The Death of Marilyn Monroe - Sharon Olds

In English 110, we're reading about Marilyn Monroe.  We are reading about her life.  We are reading about her death.  It's been almost sixties years since "they" found her dead, face down and naked in bed, in her Brentwood home.  Who is "they"?  They were the first responders.  The ambulance drivers.  Two men who Sharon Olds writes about in her poem, "The Death of Marilyn Monroe."  

Below is my response to the poem. 

When Norma Jean Baker was just starting out her career, she posed for a nude calendar.  She was desperate for money.  This was before she became Marilyn Monroe.  In those days, the scandal could have destroyed any chance of stardom, but in fact this particular photo shoot would elevate her legend.  Later when asked what she had on when she posed, Marilyn famously replied, “The radio” (Nolan 238). 

Marilyn was witty, beautiful, talented, seductive and tragic.  That’s why  the ambulance men in Sharon Olds’ poem “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” would never be the same after seeing her corpse.

 They weren’t the only ones who would be affected.  For fifty years now, conspiracy theorists have been investigating the details that led to Marilyn’s mysterious death.  Crime  investigators found  Marilyn’s house littered with pill bottles. Some of them contained chloral hydrate, a prescription sleep aid, that would become dangerous if taken in large amounts (Summers 318).  The official autopsy announced “barbiturate poisining” as the cause of death (Brown 334).

But how could someone so glamorous and illuminating commit suicide?

Here is where we are so crazy for Marilyn.  At the time of her death, she was supposedly carrying out affairs with both the President and his brother.   When they stopped taking her calls to avoid scandal, Marilyn sunk into a deep depression.   She began a telephone call frenzy.  She called the White House.  She called John F. Kennedy.  She called Bobby Kennedy.  She called Kennedy’s intermediaries.  She called her friends and doctors.  She needed to talk, but no one had anything they could tell her (304).

 Many believe Marilyn’s death was not a suicide at all but an elaborate murder.   She just knew too much…

Days after the autopsy report, police investigators learned that it would have been very difficult for any one person to physically swallow the amount of pills that had entered Marilyn’s system.   They put forth the theory that the fatal dose had to be administered by a second or third party, by “another mode of entry” (Summers 325).     Proof of the drugs administered by injection or enema would end any discussion of suicide.   

 But the case was never re-opened.  You can guess why.

“These men were never the same,” writes Sharon Olds of the ambulance men.   They were first to respond.  And the first to surpress what they saw.   That can’t be a good combination.

Works Cited

Brown, Peter Harry.  Marilyn: The Last Take.  New York: Penguin.  11992. Print.

Nolan, Tom. Artie Shaw: King of the Clarinets.  New York: Norton.  2010. Print.

Summers, Anthony. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.  New York: Macmillan. 1985. Print.