1957

The year 1957 brings Marilyn Monroe to England for the first time and places her, both in public and on screen, in an unfamiliar world. During the production of The Prince and the Showgirl, the novel makes the foreign landscape and the actress’s role echo one another: each seems to draw her into a realm where familiar bearings have fallen away.

England and The Prince and the Showgirl

The first question put to Monroe in England asks what it feels like to be there for the first time. The setting is rendered as a kingdom of the dead: its people move like silent ghosts beneath a pale, opaque sky, and Monroe, an American among them, seems caught by the same spell. Across the islands in the North Sea, the season is hard to predict; even in bitter cold, bright daffodils and crocuses bloom, while the sun appears as a frail crescent through the fog.

In The Prince and the Showgirl, Monroe plays an American dancer in a traveling troupe in a fairy-tale Balkan country, opposite the celebrated English actor Laurence Olivier. The character is introduced in a line to pay homage to the Grand Duke: as she hurries into place, one strap of her bodice breaks, nearly exposing her breast. The moment makes her body part of the scene’s comic display, while the account’s comparison to vaudeville and the Marx Brothers frames the production as light entertainment.

Fame, Exposure, and the Unanswered Letter

By 1957, Monroe’s public image had been assembled from film roles, publicity photographs, press stories, and the attention of people who felt they knew her. During the first stunned week of fame, she read every fan letter and wept over them, including messages from disabled people, terminally ill patients, veterans in hospitals, and writers who signed themselves “Heartbroken” or “Marilyn’s Eternal Admirer.” With her assistants’ help, she answered personally, treating those letters as a responsibility as well as a source of excitement. The same attention could feel unsettling: audiences’ affection belonged to the blonde actress they encountered through her films, not necessarily to the private person behind that image. The boundary between public image and private life had already been breached by the circulation of the nude photograph made before her fame. In 1949 she had sold the image rights for fifty dollars because she urgently needed money; she did not own the negative and had not authorized the photograph’s later republication in Playboy. When a reporter connected the anonymous calendar model, credited under the name Mona Monroe, to the rising actress, the image became a scandal and a source of renewed media attention. Its return showed how an image created under financial pressure could be detached from its maker and recirculated as part of the star’s public identity. Fame could not answer the question that mattered most to Monroe. As she examined her fan mail, she repeatedly hoped to find a letter from her father, imagining that he followed her career; none came, even as her name and photographs appeared everywhere. The contrast is stark: a continent of admirers could address Marilyn Monroe, while the absent father she longed to hear from remained silent.

The Wartime Image Before Stardom

The publicity surrounding Monroe’s later fame had an earlier precedent in a wartime photograph. In December 1944, while Norma Jeane Baker worked nine-hour days at the Radio Plane Aircraft Factory in Burbank, California, Stars and Stripes printed a full-page picture of her in the assembly room. She took pride in contributing to the war effort, and the magazine presented her in work clothes, holding a paint cylinder toward the camera, as both an industrious factory worker and a striking young woman. In a second image, she appeared at rest, thinking of her husband, Bucky Glazer, then serving in the South Pacific.

Aboard the Liberty, Bucky Glazer encountered the issue and recognized his wife in the photograph. His shipmates seized on the moment, teasing him because the magazine identified the sailor as Glaser rather than Glazer and disputing whether the pictured woman could really be his wife. Their mockery escalated into a struggle over the magazine, which Bucky tried to reclaim. The scene makes the printed image a public object even before Monroe became a star: it joins her labor and private marriage to the gaze of strangers, while the husband’s claim to recognize her becomes a source of both pride and humiliation.

In February 1945, another image reached Norma Jeane Baker’s former teacher, Sidney Haring. He first confiscated a copy of Pageant from students, then later retrieved it alone and recognized her despite the heavy makeup and posed, overtly seductive expression. The magazine photographs thus preceded the better-known calendar scandal: they show how quickly a recognizable face could be detached from its everyday setting and made available for other people’s amusement, judgment, or desire.

The Camera, the Contract, and the Body

Before the fame of 1957, Norma Jeane Baker’s first entry into Hollywood depended on an image-maker who claimed to have discovered her. Otto öse’s photographs helped her gain acceptance by the important agent I. E. Shinn and secure a renewable studio contract, but her first film appearance reduced that promise to a few seconds: in an otherwise forgettable bucolic comedy with June Haver, the newly named Marilyn Monroe sat far away in a rowboat, too distant for anyone—even herself—to recognize. The gap between the career being advertised and the screen time she actually received was already part of her introduction to the industry.

During a later nude session, Otto öse found that Norma Jeane responded to the camera less as to an audience than as to a mirror. Though she was capable of thought, in front of the lens she acted instinctively, entering poses with little more than the photographer’s light pressure. He placed her upright like a figurehead at a ship’s prow, her body holding an apparently commanding position despite the strain of the pose. The camera did not simply record her; its framing altered the relation between the person photographed and the person looking.

For the final composition, Otto öse photographed her stretched across red velvet from a raised vantage point. The change made her seem smaller and more vulnerable than in the upright pictures: the viewer looked down on a body presented as exposed and captured by the camera’s gaze. Otto öse’s own reaction joined aesthetic excitement to an awareness of exploitation. The photographs might bring him nine hundred dollars, and he understood that he was being paid to sell her image. The session therefore anticipates the later circulation of the nude photograph: before Marilyn Monroe became a public identity, her body had already become a saleable picture whose meaning and audience could be controlled by others.