Professor Dietrich

Professor Dietrich is the generous but exacting UCLA evening instructor whose Renaissance poetry class becomes the setting for two linked revelations: Gladys Pirig can command a room through poetry, and the quiet student his classmates know is also the Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe. His place in the story is defined by this contrast. He gives Gladys an opening to speak without forcing her, then encounters the public image that makes her seem like someone else entirely.

Identity and the Evening Class

In the autumn of 1951, Professor Dietrich taught a UCLA evening course on Renaissance poetry, meeting every Thursday from seven to nine. Thirty-two adults had enrolled, and their near-constant attendance continued even as winter arrived. The class included office workers, war veterans, retirees, middle-aged homemakers whose children had grown up, two Westwood seminary students, and several aspiring poets. Many had spent the day at demanding jobs before coming to class; their commitment to poetry, and to a teacher who could make it compelling, helped sustain the group.

The students called him Professor Dietrich, or simply Prof, although the UCLA listing identified him as an adjunct instructor rather than a professor. They liked giving him the more dignified title, partly as a joke and partly as a way of lending dignity to themselves as adult evening students. He blushed a little but never corrected them. The exchange establishes a classroom relationship built on fondness without erasing the authority he held there.

A Demanding and Generous Teacher

Professor Dietrich was remembered as cordial, likable, and generous, but also unusually demanding by the standards of evening classes. His energy and evident passion for poetry carried students through material they did not always understand. The class trusted that he knew what he was doing even when his explanations or recitations remained difficult to follow. His authority depended not just on expertise but on the enthusiasm with which he made the subject feel worthy of sustained attention after a full working day.

On the first day, after reading the students’ names, he stood before the desk, clasped his large, red-spotted hands, and presented poetry as humanity’s transcendent idiom. The declaration left the class shivering, though its meaning was not necessarily clear to them; they nonetheless felt the course fee had been justified. The moment captures his style: he could make an abstract claim with such conviction that the students’ response preceded their full comprehension. Gladys’s reaction went unnoticed. The account suggests she may have copied the words into her notebook, as she habitually did, but the class does not know whether she did.

Gladys’s Reading of The Altar

Professor Dietrich was not the kind of instructor who baited shy students. Still, he noticed the small, polite, exceptionally timid blonde seated directly in front of him, and one evening, when he asked for a volunteer to read George Herbert’s The Altar aloud, he seemed to catch a flash of desire in her expression. Rather than choose one of the students who had raised a hand, he addressed Gladys. The pause that followed made the invitation feel consequential: she seemed to hold her breath before agreeing, in a whisper, to try.

The poem’s shaped arrangement on the page and its metaphysical difficulty had made it a puzzle for the class. Gladys turned toward the others, took up the book, drew a long breath, and began. Her voice, which the account presents as unexpectedly husky and dramatic, could seem at once light and powerful, spiritual and sensual. The surprise was not only the quality of the reading. She had accepted the invitation instead of refusing or fleeing the room, a departure from the timidity by which the class had come to define her. In her voice, the poem became suddenly clear to listeners who had found it difficult on the page.

The class applauded when she finished. Even the schoolteachers in attendance joined in, although they may have resented being upstaged by the apparently unassuming student. Professor Dietrich, who had listened in astonishment, applauded too. He told Gladys that she had been extraordinary and asked whether she wrote poetry. She flushed, lowered her head, and murmured something the others could not make out. His praise recognizes what her performance has disclosed, but it does not make her suddenly comfortable with being seen.

The Actress Behind the Student

The class’s understanding changed when members brought Professor Dietrich a two-page photographic feature from the Hollywood Reporter. It showed a striking blonde young actress in a low-cut dress, heavily made up, alongside images associated with The Asphalt Jungle and an advertisement for the other film discussed in the article. The feature identified the actress as Marilyn Monroe, Miss Blonde Model 1951. The students, who had believed Gladys to be a secretary, told the professor that the woman in the photographs was their classmate.

Professor Dietrich examined the pictures first with his glasses and then without them. He had seen The Asphalt Jungle and remembered the actress, but found it hard to reconcile her appearance with their Gladys. A seminary student insisted that he also remembered her from the other film advertised in the feature, although she had only a small part. The recognition was exciting and disorienting for the class: their familiar student and the emerging Hollywood figure were the same person, yet the printed image seemed almost incompatible with the shy woman before them. Professor Dietrich’s disbelief gives the discovery its human measure. He had attended to Gladys as a student, not as a celebrity, and the magazine made that distinction suddenly unstable.

When another student later confronted Gladys with a Swank cover featuring her in a red playsuit, high heels, and disheveled hair, she denied that the pictured woman was her, then amended the denial: she was not that woman. Her face showed panic, and she appeared ready to leave. The classmates’ excitement turned the discovery into public attention she had not chosen. An eager student asked for an autograph; a veteran claimed to have recognized her talent first, and someone imitated her voice from The Asphalt Jungle, provoking a brief, shrill laugh. Gladys finally managed to acknowledge that they had found her.

Professor Dietrich joined the congratulations awkwardly, having dressed more carefully than usual in pressed trousers and a bright plaid tie. He addressed her as Gladys, Miss Pirig, and Miss Monroe, struggling to reconcile the names, then praised her performance in The Asphalt Jungle as excellent and the film as unusually profound by Hollywood standards. His words were plainly admiring, but their effect was uncomfortable: Gladys did not return to her usual seat and wanted only to get out of the classroom. The episode makes Professor Dietrich a witness to both sides of her divided public presence. His patient invitation had allowed her voice to emerge on her own terms; the class’s discovery of Marilyn Monroe, even when accompanied by praise, made that same attention difficult to bear.