Documentary: The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
Directed by: Emma Cooper
Dear Mothers and Their Children,
We are all going to be okay.
When I say that, I am not being naive. I know that we are not protected very well in this world. The focus for many who crave political power and financial wealth, status and prestige is, political power and financial wealth, status and prestige.
But these things are so flimsy, aren’t they? In the end, glitz and glamour and fake friends gets a person nowhere.
People in this charged vibration become addicted to something, usually. They live life hiding their truth. They become full of tumors or heart disease.
The Humpty Dumpties fall. They do. Keep the faith.
What we can do is plant seeds of wholesomeness, of love. More information is not the answer to life’s problems—obviously. We have at our fingertips so much information, and all it does is rewire the brain so that people become dopamine addicts to a scroll on a device that has very little sweetness.
Marilyn Monroe appeared to me during a yoga practice in the past few weeks. I was reading and planning to perform a poem by Sylvia Plath, called “Daddy.” As I was doing that, Marilyn showed up. Why? I wondered. So I started investigating.
Sylvia Plath, a famed confessional poet, died by her own hand of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1963. She left behind her poems, one of which is the famous “Daddy.”
Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 by an overdose of sleeping pills. She had found a lot of success in Hollywood, and had even connected with the Kennedy’s, but she still felt used and mistreated, and she didn’t know how to swim in the waters of this Hollywood chaos. She had no root system in place. The closest loving male figure in her life was her psychiatrist.
Both women played with this term “Daddy.” Plath’s poem grapples with having an unmet need for love and nurturing from her father, and growing to despise him because his sympathies aligned more with the bigotries of Nazi Germany than loving his own daughter. Political power, domination—that seemed to be all she could find in his ethos. Her failed marriage was only a reflection of that same wound.
Marilyn Monroe played with the “Daddy” concept by acting like a little girl on screen. She had a grown woman’s body—a voluptuous and beautiful one—and yet she talked so softly, looked at men in earnest, owned a feminine nature that seemed infantilized.
It was no wonder that these two women, and their mental health struggles, were visiting me as I prepared to read and perform a famous American poem by an artist lost too soon. I felt like Marilyn was telling me—”I, too, sing America. And this, too, is my poem.”
As a mother and a woman, I have had my own experience of feeling the way Sylvia and Marilyn felt. It is hard to write about, because there are so many stigmas that society holds about the emotionality of women, the “irrationality” of women. And yet I consistently see now, and throughout history, irrational, irreverent, angry men feeling completely entitled to their lack of reasonability, their intimidation tactics, their use and abuse of people and privilege, and their disregard for anyone who doesn’t puff up their own ego. Grab a history textbook and read today’s news.
The 1960s, the 2020’s, the 1920s, the 1770s…. The B.C.’s, when Jesus was taken to a crucifix and shouted, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and your children” (Luke 23:28). Same story, ay?
Therefore, give up any belief in progress (life is a dance, not a race), and begin sowing the seeds of deep love, deep truth, and holy Light in your heart. There is no promised land outside of us. There is only inside, what we create and attract, through our power to continually christen our inner state. The Kingdom Jesus spoke of is a place within. Water it, nurture it. Find it.
Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe did not feel entitled to that Kingdom. (And by Kingdom, I do not mean Christianity.) They did not have the keys to access it, because all of the psychologists were male, and there was this problematic “Daddy” dynamic that kept women in the boxes of inferiority. Women who knew they were capable of the same strategic measures, the same great literature, the same financial management, the same critical thinking, weren’t allowed at the table unless they were talking in a cutesy little girl voice, being secretly recorded, like Marilyn was with the Kennedys.
A noble man, an honorable man, does not use and abuse women. It is that simple.
He does not view marriage as a political status symbol, and allow his wife to be a mockery or a prop. He does not allow any woman to be a mockery. He steps up, because he knows women are people. He knows a woman has an interior life that is vast and spacious and complex, just like his own.
In these secret tapes of Marilyn Monroe, she says that the true things rarely get known—it’s the false things people cling to.
Did you know Marilyn Monroe was quite interested in philosophy?
An attractive and sexy woman is not a doll, or a pawn for the pleasure of anyone else—despite what copious cheap videos on the internet will suggest. A woman is a person.
A woman is a person.
Marilyn Monroe was a person, not a sex toy. And her story is a tragedy.
In doing my research, and tapping into the mental anguish of Sylvia and Marilyn, I decided I could not perform “Daddy.” While it is relevant, I do not want to be in that headspace or heartspace anymore. I am a woman who has lived and survived. Other women have, too. I will honor the memories of the women we’ve lost by celebrating life. By loving life. By showing how to live.
That’s the new world, sweeties. And we have the power to create it.
Piece by piece by piece.
Namaste,
Ms. Wonderful
*The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes is streaming on Netflix. It is based on the book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, by Anthony Summers.
Come see our International Women’s Day Performance in Philadelphia, March 7th and March 8th.
Saturday Vinyl Playlist - March 1st.
