no makeup and her nose was red, and she didn't have a good nose, oddly enough. I can't even read this without like throwing up. It was sort of slightly mottled, and that's mottled with a T. Lord knows how much makeup went onto it. And she really was not attractive. And so I just thought, I've had so many thoughts about this woman for so many years. I don't want to meet her today. This would just spoil it too much. And so I never went up and said hello. So, in short, Maylor had never met her, was jealous of his friends who did, finally got the chance, found her to be too ugly. And so he decided he didn't want to spoil his fantasy of her. So I had to look this guy up because I had never heard of him. And it turns out he is known for stabbing his wife at a party. Um, and when people tried to help her, he screamed, Don't touch her, let the bitch die. So this is the man who wrote a biography about Monroe and is the main voice of this documentary. So, okay, moving on. Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist icon, even admitted that as a teenager, she found Monroe embarrassing, a joke, too visibly eager for approval. Everything Steinem feared becoming herself. Even she had bought the studio's presentation of Monroe as a dumb blonde. And even her husbands bought into it at first. We already talked about how DiMaggio got upset at her publicity stunt. He actually wanted her to quit acting and become his stay-at-home wife. So he married her for her public persona of being naive and submissive, then got mad when she wouldn't submit. Then there's Arthur Miller, the famous author of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. Two weeks after they got married, Miller wrote in his journal that he was embarrassed to bring her around his intellectual friends. A year later, after knowing her better, he started writing the screenplay for The Misfits so she could finally have a role that showed her range. Unfortunately,

Mental Health, Agency, And Conspiracies

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the damage went further than just public opinion. Many people in her life didn't even respect her ability to handle the truth. In 1961, Monroe had a breakdown and was telling people, including her then psychiatrist, that she was thinking about killing herself. She had just gone through an exhausting time in her life. She just finished filming The Misfits. Clark Gable, her co-star, dies of a heart attack just about 10 days later. Her divorce from Miller is finalized. She was having an affair with French actor Yves Montand, and he ended up going back to his wife. And then Miller's mother dies, whom Monroe was actually very close to. So her psychiatrist told her that she just needed some rest. Monroe agrees and checks herself into the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic, thinking she was just going to get a rest cure. Instead, they put her in a padded cell used for the most severely disturbed patients on the ward. During this time, she wrote a six-page letter to a different doctor describing that she felt imprisoned for a crime she hadn't committed, and she even broke a window with a chair out of frustration. However, this only led to them putting her in restraints. They finally allowed her one phone call, and she chose to call her ex-husband DiMaggio, who was able to get her out. So some people praise DiMaggio for this, as well as the other times he comes to her aid after this. And when she passes, he is the one who arranges her funeral, and he purposely does not invite the people whom he felt harmed her. And then he sent roses to her crypt three times a week for 20 years. So before you go awe, I just want to remind you that he's also the same man who hit her and tried to control her. Brittany Spear said about her own conservatorship: the message I kept getting was that their minds mattered. My mind was to be ignored. I was just there to perform for them, to make them money. It was such a waste. And we're gonna give Brittany her own episode, but I just wanted to bring this up now to show the connection of how the exact same thing is still happening today. Not only does she not have agency over her own treatment, people didn't even believe she had agency over her own death. The official investigation into her death concluded with probable suicide. But conspirators often say there is no way she could have killed herself. She was at the height of her career. One, she wasn't, not that it makes a difference, and two, we have seen now how depression can affect you no matter what your level of success is. But still the theory spread. While discrepancies in timing and statements are true, and it led to the LA County District Attorney reviewing those reports in 1982, but his office also found no evidence of foul play. The biggest conspiracy, that the mafia and the Kennedys killed her and covered it up, can actually be traced back to a 1964 propaganda pamphlet trying to ruin Robert Kennedy's Senate race. I will also make note that I ran across a couple people who felt her death was an accidental overdose. And so I want to make clear that I am not pushing she killed herself. I am just sharing the damage that her reputation as a dumb blonde caused, that people can't even fathom her having agency over her death. So Marilyn actually summarized the damage of her being labeled perfectly. She said, People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts. Then they white masked themselves by calling me the lewd one. So despite all the evidence to the contrary, why did the dumb blonde label stick? I think one reason is they didn't have anything else to believe. In the 1950s, there was no public information about her beyond her film roles and the studio-managed publicity. There was no social media, there was no behind-the-scenes footage, so the people started to equate her as the characters she played. In 1952, journalist Stanley Flink said to Life magazine: Because her movie role is always that of a dumb blonde, Hollywood generally supposes she is pretty dumb herself. This is a delusion. And there is actually a name for this type of fallacy. It's called the fundamental attribution error. It's when you watch someone do something and make a judgment on that person while ignoring the circumstances. For example, that guy killed a person, he's a bad guy. Or she gave him money, she is generous. But the circumstances might be that it was in self-defense, or that maybe she actually owed him money. But for an audience watching a character in a film, the circumstances are that the actor is being paid to be that character. But some people will ignore this and apply the action they see on the screen in judgment of the actor they see. And if you're thinking that that's not possible, um, I was once watching Harrison Ford in something, and my mom walked in and she said, Oh, I don't like that guy. And I said, Harrison Ford? Who doesn't like Harrison Ford? And my mom said he was the bad guy in that movie. So I can testify that it does happen. So let's get back to that voice again. Not only does this apply to the actions they see Monroe doing on the screen, but to her voice as well. Now remember, she spent years crafting this voice with multiple coaches, and her friends witness her being able to turn it on and off. But since it's all the public hears, they think it's the real voice of a real dumb blonde. And then there's those conspiracy theories. They are still going strong. In 1985, journalist Anthony Summers wrote a book about them. And then in 2022, Mike Rothmiller and Douglas Thompson published Bombshell, claiming they had new evidence to prove the conspiracies true. And just as I was researching for this episode, I accidentally ran across a brand new episode of another podcast that was pushing the same conspiracies. So the continued refusal to believe that she had any agency over her own body continues. And in that same documentary that I don't like, a photography collector says this. Somebody wants to make a sad story. Somebody wants to make a drama. Somebody wants to make a happy story. Nobody knows the facts. Nobody is Marilyn. Nobody knows the facts or nobody cares about the facts. Those are two different things. It's because people want it to. Biographer Donald Spoto explains that she was, quote, the post-war ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently needy, worshipful of men, naive, offering sex without demands. There was yet something tenacious and independent about her. And perhaps the most disturbing of all to a culture in such turmoil, she made overt sexuality seem respectable. So what I think he means by this is that men could enjoy her or fantasize about her without feeling like they've given her any power over them. And women could watch her knowing she wasn't a threat. So everyone gets to want her, but nobody has to respect her. And that's how they want it to stay.

