Marilyn Monroe's $10-an-Hour Nude Pin-Up Years With Earl Moran
Updated: Nov 5
Long before the white dress over the subway grate, Marilyn Monroe was a twenty-year-old with a bleach job, a stack of unpaid bills and a standing booking at a pin-up artist's studio in Hollywood. Earl Moran paid her $10 an hour to pose. He wasn't selling the photos. He was painting from them, turning her into calendar girls that hung in garages and barbershops across America, often with someone else's face on top.
The story usually gets told as "Mona Monroe, the girl before Marilyn". The paperwork tells a slightly different and more interesting tale. By the time she was signing model releases as "Mona", she'd already been Marilyn Monroe for years. The fake name wasn't who she used to be. It was who she pretended to be when the job was one she didn't want traced back to her.
Quick Answers
Who was Mona Monroe? A cover name Marilyn Monroe used on model releases for nude and semi-nude work in the late 1940s, most famously on Tom Kelley's 1949 calendar shoot.
Who was Earl Moran? An Iowa-born pin-up artist (1893 to 1984) best known for Brown & Bigelow calendars. He moved to Hollywood in 1946 and hired Norma Jeane through a modelling agency.
How much was she paid? Moran's rate was $10 an hour. One surviving release from July 1949 shows her taking $15 for a session.
How long did she pose for him? On and off for about four years, from 1946 to around 1950.
Are the paintings worth much now? A Moran pastel of her sold at Heritage Auctions in 2011 for $83,650, a record for the artist.
From the Parachute Line to the Blue Book Agency
Norma Jeane Dougherty was seventeen and working at the Radioplane factory in Van Nuys when an Army photographer called David Conover turned up in the autumn of 1944 to shoot women doing war work. He was struck by how well she took a picture, came back for more and passed her on to Emmeline Snively, who ran the Blue Book Model Agency out of the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Charles Casillo's account has Snively describing her as the hardest worker she'd ever signed, a girl-next-door type rather than a sex symbol, and a future cover girl.
Her husband, Jim Dougherty, had shipped out with the merchant marine in the spring of 1944. Modelling didn't pay at first. Casillo notes she actually spent more than she earned, burning through the couple's savings on clothes, and Dougherty later said he didn't mind. By the time he came home the marriage was effectively over.
The Shampoo Job That Made Her Blonde
Snively's most famous decision came in the winter of 1945. Norma Jeane was a natural mid-brown, and a photographer called Raphael Wolff offered her a shampoo advert on one condition: she had to go blonde first. Snively backed him, arguing that blondes photographed well in any colour or any light. Tara Hanks traces what happened next to Frank & Joseph's salon on Wilshire Boulevard, across the street from the Ambassador, where a hairdresser called Sylvia Barnhart straightened and bleached her hair in stages over about eight months.
Barnhart stayed in the picture far longer than most people realise. When Frank & Joseph's opened a second salon on Hollywood Boulevard, Barnhart moved there and Marilyn followed her, keeping a regular Saturday appointment at 1.30pm for several years. Barnhart was famously short-sighted, and Marilyn once borrowed her spare glasses to rehearse How to Marry a Millionaire. Some say Barnhart was the inspiration for Pola, the near-blind character Marilyn played in it. Barnhart's own verdict on her most famous client was that she was "just magnificent, breathtaking to look at", though she also grumbled that Marilyn would turn up two or three hours late and still expect to be seen.
The Road Trip With André de Dienes
Moran wasn't the first artist to spot what Snively had on her books. In November 1945 the Hungarian-born photographer André de Dienes rang the agency looking for a fresh face to shoot in the desert. Steven Kasher Gallery's exhibition notes say he offered Norma Jeane $100 a week plus expenses, outfits and food to travel with him, and the pair spent roughly two weeks driving through California, Nevada, Arizona and Oregon. They started in Death Valley, where he never got round to the nude shots he'd planned, and ended up sharing a room at a lodge on Mount Hood during a storm.
De Dienes fell for her and believed they were engaged once her divorce came through. When he came back to marry her in the summer of 1946 she turned him down because she wanted to act. By Labor Day that year she was introducing herself to him by a brand new name.
Earl Moran, the Bachelor of Sex Appeal
Earl Steffa Moran was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, on 8 December 1893. He trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York and spent more than a decade in commercial illustration. According to Grapefruit Moon Gallery, his break came in 1932, when he painted two large bathing beauties and sold one to the Thomas D. Murphy Company and the other to Brown & Bigelow, the Minnesota calendar giant. Brown & Bigelow promptly signed him exclusively.
He was also a photographer, which explains a lot about how he worked. Moran shot his own reference pictures and understood light and shadow in a way plenty of painters didn't. His moody chiaroscuro nudes for Brown & Bigelow in the late 1930s are still rated his most artistic work, and Life magazine featured him in 1940.
