The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“You Are a Very, Very Sick Girl”

How had it come to this? Had she gone completely mad and not realized it? Was she destined to spend her last days in an asylum, just like her grandparents, and maybe her mother, too?

Though Marilyn Monroe screamed for someone to come and release her, it was useless. Finally, she broke down into wracking sobs, as she later recalled it, feeling now more than ever that all hope was lost. Then she began to repeatedly bang her fists against the hard metal door until finally both were battered and bruised. At last, two nurses entered Marilyn’s cell, their eyes blazing. If she persisted, they warned her, she would be put into a straitjacket. They then stripped her of her clothing and forced her into a hospital gown. Their angry work done, they took their leave, but not before turning off the light, leaving their stunned patient in total blackness with her confused thoughts and desperate fears—and without her medication.

The next day, Marilyn was told that she would be allowed out of her room if she agreed to mingle with other patients and “socialize.” She complied, knowing by now that it would be the only way she’d ever be able to obtain her freedom from the padded cell. Once in the hallway, she happened upon a young, sickly-looking woman standing in the hallway who, as she later recalled, “seemed such a pathetic and vague creature.” The patient may have viewed her visitor in the same light because she suggested that Marilyn would be much less depressed if she could talk to someone on the telephone, a friend perhaps. Marilyn agreed but said it was impossible since she was distinctly told that there were no telephones on the floor. The woman’s face registered surprise and she said, “But that’s not true. Who told you such a thing? In fact, I’ll take you to one.” She then escorted Marilyn to a pay phone, reached into her pocket and gave her a nickel. However, when Marilyn reached out to make a call, a security guard suddenly grabbed the receiver from her hand. “You can’t make any phone calls,” he told her.

Not knowing what to do next, Marilyn headed back to her room and, as she later recalled, tried to imagine how she would handle such a situation if she were doing an improvisational sketch in one of her acting classes. After giving it some thought, she knew what she would do in that situation, which was to make the biggest noise she could make in the hope that someone new would be summoned, someone who might actually take pity on her and help her. To that end, she picked up a chair and, with everything she had left in her, hurled it against the glass on the bathroom door. It didn’t break. She picked up the chair and hurled it against the door again and again until, finally, the double-thick glass cracked. She then reached out and carefully extracted a small, sharp sliver from the cracked window. Because she had made such a racket, an entire team of doctors and nurses burst into her room. And there she sat before them on the bed, holding the jagged glass to her wrist. “If you don’t let me out of here, I’ll kill myself,” she threatened. Later, she would rationalize this horrifying moment by explaining that she was actually just playing out a scene from her movie Don’t Bother to Knock—“only [in that movie] it was with a razor blade.” It didn’t appear to the medical staff, though, that she was playacting. The staff took quick and decisive action. Two large men and two hefty women lifted the wriggling patient from the bed right into the air, kicking and screaming, until she dropped the shard of glass. They then carried her to the elevator stretched out and facedown as she fitfully sobbed the entire way, her tears leaving a small trail. Once in the elevator, they took her to another floor. There, after she calmed herself, she was commanded to take a bath, though she had taken one that morning. “Every time you change floors you have to take a bath,” she was told. Finally, after what seemed an endless time, a young doctor came in to see her.

Through her tears, Marilyn told the intern that she had been betrayed by her psychiatrist and admitted to this mental hospital “even though I don’t belong here.” “Why are you so unhappy?” he asked her, ignoring what she had just told him. Marilyn looked at him squarely and answered, “I’ve been paying the best doctors a fortune to find out the answer to that question, and you’re asking me?”

After speaking to Marilyn for a while longer, the doctor studied her face carefully and, as if making a profound statement, said with great authority, “You are a very, very sick girl. And you’ve been very sick for a long time.” Marilyn didn’t know how to respond to the obvious. After all, she had been hearing voices for years. She had also felt paranoid—always suspecting that someone was watching her or was after her—for just as long. It had been a secret shared by just a few, such as her first husband, Jim Dougherty; her lover and Svengali, Johnny Hyde; her acting teacher, Natasha Lytess; and, most certainly, her psychiatrists. However, her secret was out of her control now—and this doctor, a total stranger, seemed to know it.

The doctor, his brow furrowed in concentration, continued, “You know, I don’t see how you ever could have made a movie being so depressed. How can you even act?” Marilyn was astonished by his obvious naiveté. After all, she had been doing just that for as long as she could remember, concealing her true feelings—portraying a reality very different from the one in which she existed from day to day. “Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had been depressed when they worked?” she asked him. She’d recently had a conversation with her half sister, Berniece, along these same lines. She had asked Berniece if she ever became depressed. Of course, Berniece said, she had experienced the blues in the past. Marilyn wondered what she did about it if she didn’t take pills—and Berniece didn’t. Berniece told her that she prayed. That sounded like a good answer. It just never worked for Marilyn. How could Berniece, a housewife in Florida living a peaceful existence with her husband of many years, ever truly relate to Marilyn’s extraordinary problems, or to the vastness of her depression? The doctor had no answer to Marilyn’s question. So he ignored it. Instead, he jotted into his notes that, in his view, Marilyn was “extremely disturbed” and also “potentially self-destructive.” Then he left her without giving her any indication that he would ever return. That evening, she couldn’t sleep. The sounds of shrieking and wailing and moaning and sobbing echoed all night long through the hallways—anonymous voices, the mentally ill. She would never be able to forget these sounds. She would never forget this awful night. ^*

On Tuesday morning, another doctor showed up in Marilyn’s cell and suggested that she spend the day with the other patients in what he referred to as “OT”—occupational therapy.

“And do what?” Marilyn asked.

“You could sew or play checkers,” he suggested brightly, “even cards, and maybe knit.”

Marilyn shook her head at his pathetic presence. “The day I do any of that,” she said through gritted teeth, “will be the day you’ll really have a nut on your hands.”

“Why is it you feel you are so different from the other patients?” he asked.

She simply stated, “I just am.”