Tragic Fame!

Marilyn Monroe’s Desperate Years On The Hollywood Casting Couch

Doomed starlet declared: 'Singers, actresses, prostitutes. What's the difference?'

Marilyn Monroe once dismissed Hollywood as where “they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and 50 cents for your soul” — with the screen legend speaking from experience! The former Norma Jean Baker started to become a major star in 1950 with turns in “The Asphalt Jungle” and “All About Eve.” Before that, though, she’d struggled to make it in Hollywood. And in the scandalous early days of showbiz, long before the #MeToo movement could expose Hollywood’s worst sexual predators, Marilyn found herself expected to sleep her way onto the silver screen. Tragically, today it’s commonly accepted that fellow stars like Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Jane Russell and Bette Davis all had to compromise their virtue to get their start in showbiz. But while Marilyn would ultimately have her heart broken by the film industry, she spent years trying to dismiss being victimized by studio predators. The doomed star even insisted to writer Jaik Rosenstein: “It wasn’t any big dramatic tragedy!”