1954

1954 is a year of outward spectacle and inward avoidance in Marilyn Monroe’s story. The narrative places her marriage to the Ex-Atleta under a shadow of foreknowledge, while linking her efforts to turn away from political and personal pain to two public journeys: her performance for American troops in South Korea and her husband’s baseball tour of Japan.

A marriage already given its ending

The year’s emotional pattern is announced through a vision of the couple’s future. Marilyn stands naked at a narrow sixth-floor window of the Wilshire, relieved that her life seems settled: the wedding has been decided. Yet the narration supplies the marriage’s dates and ending at once. They will marry in January 1954 and divorce in October. Their love will be deep but blind and disorderly, and their attempts to cling to one another will injure them. The abrupt leap from romantic certainty to the complete arc of the marriage makes 1954 feel less like an open future than a script whose ending is already known.

That foreknowledge complicates the relief of being chosen and loved. The scene’s window resembles a doorway in a dream, and the apparently secure domestic future is framed as something fragile, already shadowed by pain. The year’s marriage plot is therefore not simply a promise of happiness: it is a brief interval in which longing and harm are bound together.

Withdrawal from public events

In the account of 1954, Marilyn avoids newspapers and television news and tries not to dwell on matters she believes she cannot influence. This deliberate turning away encompasses both national events and private trauma. She does not want to follow the devastated territory occupied by United Nations troops in Korea or learn more about nuclear tests being conducted in Nevada and Utah, hundreds of miles away. The scale of these events presses against her choice to retreat into silence rather than absorb details she cannot change.

Her avoidance also surrounds the loss of a pregnancy. She tries not to think about the small being taken from her womb and discarded, or about whether it lived even briefly afterward; Yvet has reassured her that the procedure was instantaneous, painless, and legal in northern European countries. Nor does Marilyn want to think about the political climate. She suspects that government informants are watching her and that her cinematic alter ego, Marilyn Monroe, appears on a list, but refuses to pursue the fear. The narration notes that there are dozens of such lists and hundreds of names on them, placing her anxiety within a broader atmosphere of surveillance without confirming what she suspects.

Breathing becomes a way to attend to the soul while not thinking about politics or the lost pregnancy. The practice does not resolve either source of distress; it gives her a means of looking away. The year thus joins private bereavement and public unease through a repeated strategy of deliberate non-attention.

Accepting the South Korea engagement

When invited to perform for American troops in South Korea, Marilyn responds with enthusiasm, remembering wartime newsreels of entertainers visiting servicemen far from home. Her willingness does not arise from political agreement. She is unsure why American forces are still there when an armistice was signed the previous year, and questions what an armistice means. She tells the colonel that she opposes American imperial policy and military interference in other nations, while feeling compassion for soldiers separated from their homes, families, and girlfriends.

For Marilyn, the distinction is decisive: the soldiers are not responsible for politicians’ mistakes, and neither is she. She offers to entertain them, even suggesting Shakespearean monologues and a mime piece about an old woman near death. The proposal is playful, but it also shows her imagining the visit as performance rather than political endorsement. She travels with the short purple lamé dress the Ex-Atleta likes to see her wear and silver high-heeled sandals, bringing the glamour of her public persona into a mission grounded, in her account, in sympathy for isolated servicemen.

Two journeys, two versions of the honeymoon

The visit to Japan separates the couple’s public roles. Although it is their honeymoon, the Ex-Atleta remains in Japan while Marilyn goes to South Korea. He explains to reporters that professional commitments must be honored, then attends dozens of friendly baseball games across the country with a large, attentive entourage. His height and celebrity make him a conspicuous representative of American baseball, welcomed with honorary lunches and long banquets.

The narrative also gives his tour a domestic and marital edge. He misses familiar American food, resents reporters who keep asking where Marilyn is, and is furious with the wife whose absence has become the question attached to him. The passage suggests that he spends some evenings drinking with geishas, treating this as an expected offering to a visiting foreign guest and as a privilege of a husband who feels like a bachelor. His final insistence that he was the one invited to Japan sharpens the contrast: the trip is his professional occasion, while Marilyn’s separate journey makes her own judgment and sympathy visible. The honeymoon, supposedly a shared beginning, instead exposes their diverging movements and the strain already forecast for their marriage.