Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. The blond, curvy, whispery-voiced actress and one of the 20th century’s indisputable icons was 36 when she was found dead of a drug overdose in her Brentwood, Calif., bungalow on Aug. 5, 1962.
If you’re in Los Angeles, you can join members of the Marilyn Remembered fan club for a memorial service Sunday. The ceremony begins at noon and will be held at the Westwood Memorial Park, where the star is buried. More than 400 people are expected. “A reception following the memorial service will be held at the Westwood Presbyterian Church fellowship hall.”
If you’re visiting Palm Springs, a pilgrimage to the 26-foot, 34,000-pound statue of Monroe at the corner of Palm Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon might be in order. Seward Johnson, the octogenarian artist and Johnson & Johnson scion dubbed his statue “Forever Marilyn.”
Fifty years is not exactly forever, but for an actress who had yet to achieve the level of craft she hungered for, Monroe’s aura persists.
While she did not live long, her tenacity as an icon is undeniable, though perhaps somewhat baffling. It was long ago cut off from her most incandescent or charged performances in movies like “Some Like It Hot,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “The Misfits.”
Instead, like most historical figures reduced to T-shirt hagiography (Che Guevara or Malcolm X) or elevated to Andy Warhol lithographs, her staying power may have more to say about us than her.
This year, there have already been upward of 16 books added to the packed storehouse of tomes about the actress, icon, and to some, tragic heroine. It’s more than enough to make the title of 1993’s “Crypt 33: The Saga of Marilyn Monroe — The Final Word,” sound absurd.
“I think the reason she persists in the culture is that she represents an archetype Americans particularly take to heart.” says William J. Mann, author of biographies on Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and the upcoming “Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand.”(In other words a guy who knows his way around diva-dom.)
“It’s the victim, the essentially sympathetic character who means well, who wants to do good in the world. It’s almost exactly the same as the Princess Diana phenomenon. She was seen as vulnerable and innocent and thrust into a world beyond her means and then taken advantage of by everyone. After they die tragically, they get the recognition they didn’t in life. It’s why Elton John was able to switch so easily from Marilyn to Diana with “Candle in the Wind.”(“Goodbye Norma Jean (sic)” are the first words of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin ballad that was sung as tribute.)
Of course, says Mann and a slew of thoughtful Marilyn biographers, this is not quite right. But it does speak to the one-dimensional mythologizing that goes on with the modern-day forging of icons and secular saints.
“Both Marilyn and Diana were ambitious women, very shrewd. They knew what they were doing. They were mythologizing Marilyn just a few years after her death. I think there’s an infantilizing of Marilyn. You couldn’t do that with Elizabeth Taylor. She infuriated people then infuriated them some more. The fact that Marilyn died so early, we can project anything on to her.”
Indelible images
Film folk like to point to cave paintings as the origin of the movies. There it is: the stony version of a darkened theater, the story told in images. But in Monroe’s case it might be good to remember that movie images sprint by. Still photography has film beat when it comes to endurance.
Even a book as intensively researched as biographer and university professor Lois Banner’s “Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox”begins not with a riff on a film role but with a consideration of a photo: Sam Shaw’s image of Marilyn above a New York City subway grate on the set of “The Seven Year Itch.”
You know the one: Monroe’s hand tries to tame a skirt which billows naughtily thanks to the wind created purportedly by a New York subway train rushing beneath. It’s the sister of the pose captured in the Palm Springs’ statue.
A number of other photographers tout a version of that image as their own, which attests to just how orchestrated a moment it was for the Billy Wilder comedy and its star.
“The photo shoot was a publicity stunt, one of the greatest in the history of film,” writes Banner. “Its time and location were published in New York newspapers; it attracted a crowd of over a hundred male photographers and 1,500 male spectators, even though it was held in the middle of the night.”
The 20th Century Fox publicity department seemed to understand that still photographs deliver an invitation. They ask the viewer to fill in what is going on. Is it a surprise that Monroe began as a pin-up girl, a cover girl, a model?
In a sense, Monroe is known for being, not doing. For posing, not acting. Though this is hardly fair.
“I think when we first see Marilyn she projects joy, sensuality and sadness all at the same time and it’s a fascinating combination,” said Banner, who worked on “The Passion and the Paradox” for 10 years.
