ABSTRACT
Norma Jeane Mortenson, better known as Marilyn Monroe, suffered from a whole variety of psychological and psychosomatic problems for many years, among them severe depression, chronic insomnia, drug addiction, and alcoholism. The media ensured that all the world was aware of the love troubles, repeated suicide attempts, and confusional states of the world's foremost sex symbol. Yet biographies of Marilyn Monroe tell different stories of her childhood, adolescence, and adult life, and it is not a simple task to figure out why one woman was plagued with so many problems, why her love life was so unfulfilling, and why no one was able to help her. While plenty of investigative reporting has been done about her life (and even more about her death), virtually every biographer has relied at least in part on the stories Marilyn herself told her myriad interviewers over the years. Those stories vary wildly at times, painting a picture of relatively ordinary 1930s depression-age misery in certain cases, and a picture of child slave labor, molestation, and utter destitution in others. 1
