Hollywood's gendered power structure and sexual exploitation

Hollywood's gendered power structure and sexual exploitation shapes Norma Jeane Baker’s working life well before Marilyn Monroe becomes a ubiquitous public image. The novel presents the system not as a single villain’s scheme but as a chain of ordinary transactions: an agency regulates contact, employers buy labor cheaply, influential men control opportunities, and studios and publishers claim the value of images they do not create alone. The recurring imbalance is stark: Norma Jeane’s body and performance make money and attention possible, while she has little control over the terms or proceeds.

Work, Wages, and Agency Rules

In her first week with the Preene Agency, Norma Jeane Baker works as Miss Aluminum Articles 1945 at a Los Angeles household-goods fair. For four days she stands for hours on a platform, handing out brochures amid shiny aluminum wares, to a crowd made up mostly of men. Her costume is part of the job’s promotional display; the pay is twelve dollars a day, including minimal meals and streetcar fare. The following week, as Miss Paper Products 1945, she distributes samples and pamphlets at a downtown convention hall. That work pays ten dollars a day, again inclusive of minimal food and transportation. The cut in pay accompanies another carefully staged appearance, this time in a paper dress and crown.

The assignments continue through a surgical-equipment exhibition in Santa Monica, a dairy-products promotion, hotel and restaurant openings, a boat show, and the Miss Rodeo event in Huntington Beach. At the rodeo, the emcee periodically lassoes her under the bright lights. These jobs make her visible, but visibility is not the same as authority: she is hired to embody a product or occasion, and her performance is part of what the organizers sell. The agency’s rules make that imbalance explicit. Models must not arrange dates with clients or accept their tips; clients must pay the agency directly, and a breach can end the working relationship. The rule protects the agency’s control over transactions while leaving Norma Jeane dependent on it for access to paid work.

That dependence has physical and financial consequences. Menstrual cramps and headaches lead her first to aspirin and then to stronger medication prescribed by the agency’s consulting doctor. At times her vision blurs, and on the worst days she cannot work. Even these poorly paid days matter: each lost shift worsens the anxiety of making rent and meeting expenses. The practical question of where she can change a sanitary pad during long promotional shifts becomes another measure of how little the work is organized around her needs.

Gatekeeping and the Price of Opportunity

The same imbalance governs encounters that might lead to film work. At Schwab’s, Norma Jeane treats entering the restaurant as stepping onto a stage. She monitors her expression, clothes, and new laugh as she imagines the room assessing her: some people turn to look, while most return to their conversations. When Richard Widmark speaks with her there, he asks about her name, her work, and her agent, and raises the possibility that they may work together. The encounter combines professional promise with the pressure of being watched and judged in a public space.

A more precarious version of that arrangement occurs when the actor identified as W meets her in an apartment and discusses the possibility of casting her. W has influence over the other actors, and his approval could put her forward to the producer. Norma Jeane understands that the professional decision is entangled with his sexual interest. Rather than answer with easy certainty, she smiles, improvises, and turns statements into questions—a manner the narration connects to the need to soften assertions around powerful men. Her behavior is a form of skilled performance, but the need for it reveals how little room she has to negotiate as an equal.

The novel describes such encounters as part of a wider pattern, not an isolated incident. Norma Jeane later remembers little of this apartment meeting and anticipates that there will be many other rooms, summer residences, cabanas, cottages, and hotel rooms whose details will blur. She understands the governing arrangement as a banal, widely accepted truth: Hollywood is run by men, and men must be placated. The ordinariness of that belief is precisely what makes the system durable. Its force lies not only in individual abuse but in the expectation that women seeking work will accommodate men who control access to it.

Images, Ownership, and Unequal Profit

The photographic business makes the distribution of power especially concrete. For three years Norma Jeane has politely refused Otto öse’s proposals for nude work in men’s magazines. When she is dropped by the Studio and faces mounting financial pressure—behind on rent, with her secondhand car repossessed after missed payments—she calls him. He has waited for her to make that call. The session that follows lasts ninety minutes, and Otto later recognizes its importance, though Norma Jeane receives only a fraction of the value he expects to obtain from the pictures.

The camera becomes, in the novel’s account, more than a recording device. Norma Jeane responds to its lens instinctively, as if it were a mirror in which she can see herself; Otto directs her poses with small pressures and repeated encouragement. The resulting image is shaped by his position above and behind the camera, while she has little say in how the photographs will be sold. She receives fifty dollars. Otto expects to make nine hundred, and retains the negatives. The photographs eventually become among the most famous nude images in the world, generating millions for other people, especially men. The gulf between the model’s payment and the later value of the image turns exploitation into an issue of ownership as well as sexualized looking.

The later scandal further exposes the contradiction between commercial use and public respectability. A reporter identifies Norma Jeane as the model in the 1950 Ace Hollywood Calendars publication, where she had been credited as Mona Monroe under a 1949 contract. The image is then discussed widely, while the Studio’s morality rules threaten actresses with suspension or termination for conduct said to violate Hollywood standards. Yet the image had already been sold without Norma Jeane retaining its negative or rights. When the photograph is republished in Playboy as her fame grows, she says through the press that she did not authorize the publication and cannot prevent it. The system profits from her image, then makes her answer for its circulation.

Performance, Resistance, and the System’s Reach

Norma Jeane’s acting offers a limited but real counterforce to these arrangements. During the filming of La tua bocca brucia, she becomes so absorbed in playing Nell that she barely notices I. E. Shinn or the other observers. Between takes she hides; she avoids interviews, and the other actors do not know how to approach her. Her intensity unsettles the social expectations surrounding a young actress, and Shinn advises her not to push herself so hard. The role is not simply another service offered to an audience: it occupies her attention on terms that the men around the set cannot easily manage.

That resistance remains constrained. At a party in April 1953, a wealthy oilman touches Norma Jeane to test whether she is real and insists on dancing with her. She retreats to a bathroom in tears, then repairs her makeup and returns to the gathering as Marilyn Monroe, the blonde center of attention. Mr. Z and Mr. D continue to watch her. Later, other powerful men touch her while V stands nearby; when she frees herself and turns toward him, V has disappeared. The scene makes public spectacle and private vulnerability coexist: the room treats her as an image to be handled, while her performance of glamour is still expected to continue.

The novel also shows why this system can feel protective even as it harms her. On a premiere night, I. E. Shinn takes Norma Jeane by the hand through the crowd. She feels that he has invented her and experiences the evening as a fairy-tale triumph, even while the narration marks that sense of belonging as false and notes that she is not yet ready to resist him. The affection and recognition she longs for are therefore bound to the same professional structures that make her dependent. Across agency rules, auditions, photography, publicity, and parties, Hollywood converts gendered access into economic and symbolic value. Norma Jeane’s wit, improvisation, and commitment to acting help her navigate the system, but they do not erase the underlying division between those who control the opportunities and images and the woman whose labor makes them valuable.