When she was already finishing on August 4, 1962, the actress was found dead by her therapist after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. She was 36 years old and she was the most desired woman in the history of humanity, but she was completely alone.
She was still Norma Jeane. She had grown up in orphanages and foster homes, never knowing her father, and with a schizophrenic mother in and out of psychiatric clinics, when she had to move in for the third time with a family friend, Grace Goddard, who was her legal guardian. even though her husband had repeatedly abused her. They lived in Van Nuys, in Los Angeles, but the man was going to be transferred for work and California law prohibited them from taking the minor to another state, so the girl who was going to become the biggest S- symbol of all time he had to return to the hospice. The solution she found then was to marry her neighbor.
The curly brunette who would become Marilyn Monroe married James Dougherty on June 19, 1942, just two weeks after her 16th birthday. He was a cop and a former captain of the high school football team, five years her senior. She called him “daddy” and he dropped out of school to fulfill her marital duties. In the letters, personal texts, and poems that he would leave to the most definitive father figure in his life, his theater teacher, Lee Strasberg, and that make up the book Fragments (2010), he says that Dougherty was one of the few boys who did not they gave her “S- disgust”, and that she clung to him less out of love than out of loneliness and the need to be rescued.
Dougherty also bought the part of the savior of the poor forlorn damsel, but the illusion was short-lived, and Norma was quickly rejected: "My first impulse was total submission, humiliation, confinement before the male counterpart," she writes of him in his diaries.
In 1944 Jim was sent to the Pacific and was there until after the end of World War II. In his absence and against his will, she had taken up pin-up modeling and dyed her hair blonde. They divorced in September 1946, a month after she signed her first acting contract for 20th Century Fox Studios as Marilyn Monroe - her mother's maiden name, Gladys, and a name chosen by an executive producer for its resemblance. with Broadway star Marilyn Miller. Jim couldn't tolerate the idea that his wife wasn't a housewife, much less that he was pretending to have a movie career.
That experience was for Marilyn a sharp trigger for her vulnerability in front of men, and the open wound of the destruction of romantic and idealistic love: "Now what I do is fool myself because if I had one last act, I would portray a heroine suffering valiantly in his attempt to put everything aside by appealing for the protection of an unknown man. Many years later, Dougherty would confess that he never stopped loving her or the career he had opposed before it began. There was another underlying truth for the couple to dissolve: it was not convenient for a rising beauty in Hollywood to be married. With Dougherty, Norma Jeane would never have been Marilyn.
A similar fate befell her romance with the journalist and later screenwriter Robert Slatzer, whom she met after her separation. Slatzer would assure in his memoir with the diva –The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe (1974)– that they had married in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1952, but the studies objected to the marriage and forced Marilyn to request an annulment. There were no records of the union that she ever confirmed in public, even though Slatzer insisted until the end of his days that, at least for a week, he had been the husband of the most desired woman in history.
In her papers, however, her official second husband to the public and the press was Joe DiMaggio. Marilyn met at the beginning of the 50s who was then the most popular baseball champion of the moment and he immediately surrendered to her charms. He had asked to have lunch with the actress after seeing her in the B thriller Don't Bother to Knock (1952), and though he was married, he left her wife for her without much ado. Their wedding, on January 14, 1954, did make publicity sense and was accepted and even encouraged by the studios: together they fulfilled the American dream of uniting the idol of the Yankees with the platinum bomb of Hollywood.
They caused fascination, but, once again, the spell vanished very quickly: DiMaggio was a rather simple and very conservative man, and he was not used to being with a star adored throughout the planet to which no man could resist. He is said to have physically and psychologically abused her and has been known to have had epic jealous rages, such as when he stormed onto the set during the legendary scene in The Seventh Year Itch (1955) in which Marilyn's gauzy white dress flies over her head. a New York subway entrance.
Like Dougherty, DiMaggio wanted her to leave show business and save all of her sensuality for himself. They divorced just nine months after the wedding at City Hall in San Francisco, but they never stopped seeing each other. And it is that, in a perhaps clumsy and possessive way, he was one of the few men who took care of her. It was DiMaggio who rescued her from the Payne West psychiatric clinic in New York in February 1961 against the instructions of all the doctors and as her own responsibility when Marilyn complained about the inhumane treatment she received after being admitted as a psychotic patient. The following Christmas they had something of a reconciliation after he sent her a huge bouquet of flowers.
Jane Russell, close to the actress with whom she shared the bill in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), would confirm after Marilyn's suicide that they planned to remarry and there is no doubt that the sports star loved her even after death: it was the only one of the diva's three husbands who flew to Los Angeles on August 5, 1962 when the news broke. Also, the one who took care of her funeral and banned almost all the directors, producers, and actors from the studios she blamed for the tragedy. The New York Times chronicle of that day says that before leaving the cemetery, he leaned over the coffin and repeated three times that he loved her. For the next twenty years, he sent—via Hollywood's La Parisien Florist—flowers to her grave three times a week.
