If there is one actress whose myth has caused much ink to flow, it is Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962). Sixty years after her death, she continues to fascinate men and women, young and old, filmmakers and photographers, biographers and chroniclers, novelists and cartoonists. Among the works published in French recently, we have selected some novelties and reissues that are worth the detour.
Marilyn Monroe is an unfathomable mystery, an elusive character, the fruit of an era as well as its victim. From Norman Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates via Gloria Steinem or Charles Casillo, many have depicted their Marilyn, offered a subjective vision, some would say biased, a rereading of what was the woman, the child, the lover, the friend or the artist.
Something new
How to enlighten Marilyn, to express her light and her pain in living, her strength and her vulnerability, to add something new to everything that has been written so far? How can we resist the temptation to fill in the interstices, to project our own obsessions onto a larger-than-life existence? While some take a feminist reading of her fate, others take a contemporary look at her mental health. Many, of course, find in his childhood the explanation of what will happen next.
American author and director living in France, Ian Eyres publishes with Éditions de La Martinière a richly illustrated “beautiful book” entitled Marilyn Monroe. The woman behind the icon. Accompanying the broadcast of a three-part documentary series, Marilyn Monroe. Fame at all costsa production of which Télé-Québec is a partner, the work brings together in a banal and sometimes even anecdotal way the words of different people who have rubbed shoulders with the star.
In a preface as brief as it is felt, the actress Elsa Zylberstein, a great admirer of Marilyn, writes: “Beyond this extraordinary and charismatic envelope, perfect plastic, her fragile and tender heart seemed to cry, open to all the winds; her solitary soul seemed to cry out for help, for help, love me, love me for me deeply! »
The point of view adopted by the psychoanalyst writer Michel Schneider in Marilyn. The loves of his life is much more original. The one who had signed in 2006 a novel entitled Marilyn. Last sessions, which Louison moreover transformed into a comic strip a few months ago, offers here in a rich and nevertheless humble style an erudite and captivating primer, an anthology of concepts, places, objects and individuals which allow us to dig into Marilyn’s psyche, to shed light on the ins and outs of her love and sexual life, her satisfied and repressed desires, her bursts of freedom and her inner prisons. Strongly identifying with the actress, Schneider expresses from the preamble the lively and communicative empathy he feels for his subject: “I listen to her, watch her live and die, and I say: ‘Me, Marilyn’. »
In his own words
Under the “Books” entry in his primer, Michel Schneider states: “The ‘stupid blonde’ was probably the greatest reader in the history of cinema. Very aware of her educational shortcomings in her childhood, adult Marilyn was avid of reading. The actress was particularly fond of poetry. She even ventured to compose some.
In 2010, published by Seuil, in a book entitled Fragments, appeared for the first time all the poems, intimate writings and letters written by Marilyn Monroe. A sample: “Help, help / Help, I feel life drawing closer / When all I want is to die. »
Norman Rosten, poet and playwright who died in 1995, one of the first to have had access to the poems of the actress, testifies to his relationship with her in a text of great tenderness, a brochure published in 1973 which has just be reissued in French by Seghers: Marilyn. Shadow and light “She knew the shifting inner world of the poem, with its secrets, its ghosts, its surprises. She loved surprises, verbal or visual. She liked the dark and mysterious side that there is in a good poem. And somewhere deep inside she felt a primordial truth: that poetry is linked to death. Joy and fascination are the other face of elegy. Love and death, opposed and intertwined, are its borders. They were his. »
She knew the shifting inner world of the poem, with its secrets, its ghosts, its surprises. She loved surprises, verbal or visual. She liked the dark and mysterious side that there is in a good poem. And somewhere deep inside she felt a primordial truth: that poetry is linked to death. […].
When we dive into unfinished confessiona book published in 1974 under the title My Storyand which has just been republished in French, in pocket format, by Robert Laffont, we taste the unparalleled pleasure of reading Marilyn Monroe “in the text”.
Not only because we have the feeling of having access to the official version, from the point of view of the main person concerned, but also because we discover a real pen, a sense of the story, a style that is both naive and terribly lucid: “Because I almost always keep in my heart the presence of this sad and bitter child who grew up too quickly. Despite the success that surrounds me today, I feel that it is always with his terrified gaze that I contemplate the world. She keeps repeating “I’ve never lived, I’ve never been loved”, and often I deceive myself and believe that it is myself who utters these words. »
In thirty-five short chapters, dictated to screenwriter Ben Hecht in 1954, eight years before her death, Monroe recounts her childhood in foster families, her need for love and attention, her entry into adulthood and his Hollywood debut. She discusses her dreams and her disillusions, her passions and her marriages, without concealing the abuses of which she has been the victim.
Reading this prose, moreover accompanied by superb photos of Milton H. Greene, clichés in a relaxed style that reflect an obvious complicity, one cannot help imagining what the actress could have offered to literature if she had had time.
The discussions between Hecht and Monroe, and especially the memories they bring to the surface, Sandrine Revel (drawings) and Stéphanie Sphyras (script) have chosen to make a magnificent comic strip where the notion of fragment takes on its full meaning. : Marilyn Monroe. unfinished confession. On the first page, we can read: “In this suite of the Beverly Hills Hotel, she leans on Norma Jean. She summons her ghosts. She reconstructs the thread of her story. She lets us into her heart. She shares with us her dream of becoming an actress and her determination to embody it. She is not a depressed, adrift woman, but a solar fighter who never gives up. She confronts everything that is supposed to destroy her. She becomes an author. It is for all those who are waiting for their life to begin. Those who seek their place in this world. »