Marilyn Monroe--Blonde Bombshell

 

Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress, singer, and model. Famous for playing comedic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2021) by the time of her death in 1962.^[3] Long after her death, Monroe remains a major icon of pop culture.^[4] In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her sixth on their list of the greatest female screen legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage; she married at age sixteen. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career, which led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. After a series of minor film roles, she signed a new contract with Fox in late 1950. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including As Young as You Feel and Monkey Business, and in the dramas Clash by Night and Don't Bother to Knock. She faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photographs prior to becoming a star, but the story did not damage her career and instead resulted in increased interest in her films.

By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars; she had leading roles in the film noir Niagara, which overtly relied on her sex appeal, and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, which established her star image as a "dumb blonde". The same year, her nude images were used as the centerfold and on the cover of the first issue of Playboy. She played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, but she was disappointed when she was typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in The Seven Year Itch (1955), one of the biggest box office successes of her career.

When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe's contract, she founded her own film production company in 1954. She dedicated 1955 to building the company and began studying method acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Later that year, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in Bus Stop (1956) and her first independent production in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in Some Like It Hot (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama The Misfits (1961).

Monroe's troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with addiction and mood disorders. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicized, but ended in divorce. On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her Los Angeles home. Her death was ruled a probable suicide. 

Monroe was born as Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, at the Los Angeles County Hospital in Los Angeles, California.^[5] Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker (née Monroe), was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico,^[6] to a poor Midwestern family who had migrated to California at the turn of the century.^[7] At the age of 15, Gladys married John Newton Baker, an abusive man nine years her senior. They had two children, named Robert (1917–1933)^[8] and Berniece (1919–2014).^[9] She successfully filed for divorce and sole custody in 1923, but Baker kidnapped the children soon after and moved with them to his native Kentucky.^[10]

Monroe was not told that she had a sister until she was 12, and they met for the first time when Monroe was 17 or 18.^[11] Following the divorce, Gladys worked as a film negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries.^[12] In 1924, she married Martin Edward Mortensen, but they separated just months later and divorced in 1928.^[12][b] In 2022, DNA testing indicated that Monroe's father was Charles Stanley Gifford,^[16] Gladys’ co-worker with whom she had an affair in 1925.^[15]

Although Gladys was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, Monroe's early childhood was stable and happy.^[17] Gladys placed her daughter with evangelical Christian foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in the rural town of Hawthorne. She also lived there for the first six months, until she was forced to move back to the city for employment.^[18] She then began visiting her daughter on weekends.^[17] In the summer of 1933, Gladys bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved seven-year-old Monroe in with her.^[19]

They shared the house with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie.^[20] In January 1934, Gladys had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.^[21] After several months in a rest home, she was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital.^[22] She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals and was rarely in contact with Monroe.^[23] Monroe became a ward of the state, and her mother's friend, Grace Goddard, took responsibility over her and her mother's affairs.^[24]

Monroe with her first husband, James Dougherty, c. 1943–44. They married when she was 16 years old.

In the next four years, Monroe's living situation changed often. For the first 16 months, she continued living with the Atkinsons, and may have been sexually abused during this time.^[25][c] Always a shy girl, she now also developed a stutter and became withdrawn.^[31] In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Grace and her husband Erwin "Doc" Goddard and two other families.^[32] In September 1935, Grace placed her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home.^[33] The orphanage was "a model institution" and was described in positive terms by her peers, but Monroe felt abandoned.^[34]

Encouraged by the orphanage staff who thought that Monroe would be happier living in a family, Grace became her legal guardian in 1936, but did not take her out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937.^[35] Monroe's second stay with the Goddards lasted only a few months because Doc molested her.^[36] She then lived brief periods with her relatives and Grace's friends and relatives in Los Angeles and Compton.^[37]

It was Monroe's childhood experiences that first made her want to become an actor: "I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim ... When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be ... Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it."^[38]