His private life was rather less refined. In 1943 his wife Mura filed for divorce, citing what the gallery records as his "outrageous flirting" along with indecent dancing, hugging and kissing, and accused him of an affair with the model Chili Williams. The headlines ran for years. A year later Moran was awarded an honorary "Bachelor of Sex Appeal" degree in a publicity stunt, which suggests the scandal didn't do his career much harm.
$10 an Hour in a Borrowed Studio
Moran moved to Hollywood in 1946, the Norman Rockwell Museum notes, and carried on painting pin-ups there. He hired models through Los Angeles agencies, and Norma Jeane came to him that year. Grapefruit Moon says he was renting a studio from Henry Clive, another pin-up painter, when they first met.
She wasn't the only future star on his books. Moran's $10-an-hour regulars also included Joi Lansing, Barbara Nichols, Marie Wilson and Jayne Mansfield, who'd later be marketed as the next Marilyn. Back in New York he'd used beauty pageant winners, which he judged himself. In Hollywood the supply came pre-packaged: aspiring actresses who needed the cash and wanted the practice in front of a camera.
She posed in swimwear, lingerie, costumes and sometimes nothing much at all, and Messy Nessy Chic reports that she kept coming back for about four years. She later credited Moran with making her legs look better than they really were, which is a fair summary of what a pin-up artist was for. Artists' models doing this kind of work weren't new, of course. Audrey Munson had been posing for half of New York's sculptors thirty years earlier.
Whose Face Is That?
Moran wasn't making portraits. Like most pin-up artists of the era he mixed and matched, taking a pose or a figure from one model and a face or expression from another. Messy Nessy points out that this is why some of his finished paintings show a body that's clearly hers and a face that just as clearly isn't. The goal was an idealised calendar girl, not a likeness, and the paintings sold in their millions on calendars and posters.
That makes the reference photos far more valuable to historians than the paintings in some ways. They're the unedited version: a twenty-something Norma Jeane laughing between poses, stretching on the studio floor, perched on a ladder in capri pants and heels.
A New Name, and Howard Hughes Sniffing Around
In the summer of 1946 Snively got her in front of Ben Lyon, the talent executive at Twentieth Century Fox. A Fox agreement dated 25 July 1946, sold through Heritage Auctions, bound the studio to screen-test her within 45 days. She signed it as Norma Jeane Dougherty, and because she was still only twenty, and legally a minor, her guardian Grace McKee had to sign too. The same listing says Darryl F. Zanuck was reportedly underwhelmed by the test but offered her a contract anyway, partly to stop RKO, Howard Hughes's studio, getting her first. Hughes is said to have spotted her in a magazine, and she'd appeared on the cover of Laff that June as a brunette, billed as Norma Jean Dougherty.
Lyon didn't like the name Norma Jeane. A document she signed on 26 August 1946, auctioned by Iconic Auctions, records the deal: a six-month contract, with her pay routed through her agents at the National Concert and Artists Corporation. Lyon suggested "Marilyn" after the Broadway star Marilyn Miller, and she offered "Monroe", the maiden name of her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker. TCM notes that Fox gave her almost nothing to do in her first two films and then let her go. The name wouldn't be legally hers until 1956.
Room 334 at the Hollywood Studio Club
The Studio Club is often placed at the start of the story, but she actually lived there in 1948 and 1949, after Fox had dropped her and while she scraped through a short spell at Columbia. Messy Nessy Chic gives her room as 334. The club had started in 1916 in the basement of the Hollywood library, where a librarian called Eleanor Jones noticed young women hanging around until closing time with nowhere better to go. By 1926 it had a proper home at 1215 Lodi Place, designed by Julia Morgan, the architect of Hearst Castle.
The rules were strict. Etan Does LA says applicants needed references and their parents' permission, and men weren't allowed above the ground floor. Rent covered two meals a day plus classes and rehearsal space, and residents could stay a maximum of five years. Alumni included Rita Moreno, Barbara Eden, Donna Reed, Sharon Tate and Kim Novak, whose studio contract apparently ordered her to keep living there and not date during the week. Ayn Rand stayed in the 1920s. The club closed in 1975 when the cost of meeting new fire codes became too much.
That protection mattered. Freelance glamour work in Los Angeles could be dangerous, and a decade later Harvey Glatman would use fake photo shoots to lure models to their deaths.
"Mona Monroe" and the $50 Rent
This is where Mona comes in. On 27 May 1949, broke and behind on her rent at the Studio Club, she rang the photographer Tom Kelley and agreed to pose nude on red velvet. She later said she "had no job and no money for the rent" at the time. History.com records that she was paid $50 and signed the release with a fictitious name: Mona Monroe.
