Marilyn and me

Actress Susan Strasberg writes of her life and her friendship with her surrogate sister Marilyn Monroe.

"Imagine that Marilyn Monroe joins your family--when you're an insecure teenage actress--and commands your parents' attention ... that the distant father whose recognition you yearn for holds her and sings her to sleep, while you cry alone in your room across the hall ... that your overworked mother accompanies Marilyn to her film shoots to prevent her having a nervous breakdown, while you're falling apart on the set of your movie. In what well may be the most intimate, revealing, and realistic portrait of Marilyn yet, Strasberg recalls an extraordinary period of her life. The time was the mid-fifties, when Marilyn came to study with Susan's father, revered Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg. Monroe was mocked by the press for her ambitions to become a serious actress, but the Strasbergs were in her corner.^ The troubled movie star quickly became part of their household: Lee and his wife, Paula, became her teachers, surrogate parents, and therapists; Susan became her friend and surrogate sister. This is Susan's memory of Marilyn: a firsthand account of her breathy voice giving Susan advice on men, makeup, and Hollywood; her luminous charisma and infinite need blotting out the careers, the concerns, and the importance of almost everyone else around her; her struggles with her shyness, her husbands, and the truly terrifying personal demons that eventually claimed her. But this is also Susan's own story. We meet a young girl coming painfully of age in the shadow of a celebrated father and among the best and brightest theater people of the age. Her professional star would rise on Broadway and in Hollywood in such acclaimed productions as The Diary of Anne Frank and Picnic.^ She would have a tempestuous love affair with Richard Burton and, most of all, manage, as so many others did not, to love Marilyn without surrendering her own life and desires. From confidences ex