Monroe found a more permanent home in September 1938, when she began living with Grace's aunt, Ana Lower, in the west side district of Sawtelle.^[39] She was enrolled at Emerson Junior High School and went to weekly Christian Science services with Lower.^[40] Monroe was otherwise a mediocre student, but excelled in writing and contributed to the school newspaper.^[41] Due to the elderly Lower's health problems, Monroe returned to live with the Goddards in Van Nuys in around early 1941.^[42]

The same year, she began attending Van Nuys High School.^[43] In 1942, the company that employed Doc Goddard relocated him to West Virginia.^[44] California child protection laws prevented the Goddards from taking Monroe out of state, and she faced having to return to the orphanage.^[45] As a solution, she married their neighbors' 21-year-old son, factory worker James Dougherty, on June 19, 1942, just after her 16th birthday.^[46]

Monroe subsequently dropped out of high school and became a housewife. She found herself and Dougherty mismatched and later stated that she was "dying of boredom" during the marriage.^[47] In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was stationed on Santa Catalina Island, where Monroe moved with him.

 

President Harry S. Truman--Give 'em Hell, Harry!

 

Harry S. Truman^[b] (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 34th vice president from January to April 1945 under Franklin Roosevelt and as a United States Senator from Missouri from 1935 to January 1945. Having assumed the presidency after Roosevelt's death, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the Conservative Coalition which dominated the Congress.

Truman grew up in Independence, Missouri, and during the First World War fought in France as a captain in the Field Artillery. Returning home, he opened a haberdashery in Kansas City, Missouri, and was elected as a judge of Jackson County in 1922. Truman was elected to the United States Senate from Missouri in 1934. In 1940–1944 he gained national prominence as chairman of the Truman Committee, which was aimed at reducing waste and inefficiency in wartime contracts. Only after assuming the presidency was he informed about the atomic bomb. Truman authorized the first and only use of nuclear weapons in war against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Truman's administration engaged in an internationalist foreign policy by working closely with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Truman staunchly denounced isolationism. He energized the New Deal coalition during the 1948 presidential election and won a surprise victory against Republican Thomas E. Dewey that secured his own presidential term.

Truman presided over the onset of the Cold War in 1947. He oversaw the Berlin Airlift and Marshall Plan in 1948. With the involvement of the US in the Korean War of 1950–1953, South Korea repelled the invasion by North Korea. Domestically, the postwar economic challenges such as strikes and inflation created a mixed reaction over the effectiveness of his administration. In 1948, he proposed Congress pass comprehensive civil rights legislation. Congress refused, so in 1948 Truman issued Executive Order 9980 and Executive Order 9981 which desegregated the armed forces and federal agencies.

Corruption in the Truman administration became a central campaign issue in the 1952 presidential election. He was eligible for reelection in 1952, but with weak polls he decided not to run. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower attacked Truman's record and won easily. Truman went into a retirement marked by the founding of his presidential library and the publication of his memoirs. It was long thought that his retirement years were financially difficult for Truman, resulting in Congress establishing a pension for former presidents, but evidence eventually emerged that he amassed considerable wealth, some of it while still president. When he left office, Truman's administration was heavily criticized, though critical reassessment of his presidency has improved his reputation among historians and the general population.

 

 

Agatha Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE--Best Selling Fiction Writer of All Time

 

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.

Christie was born into a wealthy upper middle class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons that featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on digs in the Middle East and used her first-hand knowledge of this profession in her fiction.

According to UNESCO's Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author. Her novel And Then There Were None is one of the top-selling books of all time, with approximately 100 million copies sold. Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for the longest initial run. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End on 25 November 1952, and by September 2018 there had been more than 27,500 performances. The play was temporarily closed in March 2020 because of COVID-19 lockdowns in London before it reopened in May 2021.

In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award. Later that year, Witness for the Prosecution received an Edgar Award for best play. In 2013, she was voted the best crime writer and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the best crime novel ever by 600 professional novelists of the Crime Writers' Association. In September 2015, And Then There Were None was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate.^[1] Many of Christie's books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games, and graphic novels. More than 30 feature films are based on her work. 

