Celebrating Marilyn Monroe at 100: 26 Fun Facts From A-Z
Marilyn was far more complex than the blond bombshells she portrayed onscreen. Behind the glamour was a driven, thoughtful person who worked incredibly hard to overcome a horrible upbringing and build a career where she would be taken seriously.
Here we celebrate her remarkable life, career, and lasting legacy by going back to basics, A to Z, highlighting fascinating facts, relationships, and defining moments that made her an eternal icon.
A Appendectomy
Marilyn was no stranger to the hospital over her short life, but in 1952, the then-25-year-old was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital (now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center) in Los Angeles for an emergency appendectomy. The star taped a note under her gown to her doctor that read: “Cut as little as possible, I know it seems vain, but that doesn’t really enter into it. The fact I’m a woman is important and means much to me. Save please (I can’t ask enough) what you can – I’m in your hands. You have children, and you must know what it means – please, Dr. Rabwin – I know somehow you will! Thank you – thank you – thank you – For God’s sakes, Dear Doctor, no ovaries removed – please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars. Thanking you with all my heart. — Marilyn Monroe.”
B Books
Biographies, memoirs, photo essays, novels, and more. Marilyn’s been the subject of countless books, including her own — My Story, which was published more than a decade after her death.
C Child Bride
Everett Collection
Norma Jeane was raised sporadically by her mother, Gladys (who was periodically institutionalized), family, friends, foster homes, and even orphanages. When Norma Jeane was 15, she was living with her mother’s friend, Grace McKee Goddard, until Grace’s husband was transferred to West Virginia and the couple couldn’t afford to take her along. Instead of sending Norma Jeane back to an orphanage, Grace made a deal with their neighbors for Norma Jeane to marry their 21-year-old son, James Dougherty. They married on June 19, 1942, but after just a year of marriage, James went off to war, and Norma Jeane went to live with his mother and got a job at a factory inspecting parachutes. Their marriage only lasted until September 1946.
D Debbie Reynolds’ Marilyn Collection
Debbie Reynolds nearly broke down in tears when the gavel went down, marking the sale of Marilyn’s wind-blown white dress from 1955’s The Seven Year Itch. The dress, part of Reynolds’ collection of some 3,500 items of Hollywood memorabilia, sold for $4.6 million in 2011 to an unidentified bidder.
Reynolds had been collecting for 45 years, and among the other items sold were a dress and a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in a screen test for The Wizard of Oz, racing clothes worn by Elizabeth Taylor in 1944’s National Velvet, Charlie Chaplin‘s bowler hat worn in The Little Tramp, and more.
E Estate Turned Into the Sale of the Century
Marilyn left the bulk of her estate to acting coach Lee Strasberg. He and his wife, Paula (also one of her acting coaches), were like surrogate parents to her. Paula died of cancer in 1966, and Lee married his third wife, Anna, in 1968. When Lee Strasberg died in 1982, Anna inherited the Monroe estate. She then hired CMG Worldwide, a company specializing in managing the name and image of dead celebrities, to license Monroe products. CMG wrote deals worth millions. In 1999, Anna Strasberg commissioned Christie’s to auction off Monroe’s personal items; the catalog for the sale was 400 pages thick. In what was billed as “The Sale of the Century,” the auction brought in $13 million from the sale of 576 lots. Hundreds of glitzy possessions, from necklaces to cocktail dresses to cigarette lighters, were snatched up in a bidding frenzy.
F Father Was Clark Gable?
Marilyn had a tumultuous childhood as the daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic who was in and out of hospitals. She once believed her father was Clark Gable after she saw a photo her mother possessed that looked like him. Eventually, she discovered that her father was Charles Stanley Gifford, but he didn’t want anything to do with her. He died just three years after she did.
As for Gable, Marilyn would star with him in The Misfits, which would be the last movie for both of them. At the time, director John Huston had to shut down filming for 10 days because Marilyn was never on time and appeared despondent, among other reasons. Two days after filming wrapped, Gable had a heart attack and died 10 days later. Marilyn was unfairly blamed for his death, with people believing she made him wait too long in that hot Nevada sun.
