text:
She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors. The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She didn't want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. A few blocks away, above Loew's State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn—the one everyone knew—52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy.
When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, "Don't do that. Just tell us what you hear. Don't tell us how you feel." Marilyn began to cry. Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, "As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated." Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman?
Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn's poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36.
Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn's possessions at Christie's, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built.
Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn's biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.
"I picked up a chair and slammed it ...against the glass. It took a lot of banging. I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat."
"Complete Subjection, Humiliation, Alonement"
Marilyn began taking private lessons with celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg in March 1955, encouraged by the acclaimed theater and movie director Elia Kazan, with whom she had had an affair. "Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew," she wrote to her analyst Dr. Ralph Greenson in the last and perhaps the most important letter found in this archive, "and believe me he has known many. But he loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with his teacher, Lee Strasberg."
She was living at the Gladstone Hotel, on 52nd Street off Park Avenue, when she began working with Strasberg and embarked upon the psychoanalysis that was de rigueur for taking classes at the Actors Studio. Founded in 1947 by Kazan and directors Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, it was the holy temple of the Method—acting exercises and scenes that focused on sense memories and "private moments" dredged from the actor's life. Throughout the late 1940s and through much of the 1950s and 1960s, the Actors Studio was the most revered laboratory for stage actors in America. Its membership (one was not officially a "student" but a "member") included a roster of the most compelling actors of the day: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Rip Torn, Kim Stanley, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward—who all brought those techniques into film.
Strasberg, born in 1901 in Austria-Hungary and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a genius at analyzing an actor's performance and a stern and often cold taskmaster. Short, bespectacled, and intense, he wasn't, recalled Ellen Burstyn, "one for small talk." For Marilyn, who grew up shunted from one foster family to another, not knowing who her father was, he became a beloved paternal figure, autocratic yet nurturing, and his acceptance of her as a private student bolstered her confidence and gave her the training to improve her acting, and turned her from a movie star (and punch line) into a true artist. But years later Kazan observed, "The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee's power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe."
Most important, this archive, far more deeply than the Inez Melson collection, made public in V.F. in October 2008, reveals a woman in search of herself, undergoing the harrowing experience of psychoanalysis for the first time, at the urging of Strasberg. The key players include Strasberg himself, her three psychiatrists—Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, Dr. Marianne Kris, and Dr. Ralph Greenson—and her third husband, Arthur Miller, whom she confesses to loving body and soul, but by whom she ultimately felt betrayed. These poems, musings, dreams, and correspondence also touch on her great fear of displeasing others, her chronic lateness, and three of the biggest traumas of her shortened life: one buried in her past, and two that took place a few years after she began studying with Strasberg. But they also reveal her growth both as an artist and a woman as she manages to cope with memories and disappointments that threatened to overwhelm her.
In a five-and-a-half-page typed document, Marilyn looked back on her early marriage to James Dougherty, an intelligent, attractive man five years her senior. They married on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and in this document she describes her feelings of loneliness and insecurity in that hastily agreed-to union, which was less of a love match than a way to keep Marilyn—then Norma Jeane Baker—out of the orphanage when her caretakers at the time, Grace and Erwin "Doc" Goddard, moved away from California. (There has also been speculation that Grace wanted to remove Norma Jeane from her husband's too appreciative eye.)
Marilyn was not technically orphaned, as her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, outlived her famous daughter, but because Gladys was a schizophrenic who spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, Marilyn was virtually abandoned, raised by various foster families and by Grace Goddard, a close friend of her mother's. There were nearly two years when Marilyn was parked in an orphanage. Dougherty liked the idea of rescuing the shy, pretty girl, who left high school to marry him. Not surprisingly, the union failed, and they divorced on September 13, 1946.
"My relationship with him was basically insecure from the first night I spent alone with him," she wrote in this long, undated, somewhat rambling memoir of that marriage, probably written by hand after undergoing analysis and later typed by her personal assistant, May Reis; the archivists suggest it was written when Norma Jeane was 17 and still married to Dougherty, but the emphasis on self-analysis seems to place it later in her life. It's an intriguing document, peppered with misspellings, weaving the past with the present, at times reliving scenes from the marriage and her jealousy of Dougherty, at times stepping back and analyzing her emotional state of mind. She wrote,
I was greatly attracted to him as one of the ["only" is crossed out] few young men I had no sexual repulsion for besides which it gave me a false sense of security to feel that he was endowed with more overwelming qualities which I did not possess—on paper it all begins to sound terribly logical but the secret midnight meetings the fugetive glance stolen in others company the sharing of the ocean, moon & stars and air aloneness made it a romantic adventure which a young, rather shy girl who didn't always give that impression because of her desire to belong & develope can thrive on—I had always felt a need to live up to that expectation of my elders.
Her memory of that marriage revolves around her fear that Dougherty preferred a former girlfriend, probably Doris Ingram, a Santa Barbara beauty queen, which triggered Marilyn's sense of unworthiness and vulnerability to men:
Finding myself ofhandedly stood up snubbed my first feeling was not of anger—but the numb pain of rejection & hurt at the destruction of some sort of edealistic image of true love.
My first impulse then was one of complete subjection humiliation, alonement to the male counterpart. (all this thought & writting has made my hands tremble …
She then wonders if this exercise in memory and self-analysis is in fact good for her, writing:
For someone like me its wrong to go through thorough self analisis—I do it enough in thought generalities enough.
Its not to much fun to know yourself to well or think you do—everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls.
"Best Finest Surgeon—Strasberg to Cut Me Open"
Included in the archive are several black "Record" notebooks—the slim, narrow, leather-bound diaries then favored by writers. The earliest of these notebooks begins with the words "Alone!!!!!!! I am alone I am always alone no matter what" in a slender, cursive script that leans dangerously forward, as if about to fall off a cliff.
Marilyn apparently began recording her thoughts around 1951. Two years prior, broke and desperate, she had posed nude for photographer Tom Kelley, for a calendar series. After she signed a new contract with Fox, in December 1950, and the calendar photos surfaced, Marilyn deflected criticism by saying she had taken the job because "I was hungry." The public forgave her. She possessed a quality that seemed to trigger rescue fantasies in men and women alike, even before the sad details of her fractured childhood were completely known. In part, Marilyn knew that to cast herself as an orphan stirred up pity and empathy.
By Christmas of 1954, she was living in New York City. She had already appeared in Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where she perfected her signature character, the vulnerable, "dumb," sensual blonde, and, in How to Marry a Millionaire, with brilliant success. After that, Monroe's fame was such that she supplanted in popularity the ultimate World War II pinup girl, Betty Grable, who shortly left Fox and bequeathed the largest dressing room on the lot to Marilyn. She had married Joe DiMaggio in January of that year, entertained troops in Korea, and filmed The Seven Year Itch. But the movie's famous billboard displeased the puritanical "Yankee Clipper," and the two filed for divorce in October, just nine months after marrying.
Encouraged by Strasberg, Marilyn began seeing Dr. Margaret Hohenberg as often as five times a week, first at Marilyn's rooms at the Gladstone Hotel, then at Dr. Hohenberg's office, at 155 East 93rd Street. The psychiatrist, an acquaintance of Strasberg's, was a Brünnhilde type, a 57-year-old Hungarian immigrant complete with tightly wound braids and a Valkyrian bosom. Strasberg strongly believed that Marilyn needed to open up her unconscious and root through her troubled childhood, all in the service of her art. Between her sessions with Strasberg and with Dr. Hohenberg, she began recording some of those raked-up memories, including a devastating incident of sexual abuse. Described around 1955, in an Italian notebook whose pages are lined and numbered in green, this memory fully emerges, with the humiliating aftermath of being punished by her great-aunt Ida Martin, a strict, evangelical Christian paid by Grace Goddard to look after Norma Jeane for several months from 1937 to 1938. (Could this have been the sense-memory exercise that left her weeping in Strasberg's acting class?) Marilyn wrote,
Ida—I have still been obeying her— it's not only harmful for me to do so but unrealality because
life starts from Now
And later:
working (doing my tasks that I have set for myself) On the stage—I will not be punished for it or be whipped or be threatened or not be loved or sent to hell to burn with bad people feeling that I am also bad. or be afraid of my [genitals] being or ashamed exposed known and seen— so what or ashamed of my sensitive feelings— In April of 1955, Marilyn moved from the Gladstone to a three-room suite on the 27th floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, where she began writing down some of her memories and dreams on the hotel's handsome Art Deco stationery. In a kind of stream-of-consciousness prose poem, she recounts a nightmare in which Strasberg is operating on her, with Dr. Hohenberg assisting:
Best finest surgeon—Strasberg to cut me open which I don't mind since Dr. H has prepared me—given me anaesthetic and has also diagnosed the case and agrees with what has to be done— an operation—to bring myself back to life and to cure me of this terrible dis-ease whatever the hell it is—
The most terrifying part of the dream is what her surgeons find when they open her up:
and there is absolutely nothing there— Strasberg is deeply disappointed but more even— academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much—more than he had ever dreamed possible … instead there was absolutely nothing— devoid of every human living feeling thing— the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust—like out of a raggedy ann doll—and the sawdust spills all over the floor & table and Dr. H is puzzled because suddenly she realizes that this is a new type case. The patient … existing of complete emptiness Strasberg's dreams & hopes for theater are fallen. Dr. H's dreams and hopes for a permanent psychiatric cure is given up—Arthur is disappointed— let down +
One of her greatest fears—disappointing those she cares about—is manifest here. The Arthur she refers to is, of course, Arthur Miller. She had met him years earlier in Hollywood, through Kazan.
