Hollywood made Marilyn Monroe a star, but it was also sucking her dry.

At 28, she felt overworked, underpaid and underestimated. Dragged into one dumb-blonde movie after another, she popped pills to sleep and choked down ground liver for energy. Not even Joe DiMaggio could save her: Nine months after she and the Yankees legend were married, they separated.

And so, one November night in 1954, she donned a black wig, boarded a plane as “Zelda Zonk,” and escaped — to New York.

For the next 14 months, she meandered through the Met, jogged through Central Park, and waded into the waters off Fire Island. Many nights, she lit up the Copa with Frank Sinatra, kicked up her heels at El Morocco and cozied up to DiMaggio again, at Toots Shor’s.

Those months, warmly recalled in Elizabeth Winder’s “Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy” (Flatiron Books, out March 14), may have been the happiest of her life.

“New York meant freedom to her,” Winder writes. “Freedom from straitjackets such as ‘starlet’ and ‘sex symbol’ and ‘slut.’ ”

The man who flew to New York with Monroe that night was photographer Milton Greene. He saw her as something more than cheesecake — as a layered and vulnerable woman who deserved to make the kinds of movies she wanted. And he put his money where his mouth was, mortgaging his house to launch Marilyn Monroe Productions.

The two had been lovers very briefly, “for a weekend,” Winder told The Post. “But by the time they got to New York, that was all past, and they were just friends.”

By then, Greene was married — to a supportive and no doubt very secure woman, Amy, who invited the blond bombshell into their Connecticut home. It was there Monroe stayed until she felt secure enough to find her own place. In January 1955, she moved into the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street, then later into the Waldorf-Astoria. No matter where she lived, a group of giddy teenagers who called themselves the Monroe Six found her, and she happily posed for their Brownie cameras. They weren’t the only ones thrilled to see her: One cabbie, spotting her on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street, hit a truck.

Redbook magazine did a feature for which it posed the Hollywood star in the subway at Grand Central Station. “She looked like your average city girl,” Winder writes, “waiting for the IRT, clutching her copy of The Post.”

Fun and games aside, Monroe came to New York to study acting. Her chatty pal Truman Capote introduced her to Constance Collier, the lesbian thespian who had coached Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn. Monroe studied with her before gravitating to Lee Strasberg.

By 1955, his Actors Studio was a Who’s Who of the greats: Marlon Brando, Ben Gazzara, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Kim Stanley. The women gave Marilyn a cool reception, while some of the men were downright intimidated.

Lou Gossett Jr., the future tough guy of “An Officer and a Gentleman,” was undone by the Lifebuoy-soap aroma that Monroe trailed, as if she’d just stepped out of a shower. “I’ve never been affected so much by a woman in all my life,” he said.

Brando dated her a few times, but it wasn’t serious.

As far as Strasberg was concerned, Monroe was a diamond in the rough, his to mold and nurture. He and his wife, Paula, welcomed her into their home, relegating their teenagers, Johnny and Susie, to the couch when she stayed over.

Johnny “was the only boy in America not happy to have Marilyn Monroe sleeping in his bed,” recalled Susie Strasberg, who was 16 that year and soon to star in Broadway’s “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Yet Monroe treated her like an equal. They exchanged makeup tips and once acted out parts of the “Kama Sutra” together, keeping their skirts on. For a change, Strasberg recalled, Marilyn played the man.

That summer she stayed at the family’s Fire Island cottage, beachcombing and grilling hot dogs. Her native California seemed ever farther away.

“If I close my eyes and picture LA,” she said, “all I see is one big varicose vein.”

Still, sleep eluded her, even after a breezy day on Ocean Beach. Susie Strasberg, whose room she shared, would wake in the middle of the night to find Marilyn staring out a window, or sobbing in Lee’s arms.

By then, another man had entered her life: Arthur Miller, whom she had met on a movie set five years before. Now that Monroe was in New York, they started dating, albeit quietly. Miller was married, but that didn’t stop him from buying her a bicycle she could ride down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island.

Monroe’s friends weren’t happy. They found Miller aloof. “Would Arthur get drunk and put a barrette on Sammy Davis Jr.’s dog?” Winder writes. “No, he wouldn’t.”

Hollywood was jealous, too: It wanted its box-office draw back. At last, it offered Monroe a serious role, in “Bus Stop,” and the chance, in “The Prince and the Showgirl,” to star with Laurence Olivier.

Before returning to LA, Monroe told The Post’s Earl Wilson that she hoped to buy a place here one day, “in the 60s . . . or 70s . . . or 80s.” But when she did return, two years later, it was as Miller’s wife — isolated, depressed, cut off from the Greenes and ignored by the playwright, who holed up in his study.

By 1961, she and Miller were divorced. One year later, she was found dead in bed in LA, alone, clutching a phone. She was 36.

Winder can’t help but believe that Monroe’s story might have had a happier ending.

“If she’d bought her own place, kept up her friendship with Milton Greene and their production company, I think Marilyn’s life would have been very different,” Winder told The Post. “Longer and happier, and full of artistic triumphs and friendships and success.”

“It wouldn’t have been a tragedy,” she said.