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Since the “other” (the beloved) was unattainable, she resigned herself “to love bravely” and accept what she could not alter. Here we can sense a tortured soul who still wanted to believe in the possibility of profound connection, even as the relationship grew more strained and distant.

starting tomorrow I will take care of myself for that’s all I really have and as I see it now have ever had. Roxbury—I’ve tried to imagine spring all winter—it’s here and I still feel hopeless. I think I hate it here because there is no love here anymore. I regret the effort I desperately made here. I tried to fight what with my being I knew was true—that due to pressure (it’s going to sound like a telegram) that have come in my work (it’s funny I’ve always accepted even the worst—tried to oppose it if it meant jeopardizing my work) he could not endure (he is from another land) though I felt (innocently, which I am not) that what I could endure helped both of us and in a material way also which means so much more to him than me even. I have seen what he intends me to see and I am strangely calm while I catch my breath. It’s a good saying the not so funny—what it stands for though—pain “If I had my life to live over I’d live over a saloon”

Those tender green leaves on these one hundred & seventy five year old maples that I see (I wondered several what my senses felt what was I looking at). It’s like having a child when one is ninety. I don’t want any children because I only could trust every delicate and indelicate feeling of my child with myself in case of accident (sounds like an identification card) there is no one I trust. I mean if anything would happen Blessed thought at this moment. In every spring the green is too sharp—though the delicacy in their form is

Note: The quote is from W. C. Fields.

sweet and uncertain though—it puts up a good struggle in the wind though trembling all the while. Those leaves will relax, expand in the sun and each raindrop they will resist even when they’re battered and ripped. I think I am very lonely—my mind jumps. I see myself in the mirror now, brow furrowed—if I lean close I’ll see—what I don’t want to know—tension, sadness, disappointment, my blue eyes dulled, cheeks flushed with capillaries that look like rivers on maps—hair lying like snakes. The mouth makes me the saddest, next to my dead eyes. There is a dark line between the lips in the outline of several [illegible] waves in a turbulent storm—it says don’t kiss me, don’t fool me I’m a dancer who cannot dance.

When one wants to stay alone as my love (Arthur) indicates the other must stay apart.

Marilyn reading a script, Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles, 1952

Marilyn on her bed, Hollywood, 1962

RED LIVEWIRE NOTEBOOK

1958

In the spring of 1958, Marilyn had had enough of her dull country life. She wanted to start working again and was studying proposals from her agent and Fox, among which was an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, when, out of the blue, Billy Wilder sent her a two-page summary of an old German farce he was working on, Some Like It Hot. On July 8 she arrived in Los Angeles for the shooting.

Marilyn used only five pages of this big red spiral notebook. It can be dated from the summer of 1958, as it includes two lines of dialogue from Some Like It Hot. Why these two lines? (One might be self-referential; Marilyn was born in June just like the character of Sugar Kane.) What do they reveal about Marilyn’s musings?

Another possibility presents itself: that the pencil notes were written before the ones in blue ballpoint pen. In that case, “after one year of analysis” would refer to 1956 (she started her analysis with Dr. Hohenberg in 1955), with a hint of irony as to the result, as revealed in a short four-line poem expressing despair in the form of a cry for help: the desire to die rather than live.

I left my home of green rough wood—

a blue velvet couch I dream till now

a shiny dark bush just left of the door.

[Illegible] down the walk