Marilyn Monroe Was More Mentally Ill Than We Knew

Still from “Some Like It Hot” starring Marilyn Monroe. Courtesy of United Artist Pictures.

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In 1961, Marianne Kris, the psychoanalyst treating Marilyn Monroe, was convinced that her famous patient was on the verge of suicide. So she did what most psychiatrists at the time would have done: She committed Monroe to a mental institution. Knowing the star would never go to a psychiatric hospital on her own— Monroe was terrified of sanitariums because her mother lived in one for most of her life and her grandmother had died in one— Kris told Monroe that she was going to a private hospital for some "rest and relaxation." It was under these false pretenses that Monroe arrived at New York's Payne Whitney hospital on Feb. 5, where she was quickly escorted by orderlies through several steel doors, then forcibly thrown into a padded room with barred windows. "I'm locked up with these poor nutty people," Monroe wrote to her acting teachers Paula and Lee Strasberg. "I'm sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me."

This episode, well-known to Marilyn followers, is recounted again in the new best-selling biography, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. The author, J. Randy Taraborrelli, writes that a Payne Whitney intern who visited Monroe after she tried to break down the bathroom door in her room told her, "You are a very, very sick girl. And you've been sick for a long time.” Taraborrelli's 541-page biography is based on more than a decade of research and includes quotes from FBI files released in 2006 through the Freedom of Information Act, unpublished accounts from reporters' notebooks from the 1950s and letters to, from and about Monroe that have never before been published. Of course he promises discoveries that are “explosive” and “revelatory,” but there aren’t really any, not a to a Marilyn obsessive like myself. Instead, there is the deepening of the much more ordinary tragedy that continues to fascinate, about a woman Taraborrelli calls "a brave soldier in a devastating battle with her own mind."

Monroe died of an overdose in 1962. By some estimates, more than 300 books have been published about Monroe, and writers as esteemed as Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, and Joyce Carol Oates have attempted to wrest some kind of meaning from her short life. Was she a victim of Hollywood, or only truly happy when she was hounded by fans and posing for cameras? Was she Norma Jeane, the abandoned waif in search of love and approval, or Marilyn, "every man's love affair with America," as Mailer proposed, or both of these women rolled into one tortured psyche? Did we (or the Kennedys, FBI, et al.) kill her, or did she kill herself?

Taraborrelli delves into the early relationships that shaped Norma Jeane Mortenson, including her relationship with her mother, Gladys Baker, a paranoid schizophrenic. He also uncovers evidence that suggests that, beginning in her late teens, Monroe heard voices and believed she was being followed. This would mean that her psychosis likely predated her meteoric rise to fame and her descent into drug addiction. Is this interesting? Only in that it disrupts the romantic, self-flagellating narrative we prefer—that “we,” the insatiable public, ruined her. In, fact it’s not all that surprising given her family history.