‘Blonde’ True Story: How Accurate Is the Netflix Marilyn Monroe Movie?

Blonde on Netflix—which opened in theaters earlier this month, and began streaming today—is a movie that hopes to build on, play with, and counteract the public perception of the real Marilyn Monroe. As one of the most famous movie stars in Hollywood history, it’s almost certain that Blonde viewers will have their own ideas about the actress going in.

But it’s important to note that Blonde is not a traditional biopic. Instead, like the book by Joyce Carol Oates that it is based on, it’s a fictional story inspired by Monroe’s life. While many of the details in Blonde are pulled from Monroe’s real life—like the meticulously accurate wardrobe you’ll see Ana de Armas wear in her portrayal of the star—just as many details are imagined.

In an interview for the Blonde press notes, writer/director Andrew Dominik said, “Blonde is a work of fiction. It’s not a work of biography. I would never claim that it is. Joyce wrote a book that essentially dramatized how she felt about Marilyn Monroe.” He added, “I think that Marilyn Monroe, the figure, is meaningful to Joyce in an emotional way, in terms of what she represents about the experience of being female. I think that’s very much what the book is concerned with, that may not be accurate, but it’s meaningful. It certainly spoke to me.”

Read on to learn more about the Blonde true story.

IS BLONDE BASED ON A TRUE STORY?

Yes and no. Yes, Blonde is based on a true story in the sense that it centers on the life of Marilyn Monroe, who very much was a real cultural icon. No, in the sense that Blonde is an adaptation of the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates book of the same name, which was a fictional version of Monroe’s life. This is not the same as a documentary or even a traditional biopic like Bohemian Rhapsody. Rather, it’s a sort of celebrity fan-fiction, and not every detail in the movie should be taken as fact.

HOW ACCURATE IS BLONDE TO THE TRUE STORY?

Many of the details in both Blonde the novel and the movie are real. Monroe, who was born Norma Jeane, really did spend a portion of her childhood in Los Angeles with her mother, who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Norma did become a ward of the state after her mother suffered from a mental breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she would spend the rest of her life, more or less estranged from her daughter. And, of course, she famously was married to both New York Yankee star baseball player Joe DiMaggio and acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller. Though neither are referred to by name in the novel, the Netflix movie opted to use real names.

Many of the images and outfits Marilyn wears in the film are based on real, famous photographs of the actor, which Dominik took great pains to recreate on screen—including changing the film’s aspect ratio, and filming those scenes either in black and white or in color, depending on what the original photograph looked like. “You’re dealing with familiar imagery—literally photographs that you’ve seen before—but you’re changing the meaning of those images according to how she feels,” Dominik told Decider. “A shot like her and DiMaggio on the window, which we think of as a romantic image, becomes, from her point of view, an image where her sensitivity is being snuffed out by him.”

Blonde. L to R: Director Andrew Dominik, Boom operator Ben Greaves, Bobby Cannavale as The Ex Athlete, and Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe.
Photo: Matt Kennedy/NETFLIX

That said, many of the details are imagined. The scene where Norma Jeane’s mother tries to drown her daughter in the bathtub, for example, comes only from the notion that her real-life mother had a “breakdown.” The idea that Marilyn Monroe had a threesome/polyamorous relationship with Charles “Cass” Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr.—also from the book, though, again, real names were not used in the novel—is almost entirely imagined. (Robinson Jr. was a friend of Monroe’s, and it was rumored they may have had a sexual relationship.) Monroe biographer Donald Spoto reported that the star had more than one miscarriage, and Monroe’s friend Amy Greene claimed she had an abortion, but these things were never discussed in public at the time, so it’s impossible to verify. Finally, the throughline of Monroe receiving hand-written letters from “her tearful father,” was invented purely for the fictional novel. 

HOW MUCH WAS MARILYN MONROE PAID FOR GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES?

One true detail that Blonde the movie includes is the fact that Marilyn Monroe was paid far less than her co-star Jane Russell in one of her most famous films, 1953’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes. It was the film that launched her to super-stardom, and perhaps the one she is best remembered for, and yet you wouldn’t know it from her salary.

In Blonde, this is revealed via an angry phone call that Ana de Armas’s Blonde has with her manager, in which she is told she’ll be paid her contract rate, $500 a week, or about $5,000 total, while Jane Russell—who at the time, was a much bigger star—would make a total of $100,000. “I’ll get about $5,000 and Jane Russell gets $100,000? And I’m playing the blonde in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?” she exclaims in the movie.

This is an approximation of a famous Marilyn Monroe quote, from one of her last-ever interviews, given to Richard Meryman, and published in Life magazine on August 17, 1962. (Today you can read an edited version of the interview via The Guardian.) Monroe was quoted in the interview saying:

I remember when I got the part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane Russell – she was the brunette in it and I was the blonde. She got $200,000 for it, and I got my $500 a week, but that to me was, you know, considerable. She, by the way, was quite wonderful to me. The only thing was I couldn’t get a dressing room. Finally, I really got to this kind of level and I said, “Look, after all, I am the blonde, and it is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!” Because still they always kept saying, “Remember, you’re not a star.” I said, “Well, whatever I am, I am the blonde!”

(Though Monroe claimed Russell got $200,000, other sources estimate Russell’s salary was between 100,000 and 200,000, so perhaps Blonde was erring on the side of caution.) So, while not everything in Blonde is true, that tidbit definitely is. With a paycheck like that, can you blame a girl for craving diamonds?