Marilyn

I had a block-mounted poster of Marilyn at the beach for a lot of years.. the exact pose as shown below, only it was in color and an airbrushing. I actually found it a relaxing image, having grown up at the beach myself perhaps.. albeit in Queensland, Australia. Many people I remember, would comment about it being an incredibly sad and depressing picture. It really did not seem that way to me, as mentioned, the picture I had was ‘warmer’ being in color, but I found it somewhat comforting. Not really sure why, only that I had always been a loner.. and would often walk along the beach, on my own, in my teenage years. Perhaps also, that my Mom would always be knitting, so I was never ‘short’ of a warm knit to wear 😉

Sadly, I no longer have the picture, as it was rain damaged a few years ago, and now irreparable. Sometimes wish I could replace it. I happen to think she did a great deal for the ‘Women’s Movement’ ~ including suffering with the exorbitant wage inequality even with her ‘peers’ (such as Elizabeth Taylor), Hollywood ‘abusing’ her beauty and sincere nature. Then there was her inexorable feeling of constant ‘loneliness’. One would think that with her fame and sex goddess status that this is no surprise, as in effect this is not her ‘true self’.

“BEING A SEX SYMBOL IS A HEAVY LOAD TO CARRY, ESPECIALLY WHEN ONE IS TIRED, HURT AND BEWILDERED.”

MARILYN MONROE

My article was brought on by 2 television shows I had seen recently ‘Love Marilyn’ and a 2 part mini series The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

via Vanity Fair

Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36.

Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn’s possessions at Christie’s, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built.

Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. asFragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.

‘Help help Help, I feel life coming closer when all I want Is to die. Scream — You began and ended in air but where was the middle“?

“Complete Subjection, Humiliation, Alonement”

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With excerpts from Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe,

via Thought Catalog

Despite all the photos of her winning smile, Marilyn was a profoundly sad person. This makes sense when you think about it — the most desired woman in the world and she couldn’t find happiness with a man. Incredibly famous and her own mother didn’t know who she was. Desperate to have a family and unable to maintain a pregnancy. But back then, before social media and reality TV, the public had no idea about how Marilyn was struggling because the most important part of her image was projecting a happy, sexy starlet.

She considered “Marilyn Monroe” to be another person. Truman Capote, a good friend, once recounted a lunch where Marilyn disappeared to the bathroom and was gone so long he went looking for her. He found her staring in the mirror. When he asked what she was doing, she responded, “Looking at her.”

Susan Strasberg recalled a moment while she and Marilyn were walking through New York City. They’d been relatively unbothered most of the day; no one seemed to notice the blonde bombshell in public, which Susan found odd. Suddenly, Marilyn turned to Susan and said, “Do you want to see me be her?”

Susan said, “She seemed to make some inner adjustment, something ‘turned on’ inside her, and suddenly — there she was — not the simple girl I’d been strolling with, but ‘Marilyn Monroe’. Now heads turned. People crowded around us.”

Her Suicide Makes no Sense

Okay, everybody’s aware that Marilyn’s death has long been rumored to have been murder rather than suicide. I’m not saying you don’t know that. What I’m saying is that you don’t know WHY it looks so much like murder. Here’s a few of the oddities surrounding Marilyn’s death:

Hours before her death, she spoke with Joe DiMaggio Jr., who noted she sounded “cheerful and upbeat”.

She was discovered by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, who was never able to keep her story straight. Murray changed the timeline the night of Marilyn’s death multiple times and was found washing sheets at 4am when the police arrived.

Despite the 40 pills in her stomach, police noted there was no water glass on the nightstand next to her pill bottles. Marilyn was known to gag even when swallowing pills WITH water. Later, a glass was discovered on the floor near the bed — police claim it wasn’t there when they arrived.

The pathologist who performed her initial autopsy wanted to do further testing, specifically to see HOW the pills entered Marilyn’s system. When he requested her organs, he was told the toxicologist had already destroyed all her organs. The pathologist then asked to see slides of the organs and photos showing the unusual bruising on her body and was told they had “disappeared”.

I firmly believe something strange happened surrounding the circumstances of her death. Not to say her troubled past doesn’t add up to suicide… but there’s just something fishy about the whole thing. Read the whole article

I found this mini-documentary intriguing, as really had no idea that she was such a ‘self-made star’ ~ striving for success after so many let downs and rejections.

Related Articles:

An Interesting Viewpoint on The Hidden Life of Marilyn Monroe – Part I and Part II > M Monroe and Hollywood Mind Control at the Vigilant Citizen
Article at Australian Daily Mail – On Kennedy Family Secrets
Article at Australian Daily Mail – On Private Detective that had bugged her unit at the time of her death.
Surprisingly in-depth write up at Wikipedia on Marilyn Monroe’s Death
50 Things You Never Knew About Marilyn Monroe at The Sydney Morning Herald
Via WordPress – An Article on the Man who performed her Autopsy