Marilyn and Her Monsters (2024)

She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors. The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. A few blocks away, above Loew’s State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn—the one everyone knew—52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy.

When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, “Don’t do that. Just tell us what you hear. Don’t tell us how you feel.” Marilyn began to cry. Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, “As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated.” Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman?

[#image: /photos/54cbf9ec932c5f781b393117]|||A handwriting expert takes a magnifying glass to Marilyn’s script, scrutinizing its deeper meaning.|||

Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36.

Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn’s possessions at Christie’s, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built.

Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.

“I picked up a chair and slammed it ...against the glass. It took a lot of banging. I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat.”

“Complete Subjection, Humiliation, Alonement”

Marilyn began taking private lessons with celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg in March 1955, encouraged by the acclaimed theater and movie director Elia Kazan, with whom she had had an affair. “Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew,” she wrote to her analyst Dr. Ralph Greenson in the last and perhaps the most important letter found in this archive, “and believe me he has known many. But he loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with his teacher, Lee Strasberg.”

She was living at the Gladstone Hotel, on 52nd Street off Park Avenue, when she began working with Strasberg and embarked upon the psychoanalysis that was de rigueur for taking classes at the Actors Studio. Founded in 1947 by Kazan and directors Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, it was the holy temple of the Method—acting exercises and scenes that focused on sense memories and “private moments” dredged from the actor’s life. Throughout the late 1940s and through much of the 1950s and 1960s, the Actors Studio was the most revered laboratory for stage actors in America. Its membership (one was not officially a “student” but a “member”) included a roster of the most compelling actors of the day: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Rip Torn, Kim Stanley, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward—who all brought those techniques into film.

Strasberg, born in 1901 in Austria-Hungary and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a genius at analyzing an actor’s performance and a stern and often cold taskmaster. Short, bespectacled, and intense, he wasn’t, recalled Ellen Burstyn, “one for small talk.” For Marilyn, who grew up shunted from one foster family to another, not knowing who her father was, he became a beloved paternal figure, autocratic yet nurturing, and his acceptance of her as a private student bolstered her confidence and gave her the training to improve her acting, and turned her from a movie star (and punch line) into a true artist. But years later Kazan observed, “The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.”

Most important, this archive, far more deeply than the Inez Melson collection, made public in V.F. in October 2008, reveals a woman in search of herself, undergoing the harrowing experience of psychoanalysis for the first time, at the urging of Strasberg. The key players include Strasberg himself, her three psychiatrists—Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, Dr. Marianne Kris, and Dr. Ralph Greenson—and her third husband, Arthur Miller, whom she confesses to loving body and soul, but by whom she ultimately felt betrayed. These poems, musings, dreams, and correspondence also touch on her great fear of displeasing others, her chronic lateness, and three of the biggest traumas of her shortened life: one buried in her past, and two that took place a few years after she began studying with Strasberg. But they also reveal her growth both as an artist and a woman as she manages to cope with memories and disappointments that threatened to overwhelm her.

In a five-and-a-half-page typed document, Marilyn looked back on her early marriage to James Dougherty, an intelligent, attractive man five years her senior. They married on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and in this document she describes her feelings of loneliness and insecurity in that hastily agreed-to union, which was less of a love match than a way to keep Marilyn—then Norma Jeane Baker—out of the orphanage when her caretakers at the time, Grace and Erwin “Doc” Goddard, moved away from California. (There has also been speculation that Grace wanted to remove Norma Jeane from her husband’s too appreciative eye.)

Marilyn was not technically orphaned, as her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, outlived her famous daughter, but because Gladys was a schizophrenic who spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, Marilyn was virtually abandoned, raised by various foster families and by Grace Goddard, a close friend of her mother’s. There were nearly two years when Marilyn was parked in an orphanage. Dougherty liked the idea of rescuing the shy, pretty girl, who left high school to marry him. Not surprisingly, the union failed, and they divorced on September 13, 1946.

“My relationship with him was basically insecure from the first night I spent alone with him,” she wrote in this long, undated, somewhat rambling memoir of that marriage, probably written by hand after undergoing analysis and later typed by her personal assistant, May Reis; the archivists suggest it was written when Norma Jeane was 17 and still married to Dougherty, but the emphasis on self-analysis seems to place it later in her life. It’s an intriguing document, peppered with misspellings, weaving the past with the present, at times reliving scenes from the marriage and her jealousy of Dougherty, at times stepping back and analyzing her emotional state of mind. She wrote,

I was greatly attracted to him as one of the [“only” is crossed out] few young men I had no sexual repulsion for besides which it gave me a false sense of security to feel that he was endowed with more overwelming qualities which I did not possess—on paper it all begins to sound terribly logical but the secret midnight meetings the fugetive glance stolen in others company the sharing of the ocean, moon & stars and air aloneness made it a romantic adventure which a young, rather shy girl who didn’t always give that impression because of her desire to belong & develope can thrive on—I had always felt a need to live up to that expectation of my elders.