Norma Jeane Baker’s codeine overdose follows the death of I. E. Shinn, whose last phone call turns a career crisis into a personal rupture. When news of his death arrives, she immediately believes that he died of a heart attack and that she caused it. Her attempt to die comes amid the public scandal over nude calendar photographs, the loss of a child she believes is gone, and the sudden disappearance of the man whose concern had once felt almost parental.

The call that ends the relationship

Earlier, I. E. Shinn had spoken to Norma Jeane Baker with concern, asking whether she had taken pills or painkillers and whether she was menstruating. He also discussed work: The Studio was considering her for a part in Niagara, opposite Joseph Cotten. She was to play Rose, a sensual, calculating adulteress and potential killer, a role Shinn presented as a substantial opportunity. He praised the film in comparison with an earlier melodrama and said he would try to negotiate a better agreement for her.

Hours later, the tone changed completely. Shinn called back already shouting. He accused Norma Jeane of having concealed the nude photographs from him and demanded to know when they had been taken. He warned that The Studio might suspend her and angrily named Otto öse as a possible person responsible. The photographs had converted the earlier discussion of work into a crisis over her contract and public image; Shinn’s concern for her career came out as accusation and insult.

The call ends with a claim that exposes the possessiveness beneath his investment in her success: Shinn insists that Marilyn Monroe had been his and that Norma Jeane had no right to spoil her. The distinction between the woman and the star persona becomes a weapon in their argument. Norma Jeane is left holding the receiver, stunned and unable to understand the scale of his fury. Later, she would remember this as their final conversation. She would not see Shinn again except in his coffin.

News and the belief that she caused his death

The next morning, Norma Jeane wakes believing the disconnected telephone is ringing. She hopes Shinn is calling to forgive her, and reasons that if The Studio has decided not to dismiss her, he might forgive her too. The expectation is intensely specific: after his anger, she waits for the return of the affectionate concern she had heard earlier, as if a second call could undo the first.

At ten, she reaches to replace the receiver, and the telephone rings. She answers at once, asking whether it is Shinn. Instead, the caller is Betty, Shinn’s assistant, who asks whether Norma Jeane is sitting down. While Betty’s voice trembles, Norma Jeane lies naked in bed and calmly thinks that Shinn is dead, that his heart has failed, and that she has killed him. The passage presents this as Norma Jeane’s immediate conclusion, not as a medical explanation supplied by Betty. Its force lies in the abrupt shift from waiting for forgiveness to accepting a death for which she holds herself responsible.

The death is not an isolated piece of news: it removes the person whose approval she had hoped to regain just hours after he denounced her. The finality is sharpened by the remembered end of their relationship. The call that had made Norma Jeane feel accused and dispossessed is also the last time she hears Shinn’s voice; there can be no later reconciliation between them.

The overdose and the rescue

Later that morning, Norma Jeane swallows the remaining codeine pills, about fifteen, washing them down with long drinks of nearly spoiled milk. Naked and trembling, she lies on the shadowed floor and waits to die, looking up at the ceiling. The physical particulars make the attempt starkly different from the public performance she has just given: this is not a press statement or a carefully managed image but an effort to become still and disappear.

Her thoughts turn to the child she believes has been lost forever. She imagines the child both with a spinal deformity and with beautiful eyes and a beautiful soul. The imagined possibilities do not settle into a single account of the child; together, they register the grief and uncertainty surrounding the pregnancy. In the overdose scene, that grief converges with her guilt over Shinn’s death. She does not merely mourn two losses: in the same moment, she believes herself responsible for both the dead man and the vanished child.

Within minutes, she vomits the pills. The account lingers on the thick, bitter fluid and on her later, obsessive brushing, which makes her gums bleed. The body interrupts the intended death, but survival is not represented as a clean or immediate recovery. The next words identify what follows simply as a rescue, without detailing who performs it or how. That abrupt transition preserves the difference between the failed attempt and its aftermath: the means of rescue remain unstated, while the fact that she survives is decisive.

Narrative significance

The episode binds public exposure to private collapse without treating them as the same kind of event. The photographs have provoked Shinn’s anger and threatened Norma Jeane’s standing at The Studio; his death then becomes, in her mind, a personal consequence of that quarrel. The timing turns a professional reprimand into an irreversible loss, even though the narrative does not establish that her actions caused his death. Her belief, rather than a proven causal link, governs the immediate emotional logic of the overdose.

The sequence also sets the public Marilyn Monroe against the frightened Norma Jeane who answers the telephone. The star’s future-facing role in Niagara had just been discussed as a career opportunity; the next morning, Norma Jeane is waiting not for a contract or an audience but for Shinn’s forgiveness. The switch from receiver to ringing phone, from anticipated reconciliation to Betty’s trembling announcement, gives the scene its cruel reversal. The rescue prevents the attempt from becoming the end of her story, but the passage leaves the losses and the guilt that drove it intact.