G “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” Wage Inequity
While Jane Russell received top billing and a hefty $150,000 for the 1953 picture, Marilyn was still under contract with Fox and, despite her epic rise to fame, still only received $1,500 a week. “I never saw anybody work harder in my life,” Russell shared.
H Hugh Hefner
Getty Images
Marilyn’s final resting place is in a crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park & Mortuary in Los Angeles, where Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is her neighbor. “Spending an eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, and he reportedly paid $75,000 to secure his spot in 1992. In 2024, a crypt just one row above and four spaces to the left of Marilyn’s went up for sale on Julien’s Auctions and sold for $192,000.
I Insults From Tony Curtis
While Marilyn was struggling during the filming of Some Like It Hot, her costar Tony Curtis, who she had an alleged on-set affair that resulted in a pregnancy, delivered the cruelest of insults when he famously told reporters, “Kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler.” In later interviews, he admitted, “She was a pain in the ass and difficult to work with,” and also shared it was taken out of context. In fairness, the starlet was constantly late, and they had to sit around all day long in hair and makeup waiting for her. Curtis was married to Janet Leigh at the time, and Marilyn was still with Arthur Miller. In Curtis’ book The Making of Some Like It Hot, he states about the pregnancy: “I was stunned. I just stood there. The room was so silent that I could hear tires screeching on Santa Monica Boulevard.” After filming, he learned of the miscarriage.
J Jean Louis
DAN CALLISTER Online USA, Inc./Getty Images
French-born Hollywood costume designer Jean Louis was behind Marilyn’s most iconic garment: the skintight, flesh-colored dress that was bedazzled with over 2,500 hand-stitched crystals. This dress was so popular it had its own world tour. It’s the dress Marilyn wore when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy, and it sold for the world-record sum of $4.8 million at Julien’s Auctions in 2016. The dress was purchased by the Ripley’s museum chain. As head designer for Columbia Pictures and later Universal, Louis received 14 Academy Award nominations and was renowned for the “nude look” styles he created for stars like Marilyn and Marlene Dietrich. Louis would go on to establish his own design firm, Jean Louis Inc., where he specialized in dressing the world’s most elite stars and socialites. He died in 1997 in Palm Springs at the age of 89.
K Kennedy Brothers
Marilyn’s most infamous rumored affairs and reasons for her overdose (neither has been proved) have involved the Kennedy brothers — President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. Her alleged meetups with the president have ranged from parties at Manhattan socialite Mrs. John “Fifi” Fell’s house and Bing Crosby’s Palm Springs home in 1962 to JFK using his brother-in-law Peter Lawford‘s home as a meetup. As for Bobby, he got the privilege of sitting between Marilyn and Kim Novak at a Lawford party in 1962, which some biographers say Marilyn considered their first date, despite his wife Ethel Kennedy being in attendance.
Investigative journalist Anthony Summers, who penned the bestselling book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe and was a contributor to the 2022 Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, perhaps summarizes the rumors about her death best, telling People magazine: “There is no good evidence that she was murdered. I think Marilyn Monroe was overwrought about her relationships with both President Kennedy and his brother Robert, felt rejected by both men, had a heated argument with Robert when he visited the house, and then, whether as a cry for help or intending to kill herself, swallowed too many pills.
L Lauren Bacall
After the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn went on to star with Lauren Bacall in How to Marry a Millionaire. Many of Marilyn’s costars would complain about her tardiness and disrespect for other actors’ time. Bacall shared in Charles Casillo’s book Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon: “Marilyn was just sweet. … She was late a lot. But she wasn’t late to make a statement; she was late because she was frightened and because she was insecure. … A scene often went to 15 or more takes, which meant I’d have to be good in all of them, as no one knew which one would be used. Not easy — often irritating. And yet I couldn’t dislike Marilyn. She had no meanness in her — no bitchery. She just had to concentrate on herself and the people who were there only for her.”
