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in her carriage went over the cracks—“We’ll go far away”

The meadows are huge the earth (will be) hard

on my back. The grass surged touched

the blue and still white clouds changing from an

old man shapes to a smiling dog with ears flying

Look—

The meadows are reaching—they’re touching the sky

We’ll leave We left our outlines against/on the crushed grass.

It will die sooner because we were there—will something

else have grown?

Don’t cry my doll don’t cry

I hold you and rock you to sleep.

hush hush I’m I was only pretending now that I’m (was)

not your mother who died.

I shall feed you from the shiny dark bush

just left of the door.

Jamaica 36/78

Dr. Mike Fayer

After one year of analysis

Help Help

Help

I feel life coming closer

when I all want

is to die.

Scream—

You began and ended in air

but where was the middle?

Notes:

It has been impossible to trace Dr. Mike Fayer.

According to Donald Spoto, Marilyn is thought to have sent the five-line poem “Help” to Norman Rosten in the summer of 1961 after having started regular consultations with Dr. Ralph Greenson. Spoto adds that Marilyn first wrote this poem, or perhaps message, in Arthur Miller’s notebook in London in 1956.

I’m not very bright I guess.

No just dumb//if I had

any brains I wouldn’t be

on crummy train with this

crummy girls’ band.

I used to sing with male

bands but I can’t afford it

anymore.

Have you ever been with a male band

Heats

Note: This is a line from the scene in the train near the beginning of Some Like It Hot.

You know I’m going to be

twenty-five in June

Note: This is also a line from Some Like It Hot. When the film was made Marilyn had turned thirty-two, but her birthday was June 1.

Title—About my poems.

Norman—so hard to please

when all I want is to tease

So it might rhyme

So what’s the crime?

When I’ve spent all this After all this time

on earth

Note: Norman Rosten, poet and novelist, had been a close friend of Marilyn’s in New York since 1955.

Marilyn Monroe with Carson McCullers, during a lunch given by the American author in honor of the great Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), at McCullers’s home in Nyack, New York, 1959 Marilyn with Blixen and McCullers

FRAGMENTS AND NOTES

The notes and fragments written here and there—on torn-out pages, envelopes, tickets, address books—bring together secrets, observations, efforts at self-motivation and introspection. They also show Marilyn’s will, which was bent sometimes on purely practical matters and at other times on the general question of self-discipline. Ways of interpreting one line or other, confusion at having to act a joyful part when she felt sad, the need to concentrate harder, birthday greetings with all kinds of fanciful names (she loved inventing nicknames for her friends or herself), memories of her mother wanting to keep her out of the way, rules for life and work, reminders for fittings for a gala evening dress, instructions for her business partner Milton Greene, and, at the beginning of an address book, a list of instructions to be followed: in each text we glimpse a moment of her life, a character trait, signs of doubt or uneasiness, and, over and over, the desire to improve and transform herself.

Aug 27

I am restless and nervous and scattered and jumpy—a few minutes ago I almost threw a silver plate—into a dark area on the set—but I knew couldn’t afford to let out anything I really felt in fact I wouldn’t dare because I wouldn’t stop at that maybe. Just before that I almost threw up my whole lunch. I’m tired. I’m searching for a way to play this part I am depressed with my whole life since I first remember—How can I be such a gay young hopeful girl—What I am using is that one sunday when I was fourteen for I was all these things that day but—Why can’t I use it more consistently my concentration wavers most of the time—something is racing in me in the opposite direction to most of the days I can remember. I must try to work and work on