Historical Figure: Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe at the Height of Her Career

Marilyn serves as a good example of a self-destructive personality. She tragically died at the age of thirty-six, and everything points to the fact that she committed suicide. She was a star who lived off her image and was celebrated as an icon of feminine beauty and desirability. A broken doll exploited for the benefit of many, she lived in constant fear of losing her sex appeal, driven by public opinion.

Eternally preoccupied with maintaining her physical beauty, she relentlessly pursued a perfect image because, in dire need of love, she knew no other way to obtain it. In her own words:

"My arrival in school, with painted lips and darkened brows, started everybody buzzing. Why I was a siren, I hadn’t the faintest idea. I didn’t want to be kissed, and I didn’t dream of being seduced by a duke or a movie star. The truth was that with all my lipstick and mascara and precocious curves, I was as unresponsive as a fossil. But I seemed to affect people quite otherwise."

"It’s good for my waistline not to eat. There’s nothing finer than a washboard belly."

When she had her appendix removed, she famously went into the operating room with a note to the surgeon taped to her waist, asking him to cut as little as possible so as not to leave a noticeable scar. An integral part of her hairdresser’s job was dyeing her pubic hair blonde. She also never took off her bra, as Amy Greene, a model and close friend of Marilyn’s, well knew:

"Somebody, somewhere, had told her that if she always wore a bra, her boobs wouldn’t sag, and she insisted on it. She slept with a bra on. She told me she’d finish making love with someone and then, zoom, on with the bra."

Writer Adele Fletcher once waited for Marilyn to join her for lunch:

“She arrived at Elsa’s suite three hours late, at precisely the hour when she was supposed to be at the Cecil Beaton studio. I later learned that she had had her hair shampooed and set three times before leaving. She was continually apprehensive that she would not look her best and people would start saying her looks were fading.”

Beauty and youth—these were the things women of this character dreaded losing the most, believing that once they disappeared, they would lose everything. It was as if one didn’t deserve to live when their “physical perfection” diminished. That’s why they so often underwent cosmetic surgery.

In the summer of 1953, shortly after her twenty-seventh birthday, Marilyn lay down on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard. Beside her was Jane Russell, her co-star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They placed their hands in wet cement, did the same with their feet, and then scrawled their names alongside the prints. Jane noticed that Marilyn looked both happy and very frightened at the same time. Earlier that day, her hairdresser had received a long-distance call:

“I need your help.”

It was Marilyn, who continued in a panic:

“Please come, and bring your mom.”

It sounded like a real crisis until Marilyn explained:

“I can’t decide which dress to wear.”

Travilla, a costume designer for some of her films, recalls:

"I think she wanted to love, but could only love herself. She was totally narcissistic. She adored her own face, constantly wanted to make it better and different. She once told me, ‘I can make my face do anything, same as you can take a white board and build from that and make a painting.’ But the only way she was highly sexed [turned on sexually] was the charge she got out of looking in the mirror and seeing the beautiful mouth that she’d painted with about five shades of lipstick, to get the right curves, the right shadows to bring out the lips, because her lips were really very flat. If ever there was a prick-teaser, it was Marilyn when she wanted to be. She did it for real and for show."

Norma Jeane’s Childhood

Her family was almost non-existent. She never knew who her father was, so she created an imaginary one. Because of a picture her mother showed her of a man who claimed to be her father and who looked like Clark Gable, she created the fantasy that her father was really him and kept telling all her friends.

To cope with the pain of not having a real family, it’s typical for Sexual 3s to create a perfect one in their fantasies. Pursuing this ideal image then becomes a frustrating obsession, as it becomes impossible to attain.

Her mother’s side of the family had a long history of mental illness. Her mother suffered long periods of depression and was unable to care for her children, so she left her sons with her first husband’s family. As for Norma—Marilyn’s real name—she had foster parents and, at one point, ended up in an orphanage.

When she turned sixteen, her adoptive mother had just remarried for the second time, and they were moving to the East. The condition for taking Norma with them was that she had to get married. She was arranged to marry a twenty-one-year-old neighbor. Her future

husband’s name was Jim, and what he liked about Marilyn was that she would lean extra close when they danced, laugh at the right moments, and keep quiet when she was supposed to. She quickly became the perfect housewife. She learned to cook, and Jim said she was a good wife. He enlisted in the Navy, and the long absences began. Marilyn, who wrote to him every day, couldn’t bear the loneliness and started drinking. She decided she wanted to become a movie star. As her husband became increasingly absent, she divorced him and left for Hollywood, leaving behind, along with her entire life, her name: Norma Jeane.

