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One of the remarkable insights these documents offer is the sense that Marilyn was, until the end, planning for the future. Among other projects, she hoped over time to play the great Shakespearean roles, from Juliet to Lady Macbeth. She also pursued her idea of creating a new production company in association with Marlon Brando.

Some texts will give rise to interpretation and comment. But there is nothing dirty or low, no gossip in this book; that was not Marilyn’s way. What the notes reveal is intimacy without showiness, the seismic measuring of a soul. They take nothing away from Marilyn’s mystery but rather make the mystery more material. She was an elusive star with a magnetic force that sent compasses haywire whenever she got close.

To this day, her face, her eyes, her lips appear all around the world. Innumerable actors and pop singers take her as a reference, a definitive model: to sound like her, to act like her, in advertisements and music videos and films. Songs are composed for her—among them this famous one, by Elton John and Bernie Taupin: “Goodbye Norma Jeane (…) / Loneliness was tough / The toughest role you ever played / Hollywood created a superstar / And pain was the price you paid / Even when you died / Oh the press still hounded you / All the papers had to say / Was that Marilyn was found in the nude.”

This book does not attempt to show her stripped bare but, rather, simply as she was. Through these poems and written papers, she’s more alive than ever.

Stanley Buchthal

Bernard Comment

Jim Dougherty and Norma Jeane, Catalina Island, fall of 1943

PERSONAL NOTE

1943

Norma Jeane married James Dougherty when

she turned sixteen, the age of consent in California,

on June 19, 1942, thereby escaping the threat of

being returned to an orphanage when her foster

family moved out of state. Dougherty was born in

April 1921 and was five years older than she was.

At the end of 1943, the young couple settled for

a few months on Catalina Island off the coast of

Los Angeles, a fashionable resort before the war.

It is likely that this long note, uncharacteristically

typed, was written at this time.

One can’t help being surprised, even impressed,

by the maturity of this seventeen-year-old girl,

whose feelings of disillusionment are plain from the

first sentence, as she examines her marriage and

what she expects from life, and faces the fear of her

husband’s betrayal. Nevertheless, the

disjointedness of the text reveals turbulent

emotions.

The “other woman” she mentions might be

a reference to Doris Ingram, her young

husband’s former girlfriend and a

Santa Barbara beauty queen.

The couple were divorced on

September 13, 1946.

Marilyn during the filming of Niagara, 1952

Marilyn reading Heinrich Heine

UNDATED POEMS

Marilyn Monroe wrote poemlike texts or fragments on loose-leaf paper and in notebooks. She showed her work only to intimate friends, in particular to Norman Rosten, a college friend of Arthur Miller with whom she became very close. A Brooklyn-based novelist, he encouraged Marilyn to continue writing. In the book he wrote about her (Marilyn Among Friends), he concluded, “She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

It is likely that the poetic form, or more generally the fragment, allowed her to express short, lightning bursts of feeling—but who could hear that frail voice, the very opposite of the radiant star? Arthur Miller wrote strikingly: “To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

Life—

I am of both of your directions

Life

Somehow remaining hanging downward

the most

but strong as a cobweb in the

wind—I exist more with the cold glistening frost.

But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve

seen in a paintings—ah life they

have cheated you

Note: Marilyn apparently wrote