Replaying a memoir of sadness, sexuality, success

FORTY-FOUR years after her death, Marilyn Monroe continues to be a victim of her own bosom. Here is her sad story, reissued once again, this time sprinkled with new photos from the collection of celebrity photographer Milton H. Greene. The volume boasts images of her from the “ballerina,” “gypsy” and, yes, the “hooker” series that Greene shot of her in the 1950s.

Of all the many lovely photos, the cover portrait is the most telling. Monroe is perched on a stool, leaning toward the camera. Her crossed legs are in the foreground, a shapely arrow pointing to the photograph’s focal point: her milky white bosom. Her breasts spill out of a low-cut green vest; all that obscures her nipples is a whisper of tulle -- ruched in such a way as to make us look closer. Only after we have feasted on her decolletage do our eyes wander to Monroe’s pretty face. Her head is tilted back and she wears an expression of surprising sagacity. As semiotics, it’s a perfect photo, capturing the tension, intrigue and tragedy of Monroe’s persona and the sad fact that despite her talent, her intelligence and her extraordinary luck, both good and bad, all anybody really wanted to do was stare at her chest.

It started when she was 12. An early bloomer, Norma Jeane Mortenson, late for school and short on clean laundry, borrowed a sweater from a younger foster “sister.” “I arrived at school just as the math class was starting,” she says. “As I walked to my seat everybody stared at me as if I had suddenly grown two heads, which in a way I had. They were under my tight sweater.”

At that point the world organized itself into two predictable sides: the men who wanted her and the women who hated her. This conflict cycles through her life story with depressing regularity. From leering schoolboys to drooling movie executives and the many girlfriends and wives who sought to vilify her. Monroe spent her short life looking for love and understanding from a world that stared and stared, but never really saw her.

Ben Hecht, co-author of the manuscript first published by Greene in 1974, wasn’t much help either. Hecht lets her spill her muddled tale, doing little to make sense of it. He put a spit-shine on some of her prose, but more often it sounds false and weird: “You sit alone. It’s night outside. Automobiles roll down Sunset Boulevard like an endless string of beetles. Their rubber tires make a purring high-class noise. You’re hungry, and you say, ‘It’s good for my waistline not to eat. There’s nothing finer than a washboard belly.’ ”

This sounds more like the Hollywood hack that Hecht had become than it does Monroe. He didn’t help organize her story either. It jumps and jerks, labors over her early struggles but skips her later successes. The manuscript she gave Greene ends abruptly in early 1954, right after she marries Joe DiMaggio.

Of course, Monroe came to an abrupt end as well, and it makes a critique of this book nearly impossible -- the book is as unfinished as she was. If everyone had stayed alive (Hecht died two years after Monroe overdosed in 1962), it might have been a better book, though perhaps not a happier story.

The sad facts of Monroe’s life are legend: the absent father, the institutionalized mother, the loveless childhood in a series of orphanages and foster homes -- her molestation at age 8 by a boarder. She tells it all with blunt simplicity. “I was frightened, but I didn’t dare yell. I knew if I yelled I would be sent back to the orphanage in disgrace again. Mr. Kimmel knew this too. When he put his arms around me I kicked and fought as hard as I could, but I didn’t make any sound. He was stronger than I was and wouldn’t let me go. He kept whispering to me to be a good girl.” “My Story” has been likened to a penny dreadful, and hers is an obviously Dickensian tale. Monroe was an orphan left to fend for herself in a hostile world.

“My Story” was last reissued in 2000 with an introduction by the late Andrea Dworkin in high dudgeon claiming her as a feminist heroine whose survival instincts were “deeply and implicitly feminist.”

In fact, Monroe was a unique mix of unalloyed innocence and utter premeditation, a hapless victim and a model of self-actualization. She practiced a languorous walk, forgoing meals for voice lessons and clothes. She describes dreaming as a girl of becoming “so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed.... I dreamed of myself walking proudly in beautiful clothes and being admired by everyone and overhearing words of praise. I made up the praises and repeated them aloud as if someone else were saying them.” It was a survival strategy that finally lifted her out of poverty and gained her the world’s admiration. Tony Robbins would have been proud.

Monroe came a long way in a short time. But in the end, she was held back by the pulchritude that got her noticed in the first place. In her abbreviated career she managed an extraordinary level of craft, yet most of her films were built around her undeniable sexual magnetism. Whether she was playing the conniving Lorelei Lee in “Gentleman Prefer Blondes,” the world-weary Cherie in “Bus Stop” or the daffy girl in the tiresome “Seven Year Itch,” the premise was the same: All men were like Tex Avery cartoon wolves, panting and pawing, reducing her humanity to a fleshy fraction of herself. Even in “The Misfits,” a role that husband Arthur Miller wrote for her and one that most vividly tapped into her extraordinary vulnerability and complexity, she still is put through her paces as a freak of sexual nature. The saddest part of her dying at 36 is that she didn’t get a chance to age into roles that might have allowed her to be something other than a sex object.

At one point in “My Story,” a careless lover accuses Monroe of crying too easily. “That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your breasts it’s embryonic. You never think about life. You just float through it on that pair of water wings you wear.” He was wrong about that. Her breasts were her life preserver, keeping her afloat in choppy seas, but too insubstantial to build a fully realized life on.

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Erika Schickel is the author of the forthcoming memoir “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”