“She was a whirling light to me then,” wrote Arthur Miller, the famous playwright and former husband of Marilyn Monroe, “all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.” It would be hard to think of a cultural figure in America more mysterious and renowned than Monroe. The new Netflix film about her, Blonde, explores the complexities and controversies that defined her short life. 

Monroe’s boundless fame also made her a target for surveillance. Like many cultural figures and academics of the 20th century, Monroe was watched by the FBI, whose agents monitored her life and kept tabs on who she associated with, documenting activity that could be vaguely construed as anti-American. During the Cold War, the US government dogmatically sorted its citizens into two groups: patriots or potential Communist traitors.

The root of the FBI’s interest in Monroe was her romantic involvement with Miller, which began as a secret affair but grew into a media spectacle. Miller was a politically involved individual, engaged with many of the Communist Party’s cultural and social front groups, a progressive American writer who staunchly opposed fascism. Suspicions were aroused that Monroe, too, might be a Communist, causing the FBI to escalate its tracking of her whereabouts and the monitoring of her political opinions. The US has always tried to brand itself as a country of freedom and individual autonomy, but the FBI was jailing Americans and censoring culture that didn’t fall in line with this branding. This is the story of how Marilyn Monroe was dragged into the world of anti-Communist hysteria.

The FBI Monitored Marilyn Monroe Over Suspected Communist Ties | Teen Vogue