The Sexual 3 has a remarkable ability to disconnect, often breaking away from an entire past and leaving it behind forever when only a moment before they felt they couldn’t live without it. However, there is also a need to find themselves, a search for their own truth, and questioning whether the love they believed was definitive and indispensable was merely something they invented and idealized:

"This is the end of my story of Norma Jeane... I moved into a room in Hollywood to live by myself. I wanted to find out who I was. When I just wrote, ‘This is the end of Norma Jeane,’ I blushed as if I had been caught out in a lie. Because this sad, bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, ‘I never lived, I was never loved,’ and often I get confused and think it’s I who am saying it."

Relationship with the Father

Once, at a New York party, Marilyn took part in a game where she had to say what she wanted most in the world. Her reply was that she would like:

"To put on her black wig, pick up her father in a bar, and have him make love to her."

Then she’d say:

"How do you feel now to have a daughter that you’ve made love to?"

Vanity in the Sexual

Writer Will Fowler said of her that she loved to undress and show her body to men. She would do anything they asked, really as a favor:

"I didn’t sleep around when I was married until my husband went into the service, and then it was just that I was so damn lonesome, and I had to have some kind of company, so once in a while I’d give in, mainly because I didn’t want to be alone."

A journalist once asked her in an interview:

"Tell me," he inquired, "how old were you when you first had sex?" "Seven," Marilyn responded. "Mon Dieu! How old was the man?" The reply came in the famous whisper, with a catch of breath: "Younger."

This was Marilyn’s only jest about childhood sex. Normally, her theme was different—and grim. She claimed early on that she had been sexually molested as a child, a motif she would return to obsessively throughout her life. Was it a real event?

"I was almost nine years old and lived with a family who rented a room to a man named Kimmel. He was a stern-looking man, and everybody respected him and called him Mr. Kimmel. One day I was passing his room when his door opened and he said quietly, ‘Please come in here, Norma...’ He smiled at me and turned the key in the lock. ‘Now you can’t get out,’ he said, as if we were playing a game. I stood staring at him. I was frightened, but I didn’t dare yell... I knew it was wrong, but I was more curious than anything else... No one had ever talked to me about sex, and I never thought it was important."

Here is another of her memories:

“I fell in love with a boy named George... We used to hide in the grass together until he got frightened and jumped up and ran away. What we did in the grass never frightened me. I knew it was wrong or I wouldn’t have hidden, but I didn’t know what was wrong. At night I lay awake and tried to figure out what sex was and what love was. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there was no one to ask.”

Later, when she got married, she reflected: “The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex. My husband either didn’t mind this or wasn’t aware of it.”

Her husband, however, had a different perspective: “Norma Jeane loved sex. It was as natural to her as breakfast in the morning. There were never any problems with it.”

Other men in Marilyn’s life, including her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, offered contrasting accounts. They related that she found little satisfaction in sex. Rosenfeld, a multimillionaire who was intimate with Marilyn, recalled:

“Marilyn thought sex got you closer, made you a closer friend. She told me she hardly ever had an orgasm, but she was very unselfish. She tried above all to please the opposite sex. Ah, but it wasn’t just sex. She could be so happy and gay. How I remember that laughter!”

Minardo, another of Marilyn’s lovers, shared a similar experience: “She could never have a climax, though she would try so hard. She had such severe psychological problems. She was very, very unhappy.”

He also mentioned that she used sex to achieve her ends, a claim corroborated by Schaefer, another of her lovers:

“Marilyn must have been frustrated almost all of the time. For her, sex was part of the performance. I think she regarded it as her function—being this great, attractive female—that she was supposed to have sex with a man because that was something she could do, something she could give. She wasn’t very successful at it, in terms of her own fulfillment.”

This aligns with a typical pattern among Sexual 3s: once the conquest phase is over, their desire wanes. Even if they pretend otherwise, their insincerity often hides a deeper disconnection. This is a clear example of living for the pleasure of others rather than for one’s own. Marilyn seemed to view sex as part of her job—a routine she accepted, likely from a lack of understanding of emotional bonds during childhood.

