Marilyn Monroe’s Strange 1952 Breakfast Was Only The Start Of Her ‘Absolutely Bizarre’ Diet

In September 1952, Pageant magazine let its readers in on a curious secret. The most talked-about starlet in Hollywood was not dining out every night at the best tables in town. She was making her own breakfast on a hot plate in a hotel room. “I’ve been told that my eating habits are absolutely bizarre, but I don’t think so,” Marilyn Monroe wrote in the piece, according to the lines reproduced by Yahoo and by Refinery29.

What followed was a plain account of how a 26-year-old actress fed herself and kept in shape while working at the studio by day and studying her craft at night. The menu really was odd and so was the workout. One small habit at the end of her long days turned out to be the most charming confession in the whole article.

Why Was Hollywood’s Hottest Starlet Cooking in a Hotel Room?

By the time that issue reached the newsstands, Monroe had lived through the most nerve-racking year of her young career. In March 1952 she admitted that she was the nude model on a calendar that had quietly been making the rounds. She had posed for photographer Tom Kelley on May 27, 1949, when she was 22 and out of work. History.com reports she was paid $50 for the session. Fox wanted her to deny it, but she told United Press reporter Aline Mosby the plain truth. “I was broke and needed the money,” she said, as HowStuffWorks has recounted. The public sided with her, and Life put her on its April 7, 1952, cover as “The Talk of Hollywood.”

The films kept coming that year. RKO borrowed her from Fox for Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night, where she played a cannery worker opposite Barbara Stanwyck. In Don’t Bother to Knock she took her first starring role as a troubled babysitter, and in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business she played a secretary opposite Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. Fame had arrived, but the girl who grew up in foster homes with almost nothing was still living out of a hotel, and the way she ate showed it.

What Did Marilyn Monroe Eat for Breakfast and Dinner?

Her mornings started before she even stepped into the shower. “Before I take my morning shower, I start warming a cup of milk on the hot plate I keep in my hotel room,” she wrote, in the passage Allrecipes reprinted through Yahoo. “When it’s hot, I break two raw eggs into the milk, whip them up with a fork, and drink them while I’m dressing.” She added a multivitamin and was pleased with herself. “I doubt if any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry,” she said, as quoted by Yahoo Health.

Dinner was no more elaborate. “My dinners at home are startlingly simple,” she wrote. Each evening she stopped at a market near her hotel for a steak, lamb chops or some liver, “which I broil in the electric oven in my room,” according to the excerpts carried by Tasting Table and Refinery29. The side dish never changed. “I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all,” she admitted, before adding with a wink, “I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots.”

That left a lot of hours to fill between the hot plate and the broiler, and she had plans for them.

How Did She Fit Exercise and Acting Lessons Into Her Day?

The workout came first, right on her bedroom floor. “I never used to bother with exercises,” she told Pageant, as quoted by The List and Marie Claire. “Now I spend at least 10 minutes each morning working out with small weights.” She lay beside her bed and lifted five-pound weights from a spread-eagle position to a point above her head. “I do this 15 times, slowly,” she wrote. Then she held her arms at a 45-degree angle and moved the weights in circles until she was tired. She was firm that none of it would feel like boot camp. “I don’t count rhythmically like the exercise people on the radio,” she explained. “I couldn’t stand exercise if I had to feel regimented about it.”

The evenings belonged to acting. Monroe had worked with drama coach Natasha Lytess since 1948, and after Fox signed her to a long contract she added classes with Michael Chekhov, the Russian actor and acting teacher. Wikipedia and The Marilyn Report both place her with Chekhov beginning around 1951. In the Pageant piece she called them simply “my evening drama classes,” and it was on the way home from one of them that her strict protein diet came undone.

What Was the One Treat She Couldn’t Give Up?

Here is the confession. “I have developed the habit of stopping off at Wil Wright’s ice cream parlor for a hot fudge sundae on my way home from my evening drama classes,” she wrote, in the line quoted by both Refinery29 and The Takeout. Wil Wright’s was a Los Angeles chain with parlors in Beverly Hills and on the Sunset Strip, according to Chowhound and The Takeout.

She even had a tidy explanation for why the sundaes did no harm. “I’m sure that I couldn’t allow myself this indulgence were it not that my normal diet is composed almost totally of protein foods,” she wrote, in the sentence reproduced by Yahoo and Refinery29. So the woman whose face was on the cover of Life that spring drank raw eggs in the morning and crunched raw carrots at supper so she could earn her hot fudge on the way home from class. Of everything she told Pageant, that bargain sounds the least like a movie star’s secret and the most like a hardworking girl who had finally found a little something sweet.