Il Principe Misterioso

Il Principe Misterioso is an imagined romantic figure in Norma Jeane Baker’s inner vocabulary, not simply a prospective husband. Across a playful fantasy of escape, a hope for motherhood, and the remembered romance of The Misfits, he represents the possibility of being joined in tenderness and action while remaining outside the usual marriage script.

Identity and Imaginative Role

The prince belongs to the same private fairy-tale language as the Good Princess. In Norma Jeane Baker’s vision of The Misfits, the two figures can work together to free trapped mustangs: Clark Gable may handle the stallion while Marilyn Monroe releases the other horses. The fantasy gives Roslyn Tabor agency in the film’s action rather than leaving her as a figure glimpsed behind a window or at a mirror. The prince is thus not only a romantic counterpart; he is a partner in an imagined scene where the woman acts alongside the man.

Love, Marriage, and the Future

The figure also appears in Norma Jeane Baker’s private speculation about having a child with Marlon Brando. She entertains the possibility without marriage, reasoning that Gladys Mortensen had not married and that the mysterious prince was not the marrying kind. Her age and the two or three years of fertility she believes remain to her give the fantasy a specific urgency. The prince can signify intimacy and the prospect of a child without promising the conventional security of marriage.

The Misfits and the Fairy-Tale Image

The book later turns the imagined pairing into a way of remembering the film. Its narrator describes falling in love with the fairy tale of The Misfits and with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable as lovers: the Good Princess and the Mysterious Prince walking through the desert at sunset, whispering and laughing, while she clings to him like a child seeking affection. Gable’s sixty years make him seem newly solid, his lined face compared to stone marked by time. That image is tender but not magical: the narration immediately confronts the fantasy with his human mortality and the prospect of his dying from a heart attack within weeks. The prince’s significance lies in the contrast between the shelter of the fairy tale and the vulnerable, finite people who briefly seem to inhabit it.