 

 

Elizebeth Smith Friedman--The Woman Who Smashed Codes

 

[Clara] Elizebeth Friedman [nee Smith]  (August 26, 1892 – October 31, 1980) was an American expert cryptanalyst and author who deciphered enemy codes in both World Wars and helped solve international smuggling cases during Prohibition. Over the course of her career, she worked for the United States Treasury, Coast Guard, Navy and Army, plus the International Monetary Fund.^[3] She has been called "America's first female cryptanalyst".

Friedman was born in Huntington, Indiana, to John Marion Smith, a Quaker dairyman, banker, and politician, and Sopha Smith (née Strock). Friedman was the youngest of nine surviving children (a tenth died in infancy) and was raised on a farm.^[2][1]: 7

From 1911 to 1913, Friedman attended Wooster College in Ohio, but she left when her mother became ill. In 1913, Friedman transferred to Hillsdale College in Michigan since it was closer to home.^[1]: 8 In 1915, she graduated with a major in English literature.^[7] She was a member of Pi Beta Phi. Having exhibited her interest in languages, she had also studied Latin, Greek, and German, and minored "in a great many other things." Only she and one other sibling^[which?] attended college.^[2] In 1938, Hillsdale awarded her an honorary doctor of laws degree.^[3][8]

In the fall of 1915, Elizebeth became the substitute principal of a public high school in Wabash, Indiana. This position was short-lived, however, and in the spring of 1916, she quit and moved back in with her parents.

Elizebeth Smith began working at Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois, in 1916. It was one of the first facilities in the U.S. founded to study cryptography.^[9]: 371 Colonel George Fabyan, a wealthy textile merchant, owned Riverbank Laboratories and was interested in Shakespeare. Elizebeth was looking for a job and visited Chicago's Newberry Library, where she talked to a librarian who knew of Fabyan's interest. The librarian called Fabyan, who appeared in his limousine and invited Elizebeth to spend a night at Riverbank, where they discussed what life would be like at Fabyan's great estate located in Geneva, Illinois.^{[1]: 15–16} He told her that she would assist a Boston woman, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, and her sister with Gallup's attempt to prove Sir Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The work would involve decrypting enciphered messages that were supposed to have been contained within the plays and poems.^[2]

On the staff at Riverbank was the man Elizebeth would marry in May 1917, William F. Friedman, a plant biologist who also became involved in the Bacon-Shakespeare project.^[1]: xi

Riverbank gathered historical information on secret writing. Military cryptography had been deemphasized after the Civil War to the point where there were only three or four people in the United States who knew anything about the subject. Two of those people were Elizebeth and William Friedman.^[1]: 67 When the United States entered World War I, Fabyan established a new Riverbank Department of Ciphers, with the Friedmans in charge, and offered their services to the government.^[4][1]: 68 During the war, the Friedmans developed many of the principles of modern cryptology.^[10] Several U.S. government departments asked Riverbank Labs for help or sent personnel there for training. Among those was Agnes Meyer Driscoll, who came on behalf of the U.S. Navy.^[11]

The Friedmans worked together for the next four years in what was the only cryptographic facility in the country, until Herbert Yardley's so-called "Black Chamber" was established as MI8, the Army's Cipher Bureau, in 1919. In 1921, the Friedmans left Riverbank to work for the War Department in Washington, D.C.^[12] Their previous efforts to leave had been thwarted by Fabyan, who intercepted their mail.

 The 1919 National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, forbade the manufacture, sale, or trade of liquor in the United States.^[13] However, Prohibition, which was in effect from 1920 to 1933, did not stop the demand for alcoholic beverages, and the Coast Guard was put in charge of stopping smugglers along the coasts.^[10] Bootleggers and smugglers brought liquor and narcotics into the U.S. and to a lesser degree, to avoid taxes and other fees, perfume, jewels, and even pinto beans.^{[citation needed]}

The smugglers used encrypted radio messages extensively to conduct their operations.^[14] In response, the Coast Guard hired Elizebeth Friedman, who had quit her job in 1922, on a temporary basis to decode their backlog of messages.^{[1]: 133–134} Eventually, she and a small team of cryptanalysts she trained led the effort against international smuggling and drug-running.^[10]

Even though early codes and ciphers were very basic, their subsequent increase in complexity and resistance to solution was important to the financial growth of smuggling operations. The extent of sophistication posed little problem for Friedman; she mounted successful attacks against both simple substitution and transposition ciphers, and the more complex ciphers which eventually came into use.^{[citation needed]}

In 1927, the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Prohibition and of Customs established a joint effort with the U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence Division to monitor international smuggling, drug-running, and criminal activity domestically and internationally.^[15] From 1927 to 1939, the unit was of critical importance during a very active period of smuggling in the United States, and so was eventually folded into the U.S. Coast Guard.

