Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe Page A

the French journalist Georges Belmont, Marilyn recalled the beginning of her career: “Nobody could imagine what I did when I wasn’t shooting, because they didn’t see me at previews or premieres or parties. It’s simple: I was going to school! I’d never finished high school, so I started going to UCLA at night, because during the day I had small parts in pictures. I took courses in the history of literature and the history of this country, and I started to read a lot, stories by wonderful writers.” Her library contained four hundred books, ranging from such classics as Milton, Dostoyevsky, and Whitman to contemporary writers, including Hemingway, Beckett, and Kerouac.
    Arthur Miller played a part in her development as a reader, too, recommending Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, which she devoured. But some years before they were involved, Marilyn had already tackled James Joyce’s Ulysses .
    As we know, Marilyn inspired numerous painters: Dalí, De Kooning, and Warhol, among others. She also felt a real interest in painting—in the painters of the Italian Renaissance, such as Botticelli; Goya, especially his demons (“I know this man very well, we have the same dreams, I have had the same dreams since I was a child”); Degas, whose ballet dancer she gazed at in wonder when taken to see a private collection; and also Rodin, whose Hand of God she admired at length in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    From all these examples emerges a cultured and curious Marilyn who had a strong desire to understand others, the outside world, destiny, and, of course, herself. She took notes, swiftly setting down her feelings and thoughts and expressing her wonder. Some may be surprised at her spelling mistakes, in which, most probably, a form of dyslexia is detectable. But readers of Marcel Proust’s correspondence (Marilyn read Swann’s Way on the set of Love Nest in 1951) will have seen worse. The very Proust who, answering the question “to which failings are you most lenient?” replied unhesitatingly, “spelling mistakes,” and who, in one of his letters, wrote this strange and beautiful phrase: “Each spelling mistake is the expression of a desire.”
    The collection of documents revealed here is nothing less than a treasure trove. We owe its appearance to Anna Strasberg and her sons, Adam and David, who, during the preparation of this book, have embraced the opportunity to uncover a hitherto undervalued, even unknown dimension of Marilyn’s personality. From beginning to end we have shared their desire to create a book that, we would like to think, would have pleased its author. Marilyn once confessed to a journalist: “I think Lee probably changed my life more than any other human being. That’s why I love to go to the Actors Studio whenever I’m in New York.” Perhaps Strasberg, more than other people, had sensed who Marilyn really was.
    One of the remarkable insights these documents offer is the sense that Marilyn was, until the end, planning for the future. Among other projects, she hoped over time to play the great Shakespearean roles, from Juliet to Lady Macbeth. She also pursued her idea of creating a new production company in association with Marlon Brando.
    Some texts will give rise to interpretation and comment. But there is nothing dirty or low, no gossip in this book; that was not Marilyn’s way. What the notes reveal is intimacy without showiness, the seismic measuring of a soul. They take nothing away from Marilyn’s mystery but rather make the mystery more material. She was an elusive star with a magnetic force that sent compasses haywire whenever she got close.
    To this day, her face, her eyes, her lips appear all around the world. Innumerable actors and pop singers take her as a reference, a definitive model: to sound like her, to act like her, in advertisements and music videos and films. Songs are composed for her—among them this famous one, by Elton John and Bernie