Marilyn was re-introduced to the acclaimed playwright at the producer Charles Feldman's home. Feldman had produced The Seven Year Itch, a huge success, and Marilyn had returned to Hollywood in February of 1956 to begin work on Bus Stop, directed by Josh Logan. She was instantly smitten by the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, who was still married to his first wife, Mary Slattery, at the time. Miller possessed those traits she most admired: intellectual and artistic achievement, high seriousness. They wed in a civil ceremony on June 29, 1956, Marilyn having converted to Judaism. Two days later, Lee Strasberg acted as her father, giving the bride away in an intimate Jewish wedding.
At first, she was deliriously happy, moving back to New York with her new husband to take up residence in her dazzlingly white apartment at 2 Sutton Place, to which she had moved after leaving the Waldorf-Astoria, and then on to 444 East 57th Street, in an apartment with a book-lined living room, complete with fireplace and piano. In the Italian, green, engraved diary, she wrote,
I am so concerned about protecting Arthur I love him—and he is the only person—human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses about—but he [is] the only person … that I trust as muchas myself—because when I do trust my- self (about certain things) I do fully
Marilyn writes of her early sexual abuse: "I will not be punished for it or be whipped or be threatened or not be loved or sent to hell to burn."
They were probably happiest in the summer of 1957, spent in a rented house in Amagansett, on Long Island, where they swam and took long walks on the beach. She looks especially radiant in photographs from this era, when she happily entered into Miller's world—for example, attending a luncheon given by the novelist Carson McCullers for the writer Isak Dinesen. Marilyn was gay and witty in this company, easily holding her own—her vitality and innocence reminded Dinesen of a wild lion cub. She became friends with writer Truman Capote and met some of her literary heroes, such as poet Carl Sandburg and novelist Saul Bellow, with whom she dined at the Ambassador Hotel on the occasion of the Chicago premiere of Some Like It Hot. Bellow was bowled over by her.
Several photographs taken of Marilyn earlier in her life—the ones she especially liked—show her reading. Eve Arnold photographed her for Esquire magazine in a playground in Amagansett reading James Joyce's Ulysses. Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed her, for Life, at home, dressed in white slacks and a black top, curled up on her sofa, reading, in front of a shelf of books—her personal library, which would grow to 400 volumes. In another photograph, she's on a pulled-out sofa bed reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine.
If some photographers thought it was funny to pose the world's most famously voluptuous "dumb blonde" with a book—James Joyce! Heinrich Heine!—it wasn't a joke to her. In these newly discovered diary entries and poems, Marilyn reveals a young woman for whom writing and poetry were lifelines, the ways and means to discover who she was and to sort through her often tumultuous emotional life. And books were a refuge and a companion for Marilyn during her bouts of insomnia.
In one of the handful of sweet and affecting poems included in this archive, Marilyn, still in the first flush of her love for Miller and imagining what he might have been like as a young boy, wrote a poem about him:
my love sleeps besides me— in the faint light—I see his manly jaw give way—and the mouth of his boyhood returns with a softness softer its sensitiveness trembling in stillness his eyes must have look out wonderously from the cave of the little boy—when the things he did not understand— he forgot
The poem then turns dark, a premonition, perhaps, of how the marriage would end:
but will he look like this when he is dead oh unbearable fact inevitable yet sooner would I rather his love die than/or him? "Ah Peace I Need You—Even a Peaceful Monster"
But after she and Miller traveled to England for four months for the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier, things began to sour. They moved into a magnificent manor called Parkside House, in Surrey, outside of London. On paper, it was an idyll: here she was producing a film directed by and starring one of the most respected actors of his generation, and living in a grand country house with the man she most loved. She couldn't have felt more fulfilled and vindicated as an artist, until a chance discovery undermined her fragile confidence in herself and her trust in her husband. It was at Parkside House that Marilyn stumbled upon a diary entry of Miller's in which he complained that he was "disappointed" in her, and sometimes embarrassed by her in front of his friends.
Marilyn was devastated. One of her greatest fears—that of disappointing those she loved—had come true. His betrayal confirmed what she'd "always been deeply terrified" of: "To really be someone's wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really," as she wrote in another "Record" journal entry.
After this discovery, Marilyn found it so difficult to work that she flew in Dr. Hohenberg from New York. She was having trouble sleeping, relying on barbiturates. On Parkside House stationery, she wrote one night after Miller had gone to bed:
on the screen of pitch blackness comes/reappears the shapes of monsters my most steadfast companions … and the world is sleeping ah peace I need you—even a peaceful monster.
In the summer of 1957, the couple bought a country house in Roxbury, Connecticut, near where Miller had lived with his first wife. Any love that remained seemed to go out of the marriage. Nonetheless, she had accompanied her husband to Washington, D.C., in the spring and stood by his side as he faced down the House Un-American Activities Committee by refusing to name former Communist Party members. Many believe that Monroe's popularity saved him from being destroyed by HUAC's witch hunt, which blacklisted many show-business people and ruined their lives.
That winter Miller worked on adapting one of his short stories for the screen, "The Misfits," while Marilyn grappled with her feelings of disappointment and loss:
Starting tomorrow I will take care of myself for that's all I really have and as I see it now have ever had. Roxbury—I've tried to imagine spring all winter—it's here and I still feel hopeless. I think I hate it here because there is no love here anymore…
In every spring the green [of the ancient maples] is too sharp—though the delicacy in their form is sweet and uncertain—it puts up a good struggle in the wind—trembling all the while… I think I am very lonely—my mind jumps. I see myself in the mirror now, brow furrowed—if I lean close I'll see—what I don't want to know—tension, sadness, disappointment, my ["blue" is crossed out] eyes dulled, cheeks flushed with capillaries that look like rivers on maps—hair lying like snakes. The mouth makes me the sadd[est], next to my dead eyes…
When one wants to stay alone as my love (Arthur) indicates the other must stay apart.
In 1958, Marilyn moved back to Los Angeles to begin work in Some Like It Hot, which—despite her chronic lateness and other difficulties on the set—would turn out to be her greatest and most successful comedy. She began recording her musings and poems in a red spiral Livewire notebook, poems that took a dark turn. Here's one such fragment, written under the ironic heading "After one year of analysis":
Help help Help I feel life coming closer when all I want Is to die. Scream— You began and ended in air but where was the middle?
Marilyn had left Dr. Hohenberg in the spring of 1957, after she'd fired Milton Greene from her production company. (Greene had also been a patient of Dr. Hohenberg's.) She began analysis with a new psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris, a Viennese woman who was approved by Strasberg. Marilyn would remain Dr. Kris's patient until 1961, and she continued to write down memories and fragments of self-analysis to show to her new psychotherapist. One such note was written two days after the 10th birthday of Arthur Miller's daughter Jane, from his first marriage. Marilyn had grown close to Jane and her brother Bobby. Perhaps thinking about her stepdaughter triggered this brief memory of her mother, whose confinement in a mental hospital led Marilyn to fear that she too would end up institutionalized:
"I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone's wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really."
For Kris Sept. 9 —Remember, somehow, how— Mother always tried to get me to "go out" as though she felt I were too unadventurous. She wanted me even to show a cruelty toward woman. This in my teens. In return, I showed her that I was faithful to her.
In 1960, Marilyn remained in Hollywood to star in Let's Make Love, with French heartthrob Yves Montand. Feeling shut out of her husband's affections and esteem, she had an affair with her co-star, causing something of a feeding frenzy in the press. On the recommendation of Dr. Kris, she started analysis in Los Angeles with Dr. Ralph Greenson, a prominent psychiatrist and strict Freudian analyst who treated many celebrities, among them Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and pianist Oscar Levant. Just as she had with the Strasbergs, Marilyn became a kind of surrogate daughter to Greenson, and he often took her into his home as part of an unorthodox form of therapy—or, perhaps, because he too had become infatuated with her. He saw her every day, sometimes in sessions that lasted five hours. The treatment, often called adoption therapy, is very much discredited today.
Miller completed his screenplay for The Misfits, with the central role of a wounded young woman, who falls in love with a much older man, based, not surprisingly, on Marilyn. In July of 1960, filming began in the Nevada desert, under John Huston's direction, with Marilyn, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach in key roles. Miller was on location, watching as his wife began to unravel in the blistering heat. On the set he met and fell in love with a photographic archivist on the film, Inge Morath, who would become his third wife. On November 11, 1960, Marilyn and Arthur Miller's separation was announced to the press.
Three months later, back in New York, emotionally exhausted and under Dr. Kris's care, Marilyn was committed to Payne Whitney's psychiatric ward. What was supposed to have been a prescribed rest cure for the overwrought and insomniac actress turned out to be the most harrowing three days of her life.
