~Cosmic-Kiwi~

Alnwick Garden, Northumberland England

Addio, 2008.

This is on page 75 of the chapter titled My First Love, from the book My Story, which was ghost written in part with Ben Hecht and edited with excerpts from Milton Greene (a photographer who she became close friends with in the mid 1950s).

And this is not a mistake on OP’s part. This person did this intentionally to mislead people as this entire chapter is about Marilyn’s first love; a man who was entirely indifferent towards her until she decided to cut him out of her life. To specifically highlight this one part of the chapter to imply Marilyn was a lesbian when the whole chapter revolves around her relationship with a man is plain manipulative and absolutely insane to me.

Also rewriting Natasha Lytess as Marilyn Monroe’s Lesbian Lover is just egregiously misrepresenting their relationship. The only source that has “confirmed” Marilyn was in a relationship with Lytess was her “former” housemaid, Lena Pepitone, who wrote a whole memoir about her time working with Marilyn at her NY residency with Arthur Miller. Lena Pepitone is not a reliable source of information. Lena’s book, Marilyn Monroe Confidential, has been debunked so thoroughly that I still remember a lot of the info in the blog post despite having read the book in early 2010.

Also, notice how OP mentions that Marilyn and Lytess “held hands while filming closeups” and not “in between takes”? OP is leaving out the reason behind this; Marilyn had well documented performance anxiety and Lytess was her acting coach. Which do you think is more likely: 2 lesbians in the 1950s are holding hands while one of them is filming a closeup for a scene because they love each other, or because one has tremendous anxiety over filming and requested her coach to hold her hand while she film to help soothe her?

Although I’m willing to entertain the possibility of a sexual relationship between the two (there were rumors at the time after all) it was not by any means a romantic one. Marilyn went on record to describe Lytess as possessive and jealous of the men she dated, particularly Joe DiMaggio who she got married to in 1954 (she remarked that “she thinks she’s my husband!” Which, no, was not meant to be taken as endearing considering she was seeing DiMaggio at the time). In 1956 she had her agency send a telegram to Lytess telling her that her services were no longer needed. Marilyn completely cut Lytess out of her life. I would not for a minute take anything Lytess says about their relationship at face value as it’s a running theme for people to lie or exaggerate their relationship with Marilyn just to say they slept with her. See also: Tony Curtis, who wrote about having sex with her before and after she got famous, and published the book where he mentioned this AFTER both her and Arthur Miller (her second husband, who Curtis claims she was with at the time of their affair) had passed away (meaning the only 2 ppl who could confirm his claims were both dead, and he claimed he waited until Miller died “out of respect for him”).

It also needs to be pointed out that the speculation about some of her statements being indicative of asexuality is just myopic in scope. Not just because OP left out the part where she says she actually enjoys sex, but also because very early on in the book (pg 20, Ch. 2 My First Sin) she describes being sexually assaulted by a caretaker named Mr. Kimmel around the age of 9.

CW: Screenshot of a segment of the book where Marilyn describes CSA in detail.