![]() ![]() “She smiled too high, that’s what was wrong, and it made deep lines around her nose. This was easily rectified, as Snively later recalled. This she turned into an asset.”Īs Marilyn would later explain: “When you walk, always think UP in front and DOWN in back.”Īnother “problem” was her smile, which the agency (and several magazine editors) felt made her nose look too long. Her walk is a result of that locking action every time she takes a step. “She’s double-jointed in the knees, so she can’t relax and that is why her hips seem to sway when she walks into a room. “When Marilyn walks, her knees lock,” Snively wrote. ![]() One problem was the way she walked, which went against everything a fashion model was trained to do. Miss Snively noted that Norma Jeane was wonderful when it came to learning techniques such as makeup, hand positions and body posture, but she had concerns over other aspects. Before she was famous, Marilyn took classes in presentation, grooming and co-ordination as part of a modelling course. “Do you think I could ever get my picture on a magazine cover?” “Those are the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen,” she muttered, almost to herself, before turning to Miss Snively. Norma Jean, then 19, was staring at the magazine covers and publicity photos gracing the walls. You wouldn’t necessarily wear a white dress to a modelling job, and it was as clean and white and ironed and shining as she was.” She noted in her file: “Norma Jeane had been brought to the hotel by photographer Potter Hueth, wearing a simple white dress and armed with her modelling portfolio, which offered no more than a few choice snaps. Miss Snively, who had seen every kind of girl the profession had to offer, did not think there was anything too out-of-the-ordinary about the girl standing in her office at the Ambassador Hotel. She was noticed by propaganda photographers in the factory and after the war went looking for a job at Blue Book. But her husband shipped off with the Merchant Marines, and she worked an exhausting shift at the local defence plant. Raised an orphan, she wed at 16 to escape a series of foster homes. Norma Jeane was married, bored - and beautiful. Marilyn Monroe was desperate for a better life, so reinvented herself. "When my looks start to go, so will most of my fans," she once said.Goodbye Norma Jean. But one thing about the actress is certain: She was intensely interested in her appearance. We will probably never know the whole truth about Monroe's cosmetic surgery. "Marilyn wanted Frank to do something about them, but he wouldn't." More accurately he couldn't, because it's almost impossible to remove free silicone after it's injected. Shortly before Monroe's death "her breasts were infected," Eckersley said, probably from liquid silicone injections. I learned of those in 1995 when I interviewed Rosemary Eckersley, a friend of Monroe's and the widow of Franklin Ashley, another legendary Hollywood surgeon, known for rejuvenating John Wayne. The chart being auctioned contains nothing about Monroe's alleged breast issues. But Leaf was curious: Would more modern tools find something different? Recently, he sent the film out for a second opinion, and this time radiologists found "a minute fracture of the tip of the nasal bone," he says-a condition that, even if detected, would not have required treatment. Second Opinion In 1962, the radiologists who reviewed Monroe's X-rays detected no break in her nose. Arthur Jensen, associate clinical professor of plastic surgery at UCLA, who discussed Monroe with Gurdin when he was writing a book, The Kennedy Assassination "Mike Gurdin told me he thought she was beaten up," says J. Insiders believed the fall was no accident, but rather the result of abuse by the psychiatrist. There was "swelling and tenderness," Gurdin wrote. The reason for the 1962 visit was an accidental fall, said Monroe, who feared she had broken her nose. It was like being invited to see the tooth of the Buddha. ![]() Once he found it, Leaf treated Monroe's chart like a sacred relic, showing it reverentially to a select few who would appreciate it. (Gurdin died in 1994 at age 83.) In his 2010 memoir, Are Those Real? True Tales of Plastic Surgery From Beverly Hills, Leaf wrote that "Gurdin had mentioned to me casually over the years that Marilyn had been a patient of his and that he had seen her shortly before she died."Ī Sacred Relic When Leaf eventually tired of paying storage fees for Gurdin's files (which, legally, don't have to be preserved after seven years), it was time to rescue Monroe's records before disposing of the others. For almost two decades, her X-rays have been kept under lock and key in the office of Norman Leaf, a Los Angeles plastic surgeon who inherited them on the retirement of Gurdin, his medical partner. Monroe died 51 years ago, and the right to medical privacy, not coincidentally, ends 50 years after a person's death. ![]()
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