Marilyn Monroe’s walk, like nearly everything about her, is famed for being sexy and sensuous. Her look is easy on the eye, her voice is easy on the ear. There must be a secret to it somehow. What could have put the wiggle in the Monroe walk?
One story too often told is that Marilyn cut a small piece of the bottom of one shoe in each pair of her stilettos in order to exaggerate her sexy walk. A different story is that Marilyn had her shoes manufactured with different heel heights on each side.
But these stories are nothing more than high heeled shoe myths. Their sources are dubious at best, and no shoes of uneven heel height have ever been photographed on Marilyn Monroe or formed part of her estate.
The theories might sound plausible when you first hear them, but our analysis has carefully debunked these silly shoe stories. They are a testament to the power of the internet to spread misinformation about a public figure, long after her death.
Happily, there are a number of reasons why we can be completely confident that Marilyn Monroe did not cut a quarter inch (or any other amount) off one of her heels to get a sexy walk, or ask her shoemakers to create the same effect.
Here are those reasons.
Reason 1: the Marilyn Monroe shoe shortening claims are a recent invention
The first questions we asked about the claims that Marilyn shortened one of her heels are these: who or what is the source of these claims, and when did they start? Did they emerge during Marilyn’s lifetime, or could they be linked reliably to anything she said or did?
Perhaps suprisingly, the origins of the stories were easy enough to find.
We quickly identified that the claims did not emerge until decades after Marilyn Monroe’s death. That alone should be a cause for extreme skepticism because, in her short lifetime, Marilyn was generally regarded as the world’s most photographed woman of the 20th century.
Every aspect of Marilyn’s image and dress was on public display and ruthlessly – relentlessly – analysed during her lifetime. So, we ask rhetorically, doesn’t it seem wildly unlikely that nobody noticed at the time that the world’s most photographed woman was walking or standing on uneven high heels?
And that nobody caught a photograph showing it? Or asked her about it? For over twenty years?
First mention of shoe shortening claim
The very first public mention of Marilyn Monroe supposedly cutting off or shortening one of her high heels came in 1985, some 23 years after Marilyn’s death.
The source was Anthony Summers’ book Goddess: The Secret Lives Of Marilyn Monroe. An updated version of the book formed the basis of the 2022 Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: the Untold Tapes.
Here’s what Summers said in chapter 7 of the 1985 edition of Goddess, repeated in the updated 2013 edition:
Jimmy Starr, former columnist on the Los Angeles Herald-Express, claimed to know the secret of the Marilyn Monroe walk. ‘She learned a trick of cutting a quarter of an inch off one heel, so that when she walked, that little fanny would wiggle. It worked.’
In the notes appearing at the end of Goddess, Anthony Summers attributed the quote to an interview that he personally conducted with Jimmy Starr in 1983. A number of observations should be made about Starr’s claim and Summers’ reporting of it.
First, Anthony Summers (a reknowned investigative journalist) does not himself claim that Marilyn cut her heels short. He simply says that Starr “claimed” that was what happened. Making claims is dead easy; it is proof that requires effort.
Summers then verbatum records Starr’s claim using speech marks to indicate that he is recording Starr’s words. Again he does not endorse or seek to corrorobrate them.
Secondly, Summers correctly records that Starr was a “former columnist”. He neglects to say that what Starr wrote was a “gossip and film column“.
Starr’s career as a gossip columnist is important to considering the weight we might give to what he says. After all, the starting point with gossip columnists is that what they say shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
The essence of gossip is that it is unsourced information that has not been confirmed as being true. The essence of being a gossip columnist is to relate such information without specifying a source and without knowing for sure whether or not it is true. Or even caring.
Third, there is indeed no primary source stated by Starr. Starr does not state how he knows of Marilyn’s “trick”. He also doesn’t say from whom or how she supposedly “learned” it. And even as a gossip columnist himself, he never included the claim in anything he wrote.
How would he know that the amount cut off was “a quarter of an inch”? It’s all just to be taken on trust. Without proof, it is simply unsubstantiated gossip.
Starr may have genuinely believed what he said, but that doesn’t make it true. And, without saying how he knew it, it doesn’t make it very convincing either.
Fourthly, the claims were not made until over two decades after Marilyn passed away.
Starr retired from life as a gossip columnist in 1962, the same year Marilyn died. He moved to Arizona and was not interviewed by Summers until 1983, when he was 79 years old. By this time Marilyn had been dead for 21 years and nobody had ever made public mention of her shortening one heel.
All in all, we should be very slow to accept the uncorroborated and unsourced recollections of an elderly retired gossip columnist. This is particularly so when Marilyn never said anything herself about cutting off heels, and the allegation was never put to her by Starr or anyone else.
Lots of crazy theories about her walk were suggested to her, but there’s no record that anyone raised this one. Starr’s claims might be some evidence, but they’re pretty weak evidence. As we see below, the counter-evidence is much stronger.
Of course the internet didn’t agree. As the internet took off, so did the Marilyn shoe story. Much like other high heeled celebrity shoe myths (Coco Chanel’s supposed quote about keeping your heels and standards high is another example).
By 2011, the amount said to have been cut off had doubled: that year, Conde Nast Traveller reported the myth as being that Marilyn had “half an inch cut off one heel to give her that signature sashay”. Other sites quoted Jimmy Starr’s claim as recorded by Anthony Summers, but referred to him as a “reporter” which enhanced the credibility of what he said.
The story thus grew legs when they should have been swiftly cut off.
