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Marilyn Monroe
1926-1962
She sauntered through life as the most delectable sex symbol of
the century and became its most enduring pop confection
By PAUL RUDNICK for Time Magazine
How much deconstruction can one blond bear? Just about everyone
has had a go at Marilyn Monroe. There have been more than 300
biographies, learned essays by Steinem and Kael, countless
documentaries, drag queens, tattoos, Warhol silk screens and
porcelain collector's dolls. Marilyn has gone from actress to
icon to licensed brand name; only Elvis and James Dean have
rivalled her in market share. At this point, she seems almost
beyond comment, like Coca-Cola or Levi's. How did a woman who
died a suicide at 36, after starring in only a handful of
movies, become such an epic commodity?
Much has been made of Marilyn's desperate personal history, the
litany of abusive foster homes and the predatory Hollywood scum
that accompanied her wriggle to stardom. Her heavily flashbulbed
marriages included bouts with baseball great Joe DiMaggio and
literary champ Arthur Miller, and her off-duty trysts involved
Sinatra and the rumor of multiple Kennedys. The unauthorized
tell-alls burst with miscarriages, abortions, rest cures and
frenzied press confuerences announcing her desire to be left
alone. Her death has been variously attributed to an accidental
overdose, political necessity and a Mob hit. Her yummily lurid
bio has provided fodder for everything from a failed Broadway
musical to Jackie Susann's trash classics to a fictionalized
portrait in Miller's play After the Fall. Marilyn's
media-drenched image as a tragic dumb blond has become an
American archetype, along with the Marlboro Man and the
Harley-straddling wild one. Yet biographical trauma, even when
packed with celebrities, cannot account for Marilyn's enduring
stature as a goddess and postage stamp. Jacqueline Onassis will
be remembered for her timeline, for her participation in events
and marriages that mesmerized the planet. Marilyn seems far less
factual, more Cinderella or Circe than mortal. There have been
other megablonds of varying skills, a pinup parade of Jean
Harlow, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren and
Madonna — but why does Marilyn still seem to have patented the
peroxide that they've passed along?
Marilyn may represent some unique alchemy of sex, talent and
Technicolor. She is pure movies. I recently watched her as
Lorelei Lee in her musical smash, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."
The film is an ideal mating of star and role, as Marilyn
deliriously embodies author Anita Loos' seminal, shame-free gold
digger. Lorelei's honey-voiced, pixilated charm may be best
expressed by her line, regarding one of her sugar daddies,
"Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me."
Whenever Lorelei appears onscreen, undulating in second-skin,
cleavage-proud knitwear or the sheerest orange chiffon, all
heads turn, salivate and explode. Who but Marilyn could so
effortlessly justify such luscious insanity? She is the absolute
triumph of political incorrectness. When she swivels aboard a
cruise ship in clinging jersey and a floor-length leopard-skin
scarf and matching muff, she handily offends feminists,
animal-rights activists and good Christians everywhere, and she
wins, because shimmering, jewel-encrusted, heedless movie
stardom defeats all common morality. Her wit completes her
cosmic victory, particularly in her facial expression of
painful, soul-wrenching yearning when gazing upon a diamond
tiara, a trinket she initially attempts to wear around her neck.
Discovering the item's true function, she burbles, "I always
love finding new places to wear diamonds!" Movies can offer a
very specific bliss, the gorgeousness of a perfectly lighted
fairy tale. Watching Marilyn operate her lips and eyebrows while
breathlessly seducing an elderly millionaire is like
experiencing the invention of ice cream.
Marilyn wasn't quite an actress, in any repertory manner, and
she was reportedly an increasing nightmare to work with,
recklessly spoiled and unsure, barely able to complete even the
briefest scene between breakdowns. Only in the movies can such
impossible behaviour, and such peculiar, erratic gifts, create
eternal magic — only the camera has the mechanical patience to
capture the maddening glory of a celluloid savant like Monroe.
At her best, playing warm-hearted floozies in Some Like It Hot
and Bus Stop, she's like a slightly bruised moonbeam, something
fragile and funny and imperilled. I don't think audiences ever
particularly identify with Marilyn. They may love her or fear
for her, but mostly they simply marvel at her existence, at the
delicious unlikeliness of such platinum innocence. She's the bad
girl and good girl combined: she's sharp and sexy yet incapable
of meanness, a dewy Venus rising from the motel sheets, a
hopelessly irresistible home wrecker. Monroe longed to be taken
seriously as an artist, but her work in more turgid vehicles,
like "The Misfits," was neither original nor very interesting.
She needs the tickle of cashmere to enchant for the ages.
