I was intrigued to learn that the weird poet Edith Sitwell was friends with the wild sexpot Marilyn Monroe. The juxtaposition of the aristocratic Englishwoman with the Hollywood starlet makes one wonder about the two women and the lessons we might learn from their famous and fragile lives.
Having known for some time of the unlikely friendship between the dour T.S. Eliot and the zany Groucho Marx, I was intrigued to learn that the weird poet Edith Sitwell was friends with the wild sexpot Marilyn Monroe.
There is a famous photograph from 1953 of the two of them sharing a sofa and engaged in conversation. The juxtaposition of the aristocratic Englishwoman with the Hollywood starlet makes one wonder about the two women and the lessons we might learn from their famous and fragile lives. When examined, it is not surprising that they became friends, for beneath the contrasting surface they were sisters-in-arms.
The meeting between the unlikely friends happened because Sitwell had been commissioned to write an article about Hollywood. The movie moguls arranged the conversation for publicity purposes. Maybe the two would hate each other and sparks would fly and headlines would be made. Instead of fireworks a friendship sparked. Sitwell said of Marilyn, “On the occasion of our meeting she wore a green dress and, with her yellow hair, looked like a daffodil.” Later she described Monroe, “In repose her face was at moments strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost—a little spring-ghost, an innocent fertility daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia.” In her autobiography she added that Marilyn was “quiet, with great natural dignity and extremely intelligent.” They talked about Rudolf Steiner.
They met for the second time in July 1956 when Marilyn was in England filming The Prince and the Showgirl, and in a BBC interview Sitwell said she had met Monroe and Arthur Miller again during a visit to New York. Then Sitwell revealed her true sympathy for Marilyn Monroe, “She was a very nice girl and I thought she had been disgracefully treated.” After defending Monroe’s nude modeling on account of poverty, Sitwell continued, “the poor girl was absolutely persecuted.”
Much has been written about Monroe’s vulnerability and instability, and most observers rightly trace her problems to her horrible childhood. Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortensen to Gladys Pearl Baker. Although Martin Mortensen is named as her father, her paternity remained mysterious. The young girl’s mother soon drifted into a complete mental and emotional breakdown, at which point Norma Jean was taken into foster care. Gladys interrupted her daughter’s life until the poor woman was finally taken screaming and laughing to an asylum.
After another failed foster family, with an abusive father, Norma Jean ended up in the Los Angeles Children’s Home, and then bounced to another adoptive family where she was probably sexually abused again before entering into a teenaged marriage in a sad attempt at security.
For her part, Edith Sitwell also endured a bizarre and unhappy childhood. Neglected, unlovely and unloved, her father thought education for girls made them “unwomanly” and refused to send her to school. Edith’s mother, Lady Ida Sitwell, was insane and given to “ungovernable and terrifying rages.” An alcoholic, she once pawned her mother’s false teeth for brandy. Perpetually impoverished, she got involved in a fraudulent bonds swindle and spent three months in jail. Finally she went down with aphasia—a disorder that renders the sufferer unable to comprehend language of any sort.
Sitwell’s father was also a notable eccentric, and accounts of the family life in their country mansion Renishaw Hall sounds like a mix of the Addams Family and the Royal Tenenbaums. Her parents thought the bird-like Edith was too tall and gangly with weak ankles, so she was strapped into metal orthopaedic braces and iron corsets. Furthermore, because her long nose was considered a “cartilaginous deformity,” she was forced to wear a nose truss. Prongs were clamped on to her face, held in place by a leather belt buckled around her forehead.
It damaged her deeply. Her two brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, were both highly dysfunctional and self-absorbed, and Edith Sitwell’s biographers all noted that she remained strangely sexless, never having a genuine, loving relationship with anyone.
It is no wonder then, that Edith Sitwell and Marilyn Monroe—at first glance so utterly different—would find in one another a kindred spirit. Like many unloved persons they created a lovable persona. Desperate for attention, they became actresses and entertainers: Monroe most obviously, but Sitwell too. Wearing her outlandish costume and reading her poems through a megaphone, Sitwell’s major work was called Facade—An Entertainment. In many ways the bizarre composition was a self-portrait.