For Sexual 3 women, this pattern is unfortunately common. They often become easy prey, putting up little resistance. Arrogance emerges as a defense mechanism to distance themselves from the pain, elevating them above it. They rationalize that offering themselves willingly gives them control. There’s also confusion between love and sex. Physical contact is sometimes mistaken for emotional connection, which Marilyn likely sought desperately.

“I want to love and be loved more than anything else in the world,” she once said.

The first time she fell madly in love was with Fred Karger, the musical director of Columbia Studios. She described this period:

“A new life began for me… I had always thought of myself as someone unloved. Now I know there had been something worse than that in my life. It had been my own unloving heart. […] I even forgot Norma Jeane. A new me appeared in my skin—not an actress, not

somebody looking for a world of bright colors. When he [Fred] said, ‘I love you’ to me, it was better than a thousand critics calling me a great star.”

Yet, this relationship was not without pain: “There was one cloud in my paradise. I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me. But his love didn’t seem anything like mine. Most of his talk to me was a form of criticism. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. […] His cynicism hurt me, too…”

When Marilyn wept, he would say: “You cry too easily. That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your figure, it’s embryonic.”

Marilyn tried to leave him several times but struggled: “There was a third and fourth goodbye. But it was like rushing to the edge of a roof to jump off. I stopped each time and didn’t jump, and turned to him and begged him to hold me. It’s hard to do something that hurts your heart.”

She was also married to Joe DiMaggio, the famous baseball player, who recalled of their marriage: “It’s no fun being married to an electric light.”

During their marriage, Marilyn had several lovers, and it’s even rumored she secretly married one of them. DiMaggio was intensely jealous and physically abused her. Marilyn would arrive on set with bruises that had to be covered with makeup. These aggressions affected her deeply, though she stayed in the relationship for a long time. They eventually divorced while she was filming with Billy Wilder.

The film studios capitalized on her divorce, invading her private life and taking advantage of her emotional vulnerability. For a Sexual 3, a breakup feels worse than death. Marilyn was in such a fragile state that she lacked the strength to defend herself, allowing herself to be used.

Her Greatest Frustration: Building a Family

Around this time, she had one primary concern, perhaps the saddest of her life – becoming a mother. In the fifties, she tried year after year. She married several times and underwent numerous gynecological procedures, including multiple abortions. She once shared a disturbing story about being molested, but also claimed that the man involved actually had intercourse with her. She was left pregnant and had the baby, but her adoptive mother gave him up for adoption, and she never saw him again. We don’t know if this is true. Amy Greene, who lived with her, says she made a lot of things up.

Peter Leonardi, Marilyn’s hairdresser and assistant in the 1950s, claims that she had her fallopian tubes tied to keep her from having children when she was rising to fame, on the advice of her agent at the time, who told her that a pregnancy would ruin her career. Apparently, she later had the operation reversed. To make matters worse, friends of Marilyn’s have recounted a large number of voluntary abortions. She herself once confessed that she had had twelve. Some of them were performed illegally by real butchers. Later, she was surprised to find herself unable to conceive.

A friend of Marilyn, Henry Rosenfeld, says that she wanted a baby so badly that every two or three months, she would convince herself that she was pregnant and put on a couple of kilos. She was in a permanent state of psychological pregnancy.

Lauren Bacall, who shared filming with her, remembers how Marilyn “came into my dressing room one day and said that what she really wanted was to be in San Francisco with Joe DiMaggio in some spaghetti joint. She wanted to know about my children, my home life — was I happy? She seemed envious of that aspect of my life, wistful, hoping to have it herself.”

She always sought to build the family she never had and met with one failure after another. It seems that her inability to achieve this, coupled with an increasing sense of loneliness and despair, may have played a role in her tragic end. As a Sexual 3, love and family held greater significance for her than professional success, but she never realized these aspirations. Excessively dependent, she lacked the inner strength to resist the harmful influence of her environment. By the time she recognized what true success in her life should have entailed, it was already too late.

Acting and Professional Life

Natasha Lytess, her acting coach, remembers her like this:

“Her habit of looking at me the second she finished a scene was to become a joke in projection rooms. […] The film of the daily rushes was filled with scenes of Marilyn, finishing her dialogue and immediately shading her eyes to find me, to see if she had done well.

Marilyn is shrewd. I wish I had one tenth of her ability for business, of her clever knack of promoting what is right for her and discarding what is not.”

