Marilyn Monroe
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, Marilyn Monroe grew to be one of the most iconic figures of the 20th centuries. She was an actress, model and sex symbol. She married playwrights and had an affair with a President and was just as well known for her personal life as she was for her movie work. However, was there a hidden side to Monroe? In the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI worked tirelessly to try and find out. Despite her public persona as the ultimate All-American Girl, J. Edgar Hoover suspected that the Blonde Bombshell may have had communist sympathies.
The detailed dossier the FBI compiled on Monroe makes for fascinating reading. Above all, it shows just how paranoid and suspicious American society was at the time of the McCarthy trials. Not only did many in positions of authority believed that there were ‘reds under the bed’, they sincerely thought that many stars of stage and screen, Monroe among them, were actively working to undermine American values through culture.
For the most part, it’s simple guilt by association. While her involvement with the Kennedys, both the President and his brother Bobby, was flagged up as a possible security risk, it was her closeness to certain known lefists that really got the FBI’s attention. Most notably, the files state that Monroe had a “mutual infatuation” with Frederick Vanderbilt Field. He had exiled himself from the US for political reasons, living in Mexico and open about his socialist views, and so, when the actress met up with him while shopping for furniture in Central America, the Agency’s agents became very suspicious indeed. Similarly, her marriage to Arthur Miller, a known socialist sympathiser, was seen as proof that she had, in the words of one page of the FBI file, “drifted into the Communist orbit”, with some even believing the whole wedding was a sham and smokescreen.
Ultimately, despite all their suspicions, the FBI found no definitive proof that Monroe was indeed a communist. As one file entry of 1962 stated, she held views that were “positively and concisely leftist”. However, if she was “being used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.” The FBI files on Monroe were released under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1980s and have since been made available for anyone to read on the Agency’s own website.