what was wrong with her

[deleted]

Apparently she was severely bipolar. Her mother had been also severely mentally ill. Marilyn was partly a product of her several environments as a child (given to an orphanage, left with mothers friends, sexually abused. She went from one home to the next living a practically transient lifestyle.

When she was young she ended up in foster homes merely because the families were being financially rewarded for her being there and it made her extremely self conscious of trusting people later. When she was fifteen, the foster family she was with (her mother's best friend, actually) decided they were going to move and they had deemed not to take Norma-Jeane with them because the state they were moving to wouldn't pay them to keep her (although supposedly the story is that Grace McKee, the mother, wanted rid of Norma-Jeane because her husband has started getting rather touchy feely with the girl. In an attempt to keep Norma from going back to the orphanage, they helped arrange a marriage with a neighbours son, she was just two days over sixteen and he was twenty-two; she didn't love the boy but he was kind and she'd have her freedom. When he went to the war, she was left on her own for the first time in her life and I think this is really when her troubles started.

Her drug problem began fairly early apparently. As a child she had horrific night terrors and into adulthood she had nightmares and later insomnia which led to her being prescribed barbiturates to help her sleep. She'd be so tired from the barbiturates she'd have to take uppers to fight the drowsiness. She'd have panic attacks, and she'd throw up before takes, it's speculation whether this was withdrawals, or her reactions to the mixing of drugs. She wasn't being prescribed anything for her mental issues because in the fifties and sixties, psychiatric medicine wasn't as it is now, she was self medicating.

She got divorced from her first husband to pursue acting, and later she married Joe DiMaggio, who reportedly smacked her around often in their nine months of marriage. There was talk of a miscarriage during the marriage (but also of a miscarriage just before she had married him). The marriage ended bitterly thanks to his jealousy and his constant pointing out to her that she was merely a body that people liked. Her self esteem ran rather low after this and she started get worse.

After her marriage to Arthur Miller, it got even more progressively worse, as she realised that he, like others, saw her as a beauty, not a brain, and her self esteem and her perception of what she could be was marred when she found his writings about her (and then later his writing a part in the misfits for her). It was clear if you look at her list of suitors that nearly all of them were much older, perhaps being the father figure she'd missed all her life (no one knew him). She was constantly striving for love and approval because she lacked it as a child.

So what was wrong with her? Pretty much everything. She was passed around at movie stag parties, she was never taken seriously, and she was mentally unstable and undiagnosed. People see her as a bimbo but I feel sorry for her. In that day in age there wasn't rehab, there was asylums with straightjackets and high dosage Thorazine. If she had lived in this era, she'd have probably had her demons under control a little. It's very sad.



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We've become a race of peeping toms.

Stemming from her awful childhood, she also had borderline personality disorder.

Michael Jackson had the same thing; in many ways, Marilyn and Michael's lives were paralleled and both went down the same tragic, destructive paths until their horrible deaths.