Marilyn Monroe buys a large quantity of Nembutal

Marilyn Monroe buys a large quantity of Nembutal at Schwab’s after months without taking it, acquiring seventy-five tablets under a new prescription before an extended work trip abroad. The purchase is presented not as an isolated transaction but amid a carefully specified supply of other sedatives, a late-night visit to a shop where she is both famous and alone, and a final appointment with a masseur she has forgotten to cancel. The scene gives the reader the facts of her access to the drugs without stating what she plans to do with them.

The prescription and the purchase

Before going to Schwab’s, Monroe had spent months without Nembutal. At home she had at least fifty capsules of chloral hydrate, taken only in the reasonable doses prescribed by two doctors. She also had a new Nembutal prescription from a different doctor: seventy-five tablets, intended to last through several weeks abroad for work. The distinction between her existing supply and the newly prescribed tablets matters: this is not described as an unsupervised purchase, but as a prescribed medicine obtained in quantity ahead of travel.

She went to Schwab’s that evening to fill the prescription. The narrative gives no stated reason for the amount beyond the length of her expected absence, and it does not disclose an intention for the tablets beyond their acquisition. The precise count, the new doctor, and the planned weeks overseas make the scene concrete while leaving its ultimate significance unresolved.

Schwab’s: celebrity and solitude

The purchase takes place in the brightly lit shop at about ten-thirty at night. Monroe pays in cash, drawing bills from her purse one by one, loses track while counting, and has to begin again. She moves nervously through the store and carefully avoids the newspaper stand, where entertainment and men’s magazines display the illustrated version of her public life. The juxtaposition is pointed: the celebrity image is conspicuously available in print, while the woman buying medication moves through the shop trying not to look at it.

A young cashier recalls that Monroe usually came alone, late in the evening, without makeup and nearly unrecognizable. She was nevertheless kind, smiling at the cashier and treating her with a familiarity that made the encounter feel intimate. The cashier also remembers Monroe’s account of how her career began: someone had noticed her body. That memory links the humble setting of Schwab’s to the commercial gaze that helped make Monroe famous, even as the scene emphasizes how solitary she seemed there.

The forgotten appointment

At midnight, Nico arrives for a massage that Monroe has forgotten to cancel. She apologizes, says she does not need the session that night, but insists on paying him anyway. She hands him a bundle of bills without counting them; when he counts the money later, he finds that it exceeds the fee by nearly one hundred dollars. When he asks whether he should return the next day, she tells him to suspend the appointments for a while and credits him with having made her body perfect.

The episode does not establish that the payment, the massage, and the Nembutal purchase share a single motive. Their placement together instead lets ordinary gestures—counting money, keeping an appointment, paying more than required—sit beside the large prescription and the anticipated absence. The prose breaks the sequence into titled fragments, moving from the purchase to the masseur and then to an image of an intoxicating elixir. That form creates an unsettling association around the drugs without resolving it into an explicit plan.