Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (6 page)

things I felt then

I do know
ways people

act unconvent
iona
lly—mainly

myself—do not be afraid of

my sensiti
v
ity or to

use it—for I

can & will channel it + crazy thoughts too

I want to do my scene or exercises

([illegible] idiotic as they seem)

as sincer
e
ly as
possible
I

can knowing and showing

how
I know
it is also—
no

matter
—what they might

think—or judge from it

I can and will help

myself and work on

things anal
y
tically no

matter how painful—if I

forget things (the uncon
scious

wants to

forget—I will only try to remember)

Discipline—Concentration

my body is my body every part of it.

feel what I feel

within myself—that is trying to

become aware of it

also what I feel in others

not being ashamed of my

feeling, thoughts—or ideas

realize the thing
that

they are—

having a sense of myself

Marilyn reading
To the Actor
by Michael Chekhov, New York, 1955 Marilyn writing at home, May 1953

WALDORF-ASTORIA STATIONERY

1955

Marilyn Monroe’s immense popular appeal had at last been recognized by the Hollywood elite, who had gathered together at a party given in her honor by Charles Feldman, the producer of
The Seven Year Itch
, on November 6, 1954, at the Beverly Hills Romanoff. Still dissatisfied with what Hollywood had to offer, Marilyn decided to leave the West Coast for New York and set up Marilyn Monroe Productions with the photographer Milton Greene. This was a tremendous challenge to the all-powerful studios and a gesture for which she would never really be fully forgiven. From then on her life would swing between the West Coast and the East Coast, a contest between the movie-star image and the cultural and artistic self-invention that the Actors Studio and her New York acquaintances made possible. After a few weeks spent at the Gladstone Hotel, she stayed in a three-room suite on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf-Astoria from April to September 1955. The following documents were written on this prestigious hotel’s stationery. They include a long prose poem, the account of a nightmarish dream that is full of surprises (not least her drama teacher turning into a surgeon), thoughts and notes about what Lee Strasberg had said (she misspelled his name with a double “s”) during the classes she attended at the Actors Studio, the draft of a letter to a certain “Claude,” and a list of song titles. Some of these documents are discontinuous, and the links between texts, which might have been written in any order, have been left to the reader’s discernment.

Sad, sweet trees—

I wish for you—rest

but you must be wakeful

Sooooo many lights in the darkness

making skeletons of buildings

and life in the streets

The things
What
were
was it I thought about yesterday

down
in the streets?

It
now
seems so far away
up here
long ago

and moon
so full and dark
.

It’s better
I learned
they told me as a child what it was

for I could not
guess it or
understand it now.

Noises
from
of impatience from cab drivers always driving who

must drive—hot, dusty,
snowing
icy streets so they

can eat, and perhaps save for a vacation, in which they

will
can drive their wives all the way across the

country to see her relatives.

Then the river—the part made of pepsi cola—the park—thank god for the park

Yet I am not looking at these things

I’m looking for my lover

It’s good they told me what

the moon was when I was a child.