In an acting class, in the middle of a scene from The Cherry Orchard, her teacher at the time, Michael Chekhov, stopped to ask her whether she had not been preoccupied with sex while playing her part. Marilyn replied that she had not. Then Chekhov said to her:

“I understand your problem with your studio now, Marilyn. You are a young woman who gives off sex vibrations, no matter what you are doing or thinking. And your studio bosses are only interested in your sex vibrations. I see now why they refuse to regard you as an actress. You are more valuable to them as a sex stimulant.”

Marilyn told an interviewer that her reply to Chekhov was: “I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac.”

On the set, she was very easily hurt by any kind of criticism. She never felt safe in front of the camera. She was so afraid of not acting well and of not being physically perfect, that she couldn’t leave the trailer to go to the set. She had great talent, but she couldn’t believe in it. Lauren Bacall recalls:

“Marilyn was frightened, insecure, trusted only her coach and was always late. During our scenes she’d look at my forehead instead of my eyes. […] It was not easy, often irritating. And yet I couldn’t dislike Marilyn. She had no meanness in her, no bitchery. She just had to concentrate on herself and the people who were there only for her.”

Scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson wrote in a letter to a friend:

“Monroe is something of a zombie. Talking to her is like talking to somebody underwater. You can’t get through to her. She reminds me of a sloth. You stick a pin in a sloth’s belly and eight days later it says, ‘Ouch.’”

Here’s what actress Shelley Winters remembers from a shoot with Otto Preminger:

“Marilyn did what she always did when she was confused. She just opened her mouth and smiled at anything in sight. Preminger began to use dreadful language, implying that she was so untalented that she should stick to her original ‘profession.’ Marilyn never looked up; her smile just became more frozen.”

Then came revenge: she lied to everyone by slipping on the boat where they were shooting, saying she had broken her leg, which delayed filming and cost a lot of money.

Actress Constance Collier was her acting teacher in later years. This is how she portrays her weeks before she died:

“She is a beautiful child. I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has — this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence — could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight; only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that’s wandering through her like a jailed spirit.”

Lee Strasberg, the then-teacher of Marlon Brando and James Dean, took Marilyn in with his wife Paula and adopted her as his own daughter. In the muddle that was Marilyn, Strasberg was to discover a creature of dangerous potency. She would find a teacher, a priest for her personality, and a new dependency. He noticed, in the early classes, that when Marilyn described her past, she stuttered with fear:

“I saw that what she looked like was not what she really was, and what was going on inside was not what was going on outside, and that always means there may be something there to be worked with. It was almost as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed, and when it was pushed a door opened and you saw a treasure of gold and jewels.”

She would go to Strasberg’s classes with no makeup on, wearing jeans and baggy sweaters, and stand in the darkest corner. Her classmates were baffled by her ability to switch her Monroe persona ‘on’ and ‘off,’ to slip into obscurity only to reappear, suddenly, in a halo of white light that seemed to envelop her.

Eli Wallach, actor and Marilyn’s partner, was also struck by the phenomenon of Marilyn’s instant metamorphosis. In the street, heads would turn to stare or ogle, whereas a moment before everyone had passed her by. “I just felt like being Marilyn for a moment,” she would murmur.

According to Wallach, at times, the Strasberg acting sessions seemed intellectually beyond Marilyn. One of her colleagues, Frank Corsaro, came to call himself ‘Marilyn’s translator.’ He said: “She didn’t know what Lee was talking about half the damn time.” Acting coach Peggy Feury disagrees, saying:

“Marilyn was so bright about acting. Her trouble was only that she’d get so scared she wasn’t going to be able to do it, and so tied up in knots, that then everyone thought she was dumb.”

Lee Strasberg’s son, John, recalls:

“The greatest tragedy was that people, even my father in a way, took advantage of her. They glommed on to her special sort of life, her special characteristics, when what she needed was love. My parents did give her some love, but it was inextricably linked with the acting.”

We end with the testimony by Natasha Lytess:

“I had been her private director for many years, working with her day and night. Yet when she was asked to do something for me, she had the feeling that she was being used.”

Drugs: The Road to Destruction

She severely abused drugs, and they seem to have been what ultimately killed her. She used them as a means of disconnection, particularly after the end of a relationship or suffering a miscarriage. During her marriage to DiMaggio, she was falling apart—shaking constantly and frequently taking drugs. Many times, she was so sedated that you couldn’t hold a conversation with her. She went through numerous stomach pumpings and long stays in detoxification hospitals.

