il Padre

il Padre is a man who enters Norma Jeane Baker’s life through letters, claiming to be the father whose absence has shaped her understanding of herself. His first message prompts her to believe she has finally found him; a later birthday letter renews the promise of a meeting but also exposes the distance between his imagined reconciliation and his own prejudices. The novel gives his words and their effects, but does not establish that his account of the past is true or that the promised reunion takes place.

Identity and the First Letter

The first letter is typed and has no return address. Its postmark is Los Angeles, a small but consequential detail: the unknown sender is not presented as a distant figure writing from an imagined elsewhere, but as someone apparently nearby. He addresses Norma Jeane Baker directly and declares himself her father. He says he has delayed contact for years, insists that he is not seeking advantage from her fame as Marilyn Monroe, and describes himself as content with his life: a satisfying career, now behind him in retirement, and a family of his own.

The letter also places a boundary around the revelation. The writer says that he may explain the details of their connection if they meet in person, leaving the central claim unsupported by the very document that announces it. His wife, he adds, does not know he has written and is ill; learning of the letter, he says, would cause her pain. He asks forgiveness for his late approach and reports that he has recovered from a serious illness, citing his doctor’s surprise at his recovery. The account offers intimate-sounding particulars, but all arrive through the same self-interested voice.

A Promise of Reunion

The writer casts the possible meeting as a long-denied reunion between father and daughter. He imagines them celebrating their love together on an occasion especially meaningful to Norma Jeane Baker, and signs as a distressed father. The language is affectionate and apologetic, but it also asks her to accept a relationship before its history has been explained. His letter therefore supplies what she has long wanted—a father who claims her—without resolving how or why he disappeared.

Norma Jeane Baker reacts with immediate certainty. After grasping the letter, she reads it, lays the poorly typed pages on her dressing-room table, and carefully smooths them. She repeats to herself that he is the man she knew was there, close by and protecting her all these years. An observer, Dee-Dee, sees a happiness on her face so complete that it makes her almost unrecognizable. The scene sets the sender’s unverified assertion beside the certainty it creates in its recipient: the letter proves that a man has claimed to be her father, while her response turns that claim into a sustaining explanation of the past.

The Birthday Letter and the Missing Meeting

After the night of the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes premiere, when Norma Jeane Baker had decided to marry the Ex-Atleta, she hears nothing further from the man claiming to be her father. She tells no one about the first letter and waits. The silence makes his promised contact an ongoing expectation rather than a completed reconciliation. On June 10, 1955, another typed letter arrives, this time in a Hallmark birthday envelope embossed with a red rose. Before opening it, she holds the envelope for a long time in her trembling hand. The carefully chosen birthday greeting gives the second message the appearance of a personal gesture, but does not itself confirm its sender’s identity.

In this letter, he again promises to visit soon and calls her his lost daughter. He says that his recent illness has changed how he regards her mother: in memory, she is becoming a sick, suffering woman rather than someone truly wicked, and he says he has learned to forgive her. This revises the harsher account in which he had claimed that the mother drove him out of Norma Jeane Baker’s life and led the daughter to believe that he had driven the mother away. Neither account is independently confirmed. The letters preserve his competing explanations and his changing judgment, not a settled history of the family.

Politics and the Limits of His Appeal

The birthday letter also shifts from personal reconciliation to political admonition. The writer refers to rumors that Marilyn Monroe has been investigated for associations with communists and warns her to avoid trouble over her past. He presents the communist threat as real, invokes fears of atomic attack, praises harsh punishment for supposed traitors, and criticizes her defense of freedom of speech. He further cites Charlie Chaplin as an example of a former hero whom he considers discredited, and tells her that he hopes to correct her thinking when they meet.

This political lecture sits uneasily beside the tender address to a lost daughter. His proposed intimacy comes with a demand that she accept his judgments, including judgments about her public conduct and political understanding. He promises to come before embarking on what he calls a long journey by sea, adding urgency without clarifying when or whether the visit will occur. His renewed claim of affection and forgiveness thus remains inseparable from the views and expectations he brings to the relationship.

Narrative Role and Uncertainty

il Padre functions as both a possible answer to Norma Jeane Baker’s longing for family and a figure whose claims the narrative leaves unresolved. His letters offer an explanation for absence, a promise of recognition, and a picture of a father who says he has been close all along. Yet the reader receives no meeting or independent confirmation in these episodes; even the first letter postpones the details of the relationship until an encounter that remains a promise. The contrast between his certainty about his identity and the absence of proof gives the correspondence its tension.

The letters also show how hope can gather around a physical object. Norma Jeane Baker smooths the first pages and holds the rose-embossed birthday envelope before opening it; the paper becomes something to preserve and wait upon. Her happiness is real, but it arises from a claim rather than a verified reunion. By placing that intense response beside the sender’s evasions, silence, shifting account of her mother, and political scolding, the novel keeps open the difference between the father she longs to recover and the man who writes to her.