A century of Marilyn Monroe | Canada Voices

The build-up to Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday on June 1 has become so sprawling, lucrative and psychologically loaded it could justify a constellation of university courses.

Marketing students, for instance, could analyze the money machine behind Monroe. As one of the only movie stars of her time to attempt financial autonomy outside of the studio system – launching her own production company in 1955, decades before such moves became common – Hollywood undervalued her star power. While Cary Grant earned up to US$3-million a film and Elizabeth Taylor took home US$1 million for Cleopatra, Monroe was still perceived by film execs as a mere sex symbol and made barely US$100,000 per blockbuster for much of her career.

Yet Monroe’s fiscal afterlife is seemingly limitless. Authentic Brands Group – the global brand management company founded by Canadian Jamie Salter – acquired Monroe’s name and likeness in 2011, allowing licensing and branding partnerships to continue long after her death. In 2024, the company received major backlash for allowing tech firm Soul Machines to create “Digital Marilyn,” an AI-generated chatbot that recreated the actor’s voice and mannerisms. Another recent controversy involved the attempted sale by California auction house Julien’s Auctions of Monroe’s medical X-rays (since removed from the site after much online protest).

Literary scholars, too, have no shortage of material to chew on. In June alone, a mini publishing industry will emerge around the star’s centenary, with new releases revisiting nearly every corner of her mythology: her life in The Marilyn Monroe Century: From Norma Jeane to Icon; her death in The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe; her reading list in Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe; her relationship with fashion in Jean Louis: Hollywood’s Bombshell Designer; and her film career in Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book.

Even children are being folded into the Monroe economy with Style Icons: Marilyn Monroe, a softcover aimed at readers under 10. But the volume receiving more attention than the rest is Marilyn: The Lost Photographs, the Last Interview, featuring photographer Allan Grant’s final images of the star and an unpublished transcript of what is claimed to be her last recorded conversation with Life magazine’s Richard Meryman.

Monroe’s richest archive, however, belongs to film, fashion and music. Across 29 movies, she created a visual vocabulary that continues to fuel both high and low culture. The impact of her image is now being explored in a quartet of major exhibitions. The largest, Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, opens at Los Angeles’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on May 31. London’s National Portrait Gallery, Milan’s Mudec and Paris’s La Cinémathèque Française are also staging their own Monroe retrospectives.

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures curator Simran Bhalla said the exhibition attempts to highlight a quality that’s often overshadowed in conversations about Monroe: her skill in creating a persona.

“One of the things we talk about in the exhibition is how Marilyn Monroe really worked collaboratively with costume designers, makeup artists, with directors and screenwriters, to hone her career,” Bhalla said. “People are excited to learn about how she was able to seize agency where she could with collaborators to really craft her image.”

The show features hundreds of original objects spanning Monroe’s life and career, from her high-school yearbook to furniture from her Brentwood, Los Angeles, home and items from the set of her unfinished final film, Something’s Got to Give. Highlights include two “nude illusion” dresses designed by Orry-Kelly for Some Like It Hot, along with the famous pink gown by costumer William Travilla from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Their presence in the exhibit, Bhalla said, is meant to convey the idea that Monroe possessed a remarkable understanding of how her image functioned culturally. “We want to emphasize that Marilyn Monroe had an incredible degree of self-awareness. She understood how other people saw her.”

That self-awareness extended to Monroe’s relationship with sexuality. “She embraced her sexuality and believed that sex was incredibly natural,” Bhalla said. The show suggests that the clothes she wore in public were carefully curated to reject the status quo. “Her clothes were radical,” Bhalla said, noting that they went against “the conservative, buttoned-up approach to female sexuality that was prevalent in the 1950s.”

When CinemaScope technology widened the movie frame in the 1950s, Monroe worked closely with Travilla to shape how her body appeared onscreen, according to Bhalla. The first Canadian film to use CinemaScope was River of No Return, which was shot in Banff, Lake Louise and Jasper National Park in Alberta. Travilla designed dresses that emphasized the film’s tagline: “Two great natural beauties, Alberta Banff-Jasper and Marilyn Monroe.”

“They both made sure she wasn’t wearing A-lines or any other silhouettes that were unflattering,” Bhalla said, describing the looks in the film as a pre-Spanx “body-skimming kind of costuming.”

According to collector and historian Bryan Johns, president and CEO of the Icon Collection – a private archive of Hollywood costumes – supplied a large portion of the Academy exhibition, Monroe’s image-making may have been intentional, but it also represented a two-way admiration.

“William Travilla loved Marilyn and she loved him,” Johns said. “He saw her as the ideal woman – someone who combined innocence and sexuality in a way that never felt threatening because together they created something that both women and men loved.”

The Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dress remains perhaps the clearest expression of that balancing act. “Travilla managed to cover Marilyn up – the pink dress showed no cleavage at all – while still conveying her sensuality, sexuality and power,” Johns said, noting that the look has been copied by everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga to the Kardashians.

Monroe’s influence has long inspired other modern icons. Debbie Harry, an orphan who fantasized that Monroe was her mother, punkified Monroe’s image with her band, Blondie. Madonna famously recreated Monroe’s Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend performance in Material Girl. Lana Del Rey built much of her melancholic iconography around Monroe’s brand of fateful sensuality in music videos such as Candy Necklace, while Elton John originally wrote Candle in the Wind about the star before later revising it for Princess Diana.

More recently, Sabrina Carpenter recreated a Monroe image for her Man’s Best Friend album artwork, and Ryan Gosling channelled Diamonds in his pink-suited I’m Just Ken performance at the 2024 Oscars.

But Monroe’s deepest devotion may come from collectors. One of Canada’s most dedicated connoisseurs is Melinda Mason, who has spent 25 years building an archive of rare ephemera (think airline tickets and Franklin Mint Marilyn dolls).

“She’s inspired more than a kind of fandom,” Mason said. “Those who love her work and her beauty are what we call the Marilyn community.”

Mason’s first Monroe purchase was a signed 1950 cheque for $146 from the L.A. department store I. Magnin. Her most cherished item remains a pair of rhinestone hair clips Monroe wore in 1954 while attending a production of Macbeth at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House with her husband at the time, Arthur Miller.

Mason now sees younger women reclaiming the actor. “With a lot more feminism now, sexuality is a lot more open for these next generations,” Mason said. “The idea that she is a pioneer is sort of front and centre.”

She worries about Monroe becoming consumed by spectacle and artificial recreation, particularly with the rise of AI. The flip side, she said, is that more people will learn about Monroe and her influence.

“I do see that younger people have so much more empathy for her. From what I see online, the way they view what she went through and how she was treated by the studio, the media and her own issues with finding happiness – it’s really meaningful and relevant to how women are treated today.”

Johns believes that the tension between persona construction and authenticity is exactly why Monroe has endured.

“She has come to represent women’s empowerment in modern culture at a time when we had no language for it,” he said. “I’d say that made her too far ahead of her time.”