Marilyn wore the costume of the screen goddess. Edith wore the costume of the medieval queen. Both wore masks: Marilyn the pretty ingénue; Edith the poetic genius. Marilyn attracted and repelled with her kittenish sex appeal. Edith attracted and repelled with her aristocratic and artistic hauteur. Marilyn did a song and dance; Edith, with her poetic performances and creative costumes did the same. Both of them assuaged their hurting heart with substances to dull the pain: Marilyn famously addicted to every pill and potion Hollywood had on offer, while Edith repeated her mother’s alcoholism—being described by biographers as “a paranoid alcoholic.”
Marilyn famously slid down the path of celebrity self-destruction, ending in her sad and sleazy suicide in 1962. Edith was saved. She found reconciliation and resolution in her conversion to the Catholic faith. In 1955 she was received at the Jesuit church in Farm Street. Alec Guinness and Evelyn Waugh (both wounded souls themselves) were there. Waugh was her godfather and described Sitwell as ”swathed in black like a 16th century infanta.”
Two years later Sitwell took to a wheelchair suffering from Marfan syndrome, and she spent her final years living in a small flat in London, dying from a brain hemorrhage on December 9, 1964—just two years after her friend Marilyn.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image combines a portrait of Edith Sitwell painted in 1915 by Roger Fry and a photograph of Marilyn Monroe from the November 1953 issue of Modern Screen. Both images are in the public domain.
Mercifully, Sitwell left this life before witnessing the full effects set into motion by supposed ‘periti’ and their patrons, who wished to distill the Roman Church to an almost rationalist inspired ahistorical ‘pure essence’, and who would work through their own passions for fleeting prestige and influence by using political machinations during Vatican ii and for quite a while thereafter.
Fr. Longenecker, bless you for the compassion that lies behind this sensitive comparison. I “met” Marilyn in March, 1956 when an older friend produced the issue of Playboy that changed the world. It was almost three years old at the time, but that was about par for the little western New York town I was raised in. She, I think, was mostly the girl in The Seven Year Itch, although she was drawn time and again to criminals, slease-bags and communists (you fill in the names). I disagree that she committed suicide, but that’s something never to be determined finally. What I love about this piece is your pastoral sense. Thank you.
Actually it’s not a surprise that Marilyn befriended Sitwell. Monroe had a thing for writers. She even married Arthur Miller.
What I most remember about her was when she, shortly before her death, told Billy Graham, “I don’t need your God”. Sad.
The TruthOrFiction website calls the Billy Graham Marilyn Monroe conversation Fiction as according to a Billy Graham representative the conversation never happened.
BILLY WILDER: “Her marriages didn’t work out because Joe DiMaggio found out she was Marilyn Monroe, and Arthur Miller found out she wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.”
Marilyn Monroe was not a wild sexpot. She took on the persona of a sexpot. Edith Sitwell was not weird. She was an original.
The first paragraph is very revealing of the writer’s prejudices: Edith Sitwell was a true genius and a very great poet. Nowadays “performance art” is an accepted part of the artistic world, and Edith Sitwell was a trailblazer in this form of expression. There are numerous stories available now in which people have said they saw in Marilyn Monroe a very intelligent woman. Because of her times she could only be understood and accepted as a ditzy sexpot. In some way Sitwell and Monroe are two sides of the sexist coin: a beautiful woman can’t be intelligent, and an intelligent woman cannot be beautiful.
Fascinated by both. Fabulous article identifying their shared strengths and weaknesses. Performers, needing their personal realities to be acknowledged and loved.
…September 7, 1887 ~~
Remembering EDITH SITWELL today on her birthday…
Born in England, Sitwell (seen here in a famous 1953 photo by George Silk, with Marilyn Monroe), was a poet, author and critic.
[A bit more info about this famous photo: The meeting was arranged by Hollywood execs after they learned that Sitwell was staying at the Sunset Tower during her Los Angeles visit. They thought a meeting between the “sex goddess” actress and the “quirky, bird-like” poet might cause some sparks. Of course, after some initial banter, the two women quickly teamed up to get rid of their handlers in the room, recognized that they both came from wounded backgrounds, and proceeded to have a delightful, mutually-respectful conversation.]
Sitwell’s eccentric personage – she was an angular woman who stood over six feet tall – was an appearance she purposely fostered by wearing Elizabethan dress of velvet gowns and robes, overflowing amounts of jewelry, and a turban or other uncommon headdress.
Her style of poetry lent itself to being adapted to music, and was done so by the English composers Benjamin Britten, William Walton, and Joseph Phibbs.
Sitwell never married, had no children, and died in London in 1964 at age 77.