Movies have lent the most perishable qualities, such as youth,
beauty and comedy, a millennial shelf life. Until the cameras
rolled, stars of the past could only be remembered, not
experienced. Had she been born earlier, Marilyn might have
existed as only a legendary rumour, a Helen of Troy or Tinker
Bell. But thanks to Blockbuster, every generation now has
immediate access to the evanescent perfection of Marilyn bumping
and cooing her way through that chorine's anthem, Diamonds Are a
Girl's Best Friend, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Only movie
stars have the chance to live possibly forever, and maybe that's
why they're all so crazy. Madonna remade Diamonds in the video
of her hit Material Girl, mimicking Marilyn's hot-pink gown and
hot-number choreography, and the sly homage seemed fitting: a
blond tribute, a legacy of greedy flirtation. Madonna is too
marvelously sane ever to become Marilyn. Madonna's detailed
appreciation of fleeting style and the history of sensuality is
part of her own arsenal, making her a star and a fan in one.
Madonna wisely and affectionately honours the brazen spark in
Marilyn, the giddy candy-box allure, and not the easy
heartbreak.
Marilyn's tabloid appeal is infinite but ultimately beside the
point. Whatever destroyed her — be it Hollywood economics or
rabid sexism or her own tormented psyche — pales beside the
delight she continues to provide. At her peak, Marilyn was very
much like Coca-Cola or Levi's — she was something wonderfully
and irrepressibly American.
~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~
The film actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) epitomized the
Hollywood sex symbol with her provocative clothes, champagne
blond tresses, and breathless, whisper-voiced manner of
speaking.
Norma Jean Baker, better known as Marilyn Monroe, experienced a
disrupted, loveless childhood that included two years at an
orphanage. When Norma Jean, born on June 1, 1926, was seven
years old her mother, Gladys (Monroe) Baker Mortenson, was
diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and hospitalized. Norma
was left to a series of foster homes and the Los Angeles
Orphans' Home Society. She opted for an early marriage on June
19, 1942, and her husband, James Dougherty, joined the U.S.
Merchant Marine in 1943.
During the war years Norma Jean worked at the Radio Plane
Company in Van Nuys, California, but she was soon discovered by
photographers. She enrolled in a 3-month modelling course, and
in 1946, aware of her considerable charm and the potential it
had for a career in films, Norma obtained a divorce. She headed
for Hollywood, where Ben Lyon, head of casting at Twentieth
Century Fox, arranged a screen test. On August 26, 1946, she
signed a $125 a week, one-year contract with the studio. Ben
Lyon was the one who suggested a new name for the fledgling
actress - Marilyn Monroe.
During her first year at Fox Monroe did not appear in any films,
and her contract was not renewed. In the spring of 1948 Columbia
Pictures hired her for a small part in Ladies of the Chorus. In
1950 John Huston cast her in Asphalt Jungle, a tiny part which
landed her a role in All About Eve. She was now given a
seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox and appeared in
The Fireball, Let's Make It Legal, Love Nest, and As Young as
You Feel.
In 1952, after an extensive publicity campaign, Monroe appeared
in Don't Bother to Knock, Full House, Clash by Night, We're Not
Married, Niagara, and Monkey Business. After this the magazine
Photoplay termed her the "most promising actress," and she was
earning top dollars for Twentieth Century Fox.
On January 14, 1954, she married Yankee baseball player Joe Di
Maggio. But the pressures created by her billing as a screen sex
symbol caused the marriage to founder, and the couple divorced
on October 27, 1954.
Continually cast as a dumb blond, Monroe made Seven Year Itch in
1954. Growing weary of the stereotyping, she broke her contract
with Fox and moved to New York City. There she studied at the
Actors Studio with Lee and Paula Strasberg. Gloria Steinem
recalls a conversation with Monroe during that time in which
Monroe referred to her own opinion of her abilities compared to
a group of notables at the Actors Studio. "I admire all these
people so much. I'm just not good enough."
In 1955 she formed her own studio, Marilyn Monroe Productions,
and re-negotiated a contract with Twentieth Century Fox. She
appeared in Bus Stop in 1956 and married playwright Arthur
Miller on July 1, 1956.
Critics described Monroe in the film The Prince and the
Showgirl, produced by her own company, as "a sparkling light
comedienne." Monroe won the Italian David di Donatello award for
"best foreign actress of 1958," and in 1959 she appeared in Some
Like It Hot. In 1961 she starred in The Misfits, for which
Arthur Miller did the screenplay.
The couple was divorced on January 24, 1961, and later that year
Monroe entered a New York psychiatric clinic. After her brief
hospitalization there she returned to the Fox studio to work on
a film, but her erratic behaviour betrayed severe emotional
disturbance, and the studio discharged her in June 1962.
Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her Los Angeles bungalow on
August 5, 1962, an empty bottle of sleeping pills by her side.
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This web page was last updated on:
13 December, 2008
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