Marilyn Monroe: The Loyalty Tests of Hollywood's Most Guarded Heart

"I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else."

Amy Greene was walking down a New York street with her friend. Nobody looked twice. The woman beside her was makeup-free, hair tucked under a scarf, invisible. Then she turned and asked: "Do you want to see me become her?" Something shifted — posture, energy, the way light seemed to find her face. Cars slowed. Heads turned. A crowd materialized from nowhere. Same woman. Same street. Same clothes. She had simply turned Marilyn Monroe on.

The fact that she could switch it on and off is the single most important thing to understand about her. A woman who is her image can't take it off. A woman who wears her image as armor can. And when she takes it off, you have to ask: what is she protecting underneath?

That question — what was Norma Jeane protecting, and did she ever find anyone safe enough to stop — is the thread that runs through every relationship, every performance, every act of rebellion in Marilyn Monroe's life. She tested everyone. The protector, the intellectual, the acting teacher, the psychiatrist. Each one an experiment in the same impossible question: Can I trust you with the person behind the persona?

TL;DR: Why Marilyn Monroe is an Enneagram Type 6

• The persona was armor, not identity: She referred to "Marilyn" in the third person and could switch the character on and off at will — the opposite of someone who IS their image.
• Every relationship was a loyalty test: DiMaggio, Miller, the Strasbergs — each one structured around the question: will you stay when you see the real me?
• Counterphobic courage: She was crippled by stage fright yet became the biggest movie star alive. She challenged the studio system and won. The fear didn't stop her — it drove her.
• Knowledge as armor: A 430-book library, James Joyce on her lunch breaks, discussions of Rudolf Steiner with Edith Sitwell. She armed herself against a world she didn't trust.

The Girl Who Belonged to Nobody

Born to Gladys Baker on June 1, 1926, Norma Jeane's instability began at two weeks old when her mother — suffering post-natal depression — placed her with foster parents. The Bolenders wanted to adopt her. Gladys refused.

When Norma Jeane was seven, Gladys finally brought her daughter home. Months later, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized. What followed: eleven foster homes and an orphanage before she turned sixteen.

Several of the foster homes were actively dangerous. She was sexually abused in at least three placements. The stutter began around age eight — after a boarder molested her and she tried to tell someone what happened. The words wouldn't come.

Mental illness ran through the family like a fault line. Both maternal grandparents spent their final years in institutions. An uncle was institutionalized. The fear that she might inherit it haunted her for the rest of her life. She wrote in her diary: "As I grew older I knew I was different from other children because there were no kisses or promises in my life. I often felt lonely and wanted to die."

When brought to the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society, she cried out: "Please, please don't make me go inside. I'm not an orphan, my mother's not dead. I'm not an orphan. It's just that she's sick in the hospital and can't take care of me."

Years later, visiting her mother at a clinic-supervised boarding house, Gladys had nothing to say during the entire visit. As her daughter was leaving, she murmured: "You used to have such tiny little feet."

---

At fifteen, the family Norma Jeane lived with had to move out of state. California law prevented them from taking her. Rather than return to the orphanage, her guardian arranged a marriage to 21-year-old neighbor James Dougherty. They married days after her sixteenth birthday.

Dougherty later said: "Norma Jeane needed someone to be a father, mother, brother and husband to her — and all at different times." He also said: "I never knew Marilyn Monroe, and I don't claim to have any insights to her to this day. I knew and loved Norma Jeane."

She described the marriage differently: "My husband and I hardly spoke to each other... We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom."

The first loyalty test. She needed safety. She got silence. She left.

The Voice That Came From Nowhere

The stutter that began in childhood never fully disappeared. A speech therapist taught her to slow down, to breathe before speaking, to let the words arrive in a lower, breathy register. Drama coach Natasha Lytess refined the technique further — teaching her to move her lips before the sound came, creating a half-second delay that audiences read as seduction.

Nobody knew it was a scar.

The voice that launched a thousand fantasies was a trauma response, dressed up and sent to work. And it held — through Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, through Some Like It Hot, through the "Happy Birthday Mr. President" performance that stopped a room of politicians mid-breath.

Until it didn't. During the filming of Something's Got to Give in 1962, the stutter came back. The childhood wound breaking through the adult surface, as if to say: this was always underneath.

What is Marilyn Monroe's personality type?

Marilyn Monroe is an Enneagram Type 6

The easy misread is Type 3 — The Achiever. The persona construction, the ambition, the business savvy, the relentless reinvention from factory girl to film icon. It looks like image-management. It looks like someone whose identity IS the performance.

But Marilyn never identified with the performance.

"I never wanted to be Marilyn — it just happened. Marilyn's like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane."

"The truth is I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me... They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't."

"People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one."

