Ah, Marilyn...

Ah, she really was, wasn’t she?

“She is a beautiful child. I don't mean that in the obvious way... What she has - this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence - could never surface on the stage. It's so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera.” - from “A Beautiful Child” by Truman Capote

Marilyn Monroe, like Miles Davis (covered in an earlier piece) would have been 100 yesterday, and much like my feelings about the other icon, things remain mixed between pity and admiration. She died in August of 1962 and was born as well in the summer, at the beginning of what we now know as Pride Month (coincidence?). She could be many things to too many of us, and yet, she remains Marilyn.

As I sit and write this out, I am looking at an old postcard of Monroe holding a very large and what I knew was a difficult tome by James Joyce:

This Eve Arnold photograph from 1954 was at the peak of a career that should probably never have existed. She had a difficult life before she became our Marilyn, and she had an even more difficult life once she stepped into the spotlight and became one of the most famous women of all time.

Is that hyperbole? Is that a little too much?

No, I don’t think so:

Truman: By any chance are you under the delusion that you're Queen Elizabeth?

Marilyn: Who?

She also inspired other writers and talents (Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, etc). As I sit here, I also have out my copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blonde”. Now, if you have not read this biographical fiction, you should know that it was the basis of the 2022 film starring Ana de Armas in the title role. I have seen bits and pieces of the film, and watched a few other attempts to explain why her life haunts us (“Norma Jean & Marilyn” from 1996 with Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino in a double-sided performance is one of the best out there). And yet…there is still some mystery there.

I found an old article by the film critic Parker Tyler called “The Awful Fate of the Sex Goddess” in that numerically appropriate year of 1969 (also in his last published book). I knew that I would have to head back to it and repeat some of the thoughts and ideas about her, but I was surprised by one of the lines that stuck out to me:

Marilyn came along in those fidgety 'fifties and altered the whole set-up. There was something genuine about her, and really pathetic, as if she were all too human to exercise the great craft of queening it for the tradition... Maybe she was the last ''goddess'' actually seeming to be made out of flesh rather than foamrubber: something to sleep with, not on. And that was probably her fatal mistake. Goddesses are to be slept about.

Did she really change the game? Did she really stand out?

I think so…

We have our Jayne Mansfield, Anita Ekberg, Mamie Van Doren and even my beloved Sophia Loren. And none of them has had the cultural impact that one young lady had in a very short career.

Finally, let me mention this particular track by St. Vincent. It is called “Surgeon” and it takes an interesting trip into the mind of a woman who relied heavily on drugs to survive her own life choices:

“I definitely wanted this particular song to sound like someone was kind of in a Benzadrine and white-wine coma – like a housewife’s cocktail” – NPR interview, September 15, 2011

It is a beautiful track, and I note that she also used a direct line from Monroe’s journal when she sings:

“Best, finest surgeon

Come cut me open.”

This was in reference to Lee Strasberg – her best and finest surgeon...and acting coach – the Actors’ Studio where she bravely went in to take lessons even though she was already a movie star, and it says something deeper about her personality than anyone wants to admit: she was a young woman obsessed with pain, death and what her struggles would add to her posthumous reputation.

The interview I referenced at the beginning of this piece starts at Universal Funeral Home Chapel in New York in 1955. Ms. Constance Collier, a music-hall actress, had already been introduced to her, made her own deductions, and passed away by the time she spent the day with the future author of “In Cold Blood”. She never ran from the issue or felt she could avoid it, and it seems that she understood that this was the real fate of all sex goddesses; all the people who tried to shy away from their reality in the face of so many people’s fantasies (Warhol prints; an open windy grate; a perfect smile, etc.)

Shine on, Norma Jean. And I will not even provide a link to that horrible Elton John song as I end this. I give you the last word (from the Capote interview):

- As we got out of the taxi we saw a man with a chow on a leash... My companion stopped to pat the dog's head

The Man: You shouldn't touch strange dogs. Especially chows. They might bite you.

Marilyn: Dogs never bite me. Only humans.

*

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