“It’s not just that she’s beautiful. It’s those eyes, and you’re drawn in and you start trying to find out more about her. And when you do, what you find is endless, just endless. Because she lived a life beyond measure.”
Unlikely rise
It was an extraordinary trajectory for a girl of hardscrabble origins and an emotionally tumultuous childhood.
Born Norma Jeane Mortensen, her last name was changed by mother Gladys Baker shortly after she was born. And there remains some confusion about who her birth father was.
Gladys Baker was in and out of mental institutions and her daughter lived in a series of foster homes. Monroe stated in interviews that she had been sexually abused in one.
At 16, she married James Dougherty — in part, it’s believed, to stay in California when her foster parents Grace McKee and Doc Goddard relocated to West Virginia. In 1954, she married baseball player Joe DiMaggio. In 1956, she wed playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote her last complete film, “The Misfits.”
There were other alliances with powerful men, who figure into her last months, among them Jack and Bobby Kennedy.
It would be far too easy to believe that those relationships, or the celebrity, represented the apex for Monroe. But the actress had strived to become better at her craft, to be taken seriously.
“She was brilliant in her choice of mentors,” Banner said. “She had some of the best acting teachers in the nation mentoring her.” Among them Paula Strasberg, wife of Lee Strasberg, head of New York’s Actors Studio.
She could also be difficult on set. At the time of her death, Monroe had been fired, then rehired, for “Something’s Got To Give,” a remake of the Cary Grant/Irene Dunne comedy “My Favorite Wife.”
Last year’s sympathetic indie drama “My Week With Marilyn,” about Monroe’s London shoot of “The Prince and the Showgirl,” touched on the star’s ability to act the diva. Michelle Williams portrayed her (accurately) as frequently late to a set where other people were waiting to ply their craft, too.
Tragic end
Monroe cut a figure as tragic as her body was shapely. Her death seemed to only accentuate the sorrow. She had the sort of ugly finale that has become the stuff of celebrity demise. (Should we really be surprised that Lindsay Lohan wrote a foreword to a book of Monroe photos last year?)
Given the muddied circumstances of Monroe’s death — was it an accidental overdose, suicide, or a well- covered-up murder? — it’s hardly surprising that one of the Marilyn-centered novels published this year, “The Empty Glass,”is written in the style of a noir.
Instead of a private detective, author J.I. Baker’s story revolves around a deputy coroner who recounts his story in an interview that sounds a lot more like an interrogation. He’s found himself in a churning vortex of mobsters, cops and others who want the Monroe death left a suicide. His ally— or is she? — is an intrepid gossip columnist and fashion plate named Jo.
It’s got the ugly twists and the dodgy alliances worthy of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
The dismaying thing about “The Empty Glass” is that so many of the details are based on fact. And the facts are unseemly as they touch on the role of the Kennedy brothers in Monroe’s life and death, the long shadow of the Mafia and Monroe’s constant pill popping of barbiturates — Seconal, Nembutal — and uppers.
“The Empty Glass” is not the only novel to borrow heavily from the facts of Monroe’s unraveling life. French author Michel Schneider’s “Marilyn’s Last Sessions” uses the star’s visits with her psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson as the throughline for his novel. Greenson is reportedly the last person to see Monroe alive and one of the first to see her corpse when he was called to her home. Adam Braver’s “Misfit” is a fictional account of Monroe’s final weekend spent at Frank Sinatra’s club Cal Neva, on the border of California and Nevada.
Is it possible that the pull Monroe’s story still exerts is less magnetic for the younger generation than on baby boomers? Does the older generation continue to be spellbound by the way Monroe’s ascendancy and tragic demise reflect an America transitioning from the ’50s to the ’60s, but also the seedier side of the Kennedy clan’s “Camelot”?
“I find her a very heroic woman,” says Banner. “Ialso find her life a cautionary tale. There’s a lot of her life that should caution us in our own behaviors.”
Had she survived her woes and lived to grow old, Monroe would have turned 86 in June. Marilyn at 50, 60 and beyond. Why is it harder to imagine that than it is to entertain the chilling thought that a president or his brother had a hand in her demise?
What might that say about our culture?
Yes, had Marilyn Monroe lived on, her life might have told us other kinds of stories about ourselves, she might have secured the recognition as an actor she craved. But one thing’s certain, she would not have become “Forever Marilyn.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
