Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters Read Online Free PDF

and Fox, among which was an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, when, out of the blue, Billy Wilder sent her a two-page summary of an old German farce he was working on, Some Like It Hot . On July 8 she arrived in Los Angeles for the shooting.
    Marilyn used only five pages of this big red spiral notebook. It can be dated from the summer of 1958, as it includes two lines of dialogue from Some Like It Hot . Why these two lines? (One might be self-referential; Marilyn was born in June just like the character of Sugar Kane.) What do they reveal about Marilyn’s musings?
    Another possibility presents itself: that the pencil notes were written before the ones in blue ballpoint pen. In that case, “after one year of analysis” would refer to 1956 (she started her analysis with Dr. Hohenberg in 1955), with a hint of irony as to the result, as revealed in a short four-line poem expressing despair in the form of a cry for help: the desire to die rather than live.

     
    I left my home of green rough wood—
    a blue velvet couch I dream till now
    a shiny dark bush just left of the door.
    [ Illegible ] down the walk clickity clack as my doll
    in her carriage went over the cracks—“We’ll go far away”
     
    The meadows are huge the earth (will be) hard
    on my back. The grass surged touched
    the blue and still white clouds changing from an
    old man shapes to a smiling dog with ears flying
     
    Look—
    The meadows are reaching—they’re touching the sky
    We’ll leave We left our outlines against/on the crushed grass.
    It will die sooner because we were there—will something
    else have grown?
     
    Don’t cry my doll don’t cry
    I hold you and rock you to sleep.
    hush hush I’m I was only pretending now that I’m (was)
    not your mother who died.
     
    I shall feed you from the shiny dark bush
    just left of the door.
     

     
    Jamaica 36/78
Dr. Mike Fayer
    After one year of analysis
     
    Help Help
    Help
    I feel life coming closer
    when I all want
    is to die.
     
    Scream—
    You began and ended in air
    but where was the middle?
     
    Notes:
    It has been impossible to trace Dr. Mike Fayer.
     
     
    According to Donald Spoto, Marilyn is thought to have sent the five-line poem “Help” to Norman Rosten in the summer of 1961 after having started regular consultations with Dr. Ralph Greenson. Spoto adds that Marilyn first wrote this poem, or perhaps message, in Arthur Miller’s notebook in London in 1956.

     
    I’m not very bright I guess.
     
    No just dumb//if I had
    any brains I wouldn’t be
    on crummy train with this
    crummy girls’ band.
     
    I used to sing with male
    bands but I can’t afford it
    anymore.
    Have you ever been with a male band
     
    Heats
     
    Note: This is a line from the scene in the train near the beginning of Some Like It Hot .

     
    You know I’m going to be
    twenty-five in June
     
    Note: This is also a line from Some Like It Hot . When the film was made Marilyn had turned thirty-two, but her birthday was June 1.

     
    Title— About my poems .
     
    Norman—so hard to please
    when all I want is to tease
    So it might rhyme
    So what’s the crime?
    When I’ve spent all this After all this time
    on earth
     
    Note: Norman Rosten, poet and novelist, had been a close friend of Marilyn’s in New York since 1955.
     

     
    Marilyn Monroe with Carson McCullers, during a lunch given by the American author in honor of the great Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), at McCullers’s home in Nyack, New York, 1959 Marilyn with Blixen and McCullers
     
     

     

 
     

FRAGMENTS AND NOTES
     

     
    The notes and fragments written here and there—on torn-out pages, envelopes, tickets, address books—bring together secrets, observations, efforts at self-motivation and introspection. They also show Marilyn’s will, which was bent sometimes on purely practical matters and at other times on the general question of self-discipline. Ways of interpreting one line or other, confusion at having to