She also saved Arthur Miller's ass during the communist witch hunts led by the HUAC. She publicly spoke of her support for him when he was under investigation, risking her own career. She and Miller could easily have been blacklisted. Because of her popularity with the public, the government eventually left Miller alone. Years before this, she was found reading communist writings on the set of a film and made no apologies for it, even though she was warned not to continue. This was a woman who sympathized with the underdog and the working class. She had depth. You really think some shallow person like Anna Nicole Smith would've read that or Rilke or listened to classical music, things Marilyn was known to do? Once again, you're only focused on the screen persona and not the person's actions in real life.
Before she was famous, her wealthy agent, Johnny Hyde, asked her to marry him. He was sick and near death. He was also already married. He told her he would leave his wife and she would inherit his money if she accepted his proposal. She refused. No doubt she had slept with him. She cared for him but told him she wasn't in love with him. If she had been a gold digger like some of her characters, she could've agreed and been set for life. She said, “But I would be taken even less seriously than I am now!" Unlike a gold digger, she wanted to have a career and support herself.
She helped Ella Fitzgerald's career in a time of overt racism. Ella told the story of how Marilyn got her a gig at the popular, but whites-only, Mocambo nightclub:
“I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt … she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild."
“The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it."
Marilyn wasn't some doormat who never exercised her own agency. Essentially an orphan with no money, she couldn't have reached the top in Hollywood if she didn't have inner resources. She could've become a feminist because the examples above show that she would fight for things that mattered to her, regardless of what men wanted. She didn't put up with abusive and unsupportive husbands. She divorced them. Her later dependence on prescription pills negatively affected her behavior and reliability, but it's important to remember that doctors then didn't fully understand the side effects of pills and how addictive they could be. The studios regularly gave their stars drugs and "vitamin shots" to squeeze all the work (and profits) they could get out of them.
Marilyn's rare combination of sensuality and girlish innocence is hard to fake if that's not natural to your personality. She definitely had a screen presence that was hard to ignore (a great example being her scenes with Olivier – you didn't even notice him, something others have mentioned).
We only "know" these details of her life because of the hundreds of Marilyn books written AFTER her death (The Marilyn Encyclopedia, published in 1999, counted over 300 in English, not including books in foreign languages). Twenty years later, I'm betting the count has surpassed 400. She kept much of her personal life private. Then, as well as now, people projected whatever they wanted onto her image because she was an enigma. She still is. All those biographers can't agree on the details. There's plenty of speculation. After reading many of them, especially the ones that interviewed people who knew her, you see patterns. Those predisposed to disliking her and want confirmation bias won't bother. They'll assume she was a recreational druggie, dumb, superficial, whatever simplistic tabloid version that's available to the lazy.
“Marilyn played the best game with the worst hand of anybody I know.” ~Edward Wagenknecht
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