It all began when one of them inquired of another if she had seen Monroe at a party they’d all been to the night before. The Christian having been thrown to the lions, the ring was cleared and the fight was on. The occasional defence of Marilyn by any of the men present only whipped the ladies up to new frenzy.

"That dress!" said one. "I wasn’t sure if she was trying to get into it or out of it."

"Vulgar," said another anonymous voice behind me. "After all, we know she’s got a figure. She doesn’t have to keep showing it."

"Have you seen the suit she wears?" "You mean the one with the bunch of red roses tucked into the front of it? Seen it, my dear? How could you miss seeing it? I think it’s the cheapest, loudest, Sadie Thompsonish sort of thing I’ve ever-".

”What do you expect?" chimed in another dear lady. "If I told you where I first saw Marilyn Monroe"

A male voice said mildly, .’What were you doing there?" "I was there on business;" Mercifully, the lights went out, music filled the room and the screen ahead of us and the ladies behind me became fully occupied with the doings of Jeanne Crain and Myrna Loy in “Belles on Their Toes”.

Later I said to a studio executive, "What’s Marilyn Monroe got, or what does she do, that brings the pack down on her in full force like that?"

"It’s probably," he said, "that she just exudes sex. She is sex. She makes every man in a room aware of her as a woman. It’s not just the clothes she wears; she’d have the same effect on them if she wrapped herself in an old burlap bag."

And to prove the point, the publicity staff did just that a few days later. Billy Travilla, famous designer, went to work with several yards of burlap. The result appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country. Marilyn Monroe looking like sex personified and needing no more than a burlap bag, fringed on the bottom, skilfully arranged so that the words, IDAHO POTATOES, were boldly and carefully displayed right there, across the top of Marilyn’s famous and fabulous body. Marilyn was delighted.

"There," she said happily. "That will prove to those old cats who are always criticizing what I wear that I can look good in anything."

But ..the old cats. were neither impressed nor depressed, and they certainly were not deterred. it wasn’t a week later that Marilyn’s appearance at a Hollywood premiere in a dress of black lace over red taffeta, with a neckline that forgot altogether when to stop plunging, excited the sisters to new demands that her studio do something about teaching Marilyn Monroe how to dress.

But Marilyn Monroe knows very well how, to dress to get and to create the effect she wants. She not only dresses to get the attention of men and at this she succeeds, but in spades!-she dresses to irritate and annoy women because she doesn’t think that she could get them to like her anyway.

"I let them alone," she says of this running feud between Monroe and women. "Why don’t they let me alone?"

And yet I’m sure she’d like to have women like her. For these women, whose wrath she brings down on her lovely blonde head, are important women. Maybe she doesn’t need their liking or their approval now, but the old Hollywood saying, "Be nice to them all on the way up because you’ll meet them all on the way down," contains more than a morsel of bitter truth.

Besides that, everyone likes to be liked, and Marilyn Monroe is even more eager for approval than most people. As a child in the Los Angeles Orphanage; as a "foster" child put out in the home of any qualified person who offered to care for her at the usual county rate of $20 a month; and as a teenage girl ,who escaped the bitter loneliness of that life via a teenage marriage that ended in divorce, Marilyn has shown herself to be an extremely shy, sensitive girl who responds to anyone who seems to really like her.

I felt that tentative reaching out, that feeling her way and hoping to be liked, the first time I met her. And after spending a couple of hours with her, I could add the impressions I got then with the impressions I had received the many times we’d been in the same room together, or at the same party. I knew that here was a girl who made women virtually hate her simply because she was so sure they weren’t going to like her that she went out of her way to do and say the things that would make it almost impossible for any woman to like her.

To the oft-repeated charge that Marilyn is stupid, the answer is that no one can be stupid and get to the top in one of the toughest cities in the world. And there is little doubt that Marilyn Monroe is on the top. At this writing, she is scheduled to star in three forthcoming Fox movies, “Don’t Bother to Knock”, “Monkey Business” and “The Jean Harlow Story”.

Born Norma Jean Baker, in Los Angeles, California on June 1, none of the way up has been easy for Marilyn Monroe, She started as a model, then worked in an airplane factory where she was chosen Miss Parachute by her admiring male co-workers. This honour landed her picture in a national magazine and led to offers from Howard Hughes, 20th Century-Fox and Walter Wanger.

Then came the bit parts that were left on the cutting room floor, a dropped option. more modelling and odd jobs, including posing for the now-famous calendar that caused her studio so many headaches. But, as Marilyn says of that, "What of it? I was behind in my rent at the Studio Club and Tom Kelly’s wife asked me whether I’d pose for Tom in the nude, and he’d pay me $50 for one hour’s work. Natalie said she’d be with me in the studio at the time, and she was, and I did it, and so what?"

Now, with Marilyn a top-bracket star, the calendar has been given nation wide publicity, but Fox has handled it sensibly by echoing Marilyn’s own sentiment. She did it, so what? Other girls, down on their luck and behind in their rent, have done a great deal worse, and Marilyn has wisely chosen to forget about it and hopes the public will, too.

But the calendar story and Marilyn’s well- known approval of her own beautiful body has caused the studio to be wary about her publicity. When one interviewer asked, "What kind of a bed do you sleep in, Marilyn? Twin or double?’. and Marilyn said innocently, "Why, a twin bed, but a wide twin bed," the publicity representative leaped forward to whisper, "Don’t say that, Marilyn. It will make people think things."

Through it all, Marilyn Monroe continues to be the rage of Hollywood, the girl who’s done more than any other woman there to provoke the rage of other women. Marilyn has one answer to all the shouting.

"Oh, well," she says, "I’d rather talk to men, anyway."

"Talk" hiss the women. "Monroe talk? Why, she’s too dumb to talk."

And you can take it from there.

That she is fascinated by her own form and face, there is no doubt. She can spend solid hours in front of a mirror, just plucking out an eyebrow, smoothing a line of lipstick – but mostly being entranced by the lovely reflection she finds staring back at her.

But all this is not the work of a monster ego. It’s something a lot simpler than that. It’s a childish delight at discovering, all over again, that the skinny little ugly duckling of the Los Angeles Orphanage days is really this beautiful young woman. "No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl," Marilyn recalls. " All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t."

So now Marilyn’s mirror, and the eyes of admiring men, and even her success reassure her. She is pretty; she is an actress; she does have a gorgeous figure. And so the skirts get tighter, the necklines lower and the female protests over this "vulgar" display louder. From the American Magazine

"Motion Picture and Television Magazine"

– July 1953 Written by Isabel Moore