Marilyn graces the latest cover of Poland’s legal journal, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna (dated September 13-15), accompanying an interview with filmmaker Andrzej Krakowski about sexual behaviour in Hollywood, in which he refers to her rumoured – and much exaggerated – affair with John F. Kennedy. The main headline apparently translates as ‘Women in Bed, Not in Politics.’ (Sex was probably the last thing on Marilyn’s mind in this 1952 photo, however, as it was taken at her bedside after being admitted to hospital for an appendectomy.)
Surgical scars can be seen on Marilyn’s tummy in two of her final photo shoots, with George Barris (left) and Bert Stern (right), and in her ‘nude’ swim scene for the unfinished Something’s Got to Give, as Mehera Bonner reports for Marie-Claire. Marilyn underwent an appendectomy in 1952, and had her gallbladder removed in 1961, a year before she died. She also underwent several operations to alleviate her endometriosis and help her to have children, sadly without success. While surgical procedures are considerably more sophisticated today, our expectations have also increased. While there’s something rather liberating about these gorgeous, unaltered shots, it’s also important to remember that Marilyn – who exerted rigid control over her photo shoots, if not her movies – may herself have wanted to airbrush these photos had she lived long enough to fully review them. In fact, she vetoed many of Stern’s images, marking the rejects with an orange ‘X’; but after her death, he published the session in its entirety.
Now you see her, now you don’t: Marilyn in ‘Something’s Got to Give’
“Though she was famous for her perceived ‘perfection’ and ‘flawlessness’ (all the eye-rolls at the inherent sexism that goes into these terms), Marilyn Monroe had a pretty big scar across her stomach—which appears in both the Last Sitting and in Something’s Got to Give.
The scar itself is the result of gallbladder surgery that occurred before Stern’s famous images were taken. He says Marilyn was self-conscious about it, and called upon her hairdresser George [Masters] for reassurance before shooting. When Stern noticed the scar, he reportedly remembered Diana Vreeland saying to him, ‘I think there’s nothing duller than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars.’
Diana Vreeland is right: women *are* beautiful with scars. But she’s also incorrect about women without them being dull. Either way, the sometimes-removal of Marilyn’s scar offers a fascinating insight into beauty standards in Old Hollywood—did she ever truly have agency as to how her body was portrayed?
Ironically, Something’s Got to Give was the first time Monroe was ‘allowed’ to expose her belly button on film—as most of her previous swimwear moments were high-waisted. Before her death, she’s said to have quipped ‘I guess the censors are willing to recognize that everybody has a navel.’
Today’s Letters of Note blog features a famous note that Marilyn wrote to Dr Marcus Rabwin, while awaiting surgery Cedars of Lebanon hospital, back in 1952. She was extremely overworked and in poor health at the time, and her bosses at Twentieth Century-Fox had refused to let her undergo a much-needed appendectomy until she finished work on her current film, Monkey Business. Marilyn’s great anxiety about having children is painfully clear from the letter, and would prove to be well-founded: she suffered from endometriosis throughout her adult life, and would never carry a pregnancy to term.