Kris had driven Marilyn to the sprawling, white-brick New York Hospital—Weill Cornell Medical Center, overlooking the East River at 68th Street. Swathed in a fur coat and using the name Faye Miller, she signed the papers to admit herself, but she quickly found she was being escorted not to a place where she could rest but to a padded room in a locked psychiatric ward. The more she sobbed and begged to be let out, banging on the steel doors, the more the psychiatric staff believed she was indeed psychotic. She was threatened with a straitjacket, and her clothes and purse were taken from her. She was given a forced bath and put into a hospital gown.
On March 1 and 2, 1961, Marilyn wrote an extraordinary, six-page letter to Dr. Greenson vividly describing her ordeal: "There was no empathy at Payne-Whitney—it had a very bad effect—they asked me after putting me in a 'cell' (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed depressed patients (except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic … everything was under lock and key … the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time, also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients.)"
"Peter He Might Harm Me, Poison Me"
A psychiatrist came in and gave her a physical exam, "including examining the breast for lumps." She objected, telling him that she'd had a complete physical less than a month before, but that didn't deter him. After being unable to make a phone call, she felt imprisoned, and so she turned to her actor's training to find a way out: "I got the idea from a movie I made once called 'Don't Bother to Knock,' " she wrote to Greenson—an early film in which she had played a disturbed teenage babysitter.
I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it … against the glass intentionally. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass—so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them "if you are going to treat me like a nut I'll act like a nut."
She threatened to harm herself with the glass if they didn't let her out, but cutting herself was "the furthest thing from my mind at that moment since you know Dr. Greenson I'm an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself, I'm just that vain. Remember when I tried to do away with myself I did it very carefully with ten seconal and ten tuonal and swallowed them with relief (that's how I felt at the time.)"
When she refused to cooperate with the staff, "two hefty men and two hefty women" picked her up by all fours and carried her in the elevator to the seventh floor of the hospital. ("I must say that at least they had the decency to carry me face down.… I just wept quietly all the way there," she wrote.)
She was ordered to take another bath—her second since arriving—and then the head administrator came in to question her. "He told me I was a very, very sick girl and had been a very, very sick girl for many years."
Dr. Kris, who had promised to see her the day after her confinement, failed to show up, and neither Lee Strasberg nor his wife, Paula, to whom she finally managed to write, could get her released, as they were not family. It was Joe DiMaggio who rescued her, swooping in against the objections of the doctors and nurses and removing her from the ward. (He and Marilyn had had something of a reconciliation that Christmas, when DiMaggio sent her "a forest-full of poinsettias.")
It should be noted that this is one of the few letters that have already seen the light of day. It was quoted almost in its entirety in Donald Spoto's Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, published in 1993. Spoto says he got it from the estate of May Reis—Marilyn's personal assistant from the 1950s until her death—who had typed the letter and kept a copy. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to be able to read the facsimile of this long-sought-after document and to see some of the elements left out of Spoto's book, such as an intriguing postscript that reads:
Someone when I mentioned his name you used to frown with your moustache and look up at the ceiling. Guess who? He has been (secretly) a very tender friend. I know you won't believe this but you must trust me with my instincts. It was sort of a fling on the wing. I had never done that before but now I have—but he is very unselfish in bed.
From Yves [Montand] I have heard nothing—but I don't mind since I have such a strong, tender, wonderful memory.
I am almost weeping.
In November 1961, Marilyn met John F. Kennedy at the Santa Monica home of actor Peter Lawford, the president's brother-in-law. The following year, in February, she bought her first home, in fashionable Brentwood. She began filming her last movie, Something's Got to Give, directed by George Cukor, in April of 1962. The now famous outtakes from the unfinished film—Marilyn rising naked and un-shy from a swimming pool—show her fit and radiant, at the top of her game. Her chronic lateness and absences from the set, however—something even Strasberg couldn't cure her of—caused her to be fired from the picture, which was never completed. Four months later, on August 5, 1962, she would be found dead from a drug overdose in her Brentwood home, an apparent suicide.
Even with the revelations and unexpected pleasures of this soon-to-be-published archive, the deep mystery of her death remains. For those who believe that Marilyn's death was indeed a suicide, there are many indications of her emotional fragility and a description of a past suicide attempt. "Oh Paula," she wrote in an undated note to Paula Strasberg, "I wish I knew why I am so anguished. I think maybe I'm crazy like all the other members of my family were, when I was sick I was sure I was. I'm so glad you are with me here!"
For those who believe she died of an accidental overdose, mixing prescribed barbiturates with alcohol, the archive contains evidence of her optimism, her feeling that she has come to rely on herself and will solve her problems through work and her capable, businesslike plans for the future.
And for conspiracy theorists who have always suspected foul play, there is an intriguing note to the effect that Marilyn might have distrusted and even feared J.F.K.'s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, who was the last person to speak to her on the phone. In the handsome, green, engraved Italian diary, probably dating to around 1956, she had appended this fearful note to a short list of people she loved and trusted:
the feeling of violence I've had lately
about being afraid of Peter he might harm me, poison me, etc. why—strange look in his eyes—strange behavior in fact now I think I know why he's been here so long because I have a need to be frighten[ed]—and nothing really in my personal relationships (and dealings) lately have been frightening me—except for him—I felt very uneasy at different times with him—the real reason I was afraid of him—is because I believe him to be homosexual—not in the way I love & respect and admire [Jack] who I feel feels I have talent and wouldn't be jealous of me because I wouldn't really want to be me whereas Peter wants to be a woman—and would like to be me—I think
Marilyn and Lawford, the British actor and bon vivant, had first met in Hollywood in the 1950s. "Jack" is probably Jack Cole, the dancer-choreographer who befriended and coached Marilyn on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and There's No Business Like Show Business. (She would not meet "Jack" Kennedy until five years later.)
If this archive doesn't quite solve the enigma of Marilyn Monroe's death, it does go deeper than we have ever been into the mystery of her life. As Lee Strasberg noted in his eloquent eulogy, "In her eyes and mine, her career was just beginning. The dream of her talent, which she had nurtured as a child, was not a mirage."
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
Discovery of Marilyn's secret papers (Sam Kashner, October 2008)
Marilyn and acting teacher Lee Strasberg (Patricia Bosworth, June 2003)
Arthur Miller on anti-Semitism (October 2001)
Arthur Miller's forgotten son (Suzanna Andrews, September 2007)
Interview with Miller (James Kaplan, November 1991)
Excerpted from Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, to be published October 12th by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), HarperCollins (Canada and UK); © 2010 by LSAS International, Inc.
WATCH: Hollywood Style Star: Marilyn Monroe


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subset: commoncrawl


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Belfast Slip On Loafers
by Hush Puppies
Save 20%
Belfast Slip On Loafers
Casual does not mean sacrificing style. This slip on shoe in handsome leather uppers has an edge to it and features the Hush Puppies Dual Fit System, turning a medium width into a wide simply by removing an insert. Moisture wicking properties, under the foot comfort and hand-sewn, cornerstitch construction, provides easier flexing for walking. The outsole provides traction and durability.


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Tone Control return with house music vocal legend, Robert Owens for a steppin', bass led mantra for the dance floor. Tone Control bring in soulful house star, Sean McCabe on Moog, Rhodes and Organ to complete "Starting With Me". Working the analogue delays, "Stuck On Loop" is a dark and serious dubbed out excursion. Glaswegian producer, James Johnston has been making big waves for vinyl loving, deep house heads recently – he turns in a heavy chorded, bumpin' dub remix to complete this new single, the 12th release on Tone Control Music.
Tone Control are Marcus Harris and Simon Finnegan. The British production duo have been progressively releasing their own brand of electronic soul for over 6 years appealing to house music and leftfield DJ's alike. Following the release of their critically acclaimed "Illusion" single, much lauded by Theo Parrish and Kerri Chandler, the duo have gone on to find wider appeal with their smash "Take Me Away" ft. Adeola Ranson and "Without Your Love" ft. James B. Coleman – remixed by DJ Spinna and played by DJs globally including 'Lil Louis and Kenny Dope.
Robert Owens has played an instrumental part in defining House Music history. Robert was already DJing in Chicago when he met Larry Heard to form Fingers Inc. with Ron Wilson in 1985. Their output included "Bring Down the Walls", and the monumental "Can You Feel It". Robert's subsequent solo releases, led to the classic "Tears" with Frankie Knuckles & Satoshi Tomiie in 1989. Worldwide chart success followed in the 90's with "I'll Be Your Friend". Robert was cited as "The voice of house music" by Mixmag. Since then Robert has worked with an incredible list of influential artists including Photek, London Elektricity, Sandy Rivera, Coldcut, Quentin Harris, and recently Tevo Howard and Kai Alce to name a few. His recent LP's for Compost Records demonstrate his continued inspiration and artistic longevity, maintaining his reputation as the man who breathed life and soul into House Music.
Listen,check for links where to buy: HERE
Released 25th June as an Exclusive Traxsource Promo
Released 16th July 2012 on 12" Vinyl
Released 23rd July 2012 on Digital Download from all Major Stores and Dance Specialists


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NCAA 2012: PC Perspective Bracket Competition!!
Subject: Editorial | March 12, 2012 - 04:51 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: ncaa, giveaway, contest
For me, this is one of the most exciting times of the year. Sure, there are video cards or something coming out, but I'm talking about the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament. And what better way to celebrate the fun than by having a friendly competition with our readers at PC Perspective to win some prizes!
