Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (2 page)

1943

Norma Jeane married James Dougherty when

she turned sixteen, the age of consent in California,

on June 19, 1942, thereby escaping the threat of

being returned to an orphanage when her foster

family moved out of state. Dougherty was born in

April 1921 and was five years older than she was.

At the end of 1943, the young couple settled for

a few months on Catalina Island off the coast of

Los Angeles, a fashionable resort before the war.

It is likely that this long note, uncharacteristically

typed, was written at this time.

One can’t help being surprised, even impressed,

by the maturity of this seventeen-year-old girl,

whose feelings of disillusionment are plain from the

first sentence, as she examines her marriage and

what she expects from life, and faces the fear of her

husband’s betrayal. Nevertheless, the

disjointedness of the text reveals turbulent

emotions.

The “other woman” she mentions might be

a reference to Doris Ingram, her young

husband’s former girlfriend and a

Santa Barbara beauty queen.

The couple were divorced on

September 13, 1946.

Marilyn during the filming of
Niagara
, 1952
Marilyn reading Heinrich Heine

UNDATED POEMS

Marilyn Monroe wrote poemlike texts or fragments on loose-leaf paper and in notebooks. She showed her work only to intimate friends, in particular to Norman Rosten, a college friend of Arthur Miller with whom she became very close. A Brooklyn-based novelist, he encouraged Marilyn to continue writing. In the book he wrote about her (
Marilyn Among Friends
), he concluded, “She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

It is likely that the poetic form, or more generally the fragment, allowed her to express short, lightning bursts of feeling—but who could hear that frail voice, the very opposite of the radiant star? Arthur Miller wrote strikingly: “To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

Life—

I am of both of your directions

Life

Somehow remaining hanging downward

the most

but strong as a cobweb in the

wind—I exist more with the cold glistening frost.

But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve

seen in a paintings—ah life they

have cheated you

Note: Marilyn apparently wrote several variations on the theme of the twofold course of life (“life in both directions”) and the delicate, sometimes invisible “cobweb,” revealed by dew and resistant to wind—in particular a poem entitled “To the Weeping Willow” that was published in Norman Rosten’s book about Marilyn: “I stood beneath your limbs / And you flowered and finally / clung to me, / and when the wind struck with the earth / and sand—you clung to me. / Thinner than a cobweb I, / sheerer than any—/ but it did attach itself / and held fast in strong winds / life—of which at singular times / I am both of your directions—/ somehow I remain hanging downward the most, / as both of your directions pull me.”