{"id":3015,"date":"2016-06-01T20:02:17","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T20:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/?p=3015"},"modified":"2016-06-01T20:43:32","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T20:43:32","slug":"marilyn-monroe-a-short-monologue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/marilyn-monroe-a-short-monologue\/","title":{"rendered":"Marilyn Monroe – A short monologue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[For Marilyn Monroe’s non-90th birthday I decided to post this unpublished monologue, that I wrote with lots of love for a woman that is very very special to me. My clumsy translation into English was thoroughly revised by Ellen McRae]<\/em><\/p>\n

Me as a child and my mother screaming while laughing. Or laughing while screaming. I don\u2019t know. Angry or happy. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

My mother was crazy, I think. Ended up in the loony bin. I did, too, for that matter\u2014a couple of times\u2014maybe three. Once I asked Joe to come and save me. We ran away through the basement…
\nJoe DiMaggio, my crazy husband who I think loved me more than anyone. Why choose a woman that every American wants to take to bed if you’re jealous whenever anybody even looks at her? It’s like buying a cake when you\u2019re diabetic. But he did love me\u2014in his own crazy and twisted way, trying to suffocate me. With his love.
\n“You\u2019re mine. You belong to DiMaggio. Capish? Understand?” and then he would make that gesture with his hand like he was going to slap my face. But I was hardly ever unfaithful to Joe\u2014only if he was far away and I was really lonely. Him and his roses on my grave, for twenty years, at every birthday, I think. While my body, America\u2019s most coveted body, was rotting in the coffin. My breasts cut off for the autopsy. They had to fill my bra so my Emilio Pucci dress would fit properly\u2014emerald, beautiful. My face made up, my hair done, the screws tightened, the darkness over my body, the silence. My truest moment. My solitude.<\/p>\n

If I hadn\u2019t been killed, I would have ended up a different person. If I hadn\u2019t been murdered I would have stopped being an actress\u2014dying every morning before going on set. The fear, the panic about having to perform, to remember my lines. The lights up and everybody hating you, everybody, because you\u2019re three hours late, again<\/em>, day after day, and then you can\u2019t remember the fucking line. That scene in Some Like It Hot<\/em> where I had to just go in and say \u201cWhere\u2019s my ukulele?\u201d and not being able to say it\u2014not remembering it\u2014three stupid words that slipped from my memory, eaten up by panic. Pills for sleeping and pills to stay awake, pills to stop the panic, pills to stop the depression. And painkillers for period pain. The tension\u2014the pressure. My intelligence devoured\u2014throbbing and pushing from within, and telling me that everything I do is wrong\u2014that everything I do is not me<\/em>.
\nDesired by all, loved by few, understood by fewer still. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts had piles of material on me: experiences, traumas, fears. Too much stuff\u2014it would take a hundred years to gather it all together into a box. Organizing all the tiny crumpled sheets of paper that I\u2019d tried to throw away every day, picking them out of the wastebasket, one by one, unfolding them and trying to iron them with the back of the hand. Turning it into a compact, tidy package, and handing it to me with a smile, saying, here, Norma Jean, this is your life. See what can you do with it now.
\nI had to unlearn everything. Stop using myself. Joe had understood this.<\/p>\n

My body so full of female hormones that it got sick with endometriosis. A fucking disease you get when you\u2019re too luscious and fertile\u2014when your breasts explode and your uterus screams, “Babies! Babies!” Except your uterus is crazy and self-destructs, so you can\u2019t get pregnant. You risk dying. And your body ends up killing your baby to save you. Your little girl or your little boy\u2014you don\u2019t know what sex it is. Maybe it\u2019s neither because it\u2019s an angel. And you could die, so you need to get an abortion. You go there and they suck everything out of you\u2014except for the scream \u201cBabies! Babies!\u201d
\nWhen you go home you’re like a rubber doll, empty inside. Nobody sees it. They only see your soft shape and your breasts made for sucking, nothing else. You\u2019re not a mother\u2014you can\u2019t become one. I’m not a mother, I couldn\u2019t become one. Even though each period was as painful as labor, I never gave birth. I raised my chin and unclenched my teeth in a three-quarters smile, because I had to reassure everyone that I was fine, I was me<\/em>\u2014healthy, the blond wife of America\u2014hairline raised by electrolysis, nose and chin touched up, perfect.
\nI looked at myself in the photos. I wondered if I really was pretty. Yes, I was. I was beautiful. I knew how to use myself, but the feeling of emptiness and pretense gnawed at my stomach. I knew who I was, but I was the only one who did. It was hard to show that I was smart. People raised their eyebrows just realizing that I wasn\u2019t an idiot\u2014like that was itself a miracle. No, I wasn\u2019t very cultured, no, even though I tried to fix that. But I was smart and I knew two things above all. I knew how to give sexual pleasure, to men and women, no matter how little I took for myself, and I knew how to make people feel happy. I placed myself in front of them and, like a mirror made of sunbeams, gave them back their best self-image. I was like a drug for them, for a while. But then people got fed up. They don\u2019t want to know about wasted potential. They want to wallow in their shit lives. They don\u2019t want you to make them feel that they could be better than they are. Too much effort to move beyond themselves.
\nI also had a lot of ideas about politics that no one was interested in hearing about. Instead of talking about Cuba I spoke about human solidarity\u2014the most that the American nation could emotionally tolerate. I barely escaped McCarthyism, so I learned to express my ideas only with true friends.
\nBut the president\u2019s speeches thrilled me. That\u2019s what started things between us. His was a sick family. Dangerous. I would have survived if I\u2019d been a stupid woman. I would have floated along in a dumb and comforting vacuity, with my endometrial womb and myopic gaze. I would have been America\u2019s sweetheart until the next one showed up. But she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

No, there was no one else like Marilyn Monroe. I don\u2019t say this with arrogance, or pride. There was no one else because it\u2019s hard to find so much sex and so much death in the same flesh.<\/p>\n

Only in the candor of my uterus, the cry, \u201cBabies Babies!!\u201d but, first, \u201cMommy! Mommy!” Mommy, the Madwoman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[For Marilyn Monroe’s non-90th birthday I decided to post this unpublished monologue, that I wrote with lots of love for a woman that is very very special to me. My clumsy translation into English was thoroughly revised by Ellen McRae] … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-scripts","category-writing-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3015"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3019,"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions\/3019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monicamazzitelli.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}