Excerpted from Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley
Buchthal and Bernard Comment, to be published October 12th by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US),
HarperCollins (Canada and UK); © 2010 by LSAS International, Inc.
***
Encouraged by Strasberg, Marilyn began seeing Dr. Margaret Hohenberg as
often as five times a week, first at Marilyn’s rooms at the Gladstone Hotel, then
at Dr. Hohenberg’s office, at 155 East 93rd Street. The psychiatrist, an
acquaintance of Strasberg’s, was a Brünnhilde type, a 57-year-old Hungarian
immigrant complete with tightly wound braids and a Valkyrian bosom.
Strasberg strongly believed that Marilyn needed to open up her unconscious
and root through her troubled childhood, all in the service of her art. Between
her sessions with Strasberg and with Dr. Hohenberg, she began recording
some of those raked-up memories, including a devastating incident of sexual
abuse. Described around 1955, in an Italian notebook whose pages are lined
and numbered in green, this memory fully emerges, with the humiliating
aftermath of being punished by her great-aunt Ida Martin, a strict, evangelical
Christian paid by Grace Goddard to look after Norma Jeane for several months
from 1937 to 1938. (Could this have been the sense-memory exercise that left
her weeping in Strasberg’s acting class?) Marilyn wrote,
Ida—I have still been obeying her— it’s not only harmful for me to do so but
unrealality because life starts from Now
And later:
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
In April of 1955, Marilyn moved from the Gladstone to a three-room suite on
the 27th floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, where she began writing down some of
her memories and dreams on the hotel’s handsome Art Deco stationery. In a
kind of stream-of-consciousness prose poem, she recounts a nightmare in
which Strasberg is operating on her, with Dr. Hohenberg assisting:
Best finest surgeon—Strasberg to cut me open which I don’t mind since Dr. H
has prepared me—given me anaesthetic and has also diagnosed the case and
agrees with what has to be done— an operation—to bring myself back to life
and to cure me of this terrible dis-ease whatever the hell it is—
The most terrifying part of the dream is what her surgeons find when they
open her up:
and there is absolutely nothing there— Strasberg is deeply disappointed but
more even— academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He
thought there was going to be so much—more than he had ever dreamed
possible … instead there was absolutely nothing— devoid of every human
living feeling thing— the only thing that came out was so finely cut
sawdust—like out of a raggedy ann doll—and the sawdust spills all over the
floor & table and Dr. H is puzzled because suddenly she realizes that this is a
new type case. The patient … existing of complete emptiness Strasberg’s
dreams & hopes for theater are fallen. Dr. H’s dreams and hopes for a
permanent psychiatric cure is given up—Arthur is disappointed— let down
One of her greatest fears—disappointing those she cares about—is manifest
here. The Arthur she refers to is, of course, Arthur Miller. She had met him
years earlier in Hollywood, through Kazan.
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
The poem then turns dark, a premonition, perhaps, of how the marriage would
end:
but will he look like this when he is dead oh unbearable fact inevitable yet
sooner would I rather his love die than/or him?