Marilyn Monroe’s psychological crisis

Marilyn Monroe’s psychological crisis is a gradual collapse of the boundary between public performance and private experience, intensified by insomnia, medication, isolation, and unresolved family loss. The novel connects her adult disorientation to a childhood shaped by separation from Gladys Mortensen, but does not reduce Monroe’s distress to a single diagnosis: it shows a woman trying to work, remember, and care for others while her thoughts and sense of time become increasingly unreliable.

Early separation and the maternal history

Before Monroe’s own crisis becomes prominent, the narrative shows the instability surrounding her mother. At work in a film-negative laboratory, Gladys is so frightened by an urgent telephone call that a colleague has to help her reach the phone. The chemical substances in the laboratory make her eyes water, while voices intrude into her hearing; she has spent years trying to disregard voices she knows are not real. Her first fear is that something has happened to her daughter, but the call concerns her own mother, Della Monroe. This scene establishes both Gladys’s serious illness and the anxious uncertainty in which her family relationships are lived.

Monroe’s childhood is also shaped by the consequences of Gladys’s hospitalization. While in the care of social services, Norma Jeane is considered for adoption by three different couples, but Gladys is neither dead nor unknown: she is confined at Norwalk State Hospital, where her recorded diagnosis is chronic paranoid schizophrenia with probable neurological damage associated with alcohol and medication abuse. The record is supplied to prospective adoptive parents, making the mother’s illness part of the institutional account of the child’s prospects. Norma Jeane’s distress is not presented as an abstract vulnerability; it grows within repeated separations and the uncertainty of whether she will be chosen and kept.

Reunion, work, and the return of feeling

A decade after last seeing her mother, Norma Jeane visits her at Norwalk. The hospital reports that Gladys is near the highest level of recovery considered possible in her case. She has undergone several courses of electroshock treatment, which reduced her crises, and remains on an intensive medication regimen intended to prevent depressive and manic episodes. Hospital records say she has not tried to harm herself or anyone else for years. The psychiatrist’s question about whether the visit might cause problems for the daughter or the mother leaves the risk open rather than promising that reunion will be easy.

Norma Jeane recognizes Gladys immediately: a thin woman in a faded green hospital gown. She approaches her, identifies herself, and embraces her. In Norma Jeane’s later recollection, both women weep; in the narrated account, only Norma Jeane cries, while Gladys neither returns the embrace nor withdraws from it. The difference between memory and scene matters. The encounter gives Norma Jeane an intense, unplanned emotional release, and she later associates it with discovering that she can cry on cue in acting lessons. Professional technique and private pain begin to occupy the same territory: the feeling is real, yet she also learns how it can be summoned for performance.

Years later, when Norma Jeane arrives at Lakewood, Gladys has disappeared from the clinic and is found asleep in a pew at a Catholic church on Bellflower Boulevard, less than five kilometers away. Police return her, confused but unresisting. Norma Jeane breaks down and holds her in an embrace that seems unable to end; the mother smells of wet fabric and urine. This reunion offers no simple recovery or resolution. It is another meeting with a vulnerable mother whose condition requires institutional care, and another occasion on which Monroe’s love and distress emerge together.

Reno: exhaustion and disorientation

The crisis sharpens during the production of The Misfits in Reno. Monroe and her husband, the Playwright, are staying on the tenth and top floor of the Zephyr Hotel. On the first day of filming, she has been awake through the night and is already shut in the bathroom before the scheduled start. Mirrors fill her with alarm; she refuses to let Whitey in, though he has come to ask her to let him try to help. She is described as a mass of nerves and emotions, unable to form coherent thoughts. The account leaves open whether she has slept briefly and failed to wake or has entered a drugged, catatonic stupor with her eyes open. Either way, she has managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom, then refuses to open its door.

Her husband pleads with her and threatens to call hotel staff to remove the door from its hinges. She tells him to leave her alone. When he reaches the set, he offers successive explanations for her absence, including a migraine and fever, and promises she will arrive later. The director says the crew will film scenes without her and privately hopes that, if Monroe is going to collapse, it happens before rather than after the production. The episode makes her distress visible as a conflict between bodily incapacity and an industry that must keep filming. Reno’s identity as a divorce destination also shadows the production: the character Roslyn is there to free herself, while Monroe is working amid the strain of her own marriage.

Public performance and private loss

After her divorce, Monroe’s confusion continues inside the machinery of publicity. In a limousine with dark windows, she asks whether the divorce is over, although her companions tell her that she and her husband divorced the previous week in Mexico City and that they went there together. She struggles to breathe and concentrate, and a tooth throbs where someone struck her with a hard object; she has told herself the blow was accidental. Her lawyer and Rollo Freund, working as a studio media consultant, congratulate her on handling the situation well. The praise treats the public appearance as a successful performance even as Monroe experiences it as difficult to follow and scarcely real.

The moving limousine becomes a kind of time machine: she cannot remember what has just happened or where she has been, and does not know where she is being taken. She searches her purse for an amphetamine tablet to revive herself but finds none, or cannot feel her fingers well enough to locate it. She longs for Doc Fell, the studio doctor who is gone; the account reports Hollywood rumors that he died in his bungalow from a morphine or heroin overdose. Her search for medication and her yearning for a doctor who is no longer available underline how precariously she depends on substances and medical care while feeling abandoned by the people and systems around her.

In the limousine she clutches an envelope decorated with little red hearts, anxiously hoping for another letter from her father while suspecting this one is not from him. Her account of loneliness gathers together losses that publicity cannot repair: she misses the girls from the orphanage, feels that her mother acts as if she does not know her, and says her father writes without ever appearing. Men, she fears, love Marilyn rather than her. At the same time, she speaks of loving animals, especially horses, and of helping people in Reno establish a fund to save wild horses of the Southwest. Her wish that no animal should die except naturally sets her tenderness beside her own evident fragility.

The men accompanying her are captivated by the famous actress at close range. They see a young-looking face under theatrical makeup that appears ideal for a camera but disturbing in person, and notice how intensely she grips the anonymous admirer’s envelope, as if a stranger’s declaration of love might save her. Monroe objects to being stared at and treated as a spectacle. She also refuses to sign more papers except documents for a trust fund that will allow Gladys to remain at Lakewood Home if something happens to her. Her words trail off into uncertainty about what that might mean, and she tries to laugh it away. The crisis thus reaches beyond disorientation: even in confusion, she is planning for her mother’s continued care, while the possibility of her own absence enters the conversation in a form she cannot fully articulate.

The divided self

Monroe’s distress is intensified by the gap between being alive as a person and being fixed as a star. A fellow actress insists that Monroe will remain Monroe even if every future film fails, but this assurance makes her feel misunderstood: enduring as an image is not the same as being recognized as a living woman. Elsewhere, sleepless nights and the Playwright’s departure for New York leave her feeling isolated, as though she were on an iceberg in a turbulent sea. Thought becomes self-accusation, then gives way to the blank, bewildered expression she associates with Gladys. She recognizes that resemblance and resists recognizing it at the same time.

That divided recognition gives the crisis its particular force. The public persona remains legible to the men around her, who admire and scrutinize her, while her private continuity—memory, time, family belonging, and even the ability to explain what has happened—breaks down. Yet the narrative does not portray her only as an object of care or observation. Her efforts to protect Gladys’s place at Lakewood Home, her grief for lost companions, and her concern for horses remain acts of attachment. The crisis is therefore both a profound loss of command over her own experience and a struggle to preserve the human relationships and responsibilities that the image of Marilyn cannot contain.