Decades after the lights faded on Hollywood’s Golden Age, one of its last surviving sirens is sharing intimate and startling memories of its most incandescent star. Mamie Van Doren, the iconic ‘50s “It Girl” now 94, has opened up about her long-running friendship with Marilyn Monroe, offering a unique, firsthand perspective on the beloved icon’s triumphs and her tragic, final struggles.
Van Doren, whose bombshell image often earned her comparisons to Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, has lived long enough to reflect on the cost of fame, especially for women in a male-dominated industry. But for her, Marilyn wasn’t just a glamorous rival or a press-created counterpart—she was a flesh-and-blood woman, a friend, and a kindred spirit navigating the same treacherous waters of Hollywood’s golden cage.
“We weren’t competing,” Van Doren has said. “We were surviving.”
Their friendship began in the late 1950s, when both women were signed to major studios and frequently crossed paths at industry events and private gatherings. Despite their similar public images—platinum hair, hourglass figures, and an air of sultry mystery—the two couldn’t have been more different beneath the surface. Monroe was famously fragile, introspective, and deeply insecure, while Van Doren carried herself with a defiant confidence that helped her endure the pressures of the studio system.
What united them, Van Doren recalls, was not fame, but vulnerability. “We were both used, shaped, and sold like commodities. But Marilyn was more delicate,” she noted in a recent recollection. “She wanted love and safety. Hollywood only offered her illusion.”
According to Van Doren, Monroe’s struggles with identity, self-worth, and addiction were apparent long before they made headlines. She describes intimate evenings where the star of Some Like It Hot would sit barefoot in a corner, clutching a glass of wine and wondering aloud if she would ever be taken seriously. “She’d say, ‘They don’t see me, Mamie. They just see her—Marilyn. But I’m not her all the time.’”
Their conversations, often held in whispered tones behind closed doors, revealed a woman wrestling with fame’s heavy price. Monroe wanted to be recognized not only for her beauty but for her intellect, her passion for acting, and her dream of breaking free from the dumb blonde stereotype. “She was smart—so much smarter than people thought,” Van Doren insists. “She read poetry. She studied with Strasberg. She wanted more.”
But Monroe’s attempts to carve out a new identity met constant resistance—from studios, from the media, and from the men who tried to control her. Van Doren, who experienced many of the same battles, managed to find a path to survival by carving out her own image, refusing to conform to every expectation, and walking away when necessary. Monroe, by contrast, felt trapped. “She didn’t have an exit strategy,” Van Doren reflected. “She was too deep in.”
The last time Van Doren saw Marilyn was only weeks before her death in 1962. They met at a small gathering in Los Angeles, where Monroe seemed distracted and emotionally worn. “She smiled, but her eyes weren’t there,” Van Doren recalled. “I hugged her, and she held on a second too long. That was the goodbye—I just didn’t know it then.”
For Van Doren, surviving meant learning to let go of the fantasy and hold onto reality, no matter how harsh. Looking back, she doesn’t romanticize the past—she mourns it. “We were icons, sure. But we were also girls trying to matter in a world that only wanted our bodies.”
Now, with nearly a century of life behind her, Mamie Van Doren speaks for the woman Monroe couldn’t always speak for herself. Her memories are both tribute and cautionary tale—an intimate portrait of fame’s darkest undercurrent and a long overdue voice for one of Hollywood’s most mythologized women.
