Fragments_ Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters - Marilyn Monroe [18]
11 – Payne Whitney gives me a pain
It was often obviously an error of judgment to place me in Payne Whit. and the doctor who recommended it realized it and tried to rectify it. What the my condition warranted was the rest and care I got at Presbyterian Hospital
12 – the love of my work I love and a few reliable human beings the hope for my future growth & development.
13 – I have a strong sense of self of criticism but I believe I’m becoming more reasonable and tolerant realistic in this regard
14 – Eleanor Roosevelt—her devotion to mankind
Carl Sandburg—his poems are songs of the people by the people and for people Pres. and Robert Kennedy—they symbolize the youth of America—in its vigor its brilliance and its compassion
Greta Garbo—for her artistic creativity and her personal courage and integrity
15 – I am at ease with people I trust or admire or like the rest I’m not at ease with.
16 – At the present time I’m reading Capt. Newman M.D. and To Kill a Mockingbird—in times of crisis I do not turn to a book—I try to think and to use my understanding
17 – I love poetry and poets
18 – I constantly try to clarify and redefine my goals
Notes:
Captain Newman, M.D. is a novel by Leo Rosten (no relation to Norman), published in 1961, based on the experiences of Ralph Greenson when he was a military officer at Yuma (Arizona) during the Second World War. To Kill a Mockingbird, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Harper Lee, was published in 1960.
In Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words, the photographer George Barris describes the conversation he had with her on August 3, 1962, the day before her death, when she told him she was reading these two books.
19 – my sleep depends on my state of satisfaction and that varies with my life—my dreams are too intimate to be revealed in public.
My nightmare is the H Bomb. What’s yours?
20 – (1) I have great feeling for all the persecuted ones in the world
(2) But I must have always refrained from discussing answering personal religious questions.
21 – I hope at some future time to be able to make a glowing report about the wonders that psychoanalysis can achieve. The time is not ripe.
22 – Early lack of sufficient training and experience as of yet until now
23 – I would not wish to slight all the actresses who would be left off such a list and therefore refrain from answering
24 – The lack of any consistent love and caring. A mistrust and fear of the world was the result. There were no benefits except what it could teach me about the basic needs of the young, the sick, and the weak.
25 – I can’t answer at this time
26 – yes and I would underline it
27 – in spades!
SOME BOOKS FROM MARILYN MONROE’S PERSONAL LIBRARY
Marilyn Monroe’s library demonstrates her range of interests. Besides classics such as John Milton, Gustave Flaubert, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and Khalil Gibran, she read widely from contemporary authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and Jack Kerouac.
The proceeds from the sale of Marilyn’s books were donated by Anna Strasberg to the charity Literacy Partners. This was a logical choice, given Marilyn’s love of books and reading, as well as Lee Strasberg’s lifelong dedication to education.
THE FAVORITE PHOTO
Among Marilyn Monroe’s personal belongings were dozens of prints of this portrait taken by Cecil Beaton on February 22, 1956, in New York. She confessed it had always been her favorite, and she often included an autographed copy when she wrote back to her fans.
Joshua Logan, the director of Bus Stop, gave Marilyn the photograph in an engraved triptych, flanked by two handwritten pages by Cecil Beaton recalling this shoot. Beaton saw her as a very paradoxical figure, a siren and tightrope-walker, femme fatale and naive child, the last incarnation of an eighteenth-century