Marilyn Monroe was a sad woman, something that no one could explain and of which she felt secretly ashamed. Because she was also happy or could be, radiant, but fatigue, depression, and pessimism, the result of an extremely sensitive and intelligent character, cornered her until she lost all hope in herself and committed suicide on the morning of August 4-5, 1962 in his house (the only one he owned) in Brentwood, Los Angeles, a simple home, with a colonial air, with hardly any furniture and with a Latin inscription at the entrance: Cursum perfection (the journey ends here).
At 36, Marilyn was tired, too tired. The publication of a good part of her personal writings (most of them unpublished) in the book that is now published, Fragmentos (Seix Barral), confirms this emphatically. Her poetry, her readings, her notes, her letters... everything points to the greatest of fatigue, the one that causes that loneliness that escapes the evidence (how could the most adored woman in the world feel alone?) and that she He suffered like an implacable whip. "Alone!!! I'm alone-I'm always alone, no matter what," she writes on the first page of a notebook that, like all of them, shows a nervous and generous woman, terribly insecure and scared, who needed someone others to look for herself, but she never found comfort, always feeling trapped between betrayal or abandonment. No one doubts that her three husbands, each in his own way, loved her, nor that her lovers (from the Kennedy brothers to Elia Kazan, Frank Sinatra, Yves Montand or Marlon Brando, who was a better friend and better person with her than any one of those mentioned above), wanted her but no one could deny that none of them -not even Arthur Miller, probably the one who came closest to discovering her melancholic nature- knew how to be generous and give her the peace she needed.
Marilyn took refuge in her brief, fragmentary, girlish but not naive thoughts, basically poetic -whether in prose or in verse-, whose reading reflects an actress with a creative drive and an inexhaustible need for knowledge. She was a cultured woman, attentive to a life that excited her at the same rate that it imprisoned her. "Help, help, help. I feel that life is getting closer to me when the only thing I want is to die," he writes in a poem whose date dances between 1956 and 1961, and whose first draft, according to Donald Spoto, perhaps the best known of his biographers, she noted in a notebook by Arthur Miller. From her fragile pedestal, the great goddess called for help. But no one wanted to listen to him: not his men, not his admirers, and certainly not the Hollywood studios, where Marilyn became an awkward figure, an intolerably unruly woman whose rebelliousness translated into unprofessionalism, lateness, and self-destructive chaos. Few of her colleagues came to her defense at that time, only Brando (perhaps because he always felt as hurt by that world as she did), Dean Martin (her co-star in Something's Got to Give, who did everything possible to keep her from fired) or her beloved Clark Gable, in whom she saw the dream father she never had (Marilyn tirelessly searched for that man of whom she only possessed the blurry photo of a manly guy with a mustache).
The pills were just a way to appease her enormous anxiety and mitigate her insomnia. She suffered sudden mood swings, alcohol was her antidote to her sadness, her way of cheering herself up because she -as she insists in every corner of her writings- needed the joy that she had lost. "I used to laugh so hard and with such joy," he confessed to Richard Merymand, then deputy editor of Life, in what was his last interview, in July 1962. With shocking lucidity, Norma Mailler explained the tragedy thus: "To To survive, she would have had to be more cynical or at least closer to reality. Instead, she was a street poet trying to recite her verses to a crowd tearing her clothes to shreds." In this same sense, Miller added: "Something is amazing about her: her absolute, irremediable, sometimes intolerable, inability of her to lie."
Thus, the street poet, the woman who took her own life (and all serious investigations dismiss conspiracy theories of a mob murder orchestrated from some secret White House office) by ingesting an entire vial of Nembutal - the pills that her psychiatrist just replaced that day to stop her days without rest- she already announced in a poem without date or name that death was one of her consoling thoughts: "Oh damn I would like to be dead -absolutely non-existent- absent from here -from everywhere but how would I do it. There are always bridges- the Brooklyn Bridge But I love that bridge (everything looks beautiful from its height and the air is so clean) when walking it seems calm despite so many cars that they go crazy at the bottom. So it must be some other bridge, an ugly one with no views -except that I especially like all bridges- they have something and besides, I've never seen an ugly bridge-.
"If people who are not very sensitive and intelligent tend to hurt others, people who are too sensitive and too intelligent tend to hurt themselves," writes Antonio Tabucchi in the book's foreword. For the Italian writer, these unpublished texts by Marilyn reveal an "intellectual and artistic" personality that even biographers could not suspect. "Not only the poems, but also the brief notes and the pages of his diaries included in this book (always in a markedly elliptical, hyper-significant prose and, for this reason, bordering on the sibylline language of poetry) constitute in a way flagrant a search and a quête. The rational search of an intellectual who tries to understand the reality that surrounds her (what is this world, what does it mean) and the quête of a person who searches for herself in this world (who am I? What sense do I have...). The image that Marilyn has left of herself hides a soul that few suspected. Of great beauty, it is a soul that cheap psychology would classify as neurotic, as one can classify as neurotic anyone who thinks too much, everyone who loves too much, everyone who feels too much."
All the actress's belongings were inherited by her teacher at the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg, and it was her widow, Anna Strasberg, who began dusting them from her apartment in the mythical Dakota building in New York. Advised by a group of art collectors, in 2007 Anna Strasberg left part of the material in the hands of Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, who are in charge of publishing Fragments, an exceptional book that closes with the text that Strasberg himself wrote about her famous student upon learning of her death: "Other people had greater physical beauty, but she had a luminous quality: a combination of sadness, glow, and longing."