Exploitation After Death And Final Words

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Now let's talk about her reputation today. Unfortunately, she couldn't even escape this image after her death. In 1992, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner purchased the crypt next to hers for $75,000. He explains that he feels a connection to her because it was her nude photos that launched Playboy magazine. FYI Monroe took those photos back when she was still a struggling model in order to pay her rent. The photographer had convinced her that since she wasn't famous, no one would recognize her. He paid her $50, which is the equivalent of $700 today. Hefner found them, paid $500 for the rights, and published them in the first issue of Playboy at the height of Monroe's career. The magazine went on to be so successful, Hefner was eventually making over $100,000 a month, and he didn't pay her anything. Monroe said to a photographer friend, I never even received a thank you from all those who made millions off a nude Maryland photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it. And now she has to spend eternity next to this man. And he's not the only one. The crypt directly above hers was bought by businessman Richard Poncher, who asked to be interred face down so he could always be on top of her. In FYI, it was sold to him by Joe DiMaggio, who was originally supposed to be there. And then when Poncher's wife tries to sell it so she can move his body closer to her plot, a Japanese collector bids over $4.5 million for that same crypt. But his payment fell through. So I'm going to end this section with yet another quote from that same documentary. And it ends, the whole film ends with a man looking up at her photo and saying, She's still lovely after all these years. She's so seductive, you know, so dreamy. Maybe she wasn't born to live to 80 years. So what he's saying is that maybe she was only meant to live long enough to be the fantasy of men. And if she had lived beyond that and gotten old, she would have ruined it for them. I hope you can see why that documentary is what made me want to do this episode. To summarize, the studio sold her as a dumb blonde sex symbol, and the world bought it, even her husband's at first. But what my research found was a woman who was entirely aware of what the studio was doing became an active participant until she got sick of the low pay and the lack of range in the roles. So she built her own studio, which made them renegotiate her contract until she got exactly what she wanted. Everyone who actually knew her, photographers, coaches, co-stars, and eventually her husbands, all talk about her intelligence and real skill. Yet, 70 years later, she is still being commercially exploited. And now I'm gonna leave you with Marilyn's own words. I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead, they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't. This has been Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. Thanks for listening. I'm Christina Rose, and I'll see you down the rabbit hole.