Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1954)

To the world she is a daringly dressed, glamorous blonde. But alone, stripped of her fabulous masquerade, she’s an uncertain woman haunted by childhood fears JL_ he school bell rang, shattering the silence of the “quiet period” in the sunlit kindergarten on one of lower Hollywood’s more shabby streets. Sun-tanned, robust boys and girls, arms outspread like airplane wings, flew out the door with shrill shouts of “Hi, Mom,” “There’s my daddy,” and were quickly engulfed in waiting arms. One bonethin, sallow girl with fine, blonde baby hair blowing into her eyes, shuffled out. Why run? She knew nobody would be waiting for her. There was no expression on her sullen, withdrawn face as she stood silhouetted in the doorway, watching the glad reunions. When everyone had departed, the little girl brushed the hair from her eyes, smoothed the badly-ironed, too-large dress, took a better grip on her tin lunchbox and slowly sauntered up the street to what, at the moment, she called home. That little girl was the girl you now know as Marilyn Monroe. Seated in the Twentieth commissary one day recently, shortly after she’d returned from making “River of No Return,” she recalled the story. Her eyes turned somber and she said, simply, “I remember that as though it happened yesterday. All the kids but me runninig up to their fathers or mothers. You know,” she paused, a tiny frown creasing her forehead, “I never even knew my father. Someone told me he died before I was born, but later I learned that he’d just disappeared. Nobody knows where. “I’ll never forget my first day at school. I’d been living with an English (Continued on page 106) IIV EIVMIIVE T he Monroe the public knows — glittering, gay BY JANE CORWIN