The unseen files of Marilyn Monroe

From a review of the book, MM – Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe by Lois Banner:

What is certain is that sometime on the night of 4 August the cabinet in the guest cottage was broken into, and that crucial files were removed – perhaps pertaining to Monroe's relationship with the Kennedys and their links with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana.
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Monroe's horror at the idea of not being able to get pregnant is made starkly and rather zanily clear by a handwritten letter she taped to her stomach before having her appendix removed in 1952: "Cut as little as possible," it reads. "I know it seems vain but that doesn't really come into it. The fact I'm a woman is important. You have children and you must know what it means. For God's sakes Dear Doctor no ovaries removed."

Monroe suffered three miscarriages in the mid-1950s while married to the playwright Arthur Miller, and the archive is full of reminders of how painful that time must have been.
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Would Monroe have been a good mother? Who can tell? But letters she wrote to her stepchildren, Bobby and Jane Miller, reveal a playfulness and understanding of childhood needs and disappointments that would surely have stood her in good stead.

In August 1957 we find her writing to them at summer camp in the guise of their basset hound, Hugo (she also wrote to them as their Siamese cat, Sugar Finney): "It sure is lonesome round here! I made a mistake and I am sorry, but I chewed up one of your baseballs. I didn't mean to. I thought it was a tennis ball and that it wouldn't make any difference but Daddy and Marilyn said that they would get you another one, so is it all right for me to keep playing with this one as long as you are getting a new one? Love from your friend and ankle-chewer."
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Despite knowing how infuriating she could be, it remains impossible not to like Monroe. She had a wit worthy of Mae West ("There is only one way he could comment on my sexuality and I'm afraid he has never had the opportunity!" she wrote of Tony Curtis, though he would later claim to have been her lover) and an ability to remain winsome even in adversity.

After she was fired from the film Something's Got to Give in 1962, as her drug habit escalated, she wrote to George Cukor, the director: "I blame myself but never you. The next weekend I will do any painting, cleaning, brushing you need around the house. I can also dust."
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Equally moving is a note from the mother of a soldier who saw Monroe perform in Korea in 1955. She quotes from the letter her son sent her: "When she appeared on the stage, there was just a sort of gasp from the audience – a single gasp multiplied by the 12,000 soldiers present… The broadcasting system was extremely poor… However, it didn't matter. Had she only walked out on stage and smiled it would have been enough."

If representatives of the Kennedys did remove documents from the filing cabinet on the night of Monroe's death, and Lois Banner is certain that they did ('I know who took them and what happened to them, but I don't feel at liberty to say at this point,' Banner told me), they were pretty thorough. The archive now has almost no material relating to Monroe's relationships with JFK and Robert Kennedy, which are thought to have dominated the final months of her life.