The Poet and Marilyn

A Poetry Tale about Carl Sandburg, told by Hello Doggo.

Picture the most famous blonde in the world, nuzzling a white-haired poet of eighty-four. He stares straight ahead, utterly composed.

That’s Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg, and it’s a real photograph.

By Sandburg’s own account, they met in Hollywood in nineteen sixty, when she made a point of coming over to introduce herself. Others put it a couple of years earlier. They had something in common: both of them worshipped Abraham Lincoln — and Sandburg had written the great Lincoln biography.

In December nineteen sixty-one she turned up to meet him at a photographer’s flat in New York. Three hours late, by the host’s account. A month later, at a producer’s house in Beverly Hills, she said she couldn’t sleep. So, as the photographer Arnold Newman remembered it, the old poet showed her an exercise to cure it. Then the two of them danced. Newman photographed the lot.

Her half-sister later wrote that Marilyn kept a bust of Sandburg, and carried it from room to room. She wanted him, she said, everywhere.

That summer, she was dead. In Look magazine, Sandburg paid tribute to her vitality and her readiness for humour. He’s reported to have said he believed he could have talked her out of it. Nobody can know that, of course.

But some forty years before he met her, he’d already written the line. I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.