The Washington Merry-Go-Round by Marilyn Monroe
Monday, September 19th, 2011
Below is an article written by Marilyn Monroe in 1954 for a political column called The Washington Merry-Go-Round.
From time to time I’ve been quoted in the entertainment columns of newspapers, and even in news stories, but this is the first time I’ve been invited to contribute to a column which deals with national affairs on a high level.
Nearest I’ve come to affecting the national establishment was when a War Department representative, through a comedy of errors, ordered killed a picture of me taken with some service girls in Atlantic City, but the newspapers ran the picture anyways and a truce was arranged.
Later, 11 Marines went AWOL in Korea to hear me sing, but the incident was handled on the spot. They were confined to camp for a month, and Washington was not distracted from its more important problems.
In brief, as Lorelei would say, what is a girl like I doing in Drew Person’s column?
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been lucky and a lot of my fellow Americans have cheered from the sidelines as a little gal without much background found success and happiness the hard way.
Being neither a natural-born actress, singer, nor dancer, I still pinch myself as I drive to work on the lot in a very nice automobile and go into a singing, dancing, and dramatic routine in Irving Berlin’s There’s No Business Like Show Business.
I work with such talented people as Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, Johnnie Ray and Dan Dailey, and I feel warm all over when Irving Berlin tells me that I’m a fine performer, as distinguished from a pinup personality.
You might like to know that my pinup days are over – well, sort of. I still want to look nice and have our servicemen and others take pleasure in my pictures, but I also want to be known as a good actress. I think Seven Year Itch, which I start soon, will give me a wonderful opportunity to show how I’ve improved since my first small bit in “Ladies of the Chorus.”
Years ago, during a short period I spent in an orphan’s home because of my mother’s illness, I used to look out at the big sign on the RKO lot in Hollywood and dream of stardom. I thought it would be the easiest and the most glamorous life in the world.
Well, I like the glamour part but it certainly isn’t easy. I work hard and study hard and have little time even for my husband. But I do divorce my private life from my career as an actress, and that is why you never see Joe and me posing together around Hollywood.
I’d have enjoyed going East recently to watch Joe with one over the fence in his old timers’ exhibition game, but I was here in Hollywood that morning, up at 5 am, getting dressed and made up for a routine with Donald O’Connor.
As to the future, I just don’t know. On the horizon, like a black cloud, is the frightening figure of Dior, who has decreed that girls must be flat-chested. If this comes about, I will be a dead duck and people will be speaking of Marilyn in the past tense because no matter what Dior decrees come out of Paris, I just don’t qualify.
Source: Merman and Monroe Talk About Men and Fashions, The Victoria Advocate, Aug 31 1954, Page 2
I’ve been offered at least eight tremendous epics. I turned them all down. I think it would be suicide for me to do another one now. I’d never get out of the spectacle classification if I did. Besides, what would I prove? What I really want to do now is a modern comedy. The trouble is that they all go to Cary Grant. I’m not proud. I’d be willing to take his leavings. 