To sign up, all you need to do is head to http://pcper-com.mayhem.cbssports.com/e and sign up for an account and join our group. That password? It's "pcper.com" - pretty simple. You need to hurry though as the deadline is Thursday morning and we are limited to 400 people in the competition.
What can you win? Well I am still getting that finalized but you can be sure there will be an AMD Radeon HD 7000-series graphics card at the minimum and like some secondary prizes as well!
Have fun and go Cats!
Video News
Added this onto last years post on the forums as there was no new thread. I'm in. Finished a close 4th last year.
Thanks Ryan
Go Cats! ..just those bear ones instead of wild
Im in. Thanks for the invite! Cats for the win!
sorry I neglected to sign in. I am Jerry.
I was 2nd place last year. My Galaxy 560Ti says hello! Can't wait to try and win another free upgrade!
After last year's near last place finish - I plan to make my picks - then pick the opposite for guaranteed win!
Miss last years contest so I'll give it a go this year. Need a GPU since I wasn't really planning to get on now when the Ivy B. comes but having the extra power doesn't hurt at all :) .
Best of luck to you all.
I'm trying to get in, awaiting an email from CBS sports I guess? Need a pool password from a "pool manager."
Ok, I'm in. Like i have a chance?


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St. Louis challenges Missouri ban on gay marriage
ST. LOUIS (AP) — St. Louis officials have challenged Missouri's constitutional ban on gay marriage by issuing four same-sex marriage licenses in a City Hall ceremony.
Four gay couples were married Wednesday in the office of Mayor Francis Slay in a ceremony presided over by a municipal judge.
Attorney General Chris Koster went to court Thursday seeking to stop the marriages.
St. Louis Circuit Judge Rex Burlison denied a temporary restraining order but will consider whether to grant an injunction at a later date.
Burlison said St. Louis officials have agreed not to issue more marriage licenses to same-sex couples at this time and would do so in the future only after notifying the court and attorney general's office.
State voters approved the constitutional ban on gay marriage in 2004.
Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com
Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.


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Barack Obama is unqualified for his office by ability, experience and temperament, so maybe he can't help being a bad president. But he is a divisive president–the most viciously divisive in my lifetime, at least–by choice. Many Democrats criticized him for launching a partisan attack on Republicans while the bodies were still warm at the Navy Yard. Michael Ramirez weighs in:
Obama is passionate about only one thing: his hatred for Republicans, and for conservative principles. His callousness toward the Navy Yard victims is of a piece with his eagerness to capitulate on Syria, so that he can get back to the only war he really cares about: his war on the GOP.


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Football Highlight Of The Week: Brandon Bigalow Of The Cal Bears Breaking Tackles For A 81yr TD Rush Against Ohio State!
Credits/shout out: @kennedystarbux
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Bataan Faigao, the beloved Naropa University professor who directed the school's Traditional Eastern Arts program, and the co-founder and long-time director of the Rocky Mountain T'ai-chi Ch'uan Foundation, died last weekend while on a pilgrimage in China. He was 67.
Naropa will hold a public memorial service at 1:30 p.m. Oct. 6 at the university's Nalanda Events Center.
"Bataan and his late wife, Jane Faigao, were instrumental in founding Naropa's Traditional Eastern Arts program, and their extraordinary gifts as instructors of T'ai-chi Ch'uan benefited countless students over the past 30-plus years," Naropa President Charles Lief said in a prepared statement. "We are very fortunate that Bataan understood the teachings he experienced from his own heart teacher, Master Cheng Man-Ch'ing, and generously and effectively transmitted those teachings to a new generation of teachers who are keeping the lineage alive."
Born Dec. 1, 1944 in Cebu, Philippines, Faigao moved to New York City as a teen. There, he later met and married his late wife Jane in 1966. The couple studied T'ai-chi -- an internal Chinese martial art -- under Grandmaster Cheng Man-ching in New York from 1968 until Cheng's death in 1975. They then moved to Boulder and began their relationship with Naropa and founded the Rocky Mountain T'ai-chi Ch'uan Foundation.
Bataan Faigao continued to teach T'ai-chi through the foundation and at Naropa until his death.
"T'ai-chi Ch'uan is a journey of spiritual discovery. I encourage students to work hard and to adhere to principles," Faigao wrote about his philosophy of teaching the discipline on the foundation's website. "I teach T'ai-chi Ch'uan as a complete system for health, meditation, self-defense, and as a way of the tao. Learning this art is a process that takes care of the external to get to the internal, going back and forth from form to application, understanding and experience."
What: Memorial service for Bataan Faigao
When: 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Oct. 6
Where: Naropa University's Nalanda Events Center, 6287 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder
Beth Rosenfeld studied T'ai-chi under Faigao and his wife starting in 1983 and is now a teacher at the Rocky Mountain T'ai-chi Ch'uan Foundation. "Most people have egos with sharp edges and you bump up against it and it's abrasive, and Bataan did not have those," Rosenfeld said of her teacher and friend. "He was an amazing person and very down to earth. He never judged anybody."
Rosenfeld said that, as a teacher, Faigao was gifted in his ability to transmit knowledge without saying much of anything out loud.
"He was more likely to show you and touch you than to tell you," she said. "Anybody with familiarity could tell you, 'OK, put your hands here, and your feet here.' That wasn't what made people attracted to study with Bataan. He didn't do T'ai-chi. He was T'ai-chi, and that is really the goal, to embody it."
Faigao was on sabbatical from Naropa this semester and traveled to China in early September with a group of martial artists to visit some of the country's sacred places, Rosenfeld said. She said he received word in July that he had terminal cancer, but was not ready to make his condition public.
Faigao died on Sept. 23, Rosenfeld said, from an unknown cause and was cremated in China on Friday. No autopsy was performed.
She said the shock of Faigao's death was softened when friends and family learned he died at Wu Dang Shan, a sacred mountain village considered the spiritual center of the T'ai-chi Ch'uan.
"I think it is the main thing that is helping everybody accept this unexpected turn of events," Rosenfeld said. "When I told (my) class that is where he died and the significance of it, I could feel everyone's heart just lifted a little bit."
Faigao also was a published poet whose work was included in the 1993 book "Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English." He gave public readings in New York City and in Boulder through Naropa, university officials said. He received awards from the Boulder Arts Council in 1982 and 1984 for his work.
Faigao is survived by two adult daughters and five grandchildren.
His younger daughter is popular Boulder-area singer-songwriter Wendy Woo.
Woo recorded an album of spoken-word poetry and music with her father is 2001 titled Bataan Faigao and Wendy Woo: Ecolalia. The album was dedicated to Jane Faigao, who died of breast cancer that same year. The Denver Post ranked it one of the Top 10 local CDs of 2001.


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For more information call: (614) 448-4055 or email email@example.com
Key facts
Seasonal influenza is an acute viral infection caused by an influenza virus.
There are 3 types of seasonal influenza viruses – A, B and C. Type A influenza viruses are further classified into subtypes according to the combinations of various virus surface proteins. Among many subtypes of influenza A viruses, influenza A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) subtypes are currently circulating among humans.
Influenza viruses circulate in all parts of the world. Type C influenza cases occur much less frequently than A and B. That is why only influenza A and B viruses are included in seasonal influenza vaccines.
Signs and symptoms
Seasonal influenza is characterized by a sudden onset of high fever, cough (usually dry), headache, muscle and joint pain, severe malaise (feeling unwell), sore throat and runny nose. Cough can be severe and can last 2 or more weeks. Most people recover from fever and other symptoms within a week without requiring medical attention. But influenza can cause severe illness or death especially in people at high risk (see below). The time from infection to illness, known as the incubation period, is about 2 days.
Who is at risk?
Yearly influenza epidemics can seriously affect all populations, but the highest risk of complications occur among children younger than age 2 years, adults aged 65 years or older, pregnant women, and people of any age with certain medical conditions, such as chronic heart, lung, kidney, liver, blood or metabolic diseases (such as diabetes), or weakened immune systems.
Seasonal influenza spreads easily and can sweep through schools, nursing homes, businesses or towns. When an infected person coughs, infected droplets get into the air and another person can breathe them in and be exposed. The virus can also be spread by hands contaminated with influenza viruses. To prevent transmission, people should cover their mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing, and wash their hands regularly.
Seasonal epidemics and disease burden
In temperate climates, seasonal epidemics occur mainly during winter while in tropical regions, influenza may occur throughout the year, causing outbreaks more irregularly.
Influenza occurs globally with an annual attack rate estimated at 5%–10% in adults and 20%–30% in children. Illnesses can result in hospitalization and death mainly among high-risk groups (the very young, elderly or chronically ill). Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths.
In industrialized countries most deaths associated with influenza occur among people age 65 or older. Epidemics can result in high levels of worker/school absenteeism and productivity losses. Clinics and hospitals can be overwhelmed during peak illness periods.
The precise effects of seasonal influenza epidemics in developing countries are not known, but research estimates indicate that a large percent of child deaths associated with influenza occur in developing countries every year.
The most effective way to prevent the disease and/or severe outcomes from the illness is vaccination. Safe and effective vaccines are available and have been used for more than 60 years. Among healthy adults, influenza vaccine can provide reasonable protection. However among the elderly, influenza vaccine may be less effective in preventing illness but may reduce severity of disease and incidence of complications and deaths.
