Beneath her radiant giggly geisha aura lay the insecurities and fears of an unwanted and possibly molested foster-child, one who had been brought up on strict Christian strictures and harsh discipline. If ever there was a creature haunted by the lasting damage of her early years, it was this blond bombshell. (The signal exceptions are Bus Stop and The Misfits, where desperation flickers in her eyes even when she’s smiling.) Yet none of them have managed to make the full extent of her psychological frailties quite so disturbingly apparent as Fragments, the recently published collection of Monroe’s jottings, poems, and letters that has been painstakingly put together by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment from a recently discovered archive of her personal possessions. The easy grace and deceptive lightness that made her performances so memorable emerge on the page, as does the simmering tragedy that made her last appearances so heartbreaking.įragments is an event - an unforgettable book that will redefine one of the greatest stars of the twentieth century and which, nearly fifty years after her death, will definitively reveal Marilyn Monroe's humanity.When is a persona no longer indicative of the person behind it? To Elia Kazan and the American public, she was the “gayest girl,” but to her third husband Arthur Miller (and also, one assumes, to her various shrinks) she was “the saddest girl I’ve ever seen.” Since her ostensible suicide at the age of 36 in 1962, a slew of books about Marilyn Monroe have shed light on the fact that the real-life woman was far from the light-hearted tootsie she effected to be in most of her films.

They show a Marilyn Monroe unsparing in her analysis of her own life, but also playful, funny and impossibly charming. These bits of text - jotted in notebooks, typed on paper or written on hotel letterhead - reveal a woman who loved deeply and strove to perfect her craft. Fragments is an unprecedented collection of written artifacts - notes to herself, letters, even poems - in Marilyn's own handwriting, never before published, along with rarely seen intimate photos. Now, for the first time, we can meet this private Marilyn and get to know her in a way we never have before. To confront the mounting difficulties of her life, she wrote.

Even as Hollywood studios tried to mold and suppress her, Marilyn never lost her insight, her passion, and her humour. Her serious gifts as an actor were sometimes eclipsed by her notoriety - and the way the camera fell helplessly in love with her.īut what of the other Marilyn? Beyond the headlines - and the too-familiar stories of heartbreak and desolation - was a woman far more curious, searching and hopeful than the one the world got to know. Every word and gesture made headlines and garnered controversy. Marilyn Monroe's image is so universal that we can't help but believe that we know all there is to know of her.

Fragments by Marilyn Monroe