But if DiMaggio was the one who loved her the most, the writer and playwright Arthur Miller was instead the great love of her diva. And the man for whom she suffered the most. He met him through Elia Kazan, with whom he also had an intense romance, as the director of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) himself confessed in his letters to his wife: "I saw her for the first time on the set of Harmon Jones (the filmmaker who directed her in As young as you feel, in 1950). Her boyfriend – or her guardian – had just died and her family had not allowed him to see her body or re-enter the house they shared. She was crying and Harmon, who considered her ridiculous, was making fun of her. I invited her to eat because she seemed like a waif to me. He wasn't 'interested in her', that came after her. I got to know her and introduced her to Arthur Miller, who was also moved. You couldn't stop it from moving you. She was talented, funny, vulnerable, defenseless, and in excruciating pain, hopeless. She did not lie, she did not have vices or malice and she did have an orphan story that would kill you when you listened to it. She was like all the Charlie Chaplin heroines rolled into one.”
Kazan does not mention it, but Marilyn had an affair with Charlie Chaplin Jr –son of the comedy myth–, he says in her memoirs that he left her when he found her in bed with her brother Sydney. The director, who in those letters to her wife swore to have regretted having hurt her, but never her romance, also introduced her to Strasberg, in whom Marilyn found the image of a father that she had always sought. She tells it herself in a note to her last psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson: “Kazan says I'm the happiest girl he's ever met, and believe me, he's met many. But she loved me for a year and one night when she was very distressed she rocked me to sleep. He also suggested that she do therapy and work with her teacher, Lee Strasberg."
She met Miller again in 1956 at the home of the producer of The Seventh Year Itch, when the playwright was still married to his first wife. He was eleven years older than her and her crush was immediate. Like DiMaggio before him, Miller divorced her wife for her. They married on June 29 of that year, two days after she converted to Judaism in a ceremony in which Strasberg formally fulfilled the role of father to her.
From the first moment, the actress felt tested in front of this man who caused her more admiration than any other, because the fear of disappointing him was infinite. Marilyn, who in her dreams imagined Strasberg as a surgeon willing to “cut her open in half” only to discover that “there was nothing inside,” feared that Miller would also see her as the cliché dumb blonde that the industry had exploited as a goldmine.
In the early years, they were happy. They moved into Marilyn's apartment in New York, and she befriended Truman Capote and entered a circle she had always wanted to belong to: his literary idols. A reader of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Kerouac, and Beckett, she found in Miller and her friends, who were delighted by the diva's presence, a permanent source of cultural recommendations that finally distanced her from the stereotype, even if the media only saw her in that couple a glamorous version of beauty and the beast, and they will openly mock their photo reading Ulysses.
“I care so much about protecting Arthur, I love him so much and he is the only person I have ever met that I not only love as a man but am drawn to outside of all my senses. Because he is the only person I trust as much as I trust myself, because when I trust myself (about certain things), I do it totally, ”the diva writes in her diary. Perhaps for this reason, when she entered a spiral of guilt over the successive miscarriages that led her to increasingly abuse alcohol and pills, and discovered amid that tension that he was cheating on her with a photography archivist in On the Set of The Misfits – for which Miller had written a script based on Marilyn – the betrayal hurt twice as much. Especially when he told her that he was in love with that other woman, whom he would later marry.
Monroe returned from that filming in the Nevada desert to announce her separation from the man in her life, and three months later, in February 1961, she was admitted to the psychiatric clinic from which only DiMaggio would rescue her.
A few months before her fatal outcome, Marilyn had written a desperate letter to Marlon Brando on a letterhead from the Los Angeles Institute of Psychoanalysis, in which she asked him to convince the creator of The Method –also the actor's teacher– to move from New York to Los Angeles and start a new theater company together. They had met in the golden age of the Actor's Studio before they were the brightest stars on the big screen. Brando recounts in her memoirs that they collided – literally – at a party after he finished filming A Streetcar Named Desire: she was playing the piano in a corner and accidentally hit his shoulder; He spun around with the suddenness of reflex and jabbed his elbow into her face. When he apologized, claiming it was an accident, she graciously replied: "Accidents don't exist."
They became instant friends, until one night when she invited him to her apartment and he "fulfilled all a soldier's dreams," as she would describe it. But through the years, he had always been more of a friend to Marilyn than a lover. And also one of her biggest defenders when the attacks from Hollywood increased her insecurities.
Also, Tony Curtis, with whom he shared the set of An Eve and Two Adams (1959) wrote in his biography that they had had a relationship, and even that one of Marilyn's pregnancies during her marriage to Miller was actually the product of an encounter with him. He then was married to the actress Janeth Leigh and, far from talking about love in her memories, he only mentions her as an affair.
Rumors of the time also linked her to Frank Sinatra, and there are even FBI reports that point to the existence of orgies between them along with Sammy Davis Jr and the brothers John and Bobby Kennedy. It was said that she had gotten involved with Bob only to get back at Jack – after a brief and failed night or after JFK snubbed her to marry Jackie, the versions conflict – and until he was the one who killed her so that she would not reveal details. of the almost incestuous romance that she had both with him and with her brother President, to whom she had just sung Happy Birthday in whispers in Madison Square Garden.