A Type 3 builds an image and disappears behind it — the image becomes the self. Monroe always knew exactly where Norma Jeane ended and Marilyn began. The persona wasn't identity. It was a weapon. A shield. The counterphobic Six charging directly at the thing that terrified her — being seen, being consumed, being wanted for the wrong reasons — and turning it into something she controlled.

Enneagram Sixes are defined by their relationship with trust. They scan for threats. They test loyalty. They seek authority figures who can provide safety — then question whether those figures deserve the trust they've been given. They oscillate between clinging and rebelling, between seeking protection and demanding independence.

Monroe's entire life was this oscillation. She married the protector, then left him for intellectual freedom. She married the intellectual, then discovered he judged her privately. She adopted the Strasbergs as family, then left them everything when she died. She challenged the studio system head-on — then needed Paula Strasberg standing behind the director on every take, offering reassurance with a nod.

Billy Wilder, who directed her in two films, captured the paradox: "She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She also loved the camera... there was always that thing that comes through."

Lee Strasberg — whose students included Brando, De Niro, Pacino, and Fonda — said she was one of the two greatest acting talents he ever worked with. The other was Brando.

The anxiety didn't limit her. It was the engine.

Four Loyalty Tests

DiMaggio: The Protector

When she met retired baseball legend Joe DiMaggio in 1952, she expected "a flashy New York sports type." Instead she found "this reserved guy who didn't make a pass at me right away." For someone conditioned to expect exploitation, his restraint was the most attractive thing about him.

They married in January 1954. It lasted 274 days.

The subway grate scene for The Seven Year Itch was the breaking point. Wilder recalled DiMaggio watching the filming with "the look of death." A screaming fight that night. Bruises the next morning. She filed for divorce citing mental cruelty.

He failed that test during the marriage. But he passed the one that came after.

When Monroe was locked in Payne Whitney in 1961 — cement-block cell, bars on windows, screaming patients — it was DiMaggio who flew to New York and reportedly told the doctors: "If you don't give her to me, I will take this place apart, piece of wood by piece of wood."

He secured her release. He took her to Florida to recover. After her death, he claimed her body, arranged the funeral, and banned Hollywood from attending. For twenty years, he sent six red roses to her crypt three times a week. He never remarried.

His friend Brad Dexter said: "He was still in love with her, but also out of a great sense of guilt. Because I think he helped contribute to her demise."

Miller: The Intellectual

Arthur Miller represented a different kind of security — proof that she was more than a body. Monroe wrote of him: "He is the only person — as another human being — that I trust as much as myself."

When they met, he told her: "You're the saddest girl I've ever met." She replied: "You're the only one who ever said that to me."

The marriage coincided with her most ambitious period: founding her production company, studying at the Actors Studio, fighting for serious roles. Miller said she had "more courage, more intimate decency, more sensitivity and love for humanity than anyone I ever knew in my life."

Then she found his notebook.

While in London filming The Prince and the Showgirl, Monroe stumbled upon Miller's open diary. He'd written he was disappointed in her. Embarrassed by her in front of his intellectual friends. His first wife had let him down, but she had done something worse. And: "The only one I will ever love is my daughter."

She told Lee Strasberg what she'd read. She wrote in her own diary that Miller was "a peaceful monster." The marriage limped on for three more years, but the wound never closed.

Later, Miller would reflect with bleak honesty: "She was destroyed by many things and some of those things are you... Destroying you now. Now as you stand there weeping and gawking, glad that it is not you going into the earth, glad that it is this lovely girl who you at last killed."

The test was: Do you see me as a mind, or as a disappointment attached to a body? He saw both. She couldn't live with half.

The Strasbergs: Chosen Family

Lee Strasberg's son John met Monroe at the family home. She arrived with "no makeup, and she really looked at me as if she saw me." He found her "instinctively smart, nobody's fool" with a sensuality that was "totally innocent, nothing dirty in it at all."

She spent late nights at the Strasberg home, never wanting to leave. She received private acting lessons because she was too shy for the class. Paula Strasberg became her 24-hour on-set coach — helping with acting, sleeping problems, and medication. On set, Monroe would look past the director to Paula for approval.

She gave John her Ford Thunderbird for his eighteenth birthday. He later said: "There were so few, so very few people who were generous like that. Especially to me, who couldn't do anything for her." He credited: "I think that car saved my life."

When she died, she left the Strasbergs the bulk of her estate. Lee gave the eulogy. He said she possessed "startling sensitivity" that "remained fresh and undimmed" — and described her as "a warm human being, impulsive and shy, sensitive and in fear of rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfillment."

They passed the test. The only ones who did by outliving her.

430 Books and a Playground in Long Island

Photographer Eve Arnold found Monroe sitting on a playground bench in Long Island in 1955, reading James Joyce's Ulysses between takes. Arnold later explained: "She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going."

