More than half a century after she died, Marilyn Monroe continues to fascinate.
This week photographs purporting to reveal that the actress was pregnant with a co-star’s child while married to playwright Arthur Miller have surfaced in the US.
It’s claimed the snaps, taken by an air hostess friend in 1960, show a baby bump. Monroe is said to have admitted privately that the father was Yves Montand, with whom she starred in Let’s Make Love.
The photographs, taken two years before Monroe’s death and originating from colour slides, were recently bought at auction in Los Angeles. However, it’s only now that the pregnancy claim has been made.
Its veracity is impossible to prove as all the main players are now dead. There’s no doubt that in the photographs there’s a defined roundness to her stomach, but Monroe was always renowned for her curves and fluctuating weight.
The buyer of the slides, Tony Michaels, reveals that the six images were the work of Frieda Hull, an air hostess for PanAm who became a confidante of the troubled actress. Hull, who died in 2014, is said to have kept Monroe’s pregnancy a secret.
Let’s Make Love was one of her final films and she met Montand, then relatively unknown, on set in 1959. During shooting Monroe and her husband took up residency in the Beverly Hills Hotel, while the Italian-French actor and his wife had an adjoining suite.
The on-screen romance between Monroe and Montand spilled over into real life and caused a scandal in the 1960s. The film company even exploited the Hollywood gossip to promote Let’s Make Love.
The actress, who made her name in comedies such as The Seven Year Itch and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, said at the time: “Next to my husband and along with Marlon Brando, I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I have ever met.”
Rather ungallantly Montand, who died aged 70 in 1991, later claimed that Monroe “threw herself” at him. He also said later of succumbing to Marilyn’s charms: “I was crazy about my wife, but what can you do?” His marriage to actress Simone Signoret survived the fling.
It’s claimed that Monroe subsequently suffered a miscarriage, while filming her next film The Misfits, and this contributed to a nervous breakdown. The emergence of the so-called “pregnancy slides” adds yet another tragic dimension to her life.
Monroe was one of the world’s most beautiful women but behind the s-x symbol image and dumb blonde roles, true happiness always seemed to elude her. Underpinning this was her burning desire to become a mother.
She was married three times and had a string of affairs, notably with US President John F Kennedy. There was also an onoff affair with actor Tony Curtis starting in the early 1950s. It was re-ignited on the set of Some Like It Hot, in 1958. In his memoirs Curtis claimed that Marilyn miscarried his child, also when she was married to Miller.
“I was stunned,” Curtis recalled of the moment he found out she was expecting. “I just stood there. The room was so silent I could hear the screeching of tyres on Santa Monica Boulevard.” Curtis said the baby could not have been Miller’s because by then Marilyn’s marriage to Miller was on the rocks and they were b-rely on speaking terms, let alone sharing a bed.
Throughout adulthood Monroe’s attempts to become a mother were played out in the public eye. There was a previous reported miscarriage in 1956. After losing the baby Monroe collapsed into the arms of a friend, telling him between sobs: “It was Arthur’s. He didn’t know. It was going to be a surprise. Then he would see that I could be a real wife, and a real mother.”
B-rely 12 months later Marilyn needed emergency surgery following an ectopic pregnancy. The actress was rushed from her holiday home on Long Island and wheeled into hospital with a blanket over her head to shield her from photographers. Leaving the hospital she bravely smiled for the cameras, but the loss of another baby pushed the fragile star over the edge.
She regularly battled depression and ended up dying from an overdose of barbiturates at the age of 36. It’s widely accepted that she committed suicide.
Shortly before her death Monroe spoke of the main cause of her heartache, stating: “What do I want more than anything in the world? I want a baby! I want to have children!”
Sadly, it was never to be but that hasn’t stopped a string of claims and hoaxes about Marilyn secretly having children. There were suggestions from her gynecologists' Dr Leon Krohn that she had a daughter in 1962.
Last year claims that a woman had gone to court in California trying to establish that she was the secret offspring of Marilyn and JFK proved to be a hoax involving a Marilyn lookalike. Previously, a middle-aged man emerged with a similar tale.
The “baby bump” slides were bought for a relative pittance of less than £2,000 and the added intrigue is sure to send their value soaring. If nothing else, this latest “was-she, wasn’t-she” debate proves that the legend of Marilyn Monroe will run for a long time yet.
