The seven deadly sins of Hollywood (1957)

MARILYN MONROE One of the things about Miss Monroe that must have appealed enormously to Mr. Miller is that she could not have been a more intricate and socially significant character if he had written her himself. And if we look upon Miss Monroe as one character in search of an author, which is what she appears to be, we can understand why Mr. Miller is for her such an ideal husband. Examining her life through the eyes of an author, we can see that it contains all the elements of a psychological novel. The mythical Miss Monroe was born, not by parthenogenesis, but in the normal way at Los Angeles General Hospital on June ist, 1926. Her name was Norma Jeane Baker. She was an illegitimate child. Both her grandparents had died in mental institutions, and her mother is now, after a series of nervous breakdowns, in a private sanatorium. A few days after she was born Norma Jeane was billeted with a family on the outskirts of Los Angeles who acquainted her in infancy with the conception of hell and the consequences of drinking, smoking and swearing. To escape from her daily doses of brimstone and hell-fire she went to the woodshed and created for herself a world of fantasy. It is reported that one night she had a precocious and curiously prophetic dream. "I dreamed that I was standing up in church," she says, "without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone." A change of billet brought her into a startlingly new environment. Her new foster-parents smoked, drank and swore and taught her to do a hula dance. Then her mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was put 215