Spoilers ahead for the plot of Blonde.
There are biopics that aim to present a mostly factual version of a person’s life (think Walk the Line). There are films that are only loosely inspired by a person’s life (think Velvet Goldmine). And then there is Blonde.
Andrew Dominik’s movie, based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, is about Marilyn Monroe — that much is very clear — but it also plays extremely fast and loose with its historical details. The intention is to be an impressionistic portrait of the actress and icon — more reflective of what she represented and how she suffered than who she actually was as a person. As for how effective that is? Your mileage may vary.
Some have argued that Dominik’s relentlessly tragic epic starring Ana de Armas successfully puts the onus on the viewer who relishes in the pain of Monroe’s story. Others think it’s punishing for no good reason, sucking Monroe’s nuance away in favor of her sorrow.
But which parts of the film are actually based on truth? And what is for dramatic flourish? Some moments are obvious inventions, whereas others build on complicated and messy myths about Monroe that have developed over time. Let’s break it down.
What did Monroe know about her father?Â
Throughout Dominik’s movie, we see a photograph of Monroe’s supposed father, a handsome man she idolizes but who remains elusive. The way it plays out in Blonde is actually not dissimilar from what Monroe describes in her posthumously published memoir, co-written with Ben Hecht, My Story. In the movie, her unstable mother, Gladys, played by Julianne Nicholson, points at a picture and says, “Norma Jeane, look — that man is your father,†telling her that he works at the same movie studio she does. As a fire rages in the Hollywood Hills, Gladys drives her young daughter into the flames, claiming to police that the child’s father has a fireproof house that can protect them. Monroe’s truth is a little more bitter: Her mother told her that her dad “was killed in an auto accident in New York City,†but Monroe doubted that. Still, Monroe’s actual memories of the picture echo what Dominik portrays: “He wore a slouch hat a little gaily on the side. There was a lively smile in his eyes, and he had a thin mustache like Clark Gable.†(Worth noting: In The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Churchwell argues that Milton Greene, photographer and friend of Monroe’s, could have taken liberties with the text in My Story.)
Per Charles Casillo, who wrote the 2018 biography Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon, Monroe’s mother had an affair with her colleague, Charles Gifford, a recently divorced man. When Gifford learned that Gladys was pregnant, he wanted nothing to do with the baby and encouraged her to give it the surname of her estranged husband, Martin Edward Mortensen. Eventually, according to Casillo, Monroe did try to make contact with Gifford, but he rejected those advances. Another biographer, Donald Spoto, author of 1993’s Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, disputes the claim that Gifford was Monroe’s father, but he does acknowledge that Gladys hung a photo of Gifford in their home.
Did Monroe call nearly every man in her life “Daddyâ€?Â
Dominik really hammers home his Monroe’s daddy issues every chance he gets, most notably by having her refer to male authority figures in her life, including husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, as “Daddy.†Now, there is some evidence that she used that word in that context. Yes, she sang the song “Everybody Needs a Da-Da-Daddy†in the 1948 movie Ladies of the Chorus, which Dominik deploys in Blonde as Monroe enters the world of Hollywood and is promptly assaulted by a studio head implied to be Darryl Zanuck. But did she call her lovers “Daddy� Spoto quotes her first husband, James Dougherty, saying that she did: “She called me ‘Daddy.’ When she packed my lunch for work, there was often a note inside: ‘Dearest Daddy — When you read this, I’ll be asleep and dreaming of you. Love and kisses, Your Baby.’†If that really was the case, perhaps she continued to use the term as a pet name, but that doesn’t make it seem any less infantilizing when it’s repeated over and over in Blonde.
Did Monroe have a threesome with Edward G. Robinson Jr. and Charlie Chaplin Jr.?Â
Here’s where Blonde really diverges from public record. As is the case in Oates’s novel, the movie Monroe has a polyamorous tryst with two scions of Hollywood legends. They are credited as just Cass (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy (Evan Williams), but they are identified as Charles Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. While these two men both existed — and Robinson was probably somewhat akin to the troublemaker portrayed onscreen — their relationship with Monroe is a complete work of fiction. Even the timeline doesn’t align: Near the end of Blonde, Eddy contacts Marilyn to inform her that Cass has died. Chaplin actually died six years after Monroe did.
