Amy Greene, Jane Russell and Mamie Van Doren recall Marilyn Monroe
Four days before what would have been her 100th birthday, marilyn monroe is being remembered through the women who knew her best. ’s look back focuses on friendships that lasted beyond the screen image and into private homes, beach days and business partnerships.
Marilyn Monroe lived 36 years, but the recollections come from people who saw a different side of her: warm, supportive and empathetic. Amy Greene, the widow of Milton Greene, said Monroe shared her home with her for several years in the mid-1950s and insisted the relationship was rooted in trust.
Amy Greene and Marilyn Monroe Productions
1955 is the year Monroe and Milton Greene formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, a business move that sits at the center of Amy Greene’s memories. Greene, an ex-model, recalled that friends doubted the arrangement, but her view shifted once she knew Monroe personally: "Girlfriends would say, ‘Are you out of your mind to have that woman in your house?’ I’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you? There’s nothing there. They’re business partners!’ And when we got to know each other and we became real friends, I knew that she would never hurt me by banging Milton."
That account matters because it puts Monroe’s private life beside her professional one without reducing either to gossip. She was not only the star of How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953, where she appeared with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, but also a woman building a company with her photographer husband’s family in the middle of Hollywood’s old studio system.
Jane Russell and August 1962
August 1962 provides the sharpest surviving snapshot of Monroe’s social world. In her 1985 memoir My Path and My Detours, Jane Russell wrote about a day at the beach with close female friends, then added: "[We] had wine, music and more talk by the fire … I thought of Marilyn. I wished I had her phone number, because I knew she belonged there, where we were all laughing about our problems."
The next day, Russell learned that Monroe had died. She had co-starred with Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the memoir passage is evidence that their connection ran beyond publicity photos and premieres. It also shows how Monroe’s friendships with women survived long enough to be remembered in print decades later.
Mamie Van Doren at 95
At 95, Mamie Van Doren still remembers regularly bumping into Monroe around town. She was contracted as Universal’s answer to Monroe in 1953, which made her both a rival and a witness to the same Hollywood ecosystem. Even so, Van Doren described Monroe as "a lovely person [who] didn’t have a bad bone in her body".
That line cuts against the old stereotype of Monroe as only a screen image. She also had a close bond with Eileen Heckart’s Vera in Bus Stop, another reminder that her friendships and working relationships overlapped in ways the public rarely saw. For readers, the practical takeaway is simple: the record now rests less on mythology than on living memory, and those memories still point to Monroe as a person who kept women close, not at arm’s length.