Vaccination is especially important for people at higher risk of serious influenza complications, and for people who live with or care for high risk individuals.
WHO recommends annual vaccination for:
Influenza vaccination is most effective when circulating viruses are well-matched with vaccine viruses. Influenza viruses are constantly changing, and the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) – a partnership of National Influenza Centres around the world –monitors the influenza viruses circulating in humans.
For many years WHO has updated its recommendation on vaccine composition biannually that targets the 3 (trivalent) most representative virus types in circulation (two subtypes of influenza A viruses and one B virus). Starting with the 2013-2014 northern hemisphere influenza season, quadrivalent vaccine composition has been recommended with a second influenza B virus in addition to the viruses in the conventional trivalent vaccines. Quadrivalent influenza vaccines are expected to provide wider protection against influenza B virus infections.
Antiviral drugs for influenza are available in some countries and may reduce severe complications and deaths. Ideally they need to be administered early (within 48 hours of onset of symptoms) in the disease. There are 2 classes of such medicines:
Some influenza viruses develop resistance to the antiviral medicines, limiting the effectiveness of treatment. WHO monitors antiviral susceptibility among circulating influenza viruses to provide timely guidance for antiviral use in clinical management and potential chemoprophylaxis.
WHO response
WHO, with its partners, monitors influenza globally, recommends seasonal influenza vaccine compositions twice a year for the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and supports Member States efforts to develop prevention and control strategies.
WHO works to strengthen national and regional influenza diagnostic capacities including antiviral susceptibility monitoring, disease surveillance, outbreak responses, and increase vaccine coverage among high-risk groups.
1Currently, WHO recommends neuraminidase inhibitors as the first-line treatment for people requiring antiviral therapy, as the currently circulating influenza viruses are resistant to the adamantanes.


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The bypass pruner LÖWE 14 convinces with its compact design and good balance. By installing a dual shock absorber we have minimized cutting impact, the slim and pointed design offers as well in tight locations access and the possibility for a clean cut. The blade with built-in wire cutter completes the picture of this lightweight model.
The anvil pruner LÖWE 15 is once more a combination of an anvil pruner and a bypass pruner (analogous to LÖWE 7 and LÖWE 8). The combination of anvil technology plus bypass geometry convinces right down the line. This pruner likewise offers due to its compact design and lightweight a perfect balance and an incredible easy cut.
We offer the new series each with two different and established handle styles:
14.104 standard handle shape
14.107 handles curved inwards, ideal for small hands
15.104 standard handle shape
15.107 handles curved inwards, ideal for small hands
Gebr. Schroder GmbH manufactures and distributes worldwide, a range of high quality pruners and cutters under the brand Original LOWE. In 1923, company founder Walther Schroder developed the first anvil pruner in the world. Today Gebr. Schroder GmbH is managed by the third generation Schroder family and is the world leader in anvil pruners.
Original LOWE offers a complete range of professional pruners and loppers for all aspects of commercial and domestic Horticulture and Gardening.
Original LOWE also provides a range of professional tools utilizing the anvil principle for applications into industry and trade, cutters like slat cutters, tube cutters, miter cutters and other specialized cutters, complete the range of quality cutting tools.
All Original LOWE shears are manufactured to the highest standards of quality at our own production facility in Kiel - Made in Germany.
We hope you enjoy browsing through the world of Original LOWE shears. Original LOWE - Because every cut matters.


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Cleverly vows to win shootout against Krasniqi
by @livefight
WBO World Light-Heavyweight Champion Nathan Cleverly says his clash against big-hitting Serbian Robin Krasniqi will be like Andy Murray facing Novak Djokovic - only he will come out the winner.
Unbeaten Cleverly, 25, puts his title and record on the line at Wembley Arena on Saturday 16th March on a huge night of boxing joint-headlined with Ricky Burns WBO/IBF World Lightweight Unification fight against Miguel Vazquez, plus George Groves challenging for the Vacant European Super-Middleweight title, heavyweight Dereck Chisora* and Commonwealth Super-Featherweight Champion Liam Walsh, all live and exclusive on BoxNation (Sky Ch. 437/Virgin Ch. 546).
Cleverly, who stopped Shaw Hawk in eight rounds last November in his US debut, is looking forward to a shootout with the heavy-handed Serb who won his last four fights by KO to get himself into the mandatory position for a shot at the Welsh heros title.
And with British tennis star Murray being blasted out by Krasniqis countryman and world number one Djokovic in the Australian Open final last month to crush Murrays hope of a second major win, Cleverly says he won't let Krasniqi end his dream of going on to unify the titles.
"I watched Murray in the Australian open against Djokovic and that was a great battle over nearly four hours. He held his own, taking some big shots from the Serbian and giving it back, but despite a brave fight and battling back a couple of times, he was out-gunned by Djokovic and also the blisters on his feet couldnt have helped. Murray a great British talent, though, and hes my call to win Wimbledon this year, Said Cleverly.
Krasniqi is on a roll at the moment, hes stopped his last four opponents, three of them inside four rounds and one in the last round. Hes never been stopped in 41 fights with only two early points losses in his career. Ive got twelve rounds or 36 minutes to stop Krasniqi in, this wont be going the distance, its going to be a real fire-fight between us,
"Facing a big puncher doesnt bother me, it excites me. People were making Tony Bellew out to be some big puncher but when we got in the ring and I took one of his shots it surprised me by how soft he hits, so reputations dont always count,
He added, "While a tennis player can come back and win in his next match, for a boxer a loss is a massive set back. Im so close to a big unification fight and a slip-up against Krasniqi will be a massive blow to me facing one of the world champions next so its crucial that I win this fight.
Tickets for Rule Britannia, priced at £40, £50, £75, £100, £150 and £200 are available from Eventim on 0844 249 1000 or www.eventim.co.uk
Rule Britannia is live and exclusive on The Home of Champions BoxNation (Sky Ch. 437/Virgin Ch. 546). Join at www.boxnation.com
*Dereck Chisoras appearance on the show is strictly subject to him being successful with his license application to the British Boxing Board of Control.


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Here we are at the end of yet another quarter. Amid finishing projects and final papers I felt at a loss of what to blog about. Then, the thought of being so busy with life and school work seemed to be an idea in its self. I an eagerly completing my final work in the last week of the quarter. How are all of you Antioch students doing with the week sprint to the finish?
Life seems to repeat itself, because this time last year I took a week vacation to Jamaica and then wrote a reflective blog about the trip and my experiences. Here I am a year later, and I am going back to Jamaica at the end of this quarter. This time I am writing about it before I go.
My concerns are primarily centered around school. Finishing all my coursework is at the top of the list. I have one paper left to finish, an art project for a psych class, and more team editing for my Capstone Project. Secondly, I have to plan my course load for next quarter….which will be my last quarter before graduating. Third, I have to make sure all my paperwork for completion and graduation are in order. Lastly, I have to pack and gather all my tickets, itinerary and everything I need for the trip.
All my efforts will be worthwhile. I am looking forward to two weeks of warm sun and clear water before beginning my last quarter here at Antioch. What are your plans for the student break?


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Lotus & Troy Dunnit - Nu Flava [Montreal Rapper]
First single of the upcoming Anti-Cupid EP produced by Lotus, written by Lotus and Troy Dunnit. Visit http://lotusdunnit.com for more details. Video produced by Sixteen Pads Films.
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New Heights
- Order Reprints
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So much for reversion to the mean.
Last year turned out to be a great one for U.S. stocks, with the Standard & Poor's 500 notching a total return of 32.4%, more than double its return a year earlier. The rally had impressive depth and breadth: Small-, mid- and large-company stocks all averaged gains in excess of 30%, though small stocks shined the brightest, with the Russell 2000 up 38.8%. Value stocks drove the biggest gains: The 50 stocks with the lowest price-to-forward earnings ratio in the S&P 500 returned 64%, according to Jeffrey Rubin of Birinyi Associates, a research firm in Westport, Conn. It was a far cry from 2011 and early 2012, when risk-averse investors piled into utility stocks and other dividend-payers. Top performers last year included Walt Disney (ticker: DIS), which returned 55%, and American International Group (AIG), which returned 45%.
So it was a particularly good year for the stockpickers, which helped propel a new crop of fund firms to the top of the Barron's/Lipper Fund Family Ranking this year. The 2013 survey's winner is Boston-based Natixis Global Asset Management, an "affiliate" manager of 26 independently run fund companies, best known for the $106 billion Harris Associates, which advises the Oakmark Funds; and the venerable bond shop Loomis Sayles, which has $200 billion in assets.
Sixty-four fund companies qualified for this year's one-year Barron's/Lipper Fund Family Ranking. Because U.S. stocks are the largest category and given the highest weighting in the annual ranking, domestic equity fund performance was a big factor in determining who finished where. The one-year weightings: General (U.S.) Equity, 40%; World Equity, 17%; Mixed Asset, 18%; Taxable Bond, 22%, and Tax-Exempt Bond, 3%.
