Marilyn began taking private lessons with celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg in March 1955, encouraged by the acclaimed theater and movie director Elia Kazan, with whom she had had an affair. “Complete Subjection, Humiliation, Alonement” I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat.” Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world-in the U.S. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn’s possessions at Christie’s, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. |||A handwriting expert takes a magnifying glass to Marilyn’s script, scrutinizing its deeper meaning.||| Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, “As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated.” Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman? Don’t tell us how you feel.” Marilyn began to cry. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, “Don’t do that. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students. A few blocks away, above Loew’s State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn-the one everyone knew-52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous. The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors.
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