Critics dismissed the photo as staged. Arnold corrected them firmly. Monroe had been reading Joyce for a while.

Her personal library — auctioned by Christie's in 1999 — contained over 430 books: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kerouac's On the Road (first edition), Camus's The Fall, Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, works on poetry, theology, history, and psychology. She read between takes, late into the night, and annotated the margins.

She explained: "On nights when I've got nothing else to do I go to the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. And I just open books at random, or when I come to a page or a paragraph I like, I buy that book."

The poet Edith Sitwell met Monroe in Hollywood and expected nothing. Instead she found someone "very quiet, and had great natural dignity... and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive." They discussed Rudolf Steiner. Sitwell described Monroe's face in repose as "strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost."

Her private writing life — poetry, intimate notes, letters — was published posthumously as Fragments. One passage: "Only parts of us will ever touch parts of others — one's own truth is just that really — one's own truth. We can only share the part that is within another's knowing acceptable so one is for most part alone."

Another: "Alone!!!!! I am alone — I am always alone no matter what."

The Shrewd Businesswoman

In 1954, Fox was paying Monroe $1,500 a week. Jane Russell made $200,000 for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, despite Monroe being the bigger draw.

She didn't complain. She started a company.

Marilyn Monroe Productions: herself as president (51%), photographer Milton Greene as vice president (49%). Time called her a "shrewd businesswoman." The Los Angeles Mirror called it "one of the greatest single triumphs ever won by an actress."

Fox suspended her. Darryl F. Zanuck threatened her personally. She held firm for over a year.

On New Year's Eve 1955, Fox submitted. New contract: $100,000 per film plus approval over directors and cinematographers.

What followed: Bus Stop (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959, Golden Globe winner), The Misfits (1961). The woman who had trouble getting words past a childhood stutter now commanded the highest salary in Hollywood and chose which directors could film her.

She was crippled by stage fright on every single set. Don Murray, her Bus Stop co-star, recalled: "She was very, very nervous. She'd break out in a rash every time we'd shoot a scene." The famous "It's me, Sugar" line in Some Like It Hot took 47 takes.

But she showed up. Again and again, terrified and present. Wilder captured it with reluctant admiration: "My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?"

Cell Block, Cement, Glass

In February 1961 — weeks after her divorce from Miller — Monroe's psychiatrist Dr. Marianne Kris committed her to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic under the pretense of a "rest cure."

She was placed in a locked ward for severely disturbed patients. Cement-block walls. Bars concealed on windows. Doors with observation windows so patients were visible at all times. Screaming from other rooms.

She wrote to Dr. Ralph Greenson: "There was no empathy at Payne-Whitney — it had a very bad effect. They asked me after putting me in a 'cell' (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed depressed patients — I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't committed."

She picked up a chair and slammed it through the glass. When staff rushed in, she told them she would harm herself if they didn't release her — "the furthest thing from my mind at that moment since you know Dr. Greenson I'm an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself. I'm just that vain."

Even trapped in a psychiatric ward, she was strategic. She invoked her craft as a weapon, compared her depression to asking DiMaggio if he could hit when he was sad, and referenced a scene from one of her own films: "I got the idea from a movie I made once called Don't Bother to Knock."

She wrote to the Strasbergs: "Please help me Lee, this is the last place I should be."

DiMaggio came. He always came.

The One Who Couldn't Pass

By 1962, her final psychiatrist — Dr. Ralph Greenson — had crossed every professional boundary. Monroe was dining with the Greenson family three or four times a week, calling at all hours, staying overnight, having sessions that stretched to five hours. He had made himself her doctor, her advisor, her father figure, her anchor.

Colleagues questioned his "complete disregard for an ethical and prudent treatment strategy." But this was Monroe's pattern: finding someone, testing whether they would stay, then pulling them deeper and deeper to see if they would abandon her like everyone else had.

She wrote to him: "I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me — and that I've made of myself — as a sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's and I can't live up to it."

On August 5, 1962, she was found dead in her Los Angeles home. Acute barbiturate poisoning. She was 36.

Her final interview — given to Richard Meryman of Life magazine two days before she died — ended with a request that sounds less like vanity and more like a last will: "Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one. I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity."

---

She could turn Marilyn Monroe on and off like a light switch. She could fill a room just by deciding to. And then she could walk down the same street invisible, a woman in a scarf that nobody recognized.

The persona was never the problem. The problem was that she built the most magnetic armor in history and then spent her whole life looking for someone she could take it off around. DiMaggio came closest — but only after the marriage was over, when the tests had stopped and all that was left was roses delivered to a crypt three times a week for twenty years. The loyalty she spent her life searching for arrived, finally, in a form she couldn't feel.

Disclaimer: This analysis of Marilyn Monroe's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect Marilyn Monroe's actual personality type.