100 years of marilyn monroe

Preparations for the 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth on June 1 have become large, lucrative, and emotionally demanding enough to justify a series of university courses.

For example, a marketing student might be able to analyze the money machine behind Monroe. Hollywood underestimated her star power, as she was one of the only movie stars of the time to attempt financial independence outside the studio system, starting her own production company in 1955, decades before such a move became commonplace. Although Cary Grant earned up to $3 million for a film and Elizabeth Taylor earned $1 million for Cleopatra, Monroe was still considered a mere sex symbol by film executives, earning only $100,000 per major film for most of her career.

But Monroe’s financial future possibilities seem limitless. Authentic Brands Group, a global brand management company founded by Canadian Jamie Salter, acquired Monroe’s name and likeness in 2011, allowing the licensing and branding partnership to continue long after her death. In 2024, the company faced significant backlash after allowing technology company Soul Machines to develop an AI-generated chatbot called “Digital Marilyn” that replicated the actor’s voice and mannerisms. Another recent controversy involved the attempted sale of Monroe’s medical X-rays by California auction house Julien’s Auctions (which was removed from the site after much online outcry).

Even for literary scholars, there is no shortage of reference materials. In June alone, a mini-publishing industry will emerge to commemorate the star’s 100th birthday, with new books reimagining nearly every inch of her mythology. Her death in The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe. Her reading list for Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe. Her relationship with fashion in “Jean Louis: Hollywood Bombshell Designer.” Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official 100th Anniversary Book also explores her film career.

In Style Icon: Marilyn Monroe, a softcover aimed at readers under 10, children are caught up in the Monroe economy. But the volume that has garnered more attention than the other volumes is Marilyn: Lost Photographs, Last Interviews, which contains the star’s final photographs by photographer Alan Grant and a previously unpublished recording of what is believed to be her last recorded conversation with Life magazine’s Richard Merryman.

However, Monroe’s richest archive belongs to movies, fashion, and music. Through her 29 films, she created a visual vocabulary that continues to inspire both high and low culture. The influence of her images is currently being explored in a quartet of major exhibitions. The largest production, “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon,” opens on May 31st at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The National Portrait Gallery in London, Mudec in Milan, and La Cinémathèque Française in Paris are also holding their own Monroe retrospectives.

Academy Museum of Motion Picture Curator Simran Barra said the exhibition seeks to shine a light on a quality that is often overshadowed in conversations about Monroe: her character-crafting skills.

“One of the things we talk about in the exhibition is how Marilyn Monroe actually worked with costume designers, make-up artists, directors and screenwriters to develop her career,” Barra said. “People are excited to see how she was able to work with her collaborators to take ownership and really create her own image.”

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

Their presence in the exhibition is meant to convey the idea that Monroe had an incredible understanding of how her images functioned culturally, Barra said. “I would like to emphasize that Marilyn Monroe had incredible self-awareness. She understood how others saw her.”

That self-consciousness also extended to Monroe’s relationship with sexuality. “She accepted her sexuality and believed that sex was incredibly natural,” Barra said. The show suggests that the clothes she wore in public were carefully chosen to reject the status quo. “Her clothing was radical,” Barra said, going against the “conservative, rigid approach to female sexuality that was popular in the 1950s.”

Barra said that when CinemaScope technology expanded the boundaries of film in the 1950s, Monroe worked closely with Travilla to shape how her body looked on screen. The first Canadian film to use CinemaScope was River of No Return, shot in Banff, Lake Louise, and Jasper National Park in Alberta. Travilla designed the dress to emphasize the film’s tagline: “Alberta Banff Jasper and Marilyn Monroe, two great natural beauties.”

“We both made sure she didn’t wear A-lines or other unflattering silhouettes,” Barra said, describing the looks in the film as pre-Spanx “revealing outfits.”

Monroe’s image-making may have been intentional, but it was also a sign of two-way admiration, said collector and historian Brian Johns, president and CEO of the Icon Collection, a private archive of Hollywood costumes that provided much of the Academy exhibit.

“William Travilla loved Marilyn, and she loved Marilyn,” 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 love.”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is perhaps the clearest expression of that balancing act. “Travilla managed to hide Marilyn in a pink dress that didn’t show any cleavage, but still conveyed her sensuality, sexuality, and power,” Johns said, noting that the style has been imitated by everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga to the Kardashians.

Monroe’s influence has long inspired other modern icons. Debbie Harry, an orphan who fancied Monroe as her mother, punkified Monroe’s image with her band Blondie. Madonna famously recreated Monroe’s performance of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in “Material Girl.” Lana Del Rey built much of her melancholy iconography around Monroe’s doomed sensuality in music videos like “Candy Necklace,” while Elton John originally wrote “Candle in the Wind” about the star and later revised it for Princess Diana.

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

But Monroe’s deepest devotion may come from being a collector. One of Canada’s most passionate appraisers is Melinda Mason. He has spent 25 years building an archive of rare mayflies (think airline tickets and Franklin Mint Marilyn dolls).

“She was an inspiration to me beyond just a kind of fandom,” Mason said. “We call the people who love her work and beauty the Marilyn community.”

Mason first purchased Monroe with a signed check for $1,950 from Los Angeles department store I. Magnin. Her most treasured item is the rhinestone hair clip that Monroe wore when she attended a performance of Macbeth at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1954 with her then-husband Arthur Miller.

Mason is now seeing young women take back acting. “Now that feminism is more advanced, sexuality is more open for the next generation,” Mason said. “The idea that she is a trailblazer is front and center in a way.”

She worries that Monroe will become addicted to spectacle and artificial recreation, especially with the rise of AI. The flip side of that, she said, is that more people will learn about Monroe and his influence.

“You can see that young people have a lot more empathy for her. As far as what I see online and how they view what she went through and how she was treated by studios and 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 precisely why Monroe has endured.

“She came to represent female empowerment in modern culture at a time when there was no language to express female empowerment,” he said. “You could say she was way ahead of her time because of that.”