My Week with Marilyn - internal debate pushed to the limit!!!

I know, I know!  This is only my third blog and the subject matter is Marilyn Monroe.  I can't help myself and I can't promise there won't be many more.  More specifically, I want to talk about 'My Week with Marilyn'; the book and the film.

I watched this, when it came out at the cinema, with trepidation.  I am a fan.  It could have gone only one of two ways, there was no middle ground!  Love or hate.  Fortunately, I was thrilled by the depiction of the woman I feel I have grown to know through her work, the words of her contemporaries and of her own.  A beautiful, creative, philosophical, ambitious, insecure, desolate woman who wanted desperately to be better, better at everything she did, better at being a person.

After watching the film I was content to enjoy it for what it was, a wonderful, well-rounded portrait of Marilyn. However, the book drew me in and the internal debate began!  The book is essentially the diary of Third Assistant Director on the film 'The Prince and the Showgirl', Colin Clark.  It is split into two parts, the one he wrote whilst filming took place at Pinewood Studios, and the one he wrote many years later.  The one he wrote later is the 'missing nine days' of his original diary, or, his week with Marilyn.  From reading reviews, I seem to be the only one who is finding this fact questionable.  After all, these diaries are historical documents, which my degree studies are encouraging me to tear apart!  I'm not saying I disbelieve Clark's story, I am merely questioning whether the imagination can run away with a person when reminiscing on an exciting chapter in one's life.  I think it probably can.  In addition, I believe a little hindsight can creep in when writing about past events many years later.  To what degree have Clark's words been shaped by the things he learned about Marilyn after the event?  He does seem, at least to me, to be almost omnipresent throughout the week in question.

As a fan, I like to think that every word of Clark's self-confessed 'fairy-tale' is true, and the books and hence the film give us a true reflection of Marilyn Monroe.  And I do mean Marilyn Monroe and not 'Norma Jeane', as so many writers choose to divide the two as if separate entities (but that's for another blog entry).  The fact is, we will never know how much is truth and how much is fairy-tale, just as I will never truly know who she was.  One thing is for sure, my search for her has not ended with Clark's words, although I like I think they corroborate what I have already learned.