It is often repeated in New Brunswick that Marilyn Monroe once went fishing on the Miramichi. The problem with declaring this more authoritatively is that nobody seems to say where this information is sourced from, and, conveniently, her trip was said to have been made in secret.
Let’s see if we can piece this story together!
Marilyn Monroe was very much at the height of her fame during the alleged fishing expedition on the Miramichi River, yet only one newspaper wrote about it.
On October 5th, 1955, the Moncton Transcript ran a brief news item in which Blackville, NB, fishing lodge owner Paul O’Haire said that Marilyn Monroe had visited days earlier.
“She had requested that her presence in the province not be revealed until after she had left,” O’Haire explained to a reporter.
It’s not clear that the reporter believed him.
The Transcript’s headline was carefully prefaced by “Man says”, and noted not only once but twice in the short article that the story was “according to O’Haire.” The editors were clearly worried about accuracy and hedging their bets.
Despite Marilyn Monroe being one of the most famous people on the planet, no other New Brunswick newspapers picked up the story, which is, again, hardly a ringing endorsement that it was a true story.
Nonetheless, this offers us a helpfully specific date range to work with; her trip was said to have happened the last week of September 1955.
The oft-repeated myth claims that Monroe had come to the Miramichi with her second husband, baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio.
O’Haire did not mention this. Good thing too, as that would have been a strong mark against the secret trip having happened. The couple had an extraordinarily public divorce exactly one year earlier.
If Marilyn Monroe visited, she may have come alone.
1955 was an exceptionally difficult year for the ultra-famous actress. She had to endure not only a high-profile divorce but also a breakup with her employer.
20th Century Fox studios had controlled her life. They dictated that she had to appear in comedies. They paid her the same low salary she had been making since she first debuted, despite now being a massive box office draw.
Artistically, she wanted to play meatier dramatic roles, and financially, she wanted more money.
Earlier that year, she had fired her longtime agents and launched a lawsuit against her studio.
She started her own company, called Marilyn Monroe Productions, to manage herself. According to biographer Donald Spoto, her company was “instrumental” in other actors and actresses following in her footsteps, and ultimately caused the collapse of Old Hollywood’s (in)famous studio system.
As if the divorce and the legal battles weren’t enough, the FBI were secretly watching her.
The FBI’s investigation of her was based on the flimsy pretext of an anonymous phone call. The FBI wrote: “According to the anonymous caller, Marilyn Monroe had drifted into the Communist orbit, and money from Marilyn Monroe Productions was finding its way into the Communist Party. This source states that Marilyn Monroe Productions was filled with Communists.”
This FBI file is declassified, and using it, we can follow her movements around the time she allegedly visited the Miramichi.
In the file, we see the FBI become agitated in late August of 1955. They found out that Marilyn Monroe was planning a secret international trip, but they didn’t know which country she was going to.
The FBI assumed she was “attempting to get visas to travel in Russia.”
Her dossier recorded that a clandestine informant asked her about her destination, but she had replied: “I have not applied for a Soviet visa, but there is a possibility I may visit there some time in the future. … I am looking forward to visiting … other countries.”
Seemingly satisfied by this, the FBI did not bother jotting down her actual destination and did not mention the trip again.
Despite being a constant tabloid fixture that year, Marilyn Monroe seemed to disappear from the public eye during the last week of September and the first days of October.
Even though she was one of the best-documented individuals of the 20th century, her whereabouts that week do not seem to be covered. Nowhere, that is, except for Paul O’Haire’s comment to the Moncton Transcript.
According to O’Haire, “the blonde bombshell” had appeared in ” little Blackville, New Brunswick, “dressed as a boy.”
He claims she was deeply concerned for her privacy, “and requested her presence be kept quiet.”
Her goal may have been to get away during a painful moment. That very week in Los Angeles, the courts would finally approve her divorce from Joe DiMaggio.
According to O’Haire, while in Blackville, Marilyn Monroe rented a tiny little fishing cabin. She wanted to be alone. He said, “she spent all of her time fishing or inside her cabin to avoid being spotted.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, according to O’Haire, who was well respected locally and heavily involved in the Newcastle community, including being President of the Rotary Club and the Miramichi Concert Association, Marilyn Monroe was “an expert angler.”
This may be difficult to reconcile with the glamorous public image of the blonde sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Before she was Marilyn Monroe, though, she had been Norma Jean Baker, a brunette tomboy who grew up in rural foster homes, and later worked in a factory. Norma Jean Baker was said to have been skilled at, and passionate about, fishing.
The same day the Moncton Transcript published its article, Marilyn Monroe made a splashy reappearance in New York City.
According to the celebrity gossip rag Photoplay, she made herself ubiquitous, showing up at three different major parties in a week.
At those lavish parties, she announced that she was “The New Marilyn Monroe.”
Freshly divorced, with a new team backing her, and now in control of her finances and her career, the actress who had made her name playing flighty comedic characters now projected a strong, independent new image.
Did she slip off in secret to the forests of New Brunswick to mentally prepare to self-consciously shed her old life and debut a new version of herself? The evidence doesn’t confirm it — but it doesn’t rule it out either, and a detailed look at her activities around that time does seem to point to a mysterious New Brunswick-sized gap in her personal schedule…
