The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

I wanna be loved by you... once sung by screen icon Marilyn Monroe. This sentence could be the motto of her life. The audience and especially the male part of it loved Marilyn, she was a sex symbol, but she herself never found happiness in love. Her life was ended by her untimely death at the age of thirty-six.

The whole sorry story of Marilyn's life began shortly after she was born. Her mother, Gladys Monroe, was unable to care for her daughter (her two children from her first marriage were raised by relatives of her first husband), so Marilyn spent most of her time in orphanages or foster care.

In addition, Marilyn was predisposed to mental disorders and her volatile psyche was also largely influenced by countless abortions (both voluntary and spontaneous) and other gynaecological procedures. She was allegedly forced to have her first abortion as a teenager by her caregiver Grace McKee. According to her friends, Marilyn never stopped beating herself up for allowing her child to be taken away from her. These remorseful feelings were certainly the stronger and more agonizing the more often Marilyn tried unsuccessfully to conceive. As the years passed, her desire for children grew stronger and she supported charity events for the benefit of children, visited orphanages and was a generous donor. Officially, she has not been able to bear a single child.

Marilyn was always hard on herself. In the 1940s she was still checking parachutes and spraying paint on airplane fuselages at the Radio Plane factory, and by the 1950s she was one of Hollywood's most famous stars. Still, she was not satisfied. It bothered her that viewers and producers thought of her as a naive blonde who didn't have much sense and whose only goal was to marry well and richly. Although Marilyn also played this role in public life, in her private life she was involved in philosophy and garden architecture. She admired Abraham Lincoln, devoured the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and read Emerson, Sand, and Joyce. She studied Stanislavsky's acting method, and even signed up with renowned teacher Lee Strasberg. She aspired to become an acclaimed actress, but with each role she became increasingly afraid of appearing in front of the camera. Often the fear was so great that she was unable to come out of the dressing room and work. She fought off her anxiety with various barbiturates, but they dulled her senses to such an extent that she could not get a single good shot.

When insomnia, gynaecological problems and several disappointing love affairs with the Kennedy brothers added to her fears, the cocktail of doom was complete. Marilyn became more and more addicted to barbiturates as time went on. She was able to swallow up to twenty tablets of Nembutal or other sleeping pills in a single day and became immune to them. That's why she often combined the pills dangerously. This lethal cocktail proved fatal to her on August 4, 1962.