From the age of seventeen, she could only sleep with the help of barbiturates. She suffered from terrible insomnia, needing an excessive number of pills to sleep and more pills to wake up. She was taking Seconal when she began mixing in amphetamines, a common practice at the time among studio bosses to keep their stars working overtime. Dr. Elliot Corday, her doctor from 1948 to 1955, shared his account:

“I eventually withdrew from the case because she would not employ a decent psychiatrist. People would understand her death better had they been listening to her in my office back then. There had been many suicide attempts, more than were known. By 1954, she was using drugs—I believe hard substances as well as sleeping pills. In the end, I told her I wasn’t going to be around to witness what was going to happen.”

Her reliance on drugs and pharmaceuticals can be seen as an attempt to escape the overwhelming hypersensitivity that brought anxiety, fear, and anguish—feelings stemming from the profound sadness that Sexual 3s carry, hidden behind their meticulously maintained façades. It was also likely a way to disconnect from the constant self-critique that plagued her. Sexual 3s often replay their actions repeatedly, judging themselves harshly and projecting this self-criticism onto the imagined opinions of others. This self-punishing thought pattern leaves little mental respite, especially for someone living under the relentless scrutiny of the public eye.

Shyness, Oversensitivity, and Gentleness

Her first acting teacher, Morris Carnovsky, described her as extremely shy and deeply committed to her classes. She always arrived on time and completed all assignments. Hal Schaefer, who gave her music lessons and had an affair with her, said:

“She struck me as kind of fey, as not being altogether in this world, not all there. She was quiet, didn’t open up much. At first, she had no confidence, but she reacted to my teaching and improved.”

Milton Greene, her partner and friend, recalled:

“I thought I’d seen them all. Being in the business, I’d seen so many models and actresses. But I’d never seen anyone with that tone of voice, that kindness, that real softness. If she saw a dead dog in the road, she’d cry. She was so supersensitive you had to watch your tone of voice all the time. Later, I found out that she was schizoid—she could be absolutely brilliant or absolutely kind, then the total opposite.”

Arthur Miller’s first memory of Marilyn was at a Hollywood cocktail party.

“[She was] so terrified she couldn’t speak a word, just stood there mute but refusing to engage in the vacuous small talk.”

Marilyn later confided in Miller about her “smothering feelings of inferiority, her inability to make any real friends, and the fact that people thought of her only in terms of an inviting body and nothing else.”

Her medical doctors were certain she needed psychiatric help. Dr. Milton Gottlieb, who provided her gynecological care, said, “She was insecure, frightened of the reality of life. A very disturbed young woman.”

This shyness is also closely linked to vanity. The fear of saying or doing something wrong and being subjected to criticism often drives Sexual 3s into a silence where they can go unnoticed.

Maternal Instincts

Taking care of someone, away from the world that exacerbated her neuroses, seemed to bring her a sense of peace. Schaefer recalled the worst year of his life, when he attempted suicide:

“Marilyn came up to help nurse me. She was very sweet and quite practical. I got well there, and Marilyn enjoyed it. She looked well, went swimming, got some sun—it was a very isolated spot.”

Perfect Housekeeper and Hostess

Early in her relationship with Arthur Miller, Marilyn invited some friends to dinner. Even though their relationship was still a secret, she worked tirelessly to prepare. Miller recalled:

“She did nothing else for two days. I never saw anyone so worried about a simple meal. Actually, the whole thing was overdone—too formal, too meticulous, too manicured. She worked herself into a frazzle over it.”

Marilyn played the role of the perfect housewife during her marriage to DiMaggio. She once described her approach to their marriage:

“Joe doesn’t have to move a muscle. Treat a husband this way, and he’ll enjoy you twice as much. I like to iron Joe’s shirts, but often I haven’t the time. I like to look at Joe in a shirt I ironed. A man should never have to think about his clothes. A wife should see to it that his shoes and suits are sent out to be cleaned.”

Norman Rosten and his wife, who were friends of Marilyn, described her as a good cook who enjoyed housework. She often boasted about her dishwashing skills, attributing them to her years as a “child slave” in foster homes.

Relationship with Arthur Miller

Being the partner of an accomplished man, the “trophy wife,” aligns with the aspirations of a Sexual 3. Her marriage to Miller was her most enduring. She admired his intelligence but insisted:

“I’m in love with the man, not his mind. The Arthur Miller who attracted me was a man of warmth and friendliness. Arthur has helped me adjust myself. I’ve always been unsure of myself. Arthur has helped me overcome this feeling.”