Natixis placed first in the U.S. stock category, its performance helped by managers such as Bill Nygren, who co-manages the $12 billion Oakmark fund (ticker: OAKMX). Natixis, which also has headquarters in Paris (and is owned by the French financial services company of the same name), did not appear in last year's ranking because it did not have the requisite funds to qualify.
Unlike last year's survey, when some of the winners climbed from exceptionally low rankings in 2012, there was less year-to-year volatility among the top finishers. Putnam Investment Management placed second, down one spot from the top spot last year. The Boston firm owes its strong second-place showing to the performance of its U.S. stock funds.
Finishing third is GE Asset Management, which climbed from 14th place in 2013. With a big institutional focus that includes the GE pension fund, the money manager oversees $119 billion, about $25 billion of which is in mutual funds, though these funds are not widely available to the general investing public. (For more on GE Asset Management, see Paul Colonna's profile.) It did especially well in the two equity categories and taxable bonds.
Coming in fourth was Lord Abbett, up from 13th place last year, helped by a good showing in every category except tax-exempt bonds. Placing fifth was Waddell & Reed Investment Management, a subsidiary of Waddell & Reed Financial (WDR), a publicly traded asset manager based in Overland Park, Kan. (It also owns Ivy Investment Management, which came in 11th.) Waddell's strongest result was in the mixed-asset group, which tracks funds that use a combination of stocks and bonds.
For the first time since 2010, all 10 of the S&P 500's industry groups finished in positive territory. But in this business everything is relative, and the top managers had more of a focus on the biggest winners: Consumer discretionary stocks rose 41%; health care, 39%; industrials, 38%; and financials, 33%. Last year's worst sectors were utilities, up 9%, and telecommunication services, which gained 6%.
John Hailer
Company: Natixis Global Asset Management
Title: President and CEO
Total AUM: $838 billion
2013 Ranking: 1
U.S. Retail Funds: 47
Oakmark and Loomis Sayles are two of the most respected fund companies. But mention their parent company, and many U.S. investors would draw a blank.
That's OK with John Hailer, who has played a key role in running Natixis Global Asset Management since 1999. Hailer works out of the firm's Boston headquarters; the French parent company is based in Paris. The firm manages $838 billion globally, about half of it in the U.S. among 26 affiliates—Oakmark and Loomis Sayles make up about 35% of its U.S. assets under management.
Natixis has a centralized, global, fund-distribution arm that sells all its funds and gets them on the right platforms. That allows the fund-management firms, including Harris Associates (Oakmark's parent), Loomis, and Gateway Investment Advisers, to run their portfolios autonomously. With distribution essentially outsourced, the affiliates "put their resources back into investment talent, technology, and their investment culture."
In a recent interview, Hailer was affable, friendly, and funny, at one point characterizing himself as "a young 53." But he is a focused and hard-driving executive intent on growing the firm's business. One of 10 children, Hailer grew up in a busy household. "You had to learn to communicate and grow up with diversity" under one roof, he says with a distinctive Boston accent.
And in that crowded, noisy household, Hailer learned some rules that still apply to how he runs Natixis. The most important thing to remember, he says, "is your own name, and to treat it with respect."
International stocks didn't do quite as well, though the MSCI EAFE index, which tracks foreign large- and mid-size stocks in the developed world, rose 23%. But one important laggard was emerging-market stock funds, which we included in our survey for the first time in our 2012 survey as part of the World Equity category. (For more on how the rankings are calculated, see "How We Rank the Fund Families".) The MSCI Emerging Markets Index was down 2.6%, as rising interest rates in the U.S. put pressure on emerging-market currencies and their equities, as investors found better opportunities with less risk elsewhere.
It wasn't about macro calls or stock-picking for one notable exception, though: No. 6 on our ranking is Dimensional Fund Advisors, which has had great success with its quantitative approach of applying academic research to value-oriented investing strategies. (For more on the company, see "A Different Dimension," Jan. 6.) The firm, based in Austin, Texas, was followed by T. Rowe Price, Hartford Funds, First Investors Management, and MFS Investment Management.
Putnam, T. Rowe Price, Hartford Funds, and MFS all finished in the top 10 of the one-year survey for the second year in a row.
A KEY DRIVER FOR THE MARKET in 2013 was investor sentiment, which finally began to shift away from bonds to equities for the first time since the financial crisis. Actively managed stock funds in the U.S. had net inflows of $161 billion last year, the first net inflow for those portfolios since 2007, according to the Investment Company Institute, a trade group representing mutual funds. Conversely, actively managed bond funds had net outflows of $83 billion, reversing a trend that had taken hold since the financial crisis as investors fled to safety.
Heading into 2012, investors were "still focused on wanting to be in fixed income and wanting to avoid equities," says Mike Avery, co-manager of the $3.7 billion Waddell & Reed Asset Strategy fund (UNASX). But "that changed fairly drastically going into '13, as the market did better," he says; "It was a huge change in sentiment."
In terms of performance, fixed-income funds had the roughest go, and one of the best-known bond shops -- you know who we're talking about -- suffered greatly. As the Federal Reserve announced, and then began, the tapering of its bond-buying program, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury nearly doubled from 1.6% in May to 3% by the end of 2013. The Barclays U.S. Aggregate, a proxy for investment-grade government and corporate bonds, fell 2.02%, its first negative calendar-year performance since 1999.
The pressure on bonds hurt industry giant Pimco, which finished 54th in our one-year ranking, just 10 spots from the bottom. Perhaps most telling, the Newport Beach, Calif., behemoth finished 60th in taxable bonds, fourth from last.
In previous years, Pimco was combined with its parent Allianz Global Investors, the German-based firm. This year, however, Lipper looked at the two fund complexes separately, in part because they have different management teams and fund boards. But Allianz did not qualify for the most recent survey because it did not have a municipal-debt fund that met the survey's requirements, according to Jeff Tjornehoj, head of Lipper Americas Research.
Bob Reynolds
Company: Putnam Investments
Title: President and CEO
Total AUM: $150 billion
2013 Ranking: 2
U.S. Retail Funds: 108
After years of mixed results, investment performance is shaping up at Putnam Investment Management, where Bob Reynolds took over as CEO in mid-2008. The firm finished second in this year's one-year ranking, its third top 15 finish in the last four years.
More importantly, Putnam's long-term performance is on the mend. The firm placed No. 2 out of 55 fund families in the five-year survey, which covers Reynolds' tenure at Putnam.
"What we've tried to do, from day one when someone is hired to manage a fund, is that they are held accountable and responsible for the results," says Reynolds, 61, whose accent still bears a trace of his native West Virginia.
The portfolio managers Reynolds has brought in include Nick Thakore, who runs Putnam Voyager and Bob Ewing, who oversees the Putnam Fund for Growth and Income, both of which are in the top 15% of their respective Lipper peer groups based on five-year returns. Thakore and Ewing both worked at Fidelity, where Reynolds served as a senior executive for many years.
Reynolds has also tried to strengthen the equity research team, making it more global and collaborative, with the analysts helping to manage money.
Investors have started to take notice of Putnam's performance. For the first year since 2000, Putnam had a collective net inflow for its retail mutual-fund business last year. "It comes down to having the right people and the right incentive structure and providing them the right resources to perform," says Reynolds.
One reason for the Pimco's underperformance: the firm's flagship Pimco Total Return fund (PTTAX), managed by Bill Gross, finished the year down 2.06%, near the bottom of its Lipper category. Because the ranking is asset-weighted -- that is, the performance of the funds with the most assets are counted more than those with the least assets -- the $237 billion Total Return dragged down Pimco's performance.
"Our focus always is long-term performance for our clients, to manage risk and to deliver returns for them over a complete market cycle," Pimco said in a prepared statement. Indeed, Pimco ranked first in the five-year ranking, surpassing 54 firms.
Loomis Sayles is a much smaller ($200 billion in assets, total) and quieter firm than Pimco, but vice chairman and veteran manager Dan Fuss, 80, is venerated in the industry. Fuss's management helped propel Natixis to its No. 1 spot overall and in the taxable-bond category. His $22 billion Loomis Sayles Bond fund (LSBRX) and $1.2 billion Loomis Sayles Fixed Income (LSFIX), both finished at the very top of their Lipper categories last year. The bond fund gained 5.8%, while the fixed-income fund was up nearly 7% -- excellent showings in a tough year for bonds. "Individual security selection certainly helped," Fuss says.
On that front, investment-grade corporate bonds such as those issued by Morgan Stanley , Jefferies Group , and Ford Motor also did particularly well. At the end of last year, nearly 16% of Loomis Sayles Bond was in investment-grade corporates.
"There was a general narrowing of corporate [bond] spreads in the investment-grade area," says Fuss, who began his career at the firm in 1976, pushing up prices and helping performance.
High-yield bonds, which returned 7.4% on average, helped buoy Loomis along with other managers. Steven Rocco, a manager of the $2.8 billion Lord Abbett High Yield fund (LHYAX), says that bonds further down the capital structure of companies worked better last year, pointing in particular to bonds rated B and CCC, instead of BB. "You are getting paid for the risk," Rocco says. "Defaults are nonexistent now, and companies are hoarding cash."
Among the holdings that worked in the fund was a high-yield bond issued by First Data with a coupon of 12.625%. It returned 22.3% last year. The fund returned nearly 10% last year, good for a finish in the top 10% of its category.
