Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.

The line contrasts Hollywood’s lavish rewards for surface-level, marketable intimacy (“a kiss”) with the meager value it assigns to inner life and integrity (“your soul”). It frames the film industry as an economy of appearances: physical allure and performative romance are richly compensated, while the emotional cost—privacy surrendered, selfhood commodified, moral compromises normalized—is discounted. The quote’s bite comes from its transactional language, implying that exploitation can be dressed up as opportunity. Whether or not Monroe originated it, the sentiment resonates with mid‑century star-making practices that treated performers as products and encouraged them to trade authenticity for publicity and profit.