Here her fundamental innocence and disorganization undid her. Her largest hope was to take command of her own career, create an image of herself unbeholden to the one that she had, to a degree, co-conspired with the media to create.

Her formal education was brief and catch-as-catch-can, but she became a devoted reader of serious literature - everything from Joyce’s “Ulysses” to Heinrich Heine’s poetry - and had a firm belief in the restorative power of psychoanalysis, though it has never been clear who among her several shrinks were helpful and who were quacks (or whether she could tell the difference). What we didn’t know was what a game girl Monroe was. We all know, of course, how ill-used Monroe was by life - the mentally damaged mother and grandmother, the foster homes, the unhappy marriage at 16, her exploited early professional life as model and small-parts actress, her lifelong attraction to men who were not good for her (a poignant passage in “Fragments” recounts her devastation when she discovers that her third husband, Arthur Miller, was ashamed of his friends’ opinion of her). Her “Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters,” which appears in a slender, handsomely illustrated volume edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, has a curiously enlightening effect on the reader. Unless, of course, that author happens to have been famous and somewhat mysterious, which is the case with Marilyn Monroe. These scribbles are of no great posthumous consequence at most they may cause the relative who happens to open the box to reflect, a little sadly, on the secret life of the author. There are cartons of this stuff in attics all over America - the poems, pensées and grocery lists of yearning, dissatisfied people who at some time wished for an emotional coherence that was beyond their reach.

Fragments by marilyn monroe