High-yield holdings also helped the $1.8 billion Lord Abbett Income fund (LAGVX), which finished the year up a mere 0.5%, but outperformed 80% of its peers. The fund is more focused on corporate-bond issues, and "The way you win in investment-grade fixed income is to accumulate a lot of little wins and don't have many disasters," says Andrew O'Brien, a manager of that fund. Lord Abbett's little wins in fixed income led to a third-place finish in the taxable-income category, no doubt helping to secure its fourth-place ranking overall.
Paul Colonna
Company: GE Asset Management
Title: President and Chief Investment Officer
Total AUM: $119 billion
2013 Ranking: 3
U.S. Retail Funds: 7
GE Asset Management is not a typical mutual-fund family. For one thing, it has an institutional focus, which includes the $48 billion pension fund for General Electric. What's more, its $25 billion of mutual-fund assets aren't widely available. The Elfun Funds are open only to GE employees and their families, for example. But retail investors can buy shares of the GE institutional funds directly through LPL or TD Ameritrade.
Paul Colonna says that he and his team expected 2013 to be less volatile than the preceding year, especially as the investors gained confidence. "And we got that," he says. The firm wisely steered away from utilities and telecommunications stocks; those sectors struggled as rates rose and the economy improved.
On the fixed-income side, the firm's portfolio managers found opportunities in sectors that rewarded taking on more credit risk, such as high-yield bonds. "There's decent demand for credit products, and not a lot of net new supply," Colonna says. Even so, he expects another challenging year for fixed income.
Colonna, 45, worked early in his career as a bond-fund manager at Freddie Mac in Washington, D.C., helping to run mortgage portfolios. He joined GE in 2000; nowadays he oversees GE's in-house teams of fixed-income and equity managers. "I want to make sure we continue to bring the groups together," he says. "And ensure we have the right platforms and infrastructure for analytics." Those analytics are telling him to expect a good year for stocks, albeit with more volatility, and not another 30%-plus return.
GE Asset Management is not a typical mutual-fund family. For one thing, it has an institutional focus, which includes the $48 billion pension fund for General Electric . What's more, its $25 billion of mutual-fund assets aren't widely available. The Elfun Funds are open only to GE employees and their families, for example. But retail investors can buy shares of the GE institutional funds directly through LPL or TD Ameritrade.
Paul Colonna says that he and his team expected 2013 to be less volatile than the preceding year, especially as the investors gained confidence. "And we got that," he says. The firm wisely steered away from utilities and telecommunications stocks; those sectors struggled as rates rose and the economy improved.
On the fixed-income side, the firm's portfolio managers found opportunities in sectors that rewarded taking on more credit risk, such as high-yield bonds. "There's decent demand for credit products, and not a lot of net new supply," Colonna says. Even so, he expects another challenging year for fixed income.
Colonna, 45, worked early in his career as a bond-fund manager at Freddie Mac in Washington, D.C., helping to run mortgage portfolios. He joined GE in 2000; nowadays he oversees GE's in-house teams of fixed-income and equity managers. "I want to make sure we continue to bring the groups together," he says. "And ensure we have the right platforms and infrastructure for analytics." Those analytics are telling him to expect a good year for stocks, albeit with more volatility, and not another 30%-plus return.
Daria Foster
Company: Lord Abbett
Title: Managing Partner
Total AUM: $137 billion
2013 Ranking: 4
U.S. Retail Funds: 44
When asked about Lord Abbett's strong showing in this year's ranking, Daria Foster says there was no secret sauce.
The key: "It's making sure your focus is on the long term, and that your philosophy is consistently applied," says Foster, who has been the top executive at the closely held money manager since 2007.
Lord Abbett emphasizes fundamental and quantitative research, and pays close attention to risk. "We apply those disciplines every single day," says Foster, 59.
The firm's investment approach has paid off over various time horizons. Lord Abbett finished a very respectable 14th out of 55 fund families in the five-year ranking, and 15th out of 48 firms in the 10-year ranking.
Based in Jersey City, N.J., Lord Abbett is a much different firm than the one Foster joined in 1990 as director of fixed-income marketing. She was then charged with building up the firm's $2 billion institutional business. It has since grown to $32 billion.
Named partner in 1996, Foster helped to expand the firm's fund lineup, eventually overseeing retail fund distribution in 2005. In those early days, she recalls, the asset manager was known more as a large-company value manager. It began adding international stock funds in 2003. Nowadays, about two-thirds of Lord Abbett's assets are in fixed-income funds. The firm recently added two emerging-market debt funds, but Foster is quick to add, "We are not trying to be all things to all people."
There may be no secret sauce, but Lord Abbett does appear to have a recipe for investment success.
Leveraged loans, up 5.3%, were another bright spot, as were certain mortgage securities that benefited from rising rates. "As rates moved higher, the probability of refinancing dropped sharply," explains Bill Kohli, co-head of fixed income at Putnam. That helped securities such as agency-backed collateralized mortgage obligations, including those structured to pay only interest to bond holders. "As refinancing risk goes down, those securities go up in value," Kohli says, who points to Putnam Diversified Income Trust (PDINX) as a winner for that strategy, among others. The $5.4 billion fund's total return last year was 8.1%, besting nearly 90% of its Lipper peers.
Of the top five firms for 2013, Waddell & Reed ranked the lowest (18th) in the U.S. equity category, but the highest (8th) in tax-exempt bond funds. Putnam came in 28th for the municipal-bond category, while Natixis, GE, and Lord Abbett all ranked around the 50th percentile. Waddell's high ranking in the municipal-bond category is truly a case of relative performance winning out. The $731 million Waddell & Reed Municipal High-Income fund (UMUHX), which makes up about half its assets in high-yield municipal debt, lost 3.8% last year, but still finished in the top 10% of its category.
BUT ULTIMATELY, 2013 was driven by stock-pickers. "We went into [2013] thinking that stocks were a lot cheaper than bonds," says Bill Nygren, the well-regarded value manager with Chicago-based Harris Associates, a Natixis firm. Nygren's Oakmark fund returned 37.4% last year, placing it in the top 4% of its Lipper peer group. "We were helped by what we didn't own and what we owned more of," he says. The theme of safer, dividend-paying stocks such as utilities looked long in the tooth and too expensive, Nygren adds, and sectors such as technology, financials, and industrials "looked like they had a better opportunity." They did. Some of the fund's better performers last year were Principal Financial Group (PFG), with a total return of 77%; FedEx (FDX) , which gained 58%; and MasterCard (MA), with a total return of 71%.
David Herro runs the $28.8 billion Oakmark International fund (OAKIX). With a total return of 29.3%, the fund bested 97% of the funds in its Lipper group, no doubt helping propel Natixis to the No. 2 spot for the World Equity category.
The key to that fund's performance? "Getting exposure to Japan and being extremely overweight [there] at the beginning of the year, and having a moderate overweight in global financials," Herro says. The Nikkei finished 2013 up nearly 60% in local currency. "If you weren't exposed there, that hurt you," recalls Herro, who says his weighting in Japanese stocks peaked last year at about 25%, some seven percentage points more than the fund's benchmark, the MSCI World ex-U.S. Index. Stocks that helped the fund's performance included Daiwa Securities (8601.Japan), Toyota Motor (7203.Japan), and Credit Suisse (CSGN.Switzerland), all of which gained more than 25% last year.
THE TWO NATIXIS GEMS -- Oakmark and Loomis Sayles -- have always been consistent performers. But the comeback story is still No. 2-ranked Putnam. In the last two years, Putnam has made a big climb under Bob Reynolds, a longtime Fidelity executive who took over the then-struggling firm in July 2008. After finishing near the bottom of our ranking two years ago, Putnam shot up to No. 1 last year, propelled by very strong performances in U.S. and world equities, and both bond categories. This year's second-place ranking reflected another strong showing across all categories -- second in U.S. equity, ninth in World Equity, 15th in Mixed Equity, seventh in taxable bonds and 28th in municipal bonds.
A big lift to Putnam's U.S. equity ranking came from one of its flagship funds, Putnam Voyager, whose 2013 total return of 44.3% outperformed 97% of its Lipper peers. "There was no magic bullet; it was about broad-based stock-picking," says Nick Thakore, manager of the Putnam Voyager fund (PVOYX).
While getting into the right sectors was important, Thakore says, that wasn't what drove overall performance. "We didn't get most of our outperformance as a group by betting on those sectors." And it helped to underweight or avoid big-name disappointments such as International Business Machines (IBM), whose stock fell 2% last year. The fund's best performers included Facebook (FB), which more than doubled last year; Best Buy (BBY), which appreciated more than 200%, and Delta Air Lines (DAL), which climbed more than 100%.
Putnam also acquitted itself well in the mixed-asset category, in which portfolio managers earn their stripes by making the right decisions based on their weightings of stocks, bonds, and cash.
"Our bread and butter is to utilize diversification," says Rob Schoen, co-head of the Global Asset Allocation Group at Putnam. "But last year was a dangerous year to be leaning heavily on diversification."
So last year, in portfolios like the $1.8 billion Putnam Dynamic Asset Allocation Growth fund (PAEAX) and the $1.4 billion Putnam Dynamic Asset Allocation Balanced fund (PABAX), Schoen and his colleagues were overweight equities and, concerned about rising interest rates, underweight U.S. Treasuries. They also saw better opportunities in sectors such as high yield, helping to boost performance in those funds, both of which finished in the top 15% of their respective peer groups, with the growth fund gaining 25% and the balanced fund up 19%.