M Mr. President
With lyrics she wrote herself, and in her trademark sultry, breathy voice, Marilyn stood before a crowd of about 15,000, peeled off her white ermine fur coat and intimately sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to President John F. Kennedy at his early 45th birthday celebration on Saturday, May 19, 1962, at Madison Square Garden. It’s the most famous version of “Happy Birthday” and marked her last public appearance.
N Nude
A cash-strapped and jobless Marilyn only received $50 from photographer Tom Kelley in 1949 when she posed nude for him. Kelley later sold the photos to Western Lithograph Co. as part of a “Golden Dreams” pinup calendar. One of the images eventually found its way into Playboy magazine’s December 1953 inaugural issue. Playboy‘s launch issue featured Marilyn on the cover alongside a text burst hyping “FIRST TIME in any magazine. FULL COLOR the famous MARILYN MONROE NUDE.” Inside was the “Sweetheart of the Month” feature and image, where the text read: “There were actually two poses shot au naturel back in ’49, just before the gorgeous blonde got her first movie break. When they appeared as calendar art, they helped catapult her to stardom. We’ve selected the better of the two as our first PLAYBOY Sweetheart.” Unfortunately, Marilyn never had the opportunity to approve of the images being published.
O Overdose
On Sunday, Aug. 5, 1962, the world would awake to the news that Marilyn Monroe had died at age 36, at her Brentwood home on Fifth Helena Drive. She was found naked with a telephone receiver dangling from her hand, neatly arranged pill bottles nearby, and the only other person allegedly in the house at the time of her death was Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s live-in housekeeper and personal assistant. Murray’s accounts of the day and night leading up to Marillyn’s death still haunt and confuse historians and conspiracy theorists to this date. Murray published a book in 1975 titled Marilyn: The Last Months; however, it’s out of circulation and is a rarity if you find it. In 1982, the Los Angeles district attorney reopened her case amid pressure that Marilyn had been murdered because of her political ties. At the end of the investigation, DA John Van de Kamp said: “Based on the evidence available to us, it appears that her death could have been suicide or come as a result of an accidental drug overdose. Permit me to express a faint hope that Marilyn Monroe be permitted to rest in peace.” Murray died at age 92 in 1994.
P Piano
One of Marilyn’s most prized possessions was a white baby grand piano, originally owned by actor Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), which was given to her by her mother when she was a child. When her mother was committed to Norwalk State Hospital all of the belongings in their home, including the piano, were sold. Years later Marilyn would track the piano down and it would remain with her until her death. The piano was part of a 1999 Christie’s auction where singer Mariah Carey purchased it for $662,500.
Q Queen Elizabeth II
Keystone/Getty Images
Marilyn met Queen Elizabeth II on October 29, 1956, at the Royal Film Performance of The Battle of the River Plate at the Empire Theatre in London’s Leicester Square. Both women, age 30 at the time, chatted for several minutes about their lives, with Marilyn reportedly sharing that she enjoyed riding bicycles in the Great Park. Surely, the queen was amused.
R Revlon
“Take it from a man! Revlon’s new color ‘Bachelor’s Carnation’ breaks all the rules!” according to a 1946 ad slogan. A gold metal lipstick of Revlon’s “Bachelor’s Carnation” was part of Marilyn’s makeup supplies and fetched a whopping $18,750 at an auction of Lee Strasberg’s estate in 2016.
S Sinatra
Following a surgical procedure for her endometriosis, Marilyn went to the Sands Hotel on June 7, 1961, as Frank Sinatra‘s guest, where a special performance to celebrate Dean Martin‘s birthday was planned. Marilyn sat with Elizabeth Taylor and Taylor’s then-husband, Eddie Fisher. “All eyes were on Marilyn,” Eddie said, as reported in Charles Casillo’s Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon. “She swayed back and forth to the music and pounded her hands on the stage, her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress. She was so beautiful — and so drunk.”
