Marilyn monroe 7 year itch dress12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Even her analyst was recommended by Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna – herself a famous analyst. Her best female friend was the US President’s sister, Pat Kennedy. She surrounded herself with famous and admired people with social, or even political power. Marilyn had other strategies for distancing herself from emotional danger. I’m dreaming the hardest.” – Marilyn Monroe Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe at El Morocco nightclub in 1954. And over time, she “created and became a woman more fascinating than even she believed possible.” What she sought more than anything else, was “to be wonderful.” “I used to think…there must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of becoming a movie star. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeanne, then sometimes it works” – Marilyn Monroe Glamour and Fame Marilyn Monroe didn’t just find glamour. As Marilyn herself put it: “I just want to forget about all the misery…I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. The extent of her fame and adoration was the extent of the distance she could achieve from feelings of being worthless and condemned. Marilyn’s relentless hunt for glamour, fame, and idealization can be seen as a flight away from these emotionally unmanageable experiences. Norma’s early life was scattered with various kinds of traumatic experiences including emotional neglect, harsh judgments at times of vulnerability, and sexual abuse. Gladys Baker and baby Norma Jeane spend some time together on the beach in 1929. Ida managed to grab Norma and lock herself in the house. After a moment’s silence, the three-year-old cried out, “Mommy!!” with arms stretched out – towards Ida her foster mother. There was a struggle between the two women until the bag split, and the child fell to the ground. When Gladys emerged from the front door with a large military duffle bag over her shoulder, Ida heard muffled screams. ![]() After failing to break in from outside, Ida had run around to the front. The foster mother protested: “This is her home!” Gladys, having taken the child inside, had pushed Ida into the back garden and locked the back door. Gladys said, “You’re coming with Mommy, sweetheart” and picked up Norma. She pushed her way through to the backyard where Norma was playing with the dog. In a paranoid state, she demanded to have Norma back. One day, when Norma was three, Gladys returned unannounced to the house. ![]() Gladys, haunted by paranoid schizophrenia, could not look after the child. This was when she was just two weeks old. She had been left at the house in East Rhode Island Street, Hollywood, by her biological mother Gladys Baker. Beginnings If we were to go back to when Marilyn was three years old – when she was known as Norma Jeanne Mortensen – we would find her with a foster family and a mother figure called Ida Bolender. Sadly, other events of that same day illustrate how fame, glamour, and powerful partners, repeatedly failed Marilyn as strategies for dealing with trauma. In these first few hours of that day, Marilyn Monroe created an image that has become an archetypal representation of glamour. ![]() The ‘flying dress’ scene for the film, The Seven Year Itch (1955), was shot on September 15, 1954, between 1 am and 3 am. He uses the biographies of the iconically famous to illustrate how certain kinds of trauma can play a role in their success – and in some cases their downfall. Marcus Morris, a practicing clinical psychologist in the UK, writes a Substack blog about the psychology of celebrity and stardom. ![]()
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