|||A handwriting expert takes a magnifying glass to Marilyn’s script, scrutinizing its deeper meaning.||| Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, “As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated.” Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman? Don’t tell us how you feel.” Marilyn began to cry. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, “Don’t do that. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students.

A few blocks away, above Loew’s State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn-the one everyone knew-52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous.

The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors.

Fragments by marilyn monroe