A different shoe shortening claim, perhaps?
In 2015, the Marilyn shoe-shortening claim suddenly seemed to have mutated. The myth now became that Marilyn had her shoes manufacturered with uneven heels.
Of course, if this claim was right then it would disprove Starr’s claim because there would be no need for Marilyn to cut a quarter inch off her shoes if they were manufactured with uneven heels. You couldn’t have it both ways.
And yet James Ferragamo, who really should know better, tried to do just that.
The new claim was first reported in an article by Colleen Barry for the Associated Press in 2015 – that is 53 years after Marilyn died. Here’s what it said:
When Marilyn Monroe ordered pumps from Salvatore Ferragamo in the 1940s, she had a special request, the shoemaker’s grandson revealed. One heel was slightly higher than the other, enhancing her famed wiggle. […]
Ferragamo quickly became known as “shoemaker to the stars,” pioneering the powerful link between fashion and the booming film industry.
Those customers included Judy Garland, Mae West and Monroe, said Ferragamo’s grandson James, the brand’s accessory product director. He said Monroe bought the iconic pumps in the 1940s from a shop on Madison Avenue in New York City for $45 a pair, and he has the receipt to prove it.
“The Marilyn Monroe walk required a modification to have that wiggle effect,” Ferragamo said, saying one heel was several millimeters higher than the other.
Importantly, this article makes two different and contradictory claims: in the first sentence, it suggests that Marilyn’s Ferragamo heels were made at different heights.
But the rest of the article says that she bought them unaltered, and then had them modified. So which is it?
To start with, the idea that Marilyn ordered heels specially tailored at different heights from Salvatore Ferragamo “in the 1940s” is risible, and was subsequently retracted by Barry. Marilyn Monroe was barely known in the 1940s, let alone ordering shoes from Italian shoemakers. She was just 14 years old in 1940.
Indeed Ferragamo himself was not much making heels in the 1940s either; it is only towards the end of that decade that he started ramping them up. The stiletto itself didn’t appear until the early 1950s.
However Barry stuck by the rest of the story, including the silly claim that Marilyn Monroe made special requests when ordering Ferragamo heels for one heel to be “slightly higher than the other”.
One reason that this claim is extremely unlikely is that Marilyn didn’t order her Ferragamos from the manufacturer. She bought her Ferragamo heels off the shelf, either herself or through an agent. This is well documented in contemporaneous media reports, letters, invoices and receipts for example.
And as the Ferragamo Museum reveals, Marilyn never even met Salvatore Ferragamo. She was a customer but there is no reason to think she had her heels specially tailored before she received them.
Of course, James Ferragamo does not state a source for the “special request” that Marilyn Monroe supposedly made of Salvatore Ferragamo. Certainly it wouldn’t have been Salvatore telling James himself: James’ famous grandfather died 11 years before he was even born! None of these issues are considered by Barry in her article.
In conclusion then, the emergence of these high-heeled claims only decades years after Marilyn’s death does seem to suggest they are a bit dodgy. But what other reasons are there for disputing them?
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Reason 2: we’ve seen Marilyn’s shoes and the heels are the same height
Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Marilyn did not cut a quarter inch off her heels can be found by examining her shoes themselves. Forunately there is plenty of evidence available: Marilyn Monroe’s heels are highly collectible in the celebrity memorabilia market.
In all the dozens of pairs of Marilyn Monroe’s shoes available to collectors and on public display, not a single pair has turned up with a quarter of an inch cut off one of the heels. Not one.
As for James Ferragamo’s assertions, thirty pairs of Marilyn’s shoes were exhibited by the Ferragamo Museum in 2012 and – guess what? Not a single pair amongst them was identified as having been manufactured with one heel higher than the other.
Plenty of other pairs of Marilyn’s high heels have sold at auction, at a going price of anywhere between $15,000 and $30,000 per pair. You can therefore safely bet that if any of those shoes had heels of differing heights, they would command a premium. Again, none have been identified with different heel heights.
So if Marilyn really did cut a piece off the bottom of her heels to achieve a wiggle in her walk, then she managed to destroy every bit of the evidence just before her sudden and unexpected death while leaving all her non-altered shoes to pass to her estate.
Does that sound likely to you? Not to us either.
Also, not a single shred of documentary evidence – a receipt, a letter, a written message or anything like that has been discovered to support either of the shoe-shortening theories. Nobody has ever come forward as the chief shoe-shaver of a woman who owned dozens of pairs of high heels.
Given the sheer amount of Marilyn-related documents that are in the market – and the high prices they command – the absence of supporting evidence is a further reason to not believe the stories.
Reason 3: different heel heights don’t put a wiggle in your walk
We save the most obvious reason for last: different heel heights don’t put a wiggle in your walk. Marilyn Monroe’s walk was one-in-a-billion. If replicating it was as simple as having different heel heights, wouldn’t someone else have tried it?
The “wiggle in your walk” from wearing high heels comes from the swaying motion as you move from one leg to the other. This can be exaggerated by moving your backside deliberately at the same time, or by bending and straightening the knees slightly as you put each foot down.
What it doesn’t come from is simply having one heel higher than the other. You can try this yourself with two different heel heights. All it will do is make your walk look lopsided and when you come to stand still you will be on a lean.
There are no doubt many mysteries still to be uncovered about the incomparable Marilyn Monroe. But you can be sure that her walk, like the woman herself, was utterly unique. And not able to be replicated just by chopping a little piece off a pair of shoes.