Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (5 page)

damn near broke my back

and dislocated my neck trying not to

sleep all over the
filipino
boy

Moved my seat when a

[illegible] left the bus—the

only empty seat so

I left mine
for
so the

girl could sit her kid

down and I took the

other seat. It was next to

a
filipino
boy and

he smelled good like

flowers.

Marilyn with a book about Goya, around 1953 Marilyn and Degas sculpture, Los Angeles, 1956

OTHER “RECORD” NOTEBOOK

AROUND 1955

This black notebook has a smoother cover than the preceding one. Only the first few pages have been filled; pages 3 and 4 have disappeared, because Marilyn either ripped out the sheet to write on, or did so on rereading it. It is likely that this group of notes, which is coherent and forms a certain continuity, dates from the time Marilyn started working with Lee Strasberg, around 1955. A sincere effort at introspection can be observed as the star returned to her childhood and the lifelong fears it engendered. Aunt Ida is probably Ida Martin (rather than Ida Bolender, with whom Marilyn also stayed as a child). Ida Martin was the mother of Marilyn’s aunt by marriage, an evangelical Christian and strict disciplinarian who emphasized obedience and was repressive about sexual issues in general; she may also have made the twelve-year-old Norma Jeane feel guilty for an episode in which she said she had been molested. To no longer feel ashamed of what you were, of what you desired: this was what Marilyn, who had made her childhood dream come true by becoming an actress, was now aiming for. We may also assume that she had just started psychoanalysis, as she pointed out the bent of the unconscious to forget and repress, an impulse she urged herself to struggle against by trying to reclaim memory in order to be able to accept herself fully. She experienced work as a way of freeing herself from the constraints and shackles of the past, and these pages can be read as an outline of self-analysis, both gripping and moving.

to know reality (or

things
as they are
than

to have
not to know

and to have few

illusions as possible—

train my will now

working (doing my tasks that I

have set for myself)

On the stage—I will

not be punished for it

or be whipped

or be threatened

or not be loved

or sent to hell to burn with bad people

or feeling that I am also bad.

or be afraid of my
genitals
being

or ashamed

exposed known and seen—

so what

or ashamed of my sensitive feelings—

they are real
ity

or colors or screaming or doing

nothing

and I do have feeling

very strongly sexed feeling

since a small child—(think of all the