Norma Jeane's suicidal thoughts and suicide crises

Norma Jeane’s suicidal thoughts and crises are shaped by abandonment, exposure, and grief, but they do not form a simple progression toward death. She comes close to self-destruction more than once, yet the narrative also insists on a distinction she makes for herself: she can contain a desperate character without becoming that character. After I. E. Shinn’s death, that distinction becomes harder to maintain, and survival must be argued for as both a personal necessity and a responsibility to generations still to come.

Earlier Despair and the Limits of Disclosure

After Cass Chaplin’s betrayal, Norma Jeane swallowed almost an entire bottle of Cass’s barbiturates. She vomited them back up almost immediately. The episode is disclosed as a fact she had not shared with I. E. Shinn, even though she confided in him as both agent and friend. Her silence marks a limit in their closeness: Shinn may have known more about her private life than she realized, through the network of informants he maintained around important clients, but he did not know this particular crisis from her own account.

The betrayal and overdose establish that her later crises do not begin with the studio scandal or Shinn’s death. Self-destruction is already part of her response to emotional injury, and the account preserves the physical consequence as well as the impulse: the pills are taken, then expelled. That difference matters. The attempt brings her close to death without making death the outcome, a pattern that will recur in altered circumstances.

Nell and the Boundary of Performance

While playing Nell, a servant girl who tries to pass as a princess and is publicly exposed, Norma Jeane confronts a staged suicide with a razor. Nell’s story includes humiliation before strangers and a failed attempt to kill herself in a hotel lobby. The role draws on an intimate vocabulary of shame and self-destruction, but Norma Jeane refuses to treat the character’s actions as her own. She understands herself as an actor containing Nell, not as Nell herself.

That distinction is dramatized in the scene’s most perilous image: Nell brings a razor to her throat, while a maternal voice urges her to cut. Norma Jeane answers by refusing the act and naming acting as her work. The scene therefore sets the danger of identification against a means of separation. Nell can give form to a mental seed of madness, and Norma Jeane can enter the part deeply enough to understand it, but the character does not wholly define the person performing her.

The separation is not effortless or permanent. The role gives the later studio crisis a disturbing echo: Norma Jeane will reach for a razor after hearing the news about her nude photographs, as Nell had done. The repetition makes the boundary between role and life feel vulnerable, even as the earlier scene supplies her with a language for insisting that the two are not identical.

The Studio Scandal and the Razor

When Norma Jeane is summoned to an urgent meeting at the studio, she is left among a group of furious and disgusted men. I. E. Shinn has not been allowed to accompany her. The gathering includes Mr. Z, a producer, a public-relations official, and lawyers; the subject is the exposure of her nude photograph and the prospect of public scandal, press circulation, and threatened boycotts. The room’s concentration of male authority leaves her isolated at the very moment her image is being discussed and judged.

After the meeting, Shinn shouts into the telephone amid other shouting voices. Norma Jeane runs to the medicine cabinet in her apartment and reaches for a razor, repeating Nell’s gesture, but her fingers tremble and she drops it. The dropped blade is a consequential interruption: the narrative shows the impulse and its physical failure to become an act, rather than treating the crisis as an abstract thought. In that immediate panic, she turns instead to medication.

She takes two codeine tablets prescribed by the studio doctor for menstrual pain and migraine. When they do not work at once, panic leads her to take a third. The account places the pills within a crisis of public exposure, workplace power, and fear of professional rejection; it does not make the codeine itself equivalent to the razor or specify that this first dose is a suicide attempt. As the drug takes effect, she watches the blonde woman surrounded by the men as though from a distance, smiling as if unaware of the danger of slipping. The separation between Norma Jeane and the public figure becomes a way of looking at the scene, but also a sign of how profoundly she feels herself divided from it.

Shinn’s Death, Guilt, and a Second Overdose

After the studio decides not to dismiss her, Norma Jeane gives a press conference in which she acknowledges that she posed nude for fifty dollars in 1949, says she did not pose before or afterward, and expresses regret without claiming shame. She has performed the part of Marilyn Monroe successfully before the reporters, telling the truth as she understands it. Yet her attention remains fixed on whether Shinn will forgive her. When his assistant Betty telephones, Norma Jeane initially thinks Shinn is calling; instead, she hears that he is dead. She immediately imagines that she has killed him and broken his heart.

Later that morning, she swallows the remaining codeine tablets, about fifteen, with long drinks of nearly sour milk. Naked and trembling, she lies on the floor and expects to die. Her thoughts turn to the child she believes has been lost forever, imagining both the possibility of a spinal deformity and the alternative of a beautiful child in body and spirit. Within minutes she vomits the pills. The physical aftermath is described as thick, bitter vomit that seems to harden between her teeth despite her repeated brushing, until her gums bleed. The crisis is thus tied at once to bereavement, imagined lost motherhood, and the conviction that Shinn’s death is her fault; it ends in another failed overdose, not in death.

Survival as Obligation

In the aftermath, Norma Jeane describes feeling as if a layer of skin is missing and everything can hurt like sunburn. Since Shinn’s death, she has missed him intensely. She regards him as the one person who believed in Marilyn Monroe, and she blames herself for having broken his heart. The loss therefore threatens more than companionship: it removes the person she associates with the creation and continued existence of her public identity.

Yet her account does not end with guilt. She says she knew she had to keep living for Marilyn, even while uncertain about her own beliefs and identity. She develops that necessity into a responsibility to people who will come after her: the future is imagined as a road still being made, and remaining alive matters because children and their descendants must be able to exist. She mentions a recurring dream of a little girl but declines to disclose its private details, offering only the hope that it might contain a clue to the child’s father. The dream does not resolve her losses or remove her suicidal thoughts. Instead, it sits beside them as an image of a future she cannot yet know. The account’s central tension is precisely that survival is neither secure nor effortless; it is a decision Norma Jeane must make again, with grief still present and the next generation still imagined.