Marilyn Monroe is long gone but is still revered as a blonde icon throughout Hollywood. Particularly known for playing bombshell blonde characters, she quickly became a sex symbol and was all over the world. However, life behind curtains wasn’t all glam and peace. Monroe had a disturbing life and her end too wasn’t as pleasant.
Life is not easy when you’re as popular as the ‘Gentlemen Prefers Blondes’ actress. With great power comes great responsibility, and with great fame comes great stress. How to deal with that stress is subjective. Monroe took the easy route and turned to drugs which did not end well, as it is in most cases. The actress died at the age of 36 due to a drug overdose and the morticians who prepared her for the burial saw a completely different side of the actress.
On this day in 1962, the world found out Marilyn Monroe had died last night. Rest in Peace beautiful. We miss you pic.twitter.com/j3L0zSX90U
— Keya Morgan (@KeyaMorgan) August 5, 2016
In Allan Abbot’s book “Pardon My Hearse”, Marilyn Monroe’s horrendous conditions are defined. In the 60s, Allan Abbot and Ron Hast were the popular choices to bury the rich. Abbot reveals, “When we removed the sheet covering her, it was almost impossible to believe this was the body of Marilyn Monroe. She looked like a very average, aging woman who had not been taking very good care of herself.”
Abbot also explains that she had hairy legs, false teeth, and purple blotches all over her face – the exact opposite of a sex symbol in Hollywood. Originally, Monroe preferred nocturnal sleep to keep her beauty standards intact. But with time, she developed insomnia due to stage fright. Upon seeking consultation, she was prescribed Freudian psychoanalysis and prescriptive drugs such as barbiturates and more. Poetically, the drugs that she used to fight her insomnia eventually put her to sleep.
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For the world, Marilyn Monroe was everything fantastic but very few know about her rocky childhood. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, her mother was frequently in and out of asylum and she had to grow up with 12 different sets of foster parents. Just like her childhood, her adulthood was also met with a string of failed relationships. However, it was the stardom that became her final call.
Marilyn Monroe grossed over $200 million in her time of working. However, in the last year of her life, she started becoming absent from work and became increasingly inconsistent. In Anthony Summers’ 1985 book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, director John Huston worked with Monroe in ‘The Misfits’. However, her attitude toward work was lenient. Huston tells Summers, “Very soon we were aware that she was a problem. She’d be late on the set always. Sometimes the whole morning would go by. Sometimes she’d be alright. Occasionally, she’d be practically non compos mentis.”
Marilyn Monroe’s legacy keeps going on and she is still known for her infamous affair with John F. Kennedy. Her performance of “Happy Birthday” for President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, went viral. However, she was later instructed not to contact Kenndy and sources site that she was hurt. Months later, the news of her death came out, ending her miseries.