In her letters to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greensom, in 1961, the actress tries to explain that double face of hers, sad and happy, duplicity that she knew very well and that, far from being shocking, should explain why her deep and still inexhaustible beauty today: "I know that I will never be happy, but I know that I can be very happy! Remember, I already told you that Kazan told me that I was the happiest girl he had ever met and I think he has met some How many. But he loved me for a year, and once cradled me when I was in great distress. He also suggested I go into psychoanalysis, and then wanted me to work with his teacher, Lee Strasberg. Is it Milton who wrote 'Happy men were never born'? '? Know".
In a confusing text, along with a list of words ("trouble, nervousness, humanity, nonsense, mistakes, and my own thoughts"), the actress notes: "(a few drinks too many- from time to time) what maybe it means that I didn't have time to eat during the day and as alcohol is socially accepted and I probably had to rush beforehand - I may feel the need to relax with a few glasses of sherry that can take effect too quickly that I might not have enjoyed being too tired and they suddenly make me happy and friendly with things and the people around me, this is clearly considered drinking too much and the more I think about it, the more I realize that there are no answers, life has to be lived".
The pages smeared with uneven handwriting stop when the most desirable woman on the planet writes her own wish: "To have an idea of myself." A little further away, this woman who was born Norma Jeane Mortenson and christened Norma Jeane Baker, the unwanted daughter of a crazy mother whose absence marked her unhappy childhood, says: "Never again a little girl alone and scared, Remember that you can be installed at the top (it doesn't seem that way)".
The obsession with knowing herself and building herself led her to be fascinated by older men (baseball player Joe DiMaggio) and intelligent men (playwright Arthur Miller), in whom she unloaded her fear of never finding herself, of wandering lost in the skin of a woman that everyone -except her- idolized. Far from the dumb blonde cliché that made her famous on-screen, Marilyn was a woman seeking self-esteem and who took refuge in reading authors who could help her find the answers she so desperately needed: Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gustav Flaubert, Jack Kerouac, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Steinbeck... He read novels, essays, and, above all, poetry. More than 400 volumes were found in her library. Among them, are the six of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln biography and Ulysses, two of her favorite books.
Speaking of her beginnings in Hollywood, the actress confessed to the French journalist Georges Belmont that she studied during her free time: "They never saw me at premieres, or at press conferences, or at parties. It was very simple: I was in School! I couldn't complete my education, so I was taking night classes at the University of Los Angeles. By day I made a living playing roles in movies. By night I was taking classes in history and literature and American history I read a lot to the greats".
In 1943, Marilyn married her first husband, a blue-collar aspiring policeman named James Dougherty; he was 16 years old, and in a typed text she reveals that her husband has betrayed her with another. She reflects on the marriage and the failed expectations of her. She feels anger, humiliation, and, very soon, just despair. She also worries that he sees her like this, broken and tearful: "The numbing pain of rejection and feeling hurt by the destruction or loss of the image of some kind of idealistic or true love," she writes. She longs to feel "loved, desired, pampered"; she wonders why it won't all be "simple, run-of-the-mill, normal, and easy," though if it were, she adds, "it would surely bore me." "I guess maybe tonight I'll feel freer and maybe I'll even be able to look him in the eye and say I love you with a gesture of hate or something like that. […] Last night I was so sunburned that I just she was wearing the sweater without a bra -which gave me a sensation of sensuality that I thought he shared - now there is the question of whether he lied to me- that he loved us both I could accept it but not that he lied to me when he told me that I am the first and principal and that if our relationship changed, he would not hesitate to tell me because, as he admitted, he would never accept being second only".
Marilyn then describes herself as an "optimist" who hopes to be able to laugh soon ("without that false protective tone") at her slip-up. And she ends: "It's not so much fun knowing yourself too much or thinking you know yourself too much - everyone needs a little self-respect to get over the falls and put them behind them."
But self-love did not take hold in a personality that moved in a perpetual zigzag, blurring the possibility of that solid backbone on which any human being wishes to settle in the world. In an undated poem, the actress insists on a recurring image, the two directions and the spiders (symbols of construction and destruction that never cease): "Life - I am from your two directions. Somehow remaining hanging downwards, almost always but strong as a cobweb to the Wind - I exist more with the resplendent cold frost. But my beaded rays are the color I have seen in a painting - ah life you have been deceived".
Marilyn married Arthur Miller on July 29, 1956. There was still the possibility of a reconciliation with DiMaggio (an excessively traditional man who wanted to separate the actress from her vocation to make her a millionaire housewife, something to which she never agreed). A series of poems dated during the months she and Miller spent together in England filming The Prince and the Showgirl reflect the trauma it took for the actress to pry into the playwright's private diaries, in which he doubts his love for her.
She, implacable with herself, begins to punish her fragile self-esteem: "Where her eyes rest with pleasure - I want to continue there - but time has modified the power of that look. Oh, how am I going to manage when I'm less young. I seek joy but she is clothed with pain, take courage as in my youth sleep and rest my heavy head on her chest - for my love still sleeps next to me ". "The pain of her longing when she looks at another like a frustration from the day she was born. And I with my pitiless pain and her pain from longing, when she looks and loves another like a frustration from the day she was born, we have to cope with it, I move sadly because I don't feel any joy".
