Marilyn Monroe’s drug and alcohol dependence

Marilyn Monroe’s drug and alcohol dependence is presented not as a single crisis but as a recurring means of managing distress, exhaustion, illness, and the demands of being publicly recognizable. The novel traces a chain of sedatives, sleeping pills, stimulants, analgesics, and alcohol, while showing how attempts to control her body and keep Marilyn Monroe present for others become entangled with dangerous physical vulnerability.

Family and Medical Background

The story places medication and mental illness in Marilyn Monroe’s family history before detailing her own use. At the time of a frightening telephone call at her workplace, Gladys Mortensen was already living with voices she understood as unreal and tried to ignore. She had learned to filter them, though exhaustion sometimes made them harder to contain. Her eyes also watered from the harsh chemicals used in the negatives laboratory, where she continued working rather than complain to her former employer. The scene joins physical exposure and mental distress without treating them as the same thing.

By the time Norma Jeane Baker visited her mother at Norwalk State Hospital, Gladys Mortensen had been institutionalized for ten years. She had undergone several courses of electroshock, which hospital records said had reduced her crises, and was receiving an intensive drug regimen intended to prevent depressive and manic episodes. The records also reported that she had not tried to harm herself or others for years. The clinical account offered to Norma Jeane Baker does not erase the force of their meeting: after a decade apart, she recognized her thin, ill mother at once and cried during an awkward embrace that Gladys Mortensen did not return, though she did not pull away.

The hospital file disclosed a diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia with probable neurological damage attributed to alcohol and medication abuse. That description makes the mother’s treatment history part of the novel’s account of the family’s vulnerability to psychiatric illness and substances, but it is a medical record, not a complete explanation of either woman. Gladys Mortensen’s years of treatment also provide a stark contrast with the later, private routines through which her daughter tries to keep functioning outside an institution.

Substances as Emotional and Professional Management

During the trip to New York for a meeting with President Kennedy, the Blonde Actress takes a Miltown tablet to calm her nerves and Benzedrine for energy and courage. Before entering the bedroom where the President is waiting, she washes herself, while trying not to notice the used tissues and lipstick-stained napkins in a nearby wastebasket. The medication is thus part of a sequence of preparations for an encounter framed by performance, sexual vulnerability, and a marked imbalance of power; it does not protect her from what follows.

A separate account of her makeup ritual shows how ordinary functioning has become laborious. Whitey spends hours applying astringent, ointments, creams, powders, and other cosmetics, while Marilyn Monroe remains only partly present in the mirror. The Blonde Actress has a fever of 38.5 degrees and a viral infection, and the medicines she is taking have not brought the fever down. A doctor advises hospital admission because her white-blood-cell count is extremely low; she dismisses him and prefers psychiatrists, who prescribe pills and offer theoretical interpretations of her problems. On some days Whitey calls the studio to say she is ill; on others she arrives late, coughing and red-eyed, or appears radiant enough to draw applause. The pills belong to a larger effort to get through the day, but neither the medicines nor the ritual can reliably make her well or ready to work.

Renewed Nembutal Use and Alcohol

The novel gives the return to Nembutal an unusually concrete setting and quantity. After months without taking it, Marilyn Monroe has limited herself to what two doctors prescribe as reasonable doses of chloral hydrate; at home she keeps a supply of at least fifty capsules. A new doctor has also written a prescription for seventy-five Nembutal tablets, ostensibly because she will be abroad for several weeks. At about 10:30 p.m., she goes alone to Schwab’s to buy them, pays in cash, and has trouble counting the bills before starting over. Her late visit, the sizable prescription, and the effort required to count the money together mark the transaction as more than an incidental purchase.

A remembered account from the shop’s cashier adds another side to the pattern. Marilyn Monroe had described Schwab’s as the place where her career began, recalling that someone had noticed her body, and laughed about it. She usually came alone, late, without makeup, and was almost unrecognizable. The cashier remembered her as kind but profoundly lonely. The contrast is sharp: a place connected to the start of her public career is also where she privately buys a large supply of sleeping pills.

Alcohol appears alongside medication in a long session with Whitey. The Blonde Actress has already drunk six cups of coffee mixed with analgesics and a little gin while Whitey has consumed nearly a quart of grapefruit juice. The scene does not present alcohol in isolation from the work of maintaining her appearance: the two have been sitting together for more than two hours, and Whitey continues trying to make Marilyn Monroe recognizable in the mirror. A later appointment with her masseur, Nico, ends with her insisting on paying even though she does not need the session. Her words about his having made her body perfect give bodily maintenance an almost final, ritual quality, set against the pills and drinks that have become part of her routine.

Incapacitation and Narrative Significance

The consequences of drug use become most chilling in the account of an intruder entering Marilyn Monroe’s house in August 1962. The armed man, identified as the Tiratore Scelto, has been told by an informant that her sleep is produced by massive doses of tranquilizers and that she is not easily awakened. He finds her apparently asleep, breathing irregularly, and nearly unconscious. Beside the bed are several pill bottles, ampoules, and a glass half full of opaque liquid. These details establish the physical circumstances that make her defenseless, but the intruder’s description of her as an alcoholic and drug addict is also plainly shaped by his misogyny and dehumanization; it cannot be treated as neutral medical testimony.

Across these episodes, substances promise composure, sleep, energy, or a passage through work and private distress, yet they do not restore secure control. The prescriptions and purchases sit beside fever, missed work, loneliness, and the labor of making the star persona visible. By the final scene, the chemical means of managing consciousness have become a vulnerability another person can exploit. The novel’s account therefore presents dependence as both intimate routine and structural danger: the same body repeatedly managed for performance is left exposed when medication has rendered its owner unable to respond.