Enigmatic Marilyn Monroe: 45 Surprising Facts About the Legendary Star

Marilyn Monroe was terrible at learning lines. It took her 60 takes to deliver the line “It’s me, Sugar”, in ‘Some Like it Hot.’

27. Hugh Hefner published nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe without her permission in the first edition of Playboy magazine. He later purchased the crypt beside hers even though they had never met in life. He is now buried next to her.

28. Marilyn Monroe never intentionally posed for the first issue of Playboy. Hefner paid $500 to a Chicago calendar company for the photos which were taken 4 years earlier. Marilyn was paid $50 for the initial shoot and had to buy a copy of the magazine herself to see the photos.

29. Marilyn Monroe got her chin surgery after she overheard someone call her “a chinless wonder” at a party, behind her back.

30. In the famous sidewalk grate photograph from ‘The Seven Year Itch’, Marilyn Monroe sported two pairs of underwear, as onlookers would have been able to see through a single pair.

Joe DiMaggio was present during the on-location filming in New York City of his wife Marilyn Monroe’s iconic skirt lifted by the wind scene. He was so dismayed by the crowd of 2000 fans present that he filed for divorce shortly after.

32. The dress Marilyn Monroe wore on the night she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” was so tight she had to be sewn into it. The dress was so tight-fitting that Monroe had difficulty putting it on and she, therefore, wore nothing under it.

33. The Christian cult ‘The Family International’ considers the Goddess Aphrodite, the Snowman, Merlin, the Sphinx, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Nixon, and Winston Churchill to be among the “Spirit Helpers” for the spiritual war of good versus evil.

34. Marilyn Monroe’s famous quote “can’t handle me at my worst”, in its entirety actually says: “I’m selfish, impatient a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

35. Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the dumb blonde she portrayed herself as. People were surprised when Marilyn married the intellectual playwright Arthur Miller. It turns out, however, that she was well-read, having studied literature at UCLA, and amassing over 400 books, many of them first editions.

Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe met in 1951 and had a brief affair. When she married him at the age of 30, she converted to Judaism to “express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents.” Soon after their marriage, Egypt banned all of her movies.

37. The FBI kept a file on Marilyn Monroe due to her relationship with Arthur Miller and ongoing associations with communist front organizations and known leftists.

38. Marilyn Monroe's sister Berniece Baker Miracle is still alive today at the age of 102 (as of December 2021).

39. “Something’s Got to Give” is an unfinished film that was shot in 1962. It was Monroe’s last work, but from the beginning, its production was disrupted by her personal troubles, and after her death on August 4, 1962, the film was abandoned. Had this movie been completed and released, Monroe would have been the first mainstream star shown topless in a Hollywood motion picture release of the sound era.

40. A German-born New York physician nicknamed “Miracle Max” and “Dr. Feelgood” administered amphetamines and other medications to Marilyn Monroe and several other high profile clients, including President JFK, Yul Brynner, Mickey Mantle, Elvis Presley, and Nelson Rockefeller.

Marilyn Monroe nearly passed away from an overdose in the Hamptons 5 years before her death.

42. When Marilyn Monroe’s third marriage with Arthur Miller ended, a year before she died, her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio desperately tried to remarry, or at least help, the troubled starlet.

43. Marilyn Monroe's second husband Joe DiMaggio was so devastated after her death that he held a private funeral barring all the Hollywood elite, had half-dozen red roses delivered three times a week to her crypt for 20 years, never married again and his last words were: “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.”

44. Los Angeles businessman Richard Poncher purchased 2 crypts from Joe DiMaggio in the 1950s. As a final wish, he asked his wife for him to be placed upside down since his crypt was above Marilyn Monroe’s. In other words, he wanted to spend all eternity on top of the legendary sex symbol. In 2009, however, his wife Elsie Poncher exhumed her husband so she could sell off his burial plot to pay off her mortgage. It sold for $4.6 million.

45. In 1962, when she died at the age of 36 of an overdose, Marilyn Monroe left most of her estate to her acting coach Lee Strasberg. When Strasberg died in 1982, his wife, Anna, who had never known Monroe, inherited her estate. In 1999, she auctioned off Monroe’s personal belongings for $14 million.