Did Monroe audition for the role of Magda in an Arthur Miller play?Â
The circumstances of how Monroe and her third husband, Miller, met are well documented, but Blonde throws it all away. In the film, she encounters the Playwright (Adrien Brody) while doing a reading of a fictional play he wrote. She is playing the part of Magda, based on a woman from the Playwright’s past, and impresses him with her understanding of the role and her knowledge of Chekhov. Actually: Miller and Monroe met when director Elia Kazan brought him to the set of As Young As You Feel, a movie she co-starred in, in 1951. According to Casillo and Spoto, Monroe was sexually involved with Kazan before she was ever with Miller. She and Miller reconnected after she moved to New York, following her divorce from DiMaggio in 1955.
Was Monroe really paid less than Jane Russell for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?Â
By all accounts, yes. In one of the few scenes in Blonde in which Monroe seems to assert herself, she is angry that Russell, who was on loan from a different studio, is being offered more money to star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. After all, she quips, she is the titular blonde. Russell was paid far more than Monroe: six figures, whereas Monroe got five, according to both Spoto and Casillo. Casillo, however, argues that Monroe’s anger was less about money and more about the fact that the studio, 20th Century Fox, undervalued her to the extent that she wasn’t even given her own private dressing room.
Did DiMaggio beat Monroe after watching her film her famous skirt scene in The Seven Year Itch?Â
Unfortunately, probably yes. Monroe’s skirt billowing around her knees atop a subway grate is her most enduring image, but The Seven Year Itch’s director, Billy Wilder, recalled in Cameron Crowe’s book Conversations With Wilder that “every time her dress blew up, [DiMaggio] turned away.†The next day, she came to work with bruises that had to be covered up.
Did Monroe really hate working on Some Like It Hot?Â
In Blonde, Monroe is in the full throes of a breakdown while playing the ditzy cabaret singer Sugar in Some Like It Hot, also directed by Wilder. In the context of the film, the role is a burden to her — to the extent that she slashes her face with her own nails on set. According to Wilder, Monroe was troubled on the production, but she didn’t take to self-mutilation in front of the entire cast and crew. She was often late and would request a lot of takes to get her performance right. Wilder told Crowe that he was upset when she didn’t show up, but “I waited for her, and I swallowed my pride.†He added, “But if she showed up, she delivered, and if it took eighty takes, I lived with eighty takes, because the eighty-first was very good.†Her freak-out in Blonde happens while she’s filming the musical number “I Wanna Be Loved by You.†Wilder, meanwhile, remembered that the filming of that scene “went pretty easy.â€
Did Monroe have multiple abortions?Â
Dominik takes an almost sadistic interest in documenting the abortions the Monroe of the movie has — one after she is pregnant with either Cass’s or Eddy’s child and the other during her affair with President John F. Kennedy. He even films from the inside of the vagina, spread open by a speculum.
There is, of course, no way to know for sure how many abortions Monroe had or if she had any at all — not that that’s stopped the speculation. In her book Marilyn: Norma Jeane, Gloria Steinem was convinced that Monroe had undergone a “dozen or so†abortions despite the lack of historical record. “One can imagine her sacrificing contraception and her own safety to spontaneity, magic, and the sexual satisfaction of the man she was with,†Steinem wrote. That last sentence involves a lot of conjecture, but it’s not as if abortions were uncommon in Hollywood’s heyday. At the same time, it’s important to remember that the one thing Dominik does not portray is that Monroe likely had endometriosis — less scandalous but no less severe.
What about the blowjob?Â
One of the most talked about and horrifying scenes in Blonde finds a nearly incapacitated Monroe being dragged from a plane to a hotel room, where a man presumed to be JFK is lying on a bed. He’s on the phone and barely pays attention to her as he cajoles her into a blowjob.
According to Spoto, Monroe and Kennedy met, at most, only four times. There exists just one photo of them together: at an after-party for the Kennedy event at Madison Square Garden where she sang “Happy Birthday†to him. Did they ever have sex? There is only one indication that they might have: Monroe’s friend and masseur Ralph Roberts told Spoto that she called him up from a romantic excursion to Bing Crosby’s Palm Springs estate, during which she was sharing a bedroom with the president. Once again, it seems as if Blonde leaned more into metaphor than fact.
More on Blonde
- Joyce Carol Oates Sure Tweets About The Fabelmans a Lot
- Checking In on Netflix’s Original Movies: December 2022 Edition
- Marilyn Monroe’s Truth Was in Her Poetry