Marilyn Monroe recreates a famous scene from The Seven Year Itch. Photo / Getty Images
Fifty-seven years after she died, Marilyn Monroe is still one of the biggest stars Hollywood has ever produced.
An orphan who nobody wanted to the world's most bankable actress, Monroe not only captivated audiences but powerful men, apparently with the ability to topple political dynasties and jail mafia dons.
Her death at the age of 36 has frozen her blonde bombshell image for eternity.
But did you know she refused to get rid of the hair on her face because she thought it softened her image on screen? Or that her image still haunts guests at Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel?
Kiwi gossip columnist David Hartnell was New Zealand's man on the ground in Tinseltown in the 1970s and is still reporting on the rich and famous at 75.
He's put together 57 little-known facts about the megastar on the eve of the anniversary of her death.
• 1. Marilyn Monroe's birth certificate names her as Norma Jean Mortenson; but she was baptised Norma Jean Baker. Her initial screen name was Jean Adair and she modeled under the names Jean Norman and Mona Monroe.
• 2. Her first name was picked by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive who was reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller, and her last name was picked by Monroe after her mother's maiden name.
• 3. She reached her adult height - five feet, six inches - when she was 12 years old. At school she was teased and called "Norman Jean string bean" because her body shape was flat.
• 4. Her mother Gladys was institutionalised when Monroe was 8 years old.
• 5. She was placed with 11 sets of foster parents and also spent almost a year in the Children's Aid Society Orphanage in Los Angeles.
• 6. Two men claimed paternity of Monroe on their deathbeds: C Stanley Gifford, who both Monroe and her mother believed was her father, but who refused to meet her when she was alive; and Edward Mortensen, who was married to her mother at the time of her birth.
• 7. In 1942, Monroe, 16, married her neighbour and boyfriend, James Dougherty. The marriage ended in 1946.
• 8. In her late teens, Monroe became a Christian Scientist. Later in her life she dabbled in alternative spiritualities, including anthroposophy, the philosophy espoused by Rudolf Steiner.
• 9. It was rumoured she had an extra toe. In a photo taken of her on the beach before she was famous, a piece of sand stuck to her foot creates the illusion of a sixth toe.
• 10. Monroe posed for her first advert, for suntan lotion, on the diving board at the pool of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. She stayed at the hotel often over the years, preferring a second-floor cabana room overlooking the pool.
• 11. Today there is a white marble bust of Marilyn in the room which is ice cold even on the hottest Californian days.
• 12. She signed with Fox Studios in 1946 for US$125 per week.
• 13. She whitened her skin with hormone cream, one side effect of which was to encourage the growth of blonde hair on her face, Monroe would not remove the peach fuzz, believing that it gave her face a soft glow on camera.
• 14. She signed a six-month contract with Columbia Studios in March 1948. She attempted suicide in September that year in the apartment she then shared with her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, after being dropped.
• 15. In 1949, aged 22, Monroe posed nude on a background of red velvet and was paid a flat fee of $50.
• 16. In 1950 she starred in The Asphalt Jungle. Also up for the lead role was Georgina Holt, better known today as Cher's mother.
• 17. In 1953 Hugh Hefner put Monroe the cover of his first Playboy magazine.
• 18. In June that year, when Monroe signed her name in the cement at Mann's Chinese Theatre (now the TCL Chinese Theatre) along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she put a large fake diamond over the letter i in Marilyn. Two days later it was stolen, but the indent is still there today.
• 19. Also that year she was named The Most Advertised Girl in the World, by the American Advertising Association.
• 20. Monroe had an IQ of 168. An IQ between 90 and 110 is considered average.
• 21. She was one of the first women to head her own movie production company in America.
• 22. In 1954, having starred in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, she met baseball legend Joe DiMaggio on a blind date. They married after a two-year romance but it ended nine months later.
• 23. Lena Pepitone, Monroe's one-time maid, privately told friends that one morning she caught Joe DiMaggio Jr and Monroe in her bed, both nude. She was still married to his father.
• 24. She married playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, suffered a miscarriage in December 1958 and they divorced in 1961.
• 25. A pregnant Monroe told a friend: "I know the father of my baby is Prince Philip, and I also know it will be a boy. Do you think that one day he'll become King of England?"
• 26. Monroe converted to Judaism when she married Miller.
• 27. She took 60 takes to deliver the line ''It's me, Sugar'', in Some Like it Hot.
• 28. Monroe said: "Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you $50,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul".
• 29. The only time Monroe's character dies on screen, is in the movie Niagara.
• 30. Actress Shelley Winters said, during the years she roomed with Monroe, she used to fantasise about having Albert Einstein's baby.
• 31. As a child, she had a pet dog named Tippy. In her final movie, Something's Got to Give, the dog in the movie was also named Tippy.
• 32. Monroe once said: "I'd rather have a President or and Attorney General who does it to a woman than to a country." She was of course referring to President John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy. She had affairs with both.