Friedman solved the bulk of intercepts collected by Coast Guard stations in San Francisco and Florida herself. In June 1928, she was sent to teach C.A. Housel, stationed with the Coordinator of the Pacific Coast Details, how to decrypt the rumrunners' messages.^[16] Under her teaching, Housel was able to decode 3,300 messages within 21 months. In October and November 1929, she was then recruited in Houston, Texas, to solve 650 smuggling traffic cases that had been subpoenaed by the United States Attorney. In doing so, she decrypted 24 different coding systems used by the smugglers.^[17] Friedman's work was responsible for providing decoded information that resulted in the conviction of the narcotics-smuggling Ezra Brothers.^[18]

While working for the U.S. Coast Guard, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Bureau of Prohibition and Customs, and the Department of Justice, Friedman solved over 12,000 coded messages by hand in three years, resulting in 650 criminal prosecutions.^[13][10][19] One of the individuals Friedman helped to indict was Al Capone.^[4]

In 1930, Friedman proposed creating a team of seven people to handle the increasing workload involved in decrypting messages. Her proposal was finally approved in 1931, and she was put in charge of the only codebreaking unit in America ever to be managed by a woman.^{[1]: 139–141} She recruited and trained the analysts, and by the end of 1932, had developed the best radio intelligence team in the country.^{[1]: 141–142} This allowed her to address new, atypical systems as they appeared and expedited the entire process from initial analysis through to solution. It also allowed her to stay one step ahead of the smugglers.^{[citation needed]} "Our office doesn't make 'em, we only break 'em," said Friedman to a visitor who tried to sell her code-making assistance. The NSA notes that she did "break 'em" many times over a variety of targets. Her successes led to the conviction of many violators of the Volstead Act.^[2]

In addition to her cryptanalytic successes, she often testified in cases against accused parties. She appeared as an expert witness in 33 cases and became famous as a result of newspaper and magazine articles about her.^[10] The messages she deciphered enabled her to implicate several smugglers in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific Coast. She testified in cases in Galveston and Houston in Texas. In 1933 she was a star witness at the New Orleans, Louisiana, trial of 23 suspected agents of the Consolidated Exporters Corporation.^[8] Her testimony resulted in the convictions of five of the ringleaders, who were directly linked with smuggling vessels as a result of her analysis.^{[1]: 143–146}

The next year she helped settle a dispute between the Canadian and U.S. governments over the true ownership of the sailing vessel I'm Alone.^[20] The vessel was flying the Canadian flag when it was sunk by USCGC Dexter for failing to heed a "heave to and be searched" signal. The Canadian government filed a $350,000 suit against the U.S., but the intelligence gleaned from the twenty-three messages decoded by Friedman indicated de facto U.S. ownership just as the U.S. had originally suspected. The true owners of the ship were identified and most of the Canadian claim was dismissed.^[21]

The Canadian government sought Friedman's help in 1937 with an opium-smuggling gang, and she eventually testified in the trial of Gordon Lim and several other Chinese. Her solution to a complicated unknown Chinese enciphered code, in spite of her unfamiliarity with the language, was key to the successful convictions.

During World War II, Friedman's Coast Guard unit was transferred to the Navy, where they were the principal U.S. source of intelligence on Operation Bolívar, the clandestine German network in South America. Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the U.S. into the war, there was concern that Germany could eventually attack the U.S. via Latin America. The Nazi authorities also saw Latin America as a potential opportunity to outflank the U.S. While the FBI was given responsibility for countering this threat, at the time, the one U.S. agency with staff experienced in detecting and monitoring clandestine spy transmissions was the Coast Guard, due to its earlier work against smugglers,^[14] and Friedman’s team was its sole cryptoanalytic asset.

