The Secret Letters of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy Read Free Page A

LETTERS
     

     

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
     
    By F. R. Lichtenstein, Director of the Yale Faculty Vanderbilt Foundation, Professor Emeritus of Modern Culture and English Literature, Downing College, Cambridge, and Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis, University of Graz, Austria
     
    These priceless historical documents first came to light in 1998 when they were released by former Hollywood beautician and Marilyn confidante Patrice Renoir. Shortly before Marilyn’s death, Jackie returned her letters. Soon after receiving them, Marilyn bequeathed the entire correspondence between her and Jackie to Renoir.
    However, due to legal strictures, the documents cannot be reprinted. Marilyn’s letters are written in different colored pens (navy, green, red, purple, orange, silver). The pale pink notepaper is tinged with the scent of violets. The writing is large, expansive, with complex curlicues, flourishes, and many of the i ’sare dotted with a large circle or a heart. The letters are in good condition, folded just once.
    Jackie’s letters are written with a navy ink pen on thick cream paper. The corners are generally crumbled and it is clear the letters have been read repeatedly by Marilyn.
    Marilyn tended to be a lamentable speller. Following her ear, she habitually made such slips as “definate” and “fantasize.” Proper names were her downfall, and she often transposed the e and the i. But giventhe public perception of her innate dumb-blondeness, her occasional spelling mistakes have been retained in the text, if only to highlight how rare they were and the fact that, despite her rudimentary education, her strength of mind and purpose spurred her to improve her literacy level. Interestingly enough (and this is most apparent in Marilyn’s last long letters), her powers of description and her level of self-knowledge are often more well honed than Jackie’s.
    These letters chart the course of the friendship between Marilyn and Jackie. In the process, they chronicle the inner lives of two unique, iconoclastic sirens. Friends and enemies, mirror images, fatherless girls, hostages to history, celluloid images, female role models, fashion queens, eternal legends, each living in her own kaleidoscopic universe, unique yet similar, they are two of the most famous and revered women of their time.
    Artful seductresses, mistresses of enchantment, like Cleopatra, both Marilyn’s and Jackie’s charms cloaked sharp intellects. And it is clear that both women—each a female Machiavelli—relished the intellectual challenge inherent in the cat-and-mouse game played out in the Secret Letters.
    The hallmark of the letters, which range from Jackie’s sharp observations on Washington to Marilyn’s revealing Hollywood gossip, is an exchange between both women of intimacies about life, love, loss, their hopes, and their fears. In the process, they also expose the deepest recesses of their hearts. Compared with the multitude of comments made by both women to the press, these letters are doubly interesting in that they graphically reveal subtle aspects of their individual natures.
    Both women were prolific correspondents. Jackie’s propensity for writing letters is well known. Her most recent biographer, Sarah Bradford, confirmed that Jackie not only relished corresponding with famous people but kept their letters for many years and, just before her death, read a selection to her close friend Nancy Tuckerman.According to Bradford, “Jackie was sitting before the fire, astrakhan thrown over her lap. On the table beside her were bunches of letters, all neatly bound with ribbons. These were the letters Jackie had received from famous people over the years. Jackie unbound the letters and read some of them to Nancy.”
    Marilyn, too, was a prolific letter writer, often writing one letter with two or three different pens. According to Marilyn intimate James Haspiel, “Paula Strasberg told me that there existed personal letters written by John