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What really struck Cecil Beaton was Marilyn’s ability to keep transforming herself, to give the photographer a thousand variations of herself, without inhibition but with a real uncertainty and vulnerability—even though her incandescent beauty gave her the paradoxical freedom not to fuss over her clothes and her hair.

This photograph is just such an improvisation. Marilyn pulled this carnation from a bouquet to put in her mouth like a cigarette, only later lying on a sofa to place the flower on her breast in a gesture of protection and gift.

“She has rocketed from obscurity to become our post-war sex symbol, the pin-up girl of an age,” Beaton wrote. “And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight. Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path but the rosemary bushes.” He concluded, “Perhaps she was born just the post-war day we had need of her. Certainly she has no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’s Ondine, she is only fifteen years old, and she will never die.”

Ambassador Hotel, New York, 1956

FUNERAL EULOGY

by Lee Strasberg

Marilyn Monroe was a legend.

In her own lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine.

But I have no words to describe the myth and the legend. I did not know this Marilyn Monroe.

We, gathered here today, knew only Marilyn—a warm human being, impulsive and shy, sensitive and in fear of rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfillment. I will not insult the privacy of your memory of her—a privacy she sought and treasured—by trying to describe her whom you knew to you who knew her. In our memories of her she remains alive, not only a shadow on a screen or a glamorous personality.

For us Marilyn was a devoted and loyal friend, a colleague constantly reaching for perfection. We shared her pain and difficulties and some of her joys. She was a member of our family. It is difficult to accept that her zest for life has been ended by this dreadful accident.

Despite the heights and brilliance she had attained on the screen, she was planning for the future: she was looking forward to participating in the many exciting things she planned. In her eyes and in mine her career was just beginning. The dream of her talent, which she had nurtured as a child, was not a mirage. When she first came to me I was amazed at the startling sensitivity which she possessed and which had remained fresh and undimmed, struggling to express itself despite the life to which she had been subjected. Others were as physically beautiful as she was, but there was obviously something more in her, something that people saw and recognized in her performances and with which they identified. She had a luminous quality—a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning—to set her apart and yet make everyone wish to be part of it, to share in the childish naivete which was at once so shy and yet so vibrant.

This quality was even more evident when she was on the stage. I am truly sorry that the public who loved her did not have the opportunity to see her as we did, in many of the roles that foreshadowed what she would have become. Without a doubt she would have been one of the really great actresses of the stage.

Now it is all at an end. I hope that her death will stir sympathy and understanding for a sensitive artist and woman who brought joy and pleasure to the world.

I cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way she had of turning things around so that they faced reality—I will say au revoir. For the country to which she has gone, we must all someday visit.

August 9, 1962

CHRONOLOGY

June 1, 1926

Birth of Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles, third child of Gladys Pearl Baker,