It is 100 years since the birth of Marilyn Monroe, marked by a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, a film season at the BFI, and several new books, including I Wanna Be Loved By You – Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Takes. One often overlooked aspect of her biography is her support for mental health sufferers, a legacy now honoured with the launch of the Marilyn Monroe Mental Health for the Arts Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Lori Hall has donated $100,000 to the initiative, which aims to support those in the performing arts with mental health difficulties. Monroe herself struggled with fame, telling Life magazine in her last interview: 'It's like caviar. A little bit of it is delicious, but if you have it every damn day, it's too much.'
Monroe's interest in mental health was deeply personal. Her maternal grandfather, Otis, died in an institution aged 43 from syphilis of the brain. Her grandmother, Della, suffered from manic-depressive psychosis and attempted to smother baby Marilyn. Della was committed and died in a state hospital. Marilyn's mother, Gladys, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed Marilyn in foster care 12 days after her birth.
Monroe feared she had inherited mental illness, saying: 'For a long time I was scared I’d find out that I was like my mother and end up in the crazy house.' At age eight, she was sexually abused by a boarder in her foster home. Experts later linked this trauma to her emotional difficulties, with one 1986 article describing her as 'a child in a woman’s body, portraying a certain innocence by needing to play the seductress'.
The abuse contributed to Monroe's dependence on drugs, initially for endometriosis but later to ease psychological distress. Her therapist, Dr Ralph Greenson, wrote after her death that sleeping pills 'was her way of escaping the miseries of life', adding that 'Marilyn was a bottomless well: one could not fill her, with all the deep, deep holes her lack of family had left her with.'
