Marilyn Monroe Does ‘Vanity Fair’ Magazine

The late iconic Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe is featured on the cover and in the pages of the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine. The coverstory article devoted to the Blonde Bombshell is focused on a new collection of letters, personal notes, diary entries and poems that have been discovered recently and will be published this Fall in a collection titled Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters. Here is our first look at Marilyn on the cover of VF along with an excerpt from the coverstory article:

For all the millions of words she has inspired, Marilyn Monroe remains something of a mystery. Now a sensational archive of the actress’s own writing—diaries, poems, and letters—is being published. With exclusive excerpts from the book, Fragments, the author enters the mind of a legend: the scars of sexual abuse; the pain of psychotherapy; the betrayal by her third husband, Arthur Miller; the constant specter of hereditary madness; and the fierce determination to master her art. She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors. The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. A few blocks away, above Loew’s State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn—the one everyone knew—52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy. When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, “Don’t do that. Just tell us what you hear. Don’t tell us how you feel.” Marilyn began to cry. Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, “As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated.” Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman? Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36. Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg … Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.

This collection of writings is bound to be of great interest to Marilyn Monroe fans around the world. Despite the fact that we may think we know Marilyn, there is no possible way we can ever know who she truly was. This new collection of writings, tho, may shed some light on the woman behind the legend … the woman who was born Norma Jeane Mortenson. After the jump, check out an image of one of her writings and read one of her previously unreleased poems …

Among the poems included in this collection is one about one of Marilyn‘s husbands, famed playwright Arthur Miller:

my love sleeps besides me —
in the faint light — I see his manly jaw
give way — and the mouth of his
boyhood returns
with a softness softer
its sensitiveness trembling
in stillness
his eyes must have look out
wonderously from the cave of the little
boy — when the things he did not understand —
he forgot

Another subject of Marilyn‘s poetry was her great-aunt Ida … who doesn’t sound like she was a very nice woman:

Ida — I have still
been obeying her —
it’s not only harmful
for me to do so
but unrealality because
life starts from 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
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 —

I must admit, I’m not a big MM fan but I am terribly intrigued by these new writings. Even if the poetry isn’t very good, I’m really curious to read the words of one of the world’s most famous women, if only to try and get a peek into who she was when she lived. Despite Marilyn‘s huge success, there is no question she was a very tortured person inside. These new writings may shed some light on that torture so that we may, at last, begin to learn a bit more about the legend.

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