Marilyn Monroe’s suspected pregnancy

Marilyn Monroe’s suspected pregnancy is a state of uncertainty rather than a confirmed diagnosis: when her menstruation stops, she avoids the test that might clarify what is happening, while her dreams turn the unanswered question into a story of coercion and loss. The episode joins physical signs to grief over a child she believes was Cass Chaplin’s, and to a fear that medical and political powers can take control of her body. The novel never establishes that she is pregnant in this episode; its force lies in the tension between what she can feel, what she fears, and what she cannot verify.

A question left unanswered

By mid-July, Marilyn Monroe has stopped menstruating and insists to herself that there must be some other explanation, one she needs to discover. The absence of her period is a concrete bodily change, but not proof of pregnancy. She examines her breasts, trying to decide whether they look like those of a pregnant woman, and associates them with the smell of the Atlantic. Galapagos Cove surfaces as a vivid yet remote memory, like a film seen long ago in a heightened state of excitement. The past does not resolve the present; it makes the possible pregnancy feel at once bodily and distant.

She considers whether menopause has begun unusually early, but her sense of age is itself unstable: she confuses her own age, thirty-six, with Gladys Mortensen’s, sixty-two. The two women were born under Gemini, a coincidence she experiences as a fatal connection. That confusion and shared sign place her own reproductive uncertainty beside her mother’s life without making the two situations identical. The novel presents the connection as part of Marilyn Monroe’s fearful pattern-making, not as evidence of a medical condition.

A doctor proposes an examination and a pregnancy test. Marilyn Monroe says she has no time that day, then never returns. Her refusal preserves the uncertainty rather than settling it. She fears doctors and psychoanalysts because she imagines they may betray her by revealing the secrets they know, or inventing secrets they do not. The choice not to be examined therefore has both a practical consequence and a psychological one: no professional finding can confirm or rule out pregnancy, while suspicion and bodily vigilance continue.

The imagined abortion

During a restless night, Marilyn Monroe dreams that she is pregnant by President Kennedy. In the dream, the fetus is malformed and she faces accusations of murder; the imagined explanation includes her use of too many drugs. President Kennedy, depicted as a devout Catholic opposed to abortion and contraception, nevertheless wants to prevent a national scandal, and the fetus is to be surgically removed. The dream gives political power a direct role in a private reproductive crisis, but it remains a dream, not an account of a verified pregnancy or operation.

She wakes repeatedly, chilled and soaked with sweat, her heart racing. Her fear takes the form of an intruder entering the house to chloroform her. The dream draws on a remembered journey from Hotel C, when she had been chloroformed and flown to Los Angeles in a semiconscious state, wrapped in a hooded raincoat. Cartoon and fictional figures crowd the imagined threat, including Dick Tracy, Jiggs, Bugs Bunny, and Tiratore Scelto. Their presence does not make the fear harmless: it shows how dream, memory, and distrust become entangled while she tries to tell herself that she is awake and that the experience was not real.

In the middle of the night she calls Carlo, although she knows he will not answer. The act of dialing comforts her like a prayer. Later, fully awake and conscious of where she is, she receives a call on her reserved telephone line. Static makes her suspect that the line is monitored, perhaps by equipment in a van or a neighbor’s driveway, but she has no proof. The narration preserves that distinction: the sound is real within the scene; the surveillance remains an unconfirmed explanation. She also recognizes that some of her medications can intensify nervousness and suspicion and cause physical distress. Her awareness of that possibility does not dispel the fear.

Pregnancy, grief, and the past

The imagined fetus by President Kennedy is not the same as the child connected elsewhere in Marilyn Monroe’s memory with Cass Chaplin and Eddy G. She has privately remained certain that Cass fathered that child, and the account links her certainty to having loved Cass more deeply than Eddy G. She loved Cass before she became Marilyn Monroe, before the world saw her as Miss Golden Dreams. This remembered relationship gives her reproductive uncertainty a history that the dream’s political scenario cannot replace.

When she asks herself whether the child’s death was her fault, the question is bound up with her belief that all of them wanted the child’s death. The episode offers no simple resolution of that guilt. Instead, its juxtaposition of the lost child, the possible new pregnancy, and the dreamed fetus makes motherhood recur as both longing and danger. The person she fears losing may be imagined as a child she carries, while the act of ending a pregnancy appears in the dream as something imposed on her by others.

Maternal echoes and narrative significance

Marilyn Monroe’s fear of pregnancy and institutional control has an earlier family context. Gladys Mortensen had been hospitalized at Norwalk State Hospital for years. After electroshock treatment reduced her crises, she received intensive medication intended to prevent depressive and manic episodes; hospital records described her as no longer attempting to harm herself or others. When Marilyn Monroe visited after a decade apart, she recognized her mother immediately. Gladys did not return the awkward embrace, though she did not pull away, and Marilyn Monroe’s unexpectedly intense tears later became connected to her ability to cry on command as an actress.

That history does not establish that Marilyn Monroe will repeat her mother’s illness. It does, however, place medical treatment, maternal separation, and the interpretation of women’s distress within the same family story. Earlier, Gladys Mortensen had feared that an urgent telephone call concerned her daughter, only to learn that it concerned her own mother, Della Monroe. Later, when Marilyn Monroe reaches Lakewood, Gladys has wandered from the clinic and is found asleep in a church before police return her. These episodes show how calls, hospitals, and uncertain safety recur around the mother and daughter.

The suspected pregnancy brings those recurring pressures into Marilyn Monroe’s own body. Her hesitation about a test leaves the central fact unresolved; the dream supplies a violent answer without making it true. By setting a missed period and a refused examination beside a remembered loss, a frightening hospital history, and an unverified suspicion of surveillance, the novel makes uncertainty itself consequential. Marilyn Monroe is neither given the reassurance of a diagnosis nor granted certainty that her fears describe events outside her dreams. The gap between those possibilities is where the episode’s grief and menace persist.