Marilyn Monroe's Suicide Note

A handwritten letter from Marilyn Monroe to mentor Lee Strasberg mentions suicide and reveals Monroe's desperate state of mind toward the end of her life.

More than 50 years after Marilyn Monroe's death, questions about how and why she died remain. Does a handwritten note from the icon now up for sale clear up these questions? Or merely deepen the mystery further?

The undated note is written on stationery from the Hotel Bel-Air (Monroe was found dead at her home in Brentwood, California) and sent to acting teacher Lee Strasberg, whose Actors Studio was famous for developing Method acting.

"I still am lost," Monroe wrote despairingly. "I can't get myself together — I think its [sic] because everything is pulling against my concentration."

A few lines later, Monroe brings up suicide.

"You once said the first time I heard you talk at the actors studio that 'There is only concentration between the actor and suicide [sic].'"

Talking about suicide is, of course, a well-known warning sign that the speaker is considering it.

"My will is weak but I can't stand anything," Monroe wrote to Strasberg. "I sound crazy, but I think I'm going crazy."

And then later: "It's just that I get before a camera and my concentration and everything I'm trying to learn leaves me. Then I feel like I'm not existing in the human race at all."

Is this the letter of a woman who's going to commit suicide? Or the letter of a desperate woman soon to be murdered? Nobody knows for sure, but it is undoubtedly a sad reminder of a star who shone brightly, then flamed out too soon.

The Monroe letter is part of a number of interesting historical/pop culture artifacts being offered for sale by Profiles in History. The auction will take place May 30 and the Monroe letter is expected to go for $30,000 to $50,000, reports the New York Daily News.

Let’s go back to 1962, the year when a great and mesmerizing actor entered into the doorway of death

Sometime after 10 p.m. on August 4, 1962, Marilyn Monroe slipped into a coma caused by an overdose of sleeping pills. She would never regain consciousness. Shortly after she was discovered, a bizarre set of activities took place in her Brentwood home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. Some items were allegedly removed, including a diary and an incriminating note which could have far-reaching implications, if discovered. The order for their removal was believed to have come from someone in the White House, in an attempt to prevent a scandal from toppling the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Many witnesses said they observed Marilyn being secretly taken that night by an ambulance crew to a nearby hospital before being returned again to her Brentwood home in Los Angeles. Forever steeped in mystery are the exact events that took place on the night that one of the world's leading sex symbols and movie legends died. According to some accounts, Marilyn's body was rediscovered by her house companion, Eunice Murray, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, several hours following the initial discovery of her remains. 

Greenson would later tell police that Murray alerted him around 3:30 a.m. that something might be wrong with Marilyn, the morning following Marilyn's death. When he arrived at Marilyn's home, he broke into her bedroom and found her lying nude and face down in her bed. She was clutching a phone in her right hand. After a brief examination he determined that she was dead.

Exactly how and when Marilyn Monroe died sparked a debate that would last more than several decades and generate many theories, including that of murder. Some of these theories even implicated John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert in the mysterious death.

Whatever it was, 20^th century lost an inexplicable beauty and a great cynosure of acting arena.

courtesy crime library