The Screen Queen and the Potato Sack
Based on true events.
It starts with a party.
Spring of 1951. Somewhere high in the Hollywood Hills, where the lights below look like spilled glitter and the cocktails taste like money. The crowd is the usual: grinning agents, actresses with their ribs showing, directors pretending they’re not already bored.
And then she walks in.
Marilyn.
Not the Marilyn on your screen — not the blonde bombshell etched into pinup calendars and barracks walls. This is the beginning of her, when the spotlight is still warming her skin. When you can still pretend she’s reachable.
Her dress is fire-engine red, so tight it looks like it might scream. Strapless. Slit. More skin than scandal. Men turn. Women glare.
I watch it all from the bar with a glass of rye in one hand and a deadline in the other.
“She’s a gimmick,” I mutter.
The bartender doesn’t answer.
The next morning, I write my column.
She’s in it, of course. Because she’s in everything lately. I’ve been in this business long enough to know what sells, and right now, she’s the headline.
I tap at the keys like they’ve wronged me.
”Sure, she can wear a dress. But let’s be honest — put her in a potato sack like so many of us wore during the war, and let’s see if anyone still notices her.”
I smile. It’s acidic. Sharp. I think I’m clever.
The editor prints it without blinking. No notes. The world spins on.
Three weeks later, Roz from the photo desk tosses a proof sheet onto my typewriter’s keys.
“You see this yet?” she asks, already grinning.
I flip the page over and freeze.
It’s her.
Marilyn.
Wearing a damn potato sack.
The room doesn’t react at first. The clack of typewriter keys, phones ringing, someone shouting copy edits across the bullpen. But I stare.
The burlap hugs her hips like it’s tailored by Dior. The hem is ragged, the rope at her waist is frayed — but she stands like a queen, head high, one foot cocked like she’s daring the camera to blink first.
Her hair is curled perfectly. Her smile — god, that smile — looks like she just lit a cigarette with your last match and thanked you for it.
There’s a caption scrawled in pencil:
“Marilyn makes even a sack look sexy.”
By noon, everyone’s seen it.
By five, it’s on the wire.
By Friday, it’s the front page of Life magazine.
They print it huge. No headline needed. Just that image — her in a potato sack, looking like she owns the world and knows it.
Radio hosts start cracking jokes. Fashion editors pretend they predicted it. Some boutique in Brooklyn even makes a line of “burlap-inspired,” cocktail dresses.
The insult I wrote has been turned inside out — polished until it gleams.
And she’s the one who’s holding it up to the light.
“You should sue,” Roz says, but she’s laughing.
I don’t.
What would I even say? She made your words better than you did?
I try to ignore it.
I bury myself in stories about city council corruption and a new law banning roller skates downtown. But the mail starts coming in — readers writing to defend her. Or mock me. Or both.
One letter, typed in neat blue ink, reads:
“I wore flour sacks during the war. My mother embroidered flowers on them to make us feel less poor. Marilyn’s no joke. She’s a tribute.”
I don’t show it to anyone. I fold it three times and put it in my purse. I don’t know why.
Then comes the night I see her again.
Another party. This one more exclusive. Fewer studio hands, more senators. The drinks are better, the lighting dimmer.
She arrives late. The room stills.
She’s not wearing a potato sack this time — but she doesn’t need to. The myth is already stitched into her silhouette.
She makes her way through the crowd like she’s underwater and everyone else is floating debris. The photographer beside her has a Rolleiflex slung around his neck. He’s young. Looks like he hasn’t blinked since she walked in.
She glances my way.
It’s quick — a flick of her eyes across the room — but it lands.
She sees me.
And for one sharp second, the noise fades.
I half expect her to sneer. Or smirk. Or mouth thank you.
She does none of it.
She just turns, hair catching the chandelier light, and disappears into another conversation.
Back at my apartment, I stare at my own words.
The column. The line. The joke.
It’s brittle now. Cracked at the edges.
It wasn’t just a dig. It was a dare. And she answered it with grace and humor and something sharper than both.
She made me irrelevant by refusing to be insulted.
By laughing.
By owning it.
I dream of my mother that night.
She’s hunched over a sewing machine, piecing together scraps of sackcloth. I’m small again, and barefoot. I remember how she used to soak the labels off, trying to make them look less like they once held feed.
I ask her if I look pretty.
She touches my cheek and says, “If you wear it like you mean it, you’ll look like a queen.”
I wake up crying.
The newsroom hangs a copy of the photo on the wall. Someone adds a handwritten quote underneath:
“Elegance isn’t what you wear. It’s how you wear it.”
The byline reads: —Marilyn Monroe
Months pass. She gets bigger. Movies, headlines, war bonds. The world wants her more every day.
I stop writing about her. I write about other things — politics, poetry, war. But every now and then, I see her on a magazine cover, smiling that impossible smile, and I remember the sack.
The joke.
The girl.
And I wonder if she knew what she was doing.
If she knew she wasn’t just shutting me up.
She was speaking for everyone who’d ever been told they were only beautiful because of something — a dress, a man, a miracle.
And proving they were beautiful in spite of everything.
Sometimes I still see her in my dreams.
Wearing burlap. Laughing.
Not mocking me. Not taunting me.
Just radiant.
Just a woman who makes a dress sing instead of the other way around.
Author’s Note
In 1951, Marilyn Monroe attended a press event wearing a red strapless dress that turned heads and stirred envy. In response, a female journalist — whose identity remains uncertain — dismissed Marilyn’s magnetism as superficial, writing something to the effect of: “Her appeal is in the dress. Put her in a potato sack, and no one would even look at her.” It was a deliberate attempt to diminish her, to suggest that without silk and sequins, she would fade into the background like any other girl.
Marilyn’s answer was iconic. She posed for a photoshoot in an actual potato sack — cinched at the waist, bare feet planted firmly, eyes daring the world to look away. The resulting images, published in Photoplay, were cheeky, radiant, unforgettable. But beyond the glamour was something deeper: an homage to the resilience of Depression-era women who once sewed dresses from feed sacks and flour bags out of necessity. Marilyn turned mockery into myth — claiming power through humor, history, and complete self-possession.
The original burlap dress still exists, preserved in private collections and sometimes featured in exhibits of her most famous fashion moments. It endures not because of its material, but because of the story it tells — of a woman who refused to be reduced to fabric, and who proved that confidence doesn’t come from a label. It comes from within.
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