Marilyn's Story Becomes Our Story

So many biographies have been written about Marilyn Monroe, but few have been privy to her autobiography.

That's right. She did write an unfinished autobiography entitled My Story which was published ten years after her death.

In a chapter entitled "Soldier Boy," Marilyn writes about her battle with loneliness and poverty on the streets of Hollywood:

"Sundays were the loneliest. You couldn't look for a job on Sundays or pretend you were shopping in stores. All you could do was walk as if you were going someplace. I discovered a place to go - the Union Station.

You learned a lot watching them. You learned that pretty wives adored homely men and good-looking men adored homely wives....faces that could light up like Christmas trees when they saw each other. They kissed each other as tenderly as if they were lovers in a movie.

One Sunday morning I was walking in one of the streets near the Union Station, when a young man in a soldier's coat greeted me.

'Help the disabled war veterans. Give the crippled war heroes a chance for recovery.'
He was carrying a box full of cards with small tin stars pinned on them.

'Five silver stars for fifty cents,' he said."

Marilyn replied that she could not buy any because she had no money. She writes about her empathy and sadness:

"I could hardly talk. My heart hurt me. There was something so lonely
about this young man who had been a soldier and who was selling fake tin stars that I wanted to cry."

It was a harbinger of things to come.

In 1954, on the cusp of her greatest fame, Marilyn joined the USO tour in Korea. Dressed skimpily on a cold January day before 10,000 soldiers, she performs "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," but wondered if she had chosen the right song:

"It seemed like the wrong thing to say to soldiers in Korea, earning only soldier's pay."

Perhaps she was thinking of that one soldier selling tin stars outside Union Station.

Marilyn went on to write that even though the "Diamonds" song depressed her, she knew the soldiers liked her performance very much.

"Then I remembered the dance I did after the song. It was cute dance. I knew they would like it."

That is where My Story ends.

As we know, those 10,000 soldiers in Korea did "like" her, and cheered loudly. When Marilyn returns to Joe DiMaggio, she tells him "Oh Joe, you've never heard such cheering."

"Yes I have," sighs Joe.

The marriage was over a few months later.

Marilyn would dance, sing and cry for nine more years, but she never returns to her unfinished manuscript.

Had Marilyn lived, she would have just turned 82.
Would she be as lonely as she was fifty years earlier?

I often see the same kind of palpable loneliness amongst writers.

In a recent poem one of my colleagues wrote that love is like the master of smoke and mirrors. Our hearts are pierced "with sharp shiny swords."

It reminds me of the soldier selling his shiny tin stars a few blocks away from Hollywood's Walk of Fame - only it is our hearts that get cut out like pieces of tin, then thrown down and stomped upon along our Walk of Pain.

Still, we write our stories -- our autobiographies and memoirs. They spill over with the trials and tribulations of finding our success in life. Memories of love lost and found. Children who lived and died, and children who were never born. All loved.

Like Marilyn, we often wonder if we are singing the wrong song.

But those last lines of Marilyn's book always come back. "... I remembered the dance I did after the song. It was cute dance...."

We press on. The angst of that loneliness is sometimes replaced by joy.

So, we write. My Story becomes Our Story.

And we continue to write because it is the tool for sharing and caring. Someday we will look back at our scribblings. We may regret some of the things we wrote in anger, but we will remember and embrace the joy even more.

It was something we just had to do because....
"I knew they would like it."

Peace Marilyn.
Peace to us all.