Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe is the public name through which the novel’s Norma Jeane becomes visible to the world, but the two identities never settle into a secure whole. Her image is made and remade by photographs, film roles, publicity, and other people’s expectations; behind it, the narrative returns to a woman whose life seems to surface in the characters she plays. Her significance lies in that unstable overlap: acting offers work and a means of self-creation, yet the star persona can also appear as a stranger who takes over the mirror.

Identity and the Making of an Image

Before stardom, Norma Jeane works nine hours a day at the Radio Plane Aircraft factory in Burbank, California. She takes pride in contributing to the wartime effort and regards the labor as tiring but worthwhile. The novel gives this ordinary employment a sudden, public afterlife: a December 1944 issue of Stars and Stripes prints a full-page photograph of her in the assembly room. In the image, she points a paint spray gun playfully toward the camera, her work clothes emphasizing the pin-up pose the magazine has made from her factory identity.

The photograph reaches her husband, Buchanan Glazer, aboard the Liberty. His shipmates watch him go rigid with astonishment as he recognizes the woman in the picture as his wife. They snatch the magazine from him and tease him because the caption spells his name Glaser rather than Glazer; he angrily insists that the picture is his. The episode makes the distance between private relationship and public image tangible. The men see a beautiful pin-up and a source of amusement, while Buchanan sees his wife and tries to reclaim the page as something personal.

That transformation is not presented as the result of a single photograph. Otto öse is credited with discovering Norma Jeane and helping her gain notice in women’s magazines and the more serious U.S. Camera. His intervention also helps her reach the agent I. E. Shinn and obtain a renewable contract with The Studio. Yet the machinery of recognition does not guarantee that audiences will actually see her: in her first film appearance, a bucolic comedy with June Haver, four minutes of posing are cut to a few seconds. She appears far away in a rowboat, so small that even she could not recognize herself. The public name Marilyn Monroe begins in cinema not with a commanding entrance but with an image nearly lost in the background.

Publicity, the Body, and the Screen

The novel connects Monroe’s rise to the marketability of her appearance. Her earlier nude photograph, made by Otto öse for the Miss Sogni d’Oro calendar, resurfaces years later on the front page of Hollywood Tatler. Its headline asks whether Marilyn Monroe is the woman posing for the calendar. A photograph made in one period of her life becomes a scandal in another, and the new celebrity name supplies the sensation that sells the story. The episode extends the question raised by the wartime pin-up: who controls the meaning of her image once it has circulated beyond her?

The text also presents Monroe’s own ambivalence toward the identity that publicity builds. At one point, her account of herself brings sexuality and nature together with the Miss Sogni d’Oro persona; elsewhere, she insists on being Marilyn. These assertions do not erase the difference between a person and a marketable image. Instead, they show how the public figure can become a language she uses for herself even as it narrows the terms in which others recognize her.

Her acting offers another way to inhabit and revise that image. In discussing her work, she says she cannot memorize words as words and must instead memorize feelings. The novel’s account of The Misfits, her final film, gives that approach a particular force. As Roslyn Tabor, she plays a woman who fears she will keep arriving back where she started. Roslyn speaks of a mother who was absent, a father who was absent, and a handsome former husband who was absent; she longs for her mother, has no children, and never finished high school. Her dialogue, the narration explains, echoes the private speech of the Blonde Actress and draws on painful events in her life.

Roslyn’s actions widen the role beyond autobiography. She feeds hungry dogs and men, tends to older and wounded men, and weeps for people who cannot weep for themselves. In the Nevada desert, she calls the men liars and killers and persuades them to release the wild horses they have roped. Roslyn’s compassion and protest are therefore part of the same performance: she refuses to treat suffering people or animals as disposable. The novel describes her as a woman rather than a blonde novelty, and presents the role as an unusually intense screen performance, one in which Monroe’s public craft draws close to her private history without becoming simply identical to it.

Relationships, Recognition, and the Mirror

The boundary between role and life becomes especially porous in Monroe’s response to Roslyn. At her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, she recognizes that Roslyn’s story encompasses her own life. The recognition is not limited to resemblance between two women: the novel says that the playwright husband fashioned Roslyn’s dialogue from his wife’s private speech and dramatic experiences. Monroe does not hold this borrowing against him. She understands Roslyn as a gift he made from their shared life, and their relation as mutual and interwoven. The role thus becomes both an act of intimacy and a question about where one person’s story ends and another’s begins.

Marlon Brando occupies a different place in her emotional life. Monroe has memorized his private telephone number even though she cannot reliably recall other numbers, including her own. She treats him as the person who understands her and feels that they share a soul. But her trust is uneasy: she dislikes that he has acted as a messenger for I Gemelli and is troubled by his connection to the Hollywood outcasts Cass Chaplin and Eddy G. The silence surrounding the group and Baby intensifies her sense that important parts of her life have become inaccessible to her.

At the end of the novel, the mirror makes the split between Norma Jeane and Marilyn visible as an unstable appearance rather than a settled diagnosis. During the troubled production of Something’s Got to Give, Director C keeps changing scenes and pages of the script; even the character’s name shifts among Roxanne, Phyllis, and Queenie. Monroe jokes that the disorder resembles life. In the mirror, Marilyn appears with bright, lively eyes and then vanishes, leaving Norma Jeane looking dispirited and nauseated. Whitey remains patient beside her, but she asks him to give up. The image once loved as a magical friend has become something neither of them can confidently trust.

Crisis and the Novel’s Closing Image

The New York encounter with President Kennedy is narrated through confusion and distress. Before it, Monroe is upset that an anticipated visit has been shortened from an entire night and day to only a few hours. During the journey she has been sick and unable to eat; she takes Miltown to calm herself and amphetamine for energy and courage. The narrative places her in a hotel room with the President, where his physical control turns the meeting into a sexual assault. Monroe cannot remember how she arrived or who brought her there. She wonders whether Marilyn has done this, or whether she has entered a film scene, even imagining herself as the Girl Upstairs in an innocuous erotic movie. That uncertainty does not make the assault unreal; it shows how thoroughly her experience has been filtered through performance and disorientation.

The novel’s last movement does not resolve the struggle between the star and the woman behind her. Instead, it returns to a childhood scene with Gladys. Norma Jeane climbs the stairs to find her mother smiling and in good spirits; Gladys takes her into the bedroom and points to a photograph of a smiling man, telling her that he is her father. The ending brings the story back to the promise and wound of recognition: before the magazines, the screen roles, and the name Marilyn Monroe, there is a child being shown an image and told what it means. The adult star’s unstable search for a self closes on that first offered account of belonging.