The stunning Marilyn Monroe graces the cover of the November 2010 cover of Vanity Fair. The cover was shot by Milton H. Greene.
In the this issue, Vanity Fair published a previously unseen archive of Marilyn Monroe’s private writings. With narrative by contributing editor Sam Kashner, these notebooks cover the most tumultuous years—from around 1951 to 1961—of the young actress’s life. As Kashner points out, “[w]e have had Warhol’s Marilyn, Mailer’s Marilyn, Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized Marilyn, now finally we have Marilyn’s Marilyn.” Through the pages of Marilyn’s diaries, we see the whole arc of her tragic life: the transition from starlet to icon, her pursuit of true artistry beyond the “dumb blonde” she was pigeonholed as, and the troubled thoughts that followed her, from childhood, through three marriages, and, ultimately, to her final days. It is clear that the experience of writing was cathartic for her, providing a momentary grasp on the whirlwind of emotions that accompanied her life.
In the interests of science, VF.com had a professional graphologist (handwriting expert), Sheila Kurtz, examine a few of the documents found in the archive. And in the interests of good science, we declined to tell her whom she was analyzing—which did not prevent her from guessing that it was either Lindsay Lohan or Lady Gaga, the subjects of our last two covers.
This entry is from the first black “Record” notebook, which Marilyn kept around 1951, the year she would film Love Nest—a line from the script of which she jotted down on page 146. Not yet the star she would grow to be, Marilyn was finally beginning to appear in the credits of her onscreen roles.
