Nearly a century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognizable faces in modern culture, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood.
The images are endlessly recycled: the white dress billowing above a subway grate, the breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday,” the platinum-blonde curls that became shorthand for Hollywood glamour.
Yet those familiar symbols have obscured a far more complex figure than the one popular culture continues to celebrate.
The most surprising fact about Monroe is not a scandal, a romance or a movie role. It is that the FBI kept a file on her.
For seven years, under the direction of FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, federal agents monitored Monroe's activities.
The surveillance did not begin because of her links to the Kennedys or the gossip that surrounded her private life.
According to declassified FBI documents, it began because of her political views.
The investigation reportedly started in 1955 after Monroe sought a visa to visit the Soviet Union.
Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hoover's FBI, alongside institutions shaped by the anti-communist fervour of the McCarthy era, kept a close watch on the actress.
What they found was not a spy.
What they found was a woman with strong opinions.
Monroe openly supported labour rights, civil rights and racial equality.
She opposed McCarthyism, expressed concern about nuclear weapons and showed interest in progressive political movements around the world.
During visits to Mexico, she spent time with left-wing intellectuals and political exiles, including Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a descendant of the Vanderbilt family who had become a prominent socialist figure.
Field later recalled conversations in which Monroe spoke passionately about Black equality, social justice and political repression in the United States.
In his memoir, he described her as “a clear-minded, if taciturn, Marxist” -- hardly the image Hollywood preferred to promote.
By the early 1960s, even the FBI concluded that Monroe was not affiliated with the Communist Party.
Internal assessments reportedly described her views as distinctly left-wing but found no evidence of organised political activity. Yet the surveillance continued.
The reason was simple. Monroe possessed something more powerful than political office: influence.
She was one of the most famous women in the world, admired by millions of ordinary people.
A celebrity with independent political beliefs was difficult to control and even harder to ignore.
That tension between image and reality defined much of her life.
Beyond the headlines and glamour, Monroe was intellectually curious and spiritually restless.
She explored Buddhism, Judaism and Christian Science.
She supported the civil rights movement long before it became fashionable in Hollywood.
In 1954, she founded Marilyn Monroe Productions to gain creative control over her career -- a remarkable act of independence at a time when female stars were expected to obey studio executives.
Many historians now regard her as a proto-feminist figure navigating an industry designed to commodify her while dismissing her intellect.
Perhaps Monroe understood this contradiction better than anyone.
In one of her notebooks, she wrote: “Only parts of us will ever touch only parts of others.”
It is a striking reflection from a woman whose public image became larger than her real self.
Monroe died in 1962 at the age of 36. The FBI eventually closed its file.
The myth survived. The woman behind it is still waiting to be rediscovered.
