Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was the world's number one sex symbol, but she was not the man-eating siren her image suggested. She Died Aug 5, 1962.
As headlines flashed around the world on an August morning in 1962, announcing the death of the ultimate love goddess, newspapers filled their pages with the most iconic image of all, from her film The Seven Year Itch.
On a New York sidewalk, Marilyn Monroe stands with her legs astride a subway grating while the breeze generated by a subway train blows her accordion-pleated white dress up above her panties and around her ears.
‘Isn’t it delicious?’ she cries, as the breeze billows up between her legs and cools her hot damp vulva (inside her panties).
That moment, perhaps the most vivid memory in the whole of Hollywood history, inflamed the libido of men everywhere, establishing Monroe as the world’s number one sex symbol and as the most desirable woman on the planet.
But therein lies a great irony. For one thing, she did NOT wear panties.
And Marilyn Monroe was not the man-eating siren her image suggested.
Although she married and divorced three times, she was — though few people are aware of the fact — a lesbian by inclination. Bi-sexual by necessity.
She had described sexual encounters with actresses Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as with both her acting coaches, Natasha Lytess and Paula Strasberg.
Jean Negulesco, who directed Monroe in How To Marry A Millionaire. was due to take over the direction of Marilyn’s final film, Something’s Got To Give. ...Only a day before he was due to visit her, Monroe was found dead.
‘I still think I might have saved her if I could have got to her in time,’ he told me.
‘You know what was wrong with her, don’t you?
'Her whole existence was a search for identity, and her sexual identity was a complete LIE.
'She told me once she had never had an orgasm with a man in her entire life.’
In the transcripts of her taped sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, Marilyn described a lesbian encounter with Joan Crawford. She had a one-off encounter with Elizabeth Taylor. Negulesco’s assertion is validated by the taped transcripts of Marilyn’s sessions of psychoanalysis, in which she says: ‘I had never had an orgasm. I well remember you said an orgasm happens in the mind, not the genitals.’
She also recalls other advice from Greenson, saying: ‘When I did exactly what you told me to do, I would have an orgasm. What a difference a word makes.
'You said I would, not I could. Bless you, doctor. What you say is gospel to me.’
(R: note that this article does not actually say what Greeson told her to do!)
Marilyn's letter to her psychiatrist:
What I told you is true when I first became your patient. I had never had an orgasm. I well remember you said an orgasm happens in the mind....
You said there was an obstacle in my mind that prevented me from having an orgasm; that it was something that happened early in my life about which I felt so guilty that I did not deserve to have the greatest pleasure there is; that it had to do with something sexual that was very wrong, and my getting pleasure from it caused my guilt.
That it was buried in my unconscious. Through analysis we would bring it to the conscious mind where we could get to the guilt and free me to be orgasmic.
Then you said for the orgasm problem we'll try a different approach. That you would tell me how to stimulate myself, that when I did exactly what you told me to do I would have an orgasm and that after I did it to myself and felt what it was, I would have orgasms with lovers. What a difference a word makes.
You said I would, not I could.
Bless you Doctor. What you say is gospel to me. By now I've had lots of orgasms. Not only one, but 2 and 3 with a man who takes his time....
Marilyn’s sexual problems were probably rooted in her traumatic childhood.
....which gave Marilyn a lifelong terror of pregnancy.
In addition to her fear of giving birth to an abnormal child, Marilyn suffered from devastating bouts of endometriosis, a gynaecological condition causing intense pelvic pain, severe cramps and painful menstrual periods.
Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, who joined the Merchant Marine in 1943, would brag: ‘Never had I encountered a girl who so thoroughly enjoyed a sexual union. It made our lovemaking pure joy.’ A pure LIE. ‘Jim told me privately that she spent most of their early marriage locked in the bathroom,’ said Martin Evans, a friend of Jim’s at the time they married.
‘She had sex books and manuals that were given to her, and none of them made a difference.
'She was scared. From my information, she even asked if it were possible for her to never have sex with Jim. “Could they just be friends?” she wondered. ‘To be honest, I don’t think they had a good sex life ever — despite what Jim later claimed.’
‘For years,’ said Celeste Holm, ‘Marilyn was in love with the idea of being Betty Grable (the Forties star known as the Girl With The Million Dollar Legs). She followed Betty around everywhere, studied her all the time and copied everything she did.
Another female star Marilyn pursued and propositioned was Judy Garland, who married three gay men among her five husbands.
Shortly before Marilyn signed with Columbia Pictures in 1948, she met Natasha Lytess, a failed actress who was a drama coach at the studio. ‘I want to recreate you,’ she told Marilyn.
‘I shall mould you into the great actress I suspect you can be. But to do so, you must submit to me. Do you understand?’Natasha’s dominant intentions were clear.
In 1950, Marilyn moved into her apartment while she was being escorted by a new father-figure, the venerable Hollywood agent Johnny Hyde. When Hyde died from a heart attack in December 1950, Natasha rescued Marilyn from a suicide attempt with a drug overdose. Marilyn told her close friend, actor Ted Jordan, that she and Natasha were sleeping together.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Sex is something you do with people you like. What could be wrong with a natural act?’
Marilyn said of Natasha: ‘She was a great teacher, but she got really jealous about the men I saw. She thought she was my husband!’ Natasha detested the baseball player Joe DiMaggio, whom Marilyn started to date in 1952 and later married.
He always referred to Natasha Lytess unflatteringly as ‘Morticia’.(from cartoons of the Adams family).
'Maybe I could get through to Marilyn if I didn’t have this broad to deal with. This broad is gonna ruin her, I’m telling you.’
‘Oh yes, Crawford,’ she says. ‘We went to Joan’s bedroom. Crawford had a gigantic orgasm and shrieked like a maniac. Credit Natasha with that. She could teach more than acting.
'Next time I saw Crawford, she wanted another round?…?after I turned her down, she became spiteful.’
After Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio in 1954, DiMaggio confided to the New York newspaper columnist Walter Winchell that the real cause of the breakdown of the marriage was Marilyn’s preference for her own sex.
Marilyn's marriage to Arthur Miller had proved as unsatisfying sexually as those to Jim Dougherty and Joe DiMaggio, and they divorced in January 1961.
‘Her touch was electric,’ wrote Elizabeth Taylor of Marilyn in her diary.
‘I wanted to see how far the bitch would go. But she had to do all the work.’
Though much has been written about Marilyn’s relations with the Kennedys, and she remained both before and after her death perhaps the ultimate sex symbol for men, Dr Ralph Greenson affirmed that Monroe ‘was not sexually involved with either Kennedy brother or with any other man at the end of her life.’