Word: marilyn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Norma Jeane was about eight years old, her mother collapsed for the second time and was taken away to a state hospital, where she was kept until her daughter could afford the private care she has today. "I was sorry she was sick," says Marilyn. "But we never had any kind of relationship. I didn't see her very often. To me she was just the woman with the red hair...
...hated the orphanage. As one of the older children, Norma Jeane was assigned to wash the dishes: 100 plates, 100 cups, 100 knives, forks, spoons. "I did it three times a day, seven days a week," says Marilyn. "But it wasn't so bad. It was worse to scrub out the toilets." As payment for their work, most of the children got 5? a month. Since everybody had to put a penny in the plate on Sunday, that left each child with 1? a month to spend. With her penny, Norma Jeane usually bought a ribbon for her hair...
...through it?" Marilyn wonders today. "Or maybe it wasn't really so bad? Maybe I just took it all too hard?" For consolation, she went to the movies whenever she had a dime...
...with a will, and soon discovered mascara. "The neighbors called me cheap," she says, "but I knew I really wasn't." Her stutter began to disappear. She wrote verse. She skipped the last half of the eighth grade. "I looked back on the whole mess around that time," Marilyn recalls. "And something came up inside me and I said to myself. 'Somebody's got to come out of this whole...
...Hughes and 2Oth Century-Fox. She went to Fox first. Cried Casting Director Ben Lyon: "It's Jean Harlow all over again!" He signed her for $125 a week. He slapped a new label on her (Monroe was the maiden name of Norma Jeane's mother, and Marilyn began with an M too), and put her to work on her first part, in Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay. Marilyn's part: "Hello." It was cut from the finished film. Nevertheless, Marilyn began to acquire some of a celebrity's mannerisms. She roared through the studio gate...