La Principessa Buona

La Principessa Buona is a recurring fairy-tale image that lets Norma Jeane Baker imagine herself as worthy of happiness while exposing the distance between her private self and Marilyn Monroe, the public figure. She is at once a desired heroine, a performer shaping her own role, and an object of mass adoration whose story carries a shadow of death.

A private claim to happiness

In a private fantasy about I. E. Shinn learning of her pregnancy, Norma Jeane imagines his initial anger giving way, within days, to happiness for her. She pictures the shrewd, sarcastic old man drawing her aside and making her laugh; the fantasy depends on his eventual acceptance, even though he does not know that I Gemelli saved her life. Within this imagined reconciliation, the principle of the fairy tale is that what La Principessa Buona desires should be granted to her. The phrase turns a precarious hope into a declaration of entitlement: she deserves not only the child but a happiness other people might withhold.

The declaration acquires a different force when Norma Jeane drives toward Lakewood to find Gladys Mortensen. On the way, she passes three cinemas showing Niagara, each displaying Marilyn Monroe in a revealing red dress. The billboard image seems to taunt and summon its admirers: she is beautiful and emotionally powerful, while they are ordinary and captivated. The spectacle raises the question of who could be a Principe Misterioso worthy of her, recasting romantic longing as a problem of scale. Yet Norma Jeane also distinguishes herself from the image. The woman on the billboard is not her, she recognizes, but is the product of her work; therefore she deserves happiness and her baby. The fairy-tale claim is not simply a wish to be rescued. It is also an assertion that labor has made the public image, and that its maker has a claim to the life she wants.

The adored heroine and the audience

At a premiere at Grauman’s, the fairy-tale image enters public view as ceremony. Lights, a red carpet, applause, and the crowd chanting Marilyn Monroe’s name surround her as she descends from a limousine, smiling and waving. The narration identifies the adored figure as La Principessa Buona, but attaches a grim future to the ovation: she will one day die for the people who love her. Adoration thus carries an unresolved contradiction. The crowd’s love makes the princess radiant and powerful, yet the prediction makes that love feel costly, not protective. The public image is celebrated as if it belonged to everyone, while the person inside it remains vulnerable.

That contradiction sharpens the separation between Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe. The billboard is both hers and not hers: a product of her work, but a figure watched and desired by strangers. La Principessa Buona gives that divided identity a storybook form. It can elevate her above the crowd while also showing how celebrity turns her into an image for the crowd to consume. The fairy-tale name does not resolve the split; it makes the split visible.

Rewriting the role

During the production of The Misfits, the princess becomes a way to argue over what Roslyn Tabor is allowed to do. Norma Jeane objects to a version of Roslyn whose dialogue mainly comforts men, dries their tears, and makes them feel admired and loved. She wants Roslyn to be visible from the beginning, moving through the world rather than hidden behind a window or reduced to a woman watching herself apply makeup in a mirror. Her impatience with the windows, mirrors, and makeup is a demand for a different kind of screen presence: Roslyn should be seen whole, not confined to the surfaces through which men view her.

She also proposes changing the ending so that Roslyn helps release the trapped horses. In her imagined staging, Clark Gable can free the stallion while Roslyn releases the others; the heroine acts alongside the cowboy rather than remaining an object of his attention. La Principessa Buona and Principe Misterioso become collaborators in a rescue. The proposal makes the fairy-tale pairing less about a prince solving everything for a princess and more about two characters whose actions can meet. John Huston regards her as if she were mad, though he calls her Sweetness to calm her. Her insistence on the scene records a conflict over authorship and agency: she is not merely inhabiting the part but trying to alter what the part permits.

When a telephone rings, she imagines refusing it, getting ready, leaving the Zephyr Hotel by the kitchen exit, and arriving unexpectedly on set. In that imagined return, she will become Roslyn in a white V-neck dress with red cherries and use the remaining shooting day to demand as many takes as she needs. The scene she wants to play is Roslyn discussing her impending divorce with an older friend, allowing the trembling, insecure, indulgent character to emerge beneath Norma Jeane’s armor. The princess here is not effortless perfection; she is a role built through work, repeated takes, costume, and a struggle to be taken seriously. The imagined entrance also preserves her conviction that Marilyn Monroe is singular and that John Huston should recognize her ability.

The fairy tale on screen

The novel later describes The Misfits as a fairy tale that the people involved come to love and revisit. Its central image is Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable as lovers walking at sunset in the desert, speaking tenderly and laughing. In this remembered screen romance, the princess and the mysterious prince seem to offer a complete story: she is held close, like a child seeking affection, and he appears solid, his face marked by age. The image supplies the tenderness the fairy tale promises, but its comfort is inseparable from its constructedness. The film’s romance can be replayed and mistaken for an experience loved moment by moment, just as a person might wish to make sense of an entire life as a story.

The novel punctures that enchantment by reminding its readers that Gable can die. The prince is not magical or exempt from mortality. Across these appearances, La Principessa Buona changes from a private assurance of deserved happiness into an image claimed by admirers, then into a figure who argues for action and visibility within her role. The fairy tale offers Norma Jeane a language for desire and recognition, but it cannot guarantee rescue: its heroine remains both the author of her work and the woman exposed to the audience’s gaze.