Two months later she was still doing Moran sessions. A receipt dated 25 July 1949, sold by RR Auction in 2011 for $2,391, shows her accepting fifteen dollars from Earl S. Moran and giving him the right to use her photograph, or any painting made from it, for advertising and trade. That one scrap of paper does more to pin down their working relationship than anything else that survives, and it shows she was still taking these jobs a full three years after signing with Fox.
Messy Nessy says she signed Moran's releases as "Mona Monroe" too, although the RR listing doesn't say which name is on that particular receipt. Either way, the logic is the same. She was a contract actress by then, if not a successful one, and nude modelling was the kind of work that could end a career.
The Calendar Comes Back to Bite
Kelley sold one of the shots to a Chicago calendar publisher, and in 1952 it surfaced on a calendar just as Fox was turning her into a star. The studio wanted her to deny it. She didn't. Erskine Johnson's syndicated column that August confirmed her fee was $50, and when asked whether she'd really had nothing on, she gave the line that became famous. Barry Popik's research traces it to newspapers that summer and to Time in August 1952: "I had the radio on."
The honesty worked. Instead of sinking her, the calendar made the public like her more. Hugh Hefner then bought the image from the calendar company for $500, without asking her, and put it in the first issue of Playboy in December 1953. She never saw another penny from it.
The Pin-Up Business in the 1940s
To understand why a man like Moran was paying aspiring actresses by the hour, it helps to know how big the pin-up business was. Painted pin-ups by Moran, Gil Elvgren, Alberto Vargas and George Petty were everywhere in the 1940s, on calendars, playing cards, matchbooks and the noses of bombers. During the war they were sent to servicemen by the million, and Marilyn would later go the other way and perform for the troops in Korea in 1954.
Moran also branched out. The Heritage Auctions artist index says he also painted for Robert Harrison's girlie magazines. Within a decade, though, photography was taking over from paint, as photographers like Peter Gowland built cameras for glamour shoots and Bunny Yeager made a star of Bettie Page. Moran eventually moved to Las Vegas, turned more to fine art and kept taking commissions until 1982.
What Happened to the Moran Photos
Moran died in Los Angeles in January 1984, aged ninety, according to AskArt's biography, which cites his San Francisco Chronicle obituary. His Marilyn material didn't stay private for long. Playboy first published his semi-nude photographs of her in 1987, as part of Hefner's tribute marking twenty-five years since her death, a Charitybuzz listing notes. In 2007 a Moran image of her was one of 48 pictures in the Playboy Legacy Collection, a limited boxed set that originally sold for $65,000, and Hefner signed fifteen Moran prints of her.
The original pastels are now the most valuable things Moran ever made. In February 2011, a Moran pastel simply titled Marilyn sold at Heritage Auctions in Beverly Hills for $83,650, more than seven times its estimate and nearly double his previous record. A Brown & Bigelow calendar painting of her from around 1948 fetched $22,500 in New York in 2013, with the auction house noting that good early Marilyn paintings by Moran rarely come up.
What Moran Saw First
Plenty of photographers would later claim they understood Marilyn on camera, from Cecil Beaton in 1956, through Richard Avedon's Fabulous Enchantresses series, to Bert Stern, whose session with her came just weeks before she died. But the Moran pictures catch something earlier and plainer. She hasn't learned the half-closed eyes and parted lips yet. She's a young woman getting paid by the hour, working out what the camera wants, and occasionally cracking up laughing when she gets it wrong.
The irony is that the nude work she hid behind a fake name ended up helping her more than almost anything Fox did in those years. Mona Monroe didn't last. The woman who'd needed fifty dollars for rent would leave behind a wardrobe, a filing cabinet and a house full of possessions that are still being sold decades later.
More of the Moran Sessions
Further Reading
Want the full story? Before Marilyn: The Blue Book Modelling Years by Astrid Franse and Michelle Morgan draws on the Blue Book agency's own files, including Snively's notes and Norma Jeane's modelling cards, to cover the years before Fox.
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Sources
Messy Nessy Chic, "Mona (Marilyn) Monroe, the $10-an-Hour Pin-Up Model"
The Marilyn Monroe Collection, "Earl Moran Marilyn Monroe Pin-Up Sells Big at Auction" (2011)
RR Auction, Lot 1164: Marilyn Monroe accepts $15 from Earl Moran (1949 release)
Charitybuzz, Earl Moran "Marilyn Monroe" Playboy Legacy Collection print
History.com, "Marilyn Monroe poses nude for photographer Tom Kelley"
Barry Popik, "It's not true I had nothing on. I had the radio on"
Charles Casillo, "How Norma Became Marilyn", The History Reader
Steven Kasher Gallery, "André de Dienes: Marilyn and California Girls"
Heritage Auctions, Lot 89066: Norma Jeane Dougherty's earliest signed Fox contract (1946)
Iconic Auctions, Marilyn Monroe signed Fox document, 26 August 1946
Messy Nessy Chic, "Marilyn Monroe's Forgotten Hollywood Sorority"
