(an experiment to assemble prose into a poetic construction)
Excerpts from: Marilyn, a biography by Lois Banner

Yellow
“(Norma Jeane had a loud whistle.)”

“She had double-jointed knees that threw her hips off center so they swayed as she walked.”

(She had double-jointed knees that threw her hips off center so they swerved as she walked.)

“She studied with top acting, singing and movement teachers to create her era's greatest dumb-blonde clown.”

“She mocked … with her wiggling walk, jiggling breasts, and puckered mouth.”

“…Marilyn says that someone is following her. She walks away hips swaying. Leering at her backside, Groucho replies, I can see why.”

“She had dark hair on her arms, which she often concealed with body makeup. She put on fake fingernails to cover up the ragged edges of the ones she had bitten.”

“(Looking up at foreheads made Marilyn's eyes seem larger…)”

“She would knock your knees under the table; vamp you from time to time.”

“Marilyn was still a child. She pouted; she had tantrums; she cried easily.”

“She was a doll in a carriage pushed by a stranger.”

“Marilyn had a fantasy, she said, about wearing a hoop skirt and being naked in church, walking over the bodies of the congregation as they lay on their backs and looked up at her with open eyes.”

“She'd been forced to put on a hospital gown, and the doctors and nurses, fascinated by her body, had entered her room and checked it out.”

“The dress was made of a transparent nude fabric, with rhinestone sewn in strategic patterns over her breasts and genitals.”

“... a bare midriff and her gall bladder scar showing and ...

She looked very white…”

Red
“M-m-m-m Marilyn”

“Who does she think she is? - Marilyn Monroe?” ha ha ha

“Marilyn is simply going too far.”

“I guess Ben doesn't like pink.”

“Here lies Marilyn. No lies. Only lays.”

“M-m-m-m Marilyn”

“What does it mean? Is he screwing her, or is it a fake?”

“She called him her slugger
and said that he could hit the ball out of the park.”

“By February, as Hecht put it,
she had vanished in a honeymoon.”

Green
“I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside.”

“Going out socially...was the hardest part of my campaign to make good.”

“I want to be an actress, not an erotic freak. I don't want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisical [sic]. It was alright for the first years. But now it's different,”

“Most of the time I'm not the person I'd like to be – certainly not a dumb blonde like they say I am; a sex freak with big boobs.”

“I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it.”

“It's hard to know where to start if you don't tell the truth.”

“Why did she always feel subhuman, she asked?”

“…were treating her like a piece of meat and she didn't want to see them any more.”“She was threatening to hold a press conference and make public a diary she had kept of her conversations…”

“She had a recurring dream in which she was running through a cemetery in the early dawn looking for a way to escape.”



Purple
“Marilyn was a studio slut who had fought them at every step in her career.”

“He is supposed to have said to her, “You make money only with your tits and ass. Your talent is located above your waist and below your navel.”

“She continued to take prescription drugs, a portent of problems that lay ahead.”

“…included Phenobarbital, Amytal and sodium pentothal. She was also taking Demerol – a narcotic similar to morphine which is highly addictive – and she was injecting it intravenously.”

“If I haven't tried it,” Marilyn said, “it doesn't exist."
"I'm a war veteran of the night.”

“He told her they had to “roll Marilyn over a barrel.”

“She replied that the drugs made her feel “womby and tomby,”

“…he said she dropped the phone in the middle of a conversation with him because she heard a noise in the house.”

“…she had taken huge doses of Nembutal and chloral hydrate, although she hadn't drunk any alcohol that day.”

“…the amount of Nembutal and chloral hydrate that were in Marilyn's blood – enough to kill several men, more than the fifty tablets of Nembutal she had in her possession at the time she died.”

“…was killed through the administration of a drug laced enema.”



“say goodbye to the president”



“She would sit on a bench and read a book. It was a favourite place of hers.

It's not surprising that she wanted to be buried there.”

“…a crowd of thousands lined the streets in Westwood...Once the invited guests and the Pinkerton guards left ...”

“It's said that the suicide rate in Los Angeles doubled the month after she died.”

The poet Sylvia Plath describes a visitation by the famous actress in her journals in October 1959.

"Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother.

... She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life."