There are popular publications on the Internet describing a dialogue between a physicist and an actress about how their children would be smart like their father and beautiful like their mother. We decided to check whether such a dialogue actually took place.
Quotes from a dialogue that allegedly occurred between a Nobel laureate and a movie star are very popular on social networks (“VKontakte", Facebook*, Instagram*, "Classmates", Telegram) and on blogging platforms (“Zen", LiveJournal, "Peekaboo", "Habr"). They write about it informational And entertaining portals. The most common version of this alleged conversation is: "Marilyn Monroe once said to Einstein, 'We could have a child. He would be beautiful like me and smart like you.' To which the father of the theory of relativity replied: “I’m afraid that everything will be the other way around: he will inherit my beauty and your mind.” Some publications also specify that Marilyn Monroe's intelligence quotient (IQ) was higher than Einstein's - 165 points.
"Verified" already studied information about Monroe's incredibly high IQ and could not find confirmation that the movie star took this test and/or publicly stated it. As for the dialogue that took place about the hypothetical joint children of the physicist and the actress, it also raises some doubts.
“Verified” was unable to find joint photographs, videos, or even eyewitness accounts that Monroe And Einstein have ever met. They lived in different cities and moved in completely different circles. Of course, since each of them was an outstanding representative of his industry, hypothetically they could have been invited to some event at the same time, but there is no evidence of this.
It was not possible to find any confirmation of this story in written sources preserved after the death of the scientist: they have been well studied, most of them have been digitized. For example, in the electronic archive Hebrew University Jerusalem houses the largest collection of texts written by Einstein. Similar databases with digitized works and letters are collected in California Tech And Princeton universities (USA). Monroe, unlike the physicist, did not leave such an extensive literary legacy, and Verified was unable to find her interviews or other statements related to her meeting with Einstein.
Interestingly, in the English-speaking segment of the Internet, dialogue about hypothetical children who will inherit the beauty of their mother and the intelligence of their father is more often attributed to other famous personalities: playwright Bernard Shaw and dancer Isadora Duncan, writer Anatole France and the same Duncan, Marilyn Monroe and playwright Arthur Miller, etc. The quotation verification portal Quote Investigator tracked this historical anecdote to publication in the Boston Globe on December 7, 1923 (two years before Monroe's birth). Then its characters were Duncan and France. It seems extremely doubtful that Monroe and Einstein, when meeting, would have decided to repeat the ironic dialogue that had long previously been attributed to other people.
At the same time, it is quite possible that Monroe felt some sympathy for Einstein, despite the significant age difference (the physicist was 47 years older than the star). Actress Shelley Winters, who shared a room with Monroe in her youth, said in an interview with the newspaper Los Angeles Timesthat once girls made lists of men they would like to sleep with. According to Winters, Monroe's list included no one under 50 and included the name of a Nobel laureate, among others. The actress notes that she does not know whether her friend managed to realize any goals from this list, but hints at a possible connection between Monroe and Einstein, since after the actress’s death she saw her autographed photo of the physicist. However, there is no other evidence of the connection between the scientist and the actress, and the photo with the signature is extremely weak evidence.
Thus, there is no evidence that Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein knew each other at all or even saw each other at common events. The dialogue about hypothetical children who could inherit the beauty of their mother and the intelligence of their father was attributed to completely different people not only long before Monroe’s hypothetical meeting with the Nobel laureate, but even before her birth.
*Russian authorities consider the company Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, to be an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: left - Photograph by Oren Jack Turner, Princeton, N.J., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, on the right - Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Read on the topic:
- Quote Investigator. But Suppose the Child Inherited My Beauty and Your Brains?
- Is it true that Albert Einstein did poorly at school?
- Is it true that Einstein appropriated the intellectual merits of his first wife?
- Did Marilyn Monroe say: “Women who are just trying to be equal to men have little ambition”?
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