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There’s an unsettling moment in Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, a new exhibition opening in Los Angeles this weekend, where some of the star’s last recorded words emanate from the gallery walls.
Her voice, gentle and unassuming, is taken from a restored audio recording of her final interview, published in Life magazine the day before she died.
“With fame, you can read about yourself and somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about you, for survival and living day to day with oneself,” Marilyn Monroe said in 1962. “I like people, but the public scares me.”
It’s a moment that encapsulates Monroe’s complex relationship to stardom and the tension between her public and private lives. And while the exhibition is packed with dramatic costumes and photography, it is the intimate items on display – letters, notes, personal effects – that leave the biggest impression.
The exhibition is one of several this year – including at the British Film Institute and National Portrait Gallery in London – to celebrate Monroe’s centenary, and curators worked together to ensure each was unique, says Sophia Serrano, who curated the Academy Museum event. This collection of outfits, belongings, documents and multimedia recordings is presented in the museum’s typically glossy style: an entrance hallway features a red carpet and huge video screen where Monroe blows the viewer kisses; her songs play overhead throughout the exhibition, and it’s decorated in red, with chandeliers and heart-shaped pillows – a nod to her performance of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend as well as studios “positioning her as America’s sweetheart”, says Serrano.
The pink dress she wore during that scene – which has rarely gone on public display, Serrano notes – has pride of place. Other items, including a dress from the film Love Happy as well as several letters and photos, have never been available for public viewing. Among the most memorable costumes are an elaborately sequined outfit with a big feathered tail from a charity appearance at Madison Square Garden, where Monroe rode in on an elephant and announced her new production company; on the other end of the spectrum are simple pyjamas from The Seven-Year Itch. The original white dress famously buffeted by the air over a subway grate in that film does not make an appearance, but there’s a replica by the same designer, William Travilla.
Hung on one wall is a pair of Monroe’s jeans, with a caption noting her role in popularizing women’s denim. They’re far less flashy than most of the outfits, but – along with a collection of her belongings, including a telephone, chair, marked-up scripts, a wine glass and address book – they offer a compelling look at Monroe’s private life. Particularly powerful are letters and notes written by and about Monroe. A pair of pages feature the actor’s free-associative musings: “I’m afraid to ever say anything about her for fear she will think I am trying to flatter her – thereby trying to trap her into liking me,” she has scribbled in a circled note about an unidentified person. Elsewhere, she writes: “I’m finding that sincerity is often taken for stupidity.” In a handwritten letter to the director John Huston, Monroe, who had an interest in psychoanalysis, declines a role in a film about Sigmund Freud, writing: “I have it on good authority that the Freud family does not approve of anyone making a picture of the life of Freud – so I wouldn’t want to be a part of it.”
There’s also an exchange of telegrams between the director Billy Wilder and Monroe’s then husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, in which Wilder criticizes Monroe’s behavior on set: “Her biggest problem is that she doesn’t understand anybody else’s problems.” Miller fires back: “Your jokes, Billy, are not quite hilarious enough to conceal the fact. You are an unjust man and a cruel one. My only solace is that despite you her beauty and humanity shine through as they always have.”
We see throughout the galleries how concerns about public image weighed on the actor; there are newspaper clippings she made of articles about herself and details of her collaborations with favored designers and photographers (one image has a large X painted over it after she rejected it as a potential Vogue cover; in another, after criticism of her fashion choices, she wears a potato sack dress). A reel of television appearances serves as a reminder of the shocking sexism she endured, as well as her sense of humor: when an off-screen interviewer asks whether she weighs the same as she did at a previous event, she says she’s the same, “but it’s a different suit”. Another voice asks: “You’re a happy girl now?” Her response: “Eh.”
Still, she was more than capable of portraying happiness, both on-screen and in life. “For hours she danced and sang and flirted – she did Marilyn Monroe,” the photographer Richard Avedon notes in a quote emblazoned on an exhibit wall. “And when the night was over ... she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone.”
Her own childhood was difficult, she says in the Life interview, but she found joy in imagination and play. “Then I heard somebody say, you know: ‘That’s acting.’ And I said: ‘That’s what I want to be!’” she says.
“But then you grow up and you find out,” she says with a dark laugh, “they make playing very difficult for you.”
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Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon runs from 31 May 2026 to 28 February 2027
