And so America keeps retaking the Marilyn Monroe test and failing. In 1955, after fighting 20th Century Fox over pay and creative control, she formed Marilyn Monroe Productions and studied at the Actors Studio. Until beauty stops functioning as evidence against intelligence, ambition and authority, the Marilyn Monroe test will remain less a measure of women than of the culture looking at them. Political power, economic power and institutional authority arrived much later—and often only after a fight. ...That is why the Marilyn Monroe test keeps resurfacing in new forms.