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Their apologies only masked a darker, more important failure—the cloying, pervasive inability to understand her—or any other complicated soul—the lie of grabbing belated responsibility where none had ever existed. Marilyn was never more than Hollywood's plaything, when she might have been its lesson and its guide. What things she had to say were never heard because her voice was a dog whistle in a town accustomed to brass bands. Her misery was less the price of living up to an image too big for her than living down the reflections of her own abysmal past and her inability to share the lessons it taught her. In a sense, Marilyn Monroe never existed, as Lee Strasberg, her drama coach, noted in his eulogy: "I have no words to describe the myth and the legend. I did not know this Marilyn Monroe."
Merciful Silence. Under DiMaggio's hand, the funeral was sober, orderly and brief. But even burial did not bring the long wake to an end. The temptation of mystery was too strong to ignore, and gossipists busied themselves with its narrow questions. Mexican Film Writer Jose Bolanos was suggested as Marilyn's tragic Lothario, and a friend in Mexico City announced breathlessly that Marilyn and he had intended to marry in September. Writers even troubled themselves with the identity of the anonymous mourner who sent $50 worth of roses to the funeral—together with a love sonnet from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Marilyn's troubled financial state was suggested as meaningful: apart from her $77,500 house, which carried a $35,000 mortgage, her property consisted of some $4,000 in cash plus clothing, furs and jewelry. For the past two years she had restricted herself to $20 a week pocket money.
Some kept mercifully silent. Joe DiMaggio was one. Arthur Miller, her last husband and only interpreter, said simply: "She could have made it with a little luck." He could not believe her death was suicide. She had, he once said, "the gift of life"—a classic pantheism. "Please Don't Kill Anything" was his title for a short story he once wrote about her and the litany he had her speak in The Misfits. Her gift, he had said, was a response "to the most elemental part of the human being near her, his propensity for hurting or helping, and he is immediately stimulated by the fact that he is really being looked at." On the screen, her genius for humanity was transparent yet obscure; at the funeral, Strasberg called it "wistfulness, radiance and yearning."
The Unique Force. Yet the final mood of Marilyn Monroe is embarrassment. First taken by the world only as a vapid comedienne, she strove to become both an actress and an intellectual, and in death somehow became something more. As the London Daily Mail noted, her death has "impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." The arid, senseless argument that follows it—suicide or accident?—only heightens the general shame in a quibble over whether a token of death amounts to death itself. To say that she died while trying to live (the hand on the telephone) only avoids the issue of her unhappiness, turning despair into a mechanical event measured in milligrams of sleeping potion.