Marilyn Monroe, The Writer

In October a new publication of the side of Marilyn Monroe few people knew, not even some very close to her, would be in bookshops everywhere, in the edition simultaneously in French, English and Spanish. It's a compilation of poems, annotations of diaries and other written material of Norma Jean Mortenson, much better known worldwide by her artistic name Marilyn Monroe. A name of 'tinkling sound' according to the sharp observation of Carmen Martin Gaite, author of an article in which she compared the actress with Madame Bovary of Flaubert. Both linked together with suicide in their 30's, also, both lives are destined by circumstances and criterions imposed.

The variety of written notes are grouped under the title of 'Fragments' that had led the actress to the theatre director, Lee Strasbery of 'Actors' Studio' and her tutor, in the mid fifties. She wanted to learn more about acting not just being decoration in films.

The original list of notes include writers of 1943 - 1962, before being passed onto the hands of Strasbery's widow, and from her, recently, to a French editor who considered them worthwhile of publication. It's now a question of wait and see, as said by the editors, whether the work actually and factually reveal an unsuspecting streak of the melancholic Marilyn, of whom they labelled as 'great reader' and 'with talent and quality of a writer'. Some accolade.

There's a photo of her in a swimming suit, reading the 'Ulyses of Joyce', in the year before her wedding with the writer Arthur Miller, in 1956. The author of famous works like 'Death of a merchant', said that her most surprising characteristics was her 'absolute, irremediable and sometimes even irritable incapacity to lie.' (that describes me too). When she knew she was pregnant by Tony Curtis, during the filming of 'Some like it hot', she put the 2 men together in one room to inform them of that particular situation.

Perhaps the grouped written record would help those interested parties to understand; if that was not the reason of her 'suicide', nor the chain of events before, or the decadence since. One hypothesis is that during that period, the end of the 50's, she was already not quite herself, Norma Jean, but what the rest of the world had made her. It's too late already.

Marilyn wrote in her autobiography: 'it was the street poetess that had wanted to recite her verses to a multitude who just wanted to tear off her clothes.'

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