A rare black and white photograph of Marilyn Monroe with her Golden Globe at the 1952 awards ceremony has been discovered at a West Hollywood memorabilia shop and is now in the HFPA archives.
The original print, a bit yellowed at the edges but in good condition for its age, shows the actress seated at a table with her statuette as her unknown tablemate looks on. The photograph is not signed and has no stamps or markings on the back, so the photographer is unknown. Explained Scott Forter, a leading expert and collector of all things Marilyn: “At that time, the Globes was a smaller, more open affair, with no official photographer, no tight security, and a large group of press photographers moved freely among the tables.”
Marilyn Monroe received the Golden Globe in a ceremony at the Club Del Mar in Santa Monica when she was 25 years old. More accurately it was the Henrietta Award, an almost two-foot-tall statuette of a woman, but named after a man, Henry Gris, one of the first presidents of the Foreign Press Association of Hollywood, a predecessor of the HFPA.
At the time the Henrietta was given to the actor and actress deemed “best young box office personality”.  Monroe won the 1951 poll, the year before she had her first leading role, in the noirish Don’t Bother To Knock.
In all the HFPA honored her four times: three times for her popularity and once for her performance as the Lead Actress in a Comedy, for Some Like It Hot, in 1959. Her last win came in 1962, a few months before her death at the age of 36.
That recognition turned out to be very important to Monroe, as Dr. Susan Doll wrote in an article: ”Marilyn’s February 1962 purchase of her new home and her winning of the Golden Globe Award as World’s Film Favorite in March, would be the last two high points of her life.”
The Golden Globe for Some Like it Hot (she was also nominated for a Golden Globe for best dramatic actress in 1956 for Bus Stop) would be Monroe’s only American acting award. She won several awards from magazines (Look, Redbook, Photoplay) and several European film awards, but she never received as much as a nomination from the Academy.
Only the HFPA recognized and awarded Monroe for her acting, and only the HFPA gave Some Like it Hot the recognition it so richly deserved. The presenter of Monroe’s 1962 award was actor Glenn Ford (three time Golden Globe nominee, who finally won in 1962 as Best Actor for his performance in Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles).
The awards ceremony was held at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove. It was the first time the two met, and as told by Ford’s son, Peter, in his Glenn Ford: A Life, it led to a later romance —not the first or the last time that the Golden Globes acted as a matchmaker. Ask Harrison Ford who met his future wife, Calista Flockhart at the 2002 Golden Globes, when he received the Cecil B. deMille award.
The original article was written by photographer and HFPA member Yoram Kahana, in 2014. Kahana passed away on June 19, 2021.