Friedman’s team remained the primary U.S. code-breakers assigned to the South American threat, and they solved numerous cipher systems used by the Germans and their local sympathizers, including three separate Enigma machines. According to cables between Britain's Bletchley Park and Washington, D.C. at the time, the two organizations exchanged solutions. The Bletchley Park section that solved the spy Enigmas was known as ISK, Intelligence Service Knox, and the American section was the Friedman's Coast Guard Cryptanalytic Unit 387. The two sections worked independently and ended up solving the machines around the same time.^[22] One turned out to be an unrelated Swiss network, but the other two were used by Johannes Siegfried Becker (codename: ’’Sargo’’), the SS agent who headed the operation, to communicate with Germany. Regarding Becker, biographer Jason Fagone states: “Elizebeth was his nemesis. She successfully tracked him where every other law enforcement agency and intelligence agencies failed. She did what the FBI could not do.”^[4] After the spy ring was broken, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile broke with the Axis powers and supported the Allies.^[4]

Over the course of the war, Friedman’s team decoded 4,000 messages sent on 48 different radio circuits.^{[1]: 197–202} The work of Friedman's Unit 387 (Coast Guard Cryptanalytic Unit) was often in support of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, and was not always credited.^[14] In fact, Friedman was irritated by the "sloppiness" of the FBI,^[4] for example in rounding up spies in South America, thus alerting the Nazis that their codes had been broken.^{[1]: 243–247} At the end of World War II, Hoover began a public media campaign claiming that the FBI led the code-breaking effort that resulted in the collapse and arrest of the German spy network in South America. This effort included a story in The American Magazine titled "How the Nazi Spy Invasion Was Smashed" and a publicity film called The Battle of the United States. Neither mentioned Friedman or the Coast Guard.^{[4][1]: 299–300}

In 1944, Friedman helped convict Velvalee Dickinson for having attempted to send information to Japan.^[23] Known as the "Doll Woman," her antique doll shop was her cover as she corresponded with Japanese agents using the names of women from her business correspondence. Her messages contained encoded material addressing naval vessel status in Pearl Harbor.^[23] The messages were decoded by Friedman and helped convict Dickinson.

After World War II, Friedman became a consultant to the International Monetary Fund and created communications security systems for them based on one-time tapes.

After retirement from government service, Friedman and her husband, who had long been Shakespeare enthusiasts, collaborated on a manuscript, The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare, eventually published as The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined.^[24] It won awards from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the American Shakespeare Theatre and Academy. In this book, the Friedmans dismissed Baconians such as Gallup and Ignatius Donnelly with such technical proficiency and finesse that the book won far more acclaim than did others that addressed the same topic.^[25]

The work that Gallup had done earlier for Col. Fabyan at Riverbank operated on the assumption that Bacon wrote Shakespeare and used the bi-literal cipher he invented in the original printed Shakespeare folios, employing "an odd variety of typefaces." The Friedmans, however, "in a classic demonstration of their life's work," buried a hidden Baconian cipher on a page in their publication. It was an italicized phrase which, using the different type faces, expressed their final assessment of the controversy: "I did not write the plays. F. Bacon."^{[citation needed]} Their book is regarded as the definitive work, if not the final word, on the subject. Ironically, it was the Riverbank effort to prove Bacon wrote Shakespeare that introduced the Friedmans to cryptology.

Following her husband's death in 1969,^[26][27] Friedman devoted much of her retirement life to compiling a library and bibliography of his work.^[3] This "most extensive private collection of cryptographic material in the world" was donated to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia.^[8] In 1971, she donated her own papers, which are now known as The Elizebeth Smith Friedman Collection at the Marshall Foundation.^{[1]: 336–337 [28]}

Friedman belonged to civic organizations such as the League of Women Voters and worked on behalf of statehood for the District of Columbia. She was also a respected public speaker.