Another special mention goes to MFS Investments. A consistent performer in our survey lately, MFS placed in the top 10 in each of the past three years -- a feat no other fund company has achieved in several years. Its No. 10 rank for 2013 was due in large part to finishing sixth in U.S. equities, thanks to the $30.3 billion MFS Value fund (MEIAX). Ranked in the top 10% of its peer group, the fund had a total return last year of 35.8%. One of the fund's managers, Steven Gorham, attributes its strong showing to seeds that were planted from 2010 through 2012, and even earlier in some cases.
One stock that helped the portfolio was Lockheed Martin (LMT), a large defense contractor whose total return was 68%. Other good calls included Viacom (VIAB), up 68%, and Honeywell (HON), which gained 47%. The fund, says Gorham, tries to focus on "downside protection for our clients" while participating in up markets, though not necessarily beating them. Last year, it did both.
THE BOTTOM-RANKED fund families were a mixed bag of poor performance and poor relative performance. Finishing 60th, four places from the bottom, was State Street Bank & Trust, which was especially hurt by poor showings in U.S. Equity, World Equity, and the balanced-fund category. The bottom four finishers were BMO Asset Management, Wilmington Funds, State Farm Investment Management, and FolioMetrix.
Craig Rawlins, chief investment officer of BMO Global Asset Management, quibbled with Lipper's decision to put the BMO Large Cap Value (MLVIX) and the BMO Large Cap Growth (MLCIX) funds into multi-asset categories instead of value and growth, respectively. Though both funds are tiny, with little more than $200 million in assets for each, they're large relative to BMO's other funds, and their return of 34% (each) in 2013 could have nudged the firm a ever-so-slightly higher.
Hank Herrmann
Company: Waddell & Reed Financial
Title: CEO and Chairman
Total AUM: $28 billion
2013 Ranking: 5
U.S. Retail Funds: 20
Hank Herrmann, the CEO of Waddell & Reed Financial, wears many hats: chief executive of a publicly traded company, macro strategist, and chairman of the investment policy committee.
But his true colors emerge during the firm's daily morning meeting when the investment team gathers to hash out ideas. Skeptical, focused, and curious, Herrmann likes to probe and ask questions, just another analyst trying to come up with investment ideas. After all, that's how he started at Waddell: Herrmann, 71, grew up on Long Island and worked on Wall Street in the 1960s, before moving to the Midwest to work for Waddell & Reed in 1971 as a technology analyst.
Looking back on 2013, Herrmann says he expected stocks to return 7% or 8%, their historical average. Despite the big rise, "stock-picking was important," he says. "We have some 80 people focused on bottoms-up research, and that paid off."
Waddell & Reed Financial is parent to Waddell & Reed Investment Management, which finished fifth in our one-year table, thanks to a solid showing across all five categories. W&R funds are sold through the company's network of financial advisors. Waddell & Reed Financial is also parent to Ivy Investment Management, which is ranked separately, coming in at No. 11 this year. Ivy has $72 billion in 32 funds, many of which mimic those offered by Waddell.
In all, the fund complex oversees assets of $128 billion, much smaller than other publicly traded firms such as BlackRock, whose assets total $4.2 trillion, as well as the other four top performers. But that's fine with Herrmann. "Bigger is not better in the asset-management business," he says. "You can lose a lot of flexibility."
What's more, the BMO Mid-Cap Growth fund (MRMSX) last year did not hold highflying stocks such as Netflix (NFLX), Tesla Motors (TSLA) or LinkedIn (LNKD) because those companies "either don't meet our criteria or have valuations that we think are high relative to what they offer," says Rawlins. As a result, the fund returned 29%, trailing 90% of its category.
Samuel Fraundorf, president of Wilmington Trust Advisors, notes that the Wilmington Large Cap Growth fund (VLCPX) has about 70% of its assets in large-company names, with the remainder in midsize stocks, which hurt relative performance, he says. And the Wilmington Multi-Manager International fund (MVIEX) was hampered by its 33% stake in emerging markets in the first half of last year.
Scott Hintz, assistant vice president of mutual funds at State Farm, says "while we participated in the market gain, we were not surprised at all" when told of that fund family's results. "It comes down to what worked in this market environment. And what didn't work was a high-quality, conservative risk profile [that we use in our funds]."
For example, the State Farm Growth fund (STFGX) returned 27% last year, but it trailed more than 80% of its peers in Lipper's large-cap core equity category. The fund was underweight technology, consumer cyclical, and financials, hurting its relative performance.
Whether a more-conservative approach to portfolio management works in 2014, after two straight years of outsize returns with other strategies, will be one of the key factors in deciding next year's Barron's/Lipper Fund Family Ranking.
How We Rank the Fund Families
To qualify for the Barron's/Lipper fund survey, a group must have at least three funds in Lipper's general U.S.-stock category, as well as one in world equity, which combines global and international funds. (Last year was the first time we included the performance of emerging-market funds in the world-equity category, though fund companies are not required to offer one.) We also require at least one mixed-asset (or balanced) fund, which holds stocks and bonds. Fund shops also must have at least two taxable-bond funds and one tax-exempt offering.
Each fund's returns are adjusted for 12b-1 fees, which are used for marketing and distribution expenses. Funds typically factor these fees into returns, which better reflects the returns investors would see after these annual fees have been deducted. But our aim is to measure the manager's skill, uncomplicated by expenses. Fund loads, or sales charges, aren't included in the calculation of returns, either.
Each fund's return is measured against those of all funds in its Lipper category (such as small-value). That leads to a percentile ranking, with 100 the highest and 1 the lowest, which is then weighted by asset size relative to the fund family's other assets in its general classification. If a family's biggest funds do well, that boosts its overall ranking; poor performance in the biggest funds can hurt a firm's ranking.
Finally, the score is multiplied by the weighting of its general classification, as determined by the entire Lipper universe of funds. The category weightings for the one-year results: general equity, 40%; world equity, 17%; mixed-asset, 18%; taxable bond, 22%; and tax-exempt bond, 3%. The category weightings for the five-year results: general equity, 42%; world equity, 16%; mixed-asset, 18%; taxable bonds, 21% and tax-exempt bonds, 3%. The category weightings for the 10-year results: general equity, 44%; world equity, 15%; mixed-asset, 17%; taxable bonds, 20%; and tax-exempt bonds, 4%.
The scoring: Say a company has a fund in the general U.S. equity category that has $500 million in assets and that it accounts for half of the company's assets in that category. Its ranking is the 75th percentile. The first calculation would be 75 times 0.50, which comes to 37.5. That score is then multiplied by 40%, general equity's overall weighting in Lipper's universe. So it would be 37.5 times 0.4, which equals 15. Similar calculations are done for each fund in our study. Then, all the numbers are added up for a total score. The fund shop with the highest score wins, both for every category and overall. The same process is repeated for the five- and 10-year rankings based on their weightings.
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text:
Harbinger for Holidays
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Orange County's largest shopping centers saw taxable sales rise about 7% over the 12 months ended in June, as property and store improvements, along with a number of OC-exclusive tenants, helped draw customers amid the ongoing economic recovery.
The 29 largest shopping centers here—a mix of malls and outdoor centers—had taxable sales total $6.9 billion for the 12 months through June, according to this week's Business Journal list. That marked the largest gain in the past three years, a streak of annual increases that started after a 7% dive in 2009.
The latest gains came amid a surge of leasing activity, store redesigns and renovations at a number of shopping centers.
Nineteen shopping centers saw taxable sales grow during the 12-month period, based on data for taxable sales from cities and the centers. Three centers had declines, one was about flat, and comparable totals for the prior 12-month period weren't available for six others.
South Coast Plaza once again topped the list, with a more-than-10% increase in taxable sales to $1.4 billion.
The Costa Mesa mall has seen 18 new stores this year and about as many others remodel, helping push its 2012 sales projection to $1.5 billion. That's up about 7% from a year ago.
No. 2 Fashion Island, which saw sales rise almost 11% to $576 million, nabbed its own raft of OC-exclusive retailers and other new tenants. That took place amid a $100 million center makeover that has seen landscaping improvements and now is wrapping up with the addition of about 20,000 square feet of space.
No. 3 Brea Mall, owned by Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group Inc., and No. 4 The Market Place in Tustin maintained their spots on this year's list with sales gains of about 6% and 16%, respectively.
The District at Tustin Legacy rounded out the top five with a 13.2% increase in sales to $364.7 million.
The District took the No. 5 spot from No. 6 Irvine Spectrum Center, where sales rose almost 10% to $355.2 million.
Taxable sales for the top five centers totaled $3.3 billion, accounting for nearly half of the list's total sales for the 12-month period.
The year's biggest percentage gainer was No. 11 The Outlets at Orange, which saw sales jump 21% to about $185.2 million for the 12-month period, good for a move up three spots on the ranking.
Its sales gains—and similarly boosted sales at other centers—was driven by a swell of new tenants added during the past year, according to General Manager Kristin Elfring. New stores at The Outlets include Banana Republic and Nordstrom Rack.
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