Miller himself confessed to journalist Robert Ajemian:

“She is the most womanly woman I can imagine. Being with her, people want to die. This girl sets up a challenge in every man. Most men become more of what they are natively when they are around her: a phony becomes more phony, a confused man becomes more confused, a retiring man more retiring. She’s kind of a lodestone that draws out of the male animal his essential qualities.”

He also spoke of Marilyn’s obsessive concern about her lack of education:

“She’ll come to me and say, ‘I heard a new word the other day—what does it mean?’ The other day she asked me about the word ‘impermeable.’ She often mispronounces a word, but she wants to learn. How can I capsulize Marilyn? The more you know about people, the more complex they are to you. If she were simple, it would have been easy to help her.”

Her Relationship with Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan, who knew Marilyn from the early days of her career, provides a heartfelt description of her in his autobiography. The director was not only Marilyn’s lover but also her friend and confidant:

"When I met her, she was a simple, eager young woman who rode a bike to the classes she was taking, a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to. Like many girls out of that kind of experience, she sought her self-respect through the men she was able to attract.

All young actresses in that time and place were thought of as prey, to be overwhelmed and topped by the male. A genuine interest, which I did have, would produce results. I’m still surprised at how quickly women will empty the most intimate secrets of their lives into a sympathetic ear. I was good at listening, and the stories she told me, with neither malice nor regret, were amazing.

She’d married Jim, her first husband, so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage where she’d been placed after the dissolution of her parents’ home. She was sixteen. She didn’t like 'anything Jim did to me—except when he kissed me here' (she touched her breasts). After he was finished, Jim would fall asleep, leaving her awake and unsatisfied. She remembered taking long walks at night along the tracks where they lived in Sawtelle.

A lover found her available. Fred was a musician, scrawny but able in love. She came as many as three times with him in one go. He was vulgar, coarse, and scornful with her. He said she was no good for anything except fucking. He found her dress 'cheap.' He told her her breasts were too big. He didn’t like to sleep in the same bed with her. He thought her beneath the conversation, said she was stupid and only good for one thing, which he didn’t regard too highly. When she left Fred for Johnny, Fred became frantic, and his attitude changed completely. He begged Marilyn to marry him.

I asked her if she was attracted to men who abused her; when Freddie stopped being mean to her, was she no longer attracted? I asked her if she respected men who were scornful of her because their estimate coincided with her own. 'I don’t know,' she said.

When I first met her, after Johnny’s death, she was being courted by Joe Schenck. Mr. Schenck was one of the richest as well as the most respected men in the 'Hollywood' community. She told me about the night when Schenck had taken her dancing and asked her to marry him. Mr. Schenck was then seventy-one years old and had had his first cerebral hemorrhage.

During the courtship, he took her to his house, showed her a huge room decorated with piles of money, and told her that it would be hers if she wanted it. To convince her, again and again, he told her how old he was and that he would not be in this world for long, that she would be a widow stuffed with millions. 'I’m seventy-one,' he said. 'I know I’m a man of limited powers. But you’ll find that I’m understanding. If my wife feels she must go with other men, I’ll understand. But only so long as it’s not the same man twice in a row.'

This did not appeal to Marilyn, who was a romantic. It seemed to me that many women like Marilyn in that world would have been tempted by this offer, but she was pure of heart. What she needed above all was to have her sense of worth affirmed. Born out of wedlock, abandoned by her parents, kicked around, and scorned by the men she’d been with until Johnny, she wanted more than anything else approval from men she could respect.

But there was a fatal contradiction in Marilyn. She deeply needed to be valued, yet she respected the men who looked down on her, because they reaffirmed her lack of self-esteem.

When I first saw her with Art [Arthur Miller], they were dancing, and she looked so happy in his arms. Not only was he tall and handsome in a Lincolnesque way, but he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. All her doubts about her worth were being satisfied in one package."

It’s interesting that Kazan notes how Marilyn respected men who despised or mistreated her. Marilyn sought her value in men because that’s where she primarily experienced a sense of lack. This is a common trait among women of her subtype.

Since she was very young, men only valued her for her sex appeal. Her interactions with them were often abusive or purely sexual, lacking the depth of a loving connection. Hence the confusion and the question that haunted her as a child: “What is love, and what is sex?” This also explains why she repeatedly entered relationships that reinforced the sense of worthlessness she felt so deeply.