Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (13 page)

I’m not very bright I guess.

No just dumb//if I had

any brains I wouldn’t be

on crummy train with this

crummy girls’ band.

I used to sing with male

bands but I can’t afford it

anymore.

Have you ever been with a male band

Heats

Note: This is a line from the scene in the train near the beginning of
Some Like It Hot
.

You know I’m going to be

twenty-five in June

Note: This is also a line from
Some Like It Hot
. When the film was made Marilyn had turned thirty-two, but her birthday was June 1.

Title—
About my poems
.

Norman—so hard to please

when all I want is to tease

So
it might rhyme

So what’s the crime?

When I’ve spent all this
After all this time

on earth

Note: Norman Rosten, poet and novelist, had been a close friend of Marilyn’s in New York since 1955.

Marilyn Monroe with Carson McCullers, during a lunch given by the American author in honor of the great Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), at McCullers’s home in Nyack, New York, 1959 Marilyn with Blixen and McCullers

FRAGMENTS AND NOTES

The notes and fragments written here and there—on torn-out pages, envelopes, tickets, address books—bring together secrets, observations, efforts at self-motivation and introspection. They also show Marilyn’s will, which was bent sometimes on purely practical matters and at other times on the general question of self-discipline. Ways of interpreting one line or other, confusion at having to act a joyful part when she felt sad, the need to concentrate harder, birthday greetings with all kinds of fanciful names (she loved inventing nicknames for her friends or herself), memories of her mother wanting to keep her out of the way, rules for life and work, reminders for fittings for a gala evening dress, instructions for her business partner Milton Greene, and, at the beginning of an address book, a list of instructions to be followed: in each text we glimpse a moment of her life, a character trait, signs of doubt or uneasiness, and, over and over, the desire to improve and transform herself.

Aug 27

I am restless and nervous and scattered and jumpy—a few minutes ago I almost threw a silver plate—into a dark area on the set—but I knew couldn’t afford to let out anything I really felt in fact I wouldn’t dare because I wouldn’t stop at that maybe. Just before that I almost threw up my whole lunch. I’m tired. I’m searching for a way to play this part I am depressed with my whole life since I first remember—How can I be such a gay young hopeful girl—What I am using is that one sunday when I was fourteen for I was all these things that day but—Why can’t I use it more consistently my concentration wavers most of the time—something is racing in me in the opposite direction to most of the days I can remember. I must try to work and work on my concentration—maybe starting with the simplest of things.

Must make effort to do

must have the discipline to do the following—

z – go to class—my own
always
—without fail

x – go as often as possible to observe Strasberg’s other private classes

g –
never
miss my actors studio session

v –
work
whenever possible—on class assignments—and
always keep working on the acting exercises.

u – start attending Clurman lectures—also Lee Strasberg’s directors’ lectures at theater wing—
enquire
about both

l – keep looking around me—only much more so—
observing
—but not only myself but others and everything—take things (it) for what they (it’s) are worth.

y – must make strong effort to work on current problems and phobias that out of my past has arisen—making much much much more more more more more effort in my analysis. And be there
always
on time—no excuses for being
ever
late.

w – if possible take at least one class at university—in literature—

o – follow RCA thing through.

p – try to find someone to take dancing from—body work (creative)

t – take care of my instrument—personally & bodily (exercise)

try to enjoy myself when I can—I’ll be miserable enough as it is.

Words—Find out their meanings

Notes:

The names in this address book, especially that of Milton Greene, would seem to indicate that it was bought in New York in 1955.

Harold Clurman, theater director and drama critic, was one of the three founders of Group Theatre in New York in 1931 (along with Lee Strasberg).

Marilyn Monroe signed a contract to record film songs with the RCA label in 1954.

There is no obvious link between “Wanderjahre” (the wandering years) and “Entsagung” (renunciation), unless Marilyn is echoing her reading of Freud or Rilke.

“À trois”/“threesome” bears at most a dubious connection with “probation.”