David Lynch was intrigued by making a movie based on an adaptation of Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, a biography that focuses on the her final days.
“You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe, and that Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too. Everything is about Marilyn Monroe,” Lynch revealed in his book Room to Dream.
Marilyn in Niagara, 1952
Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles to absent father and a mother who worked as a film cutter, glueing together black-and-white celluloid. Norma
Jeane was eight years old when her mother was institutionalized, and she moved between orphanages and foster families during childhood and her teens, when it is believed she was sexually abused.
At 16, her foster family moved to a different state, and she would have returned to an orphanage had she not married high school friend and neighbor.
In rare outings, Norma Jeane ventured into film theaters. On the silver screen, she found an opportunity to be loved—and a father figure in Clark Gable, who looked like the man she believed to be her father.
After filing for divorce to work as a model, Norma Jeanne dyed her hair blonde, like her hero Jean Harlow, and became Marilyn Monroe, the world’s greatest movie star, and actor who aspired to play Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka in unrealized adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov.
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn never lived on Mulholland Drive; the only home she ever owned was where she died in 1962—the same year she bought it.
Marilyn Monroe in the mirror with Marilyn Monroe
