Hollywood's sexualization and commercial exploitation of actresses

Hollywood's sexualization and commercial exploitation of actresses is a recurring system in which women's work and public images are fashioned for sale, while the women themselves have limited control over the terms or proceeds. Through Norma Jeane Baker's career, the novel traces that system from low-paid promotional assignments to the reuse of photographs she had not authorized, and contrasts her modest earnings with the much larger value captured by others. It also shows how audiences and studios turn a performer into an image that can be consumed separately from the person who made it.

From wartime worker to promotional image

In December 1944, Buchanan Glazer found Norma Jeane's photograph in Stars and Stripes while serving aboard the Liberty. The page presented her as a factory worker contributing to the war effort at Radio Plane Aircraft in Burbank, where she worked nine hours a day assembling aircraft fuselages. The accompanying copy described her as proud of the work; the photographs showed her at the plant and in a moment of leisure, thinking of her husband, then stationed in the South Pacific. To Glazer's fellow sailors, however, the striking discovery was that the woman in the full-page photograph was his wife. The magazine had printed his surname incorrectly as Glaser, but Glazer recognized Norma Jeane at once. Her labor and marriage had become part of a public image circulated far beyond the factory.

The shift from factory work to image-making did not bring economic security. In her first weeks with the Preene Agency, Norma Jeane was hired for a succession of promotional roles: Miss Aluminum Articles, Miss Paper Goods, a hospitality representative at a surgical-equipment exhibition, and a dairy-products representative. Her assignments placed her in themed outfits at fairs, trade events, hotel and restaurant openings, and a rodeo. She spent long hours distributing samples and brochures, often to male attendees, for daily pay of ten or twelve dollars, with minimal meals and streetcar fare included. The changing costumes and titles made her appearance part of the product being promoted, while the low rates treated her time as inexpensive labor.

The agency also set strict limits on her contact with the people who encountered her at these events: she was forbidden to arrange appointments with clients or accept tips, on pain of losing her agency relationship. Clients were to pay the agency directly. The rule makes the arrangement's power imbalance explicit: Norma Jeane was the visible representative, but the agency controlled the terms of access and payment. When menstrual pain and headaches made her miss work, each lost day mattered to her financially. She took aspirin and later stronger medicine prescribed by the agency's consulting doctor; the evidence presents illness not as a separate matter from work but as a condition she had to manage while trying not to lose scarce income.

Image-making and unequal returns

Photographer Otto öse had helped Norma Jeane attract an agent and a renewable studio contract, and she had appeared in a film, though her few minutes of footage were cut to only seconds in which she was barely recognizable. She nevertheless refused his proposals for nude work for three years while she still hoped to advance in film. When she finally posed for a calendar photograph, the circumstances had changed: the studio had dropped her, the agency was preparing to drop her, she had left studio housing for a furnished room in West Hollywood, rent was overdue, and her used car had been repossessed after she missed two fifty-dollar payments.

The calendar session sharply exposes the unequal distribution of value. Norma Jeane received fifty dollars for the nude photographs. Otto öse received nine hundred dollars for the shoot and kept the negatives; the images would later become among the best-known nude photographs in the world, generating millions of dollars for other people. The contrast is not only between a small fee and enormous later returns. It is also a contrast between the model's limited immediate need for money and the photographer's continuing control of the negatives. The image could circulate and appreciate in value without transferring comparable authority or income to the person depicted.

Years later, a photograph from the session was discovered and published on the front page of the tabloid Hollywood Tatler, reigniting the scandal around Norma Jeane's image as Marilyn Monroe. The picture was also republished in Playboy, although she said she had not authorized that use. She had sold the photograph's rights in 1949 for fifty dollars when she desperately needed money; the negative and rights were no longer hers to control. The distinction between having once agreed to a sale and consenting to each later publication is central to the episode: the commercial image outlived the circumstances of its sale and continued to produce attention and value beyond her control.

The studio, the press, and the public persona

The novel shows that exploitation involved more than the original photograph. The studio printed copies of the controversial image for possible use in situations of that kind, and Norma Jeane accepted sending one to the columnist Leviticus after his public letter praised her. Her response suggests an attempt to handle the image on her own terms, but the underlying rights remained contested, and the studio's stock of printed copies made the photograph available as publicity material. Her public persona was thus assembled from studio photographs, press stories, and images whose ownership she did not necessarily retain.

As Marilyn Monroe became famous, the scale of the public's attention grew. Her dressing room filled with flowers, telegrams, gifts, and letters from admirers across the country, including disabled people, hospital patients, veterans, and older correspondents. She read the letters and personally answered many of them with help from her assistants, treating those responses as part of her responsibility as an actress. The attention could be moving, but it was also unsettling: audiences addressed a public image as if it were an intimate acquaintance, while the machinery of fame made that image commercially useful to the studio. Even amid this flood of recognition, Norma Jeane kept hoping for a letter from her father, imagining that he followed her career; none came in the period described.

Her return to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre for the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes gives this transformation a visible setting. As a child she had watched blonde actresses there with lonely admiration; now Marilyn Monroe appeared on a screen and in publicity as one of the stars of a lavish film expected to reach thousands of screens and earn millions. The novel places her recognition within postwar prosperity and mass distribution, while preserving the disjunction between the child who once watched and the adult whose enlarged image now commanded the audience's gaze.

The body as spectacle and the limits of control

The studio's treatment of Monroe's roles sharpens the conflict between a performer's work and the marketable body attached to her name. During a visit to Gladys, Norma Jeane says that the studio offers her only films she regards as erotic, and describes its conception of Marilyn Monroe as a curvaceous doll to be used up and discarded. Her husband reinforces that interpretation, warning that studio officials, her agent, and even people claiming to oppose the studio may seek to exploit her. This is his account, not a neutral statement of every party's motives; the wider evidence nevertheless supports the underlying concern by repeatedly showing who sets the terms, who holds the image, and who benefits from its circulation.

The subway-grate scene in The Seven Year Itch turns that commercial logic into a public spectacle. Filmed at night in Manhattan beneath intense spotlights, it keeps the actress in position for hours as a crowd gathers behind police barriers. The scene's promotional identity reduces her to a nameless girl and a pair of exposed, moving skirts, while the crowd's presence makes spectatorship part of the event. The publicity image later appears above a theater as a poster of Monroe in the familiar pose. Her body becomes a reproducible attraction, presented as comic entertainment to some viewers and as sexual display to others.

The novel complicates, rather than simply rejects, that image. Watching The Seven Year Itch alone, Norma Jeane feels pride in the blonde comic performer on screen and recognizes that the audience's laughter can be an artistic achievement. Yet a man nearby watches the film while also staring at her in the dark, collapsing the distance between the actress on screen and the woman seated in the theater. She moves to another seat beside a laughing newlywed couple and tries to recover her enjoyment of the film. That interruption makes the difference between performing a role and being treated as an available object unmistakable. Hollywood's sexualization is therefore shown not only as a matter of costumes or publicity, but as a structure joining commercial ownership, mass circulation, and the public's claim to look—often at the expense of the actress's control over her image and her own experience.