Marilyn Monroe was Hollywood’s biggest star. In addition to her extensive film career and stormy life, she represented the stereotype of the “dumb blonde” for the macho society of the last century. But Marilyn was no bimbo. In fact, it is said that she had an IQ five points higher than that of Albert Einstein.
Unfortunately, the anecdote that places Marilyn with an IQ higher than that of the most important German physicist of the 20th century is probably false. The first time the world heard about it was around 2013 when the Internet spread the rumor that the actress had an IQ of 165. But there is no proof of that or that she had ever been tested to find out.
Part of the legend tells that, one day, Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein met, both at the peak of their careers. She would have told him that they could have a child with the actress’s beauty and the physicist’s intelligence, to which he replied that it would be a tragedy if it were born the other way around: with her intelligence and his beauty. That anecdote gives us a clue to the way Marilyn Monroe was perceived; a beautiful woman whose intelligence was constantly belittled.
The Marilyn Monroe we have known, the one who sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy, was a character. She went from being a brilliant businesswoman and a professional at her job to playing what the world knew her for (a lesson in never judging actors and actresses by the characters they play). But Marilyn, in fact, loved to read. She had a vast personal library of over 400 titles on art, philosophy, psychology, politics, poetry, theology, and history.
She herself wrote poetry. “Only parts of us will touch parts of others,” she wrote in one of her notebooks. “Our own truth is just that, our own truth. We can only share the part that is understood by the conscious acceptance of the other, so we are, most of the time, alone. As it must be, evidently, in nature.”
Sarah Churchwell, an expert on the life of Marilyn Monroe, says the biggest myth about her is that she was “dumb.” “The second is that she was “fragile.” The third is that she “couldn’t act.” But she was very far from dumb; although she had no formal education, she was very sensitive to that. She was very smart, indeed, and very strong. She had to be both to beat the Hollywood system in the 1950s. The head of Fox Studios was incredibly dismissive of her, and “she fought tooth and nail and won, in real terms.”
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