T Tommy Hilfiger & Teeth
At a Christie’s auction held in 1999, Tommy Hilfiger purchased the blue jeans worn by Marilyn in 1954’s River of No Return — which she considered one of her worst movie performances. The clothing designer purchased the jeans for $42,550, along with paying $85,000 for a pair of square-toed cowgirl boots she wore in The Misfits. In other “T” related tidbits, Marilyn wrote in her autobiography My Story: “I could never be attracted to a man who had perfect teeth. A man with perfect teeth always alienated me. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the kind of men I have known who had perfect teeth. They weren’t so perfect elsewhere.”
U USO
Courtesy Everett Collection
While on her honeymoon to Japan with Joe DiMaggio in 1954, Marilyn made a somewhat spontaneous decision to visit American troops still stationed in Korea to help lift their spirits. It wasn’t an official USO tour, but she agreed to a 10-stop tour over four days, where she would sing, dance, joke, and mesmerize some 100,000 soldiers in the freezing cold. “I never felt like a star before in my life — it was so wonderful to feel appreciated, to feel that I was part of something,” she shared with Modern Screen later that year.
V Valentine
Arthur Miller wrote The Misfits as a valentine of sorts for Marilyn. “I would not have written it except for Marilyn. I wrote it for her,” Miller said to biographer Christopher Bigsby. “It was the only time I did write anything for an actor and, had I not known her, I would not have begun such a thing. She had lost a child in early pregnancy, which really upset her a lot, so it was a kind of a gift. It was also the expression of a kind of belief in her as an actress.” Tragically, it would be Marilyn’s final completed movie.
W Warhol
PA Images via Getty Images
Andy Warhol was obsessed with movie stars as a child and had a long fascination with Hollywood. According to the Andy Warhol Museum, he had just finished his first solo pop art exhibit featuring Campbell’s Soup Can paintings when he heard the news of Marilyn’s sudden death in 1962 (she died the day before his own birthday). He would go on to create some of the most famous pieces of contemporary art with his 1962 Marilyn Diptych and in 1967 the Marilyn Monroe portfolio, which were close-up crops of Marilyn’s face, each in vibrant colors. In 2022, his Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold at The Collection of Thomas and Doris Ammann’s auction for $195 million. According to Christie’s auction house in New York, where the sale took place, it was the most expensive piece from the 20th century ever auctioned at that time.
X X-Factor
Marilyn had it through and through — that intangible, undefinable X-Factor/It-Factor, which started when she was a child. She tried to explain the effect she had on people in her autobiography My Story, which was published over a decade after her death. “The boys took to wooing me as if I were the sole member of my sex in the district. … My admirers all said the same thing in different ways. It was my fault, their wanting to kiss and hug me. Some said it was the way I looked at them — with eyes full of passion. Others said it was my voice that lured them on. Still others said I gave off vibrations that floored them.” It was her raw charisma — that X-Factor — she exuded almost effortlessly.
Y “You look a bit young to be so bad.
In 1960, Marilyn said, “You look a bit young to be so bad,” to 23-year-old Look magazine photographer Lawrence Schiller, who introduced himself as the “Big Bad Wolf” while on assignment at 20th Century-Fox Studios for her film Let’s Make Love. Schiller would forge a two-year friendship with Marilyn and eventually share his private photographs and stories in his book Marilyn & Me (although he waited until he was over 70 to publish it). “Marilyn had shown me what other photographers who had shot her knew — that when she turned herself on to the camera, the photographer didn’t have to be more than a mechanic; it was almost as if she were both the shooter and the subject.”
Z Zelda Zonk
In November 1954, Marilyn was 28 when she boarded a flight from Los Angeles to New York determined to take a break from Hollywood typecasting to start her own independent film company in the Big Apple. She was disguised in a black wig and sunglasses — and would call herself Zelda Zonk to avoid being recognized in public. According to Elizabeth Winder’s Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy, she was accompanied by Look magazine photographer Milton Greene, who helped her get settled in New York, along with Milton’s wife, and later became vice president of Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP). The studio started to unravel in 1956, when Marilyn wed Arthur Miller.
This article is from the June 2026 100 Years of Marilyn Monroe Issue of ReMIND Magazine. You can purchase the full issue at the link below.
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100 Years of Marilyn Monroe
June 2026
Is there a star more worshipped than Marilyn?
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