• 33. She very seldom wore underwear as she didn't like the restriction and hated a visible panty line.
• 34. There are more memorabilia items in Monroe's likeness than any other movie star in the history of Hollywood.
• 35. The only award she won was in 1959, a Golden Globe for lead actress in a comedy for Some Like It Hot.
• 36. In July 1962 she entered hospital, reportedly to abort a child of Jack Kennedy.
• 37. She only owned one house, at 12305 Fifth Helen Drive, California. It's the house she died in. In 1962 she paid US$90,000 for the one-storey, four-bedroom, three-bathroom home which was built in 1929. In 2010, the house sold for US$5 million.
• 38. She often went out to major Hollywood events wearing nothing under the full-length black mink coat DiMaggio gave her.
• 39. Monroe was Truman Capote's first choice for the part of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a role which went to Audrey Hepburn.
• 40. In 1962 she started work on the movie Something's Got to Give with Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. She had been absent from the big screen for more than a year, having recently undergone gallbladder surgery, dropping more than 11kg and reaching the lowest weight of her adult life.
On the first day of production, she phoned Fox Studio to say that she had a severe sinus infection and would not be on set that day. Over the next four weeks, production continued mostly without her. The studio heads decided to replace her with the actress Lee Remick. However, Dean Martin had leading lady approval written into his contact and said "no Marilyn, no picture".
The project seemingly ended until the studio realised they had thrown away $2 million. They agreed to rehire Monroe, paying her more than her original salary of $100,000. However, she had to agree in writing that she would make two more movies for Fox Studios.
• 41. In the 1960s Monroe bought a white-lacquered piano which she insisted that her mother once owned and sold. In 1999 at a Beverly Hills auction the piano went under the hammer, Mariah Carey bought it for US$662,500.
• 42. It is rumored that she took the drug Nepresol (which was the drug that eventually killed her) by pricking the capsule with a pin and pouring it into champagne because it worked quicker.
• 43. The night Monroe died she placed six urgent phone calls, leaving messages for JFK, which were not returned.
• 44. The murky, mysterious details of Monroe's last days have fuelled speculation from the day of her death. Many witnesses have delivered bombshell revelations, if only on their death beds. Some of the key witnesses, including actor Peter Lawford and Eunice Murray (Marilyn's housekeeper who was there the night she died), repeatedly changed their original stories, which were complete distortions to begin with. Other witnesses, separately or together, based on different motives and agendas, colluded in a cover-up.
• 45. A bizarre rumor was that Cuban agents murdered Monroe as a reprisal against the Kennedys for the CIA-initiated Mafia contract that was put out on Fidel Castro. Yet another outlandish theory attributes her death to Communist conspirators who sought to ruin the Kennedy brothers by linking them to murder.
• 46. The hearse that carried her body was sold to a private collector for US$5 million.
• 47. At the time of her death she only had US$218.56 in her bank account.
• 48. Today, Monroe's estate brings in more than US$18 million a year.
• 49. No inquest was ever held into her death despite massive protests from around the world.
• 50. A poignant letter by Monroe written nine months before her suicide, and discovered in May 2019, revealed her "emotional insecurity" and being in "quicksand".
• 51. Monroe's grave is the most visited of a celebrity in America. Wall crypt 33 is estimated to have aprox 350 visitors each day.
• 52. Monroe didn't like the idea of being buried in the ground. On August 8, 1962, dressed in a green sheath dress with a green silk scarf draped around her neck, her hair freshly dyed blond, and clutching a small bouquet of mature pink roses, which came from DiMaggio, she was placed in the crypt.
• 53. Monroe was also wearing the diamond wedding ring Miller gave her.
• 54. In 2018, the Julien's Auction House auctioned off Monroe memorabilia. The catalogue was over four volumes and almost 1000 pages each. It was the biggest celebrity auction for one person they had ever had. The gown she wore in 1962 to sing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in New York, sold for US$4.81 million to a private collector.
• 55. Hollywood clairvoyant Kenny Kingston says he contacts Monroe often and that she told him she is happy on the other side and was studying philosophy and psychology, explaining that she always wanted to be intellectual. She apparently told him she married Arthur Miller because he was an intellectual which she found sexy, but "he was nice enough to me, but he was not the right man for me. I could never be smart enough with Arthur."
• 56. There is a full-length mirror outside the lift on the ground floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in which guests have claimed a reflection of Monroe has appeared. The same mirror used to be in the Cabana Room overlooking the pool where Monroe stayed.
• 57. After the death of Richard Poncher, the man who bought the empty crypt above Monroe, an urban legend goes that a few of his close friends stayed behind after the funeral so they could honour his last request - to turn his body face down, so he would lie on top of Monroe for eternity.
He reportedly bought the crypt from DiMaggio as he and Monroe were divorcing. Poncher's wife sold the crypt for US$4.6 million in 2009 to pay off her mortgage. She moved her husband's remains.
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