Marilyn Monroe: the men in her life

Marilyn Monroe had two famous marriages with Joe DiMaggio and Arhtur Miller; she married for the first time at the age of 16 with James Dougherty

Alone. I’m alone. I am always alone. Either way. The verses of the saddest woman in the world, written in one of her notebooks rescued from her just two years ago, undress a Marilyn Monroe insecure; scared. She always was: the most desired woman in Hollywood never loved herself and I sought consolation in a multitude of men. But could not shake the feeling of abandonment. Neither her three husbands nor her multiple lovers – from the Kennedy brothers to Elia Kazan through Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando – made her happy.

James Dougherty: Wedding at 16

Marilyn looked for self-esteem in others. Perhaps his complicated childhood, with an absent father, an unbalanced mother, foster homes and various aggressions, made the myth yearn for the protective embrace of a man. She was barely 16 when she first got married.. It was 1942 and the chosen one, an aspiring police worker named james dougherty. A former football captain and class representative, he was 20 years old when he started dating Norma Jean Baker. I didn’t know Marilyn Monroe. Her family had been neighbors of Grace Goddard, a friend of Norma Jean’s mother, who was then living with them. They were going to move and we decided to get married to prevent her from going back to a foster home. We were in love, Dougherty would later recall. Thus the great sexual myth became Housewife in a relationship that seemed to work, although some of his letters later showed that her husband was unfaithful.

Dougherty was drafted into World War II and in his absence, the young woman became a model listed in Los Angeles. And he sought the company of other men to mitigate the loneliness that anguished him. Hollywood I soon claimed her and she processed a divorce which took place in September 1946. They had been together four years. Returning home, Dougherty tried to persuade her to come back, but she refused. She was going to become Marilyn. She wanted to sign a contract with 20th Century Fox in which she said she couldn’t be married, Dougherty recounted in 1984.

Joe DiMaggio: The Sports Star

His second big man was Joe DiMaggiothe baseball player she married fulfilling the American dream of seeing two of her legends together: the idol of the Yankees with the Hollywood diva. They were married in 1954 -before, the writer Robert Slatzer He claims to have been her husband for a week in 1952, although there is no proof of this – but the engagement lasted only nine months, despite the fact that they continued to see each other for years. The athlete, very conservative, was unable to adapt to the life of the star. She found it an offense to be desired by more men and lived hysterical fits of jealousy. He wanted to take her away from the show and save all her explosiveness for him, but she didn’t give in. That the am is shown by the fact that During the 20 years that followed her death, I sent a bouquet of flowers to her grave three times a week.. The Parisien Florist in Hollywood had the emotional commission.

Arthur Miller: the intellectual who wanted to save her

A Arthur MillerThe intellectual, the Jew, saw him for the first time in 1951, when she was 25 years old and he was ten years older. They were married five years later – when there was still speculation of a reconciliation with DiMaggio -, in a ceremony in which Marilyn converted to Judaism. By then, the media had already created a superficial, addicted Marilyn, sexy as hell, but troubled and depressed. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wanted to save her. They seem happybut just three years later the marriage ran aground and in 1960, Marilyn had a notorious adventure with the Frenchman Yves Montand when they were shooting ‘The Billionaire’

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller they were together until 1961. He was perhaps the man who could best understand the emptiness that suffocated her, the one most capable of appreciating her talent and making her believe it, but exhausted from that sick personality and left her to go with the photographer Inge Morath, whom I met on the set of ‘Rebel Lives’. Paradoxes of life, Miller had written for Marilyn that story in which she tried to explain her contradictions. Can a man smile when he beholds the saddest woman in the world?, she had him tell Gable in fiction.

Lovers

The list of lovers of Marilyn was endless. What Elijah Kazan, described thus in letters he wrote to his psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greensom, in 1961: He loved me for a year, and once rocked me when I was in great distress. And he suggested that I psychoanalyze myself. also Marlon Brando wanted to take care of her. She met him before they were stars and they had an on-and-off relationship for years. Perhaps he was always more her friend than her lover and defended her to the death when the industry began to reject her because of the ordeal involved in working with the self-destructive hurricane towards which she was drifting.

With Tony Curtis also had a history that came and went. For eight years. And according to the actor himself, included a miscarriage. The relationship began in 1950 and was reactivated in the filming of ‘With skirts and crazy’. Marilyn was married to Miller and Curtis to Janet Leigh -the actress murdered in ‘Psycho’-, who was also pregnant, but that did not prevent Tony and Marilyn from ‘relapse’. As Curtis has related in her memoirs, she became pregnant and lost the baby shortly after meeting him in a room with her husband to tell her. I stood there petrified. Silence fell and he could hear the noise of car wheels screeching in Santa Monica, he described. Although it has not been confirmed, the truth is that the actor has never been fond of Marilyn’s memory and has shamelessly aired intimacies.

The Kennedys, John and Robert

Rivers of speculation have also unleashed the affairs he had with the Kennedys, John and Robert; documented in the archives of the FBI and the CIA, concerned about Marilyn’s friendship with Hollywood communists and what secrets she might learn about the president. There is a 1965 report of sex parties with the Kennedys, Monroes, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra, another of her faithful lovers for years. Of his relationship with the then US president there are few clues. Some voices say that he did not stop until he had her in her bed and after she dissociated himself, while the most conspiratorial add that the secret services and the Kennedys themselves were in charge of erasing the tracks. There are all kinds of versions of this relationship, but there are no witnesses. What we have all seen, and we do not forget, is that happy birthday at Madison Square Gardenon May 19, 1962. Three months later the diva died in California.

Marilyn suffered alone and suffered with her men. She herself said that a star was an object. And I hated to be. Alone. She always felt alone. Until her tragic death.