Sixty years after her death, we are still fascinated by her legend, but do we really know the screen icon beyond the persona she created and ultimately could not control?
'After I read the whole book, I could better understand that Joyce is an artist who could penetrate the souls of people, male or female': Marilyn Monroe on Ulysses
Star quality: Monroe sought comfort in the movies during a difficult childhood. Photo by Baron via Getty Images
Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.
Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch
'After I read the whole book, I could better understand that Joyce is an artist who could penetrate the souls of people, male or female': Marilyn Monroe on Ulysses
Next Thursday marks the 60th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, but in some ways it’s as if she never went away. In May, a new documentary about her life and death was released which rehashed conspiracy theories that have inspired shelf-loads of books. In September, Netflix will release a biopic directed by Andrew Dominik.
At the Met Gala, Kim Kardashian showed up wearing the dress Monroe wore when she serenaded John F Kennedy on the occasion of his 45th birthday, and endured a trial by social media for having allegedly stretched it. And in June, a portrait of Marilyn by Andy Warhol fetched a staggering $195m at auction. Everywhere you look, the myth of Marilyn the martyred confronts you, obscuring the real person, adding to her mystery.
Maybe it’s all Warhol’s fault. In 1962, just six weeks after Marilyn Monroe’s death, he unveiled that silkscreen painting, Marilyn Diptych, in which he used multiple versions of an overworked publicity photo to portray the actress as a mass-produced icon. He had done the same with Elvis, and seemed to be suggesting that these preened and carefully marketed artists were the cultural equivalents of his famous Campbell’s soup tins, pop commodities to be bought, sold and vicariously possessed. And of course he had a point, but somewhere under that clinically brilliant artwork lay the real Marilyn, glossy, ossified, unknowable.
Dead in murky circumstances at the age of 36, she would posthumously inspire a cottage industry of books, posters, tell-alls, biopics, all of which managed to further muddy the waters. And within a decade of her death, Monroe had become the pop cultural equivalent of a religious icon, a quasi-divine ideal of doomed but eternal beauty. Elton John didn’t help, writing a maudlin but catchy song that would later be repurposed to eulogise another unlucky blonde, Diana Spencer.
Rarely has a dead celebrity been so comprehensively buried beneath conspiracy theories and competing accounts of her life. Who was Marilyn? In the year 2000, American writer Joyce Carol Oates decided that mere biography was insufficient to the task of describing Monroe’s rise and fall, and so created a fictional account of her life that was widely acclaimed and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
An adaptation of Blonde will be released next month by Netflix, with the Cuban actress Ana de Armas playing Marilyn: it’s a fascinating prospect, but the film will have to tread carefully as it tiptoes its way through fact, legend and competing conspiracy theories. When it comes to Marilyn Monroe, it seems, nothing is straightforward.
This much we know. She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, on June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles, and from the start, the stars seemed aligned against her. She never knew her father, and her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, was an indifferent parent who fostered her out at an early age. At first, this proved a blessing, and Norma Jean blossomed in the care of an evangelical Christian couple in rural California. But later, foster parents would not be so benign.
She was abused by several guardians, and sought comfort in the cinema. “I didn’t like the world around me because it was grim,” she would say later. Sent to the movies by her carers, she would “sit there all day and all night… up in front there was a screen so big, and I loved it”.
If cinema was a means of escape, acting might answer all her prayers. As we know, it didn’t.
The path she took from glamour modelling to bit parts in movies was well trodden, but what happened next was extraordinary. Critics still bicker about whether or not she could act, but she had star quality by the bucketful, and drew all eyes whenever she was on screen. A small role in John Huston’s 1950 noir thriller The Asphalt Jungle put her on Hollywood’s radar, and she made her bombshell breakthrough in the steamy 1953 Technicolor adventure Niagara, playing a treacherous, murderous blonde. “Niagara may not be the place to visit in these circumstances,” noted one critic wryly, “but the falls and Miss Monroe are something to see.”
In the years since her death, it’s become commonplace to portray Marilyn as a hapless victim of the Hollywood flim-flam machine, a rabbit in the headlamps. But while she did have a little-girl-lost aspect to her personality that underpinned her onscreen sexuality, Monroe operated under a persona she had mostly created herself.
While still working as a model, Marilyn had dyed her brown hair platinum blonde and later cut it into the curly bob favoured by her idol, 1930s star Jean Harlow, a spectacular talent, and similarly doomed. She wore white to emphasise her glorious blondeness, figure-hugging clothes to show off her famous hour-glass shape, and had a hip-swinging walk that was almost absurdly feminine.
Star quality: Monroe sought comfort in the movies during a difficult childhood. Photo by Baron via Getty Images
Monroe designed her own publicity stunts, like the times when the strap on her dresses would mysteriously ‘break’, and cultivated relationships with gossip columnists like Louella Parsons. She thought she could control the monster she had created, but soon discovered it had a life of its own.
From the very start she was typecast as a dim and wide-eyed bombshell oblivious to the chaos her beauty wreaked around her. Marilyn played up to the image, honing that baby doll voice and acting dumb in interviews. But when she later struggled to break free of it, taking method acting classes and tackling serious dramatic roles, critics made fun of her. “I want to be an artist,” she told one interviewer, “not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac.”
In her last film, The Misfits, she would get to prove her dramatic credentials, but Marilyn’s great gift was for comedy, and movies like The Seven Year Itch, Some Like it Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are impossible to imagine without her.
When a photo emerged, taken during her brief and unhappy marriage to playwright Arthur Miller, showing Monroe reading Ulysses, general hilarity ensued. It was a publicity stunt, people decided, but Marilyn had read it closely, and was most taken with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. “Here is Joyce writing what a woman thinks to herself,” she said, “can he, does he, really know her innermost thoughts? But after I read the whole book, I could better understand that Joyce is an artist who could penetrate the souls of people, male or female.” Some dummy.
Most folk, it seems, just couldn’t see beyond the beauty. “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person,” she explained. “They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”
Directors and fellow actors tended to see her as an object as well. She recalled that when Billy Wilder was shooting the famous scene in Seven Year Itch where her wind from the subway blows her skirt up, he turned it into an unseemly circus. “At first it was all innocent and fun,” she said, “but when Billy kept shooting the scene over and over, the crowd of men kept on applauding and shouting ‘more, more Marilyn — let’s see more’. What was supposed to be a fun scene turned into a sex scene.”
Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch
Wilder would later bitch and moan about Monroe’s unprofessionalism and demands for multiple takes on Some Like it Hot, though he did admit that her finished performance was magical. Tony Curtis was still less chivalrous, remarking that kissing Marilyn was like “kissing Hitler”, and later claiming they’d had an affair which led to an abortion. If men couldn’t have her, they seemed determined to destroy her.
She came to hate the body everyone obsessed over. Plagued by menstrual cramps and gynaecological problems, she had several miscarriages and abortions, and became resigned to the fact that she would be forever excluded from domesticity.
She once spoke poignantly about Sunday being the loneliest day of her week. “All the men I know are spending the day with their wives and families, and all the stores in Los Angeles are closed. You can’t wander through looking at all the pretty clothes and pretending to buy something.”
Addicted to painkillers and sleeping pills, and chronically insecure, it would have been a miracle if Marilyn had lived to be old. At her bedside in Brentwood, police found empty medicine bottles and drug levels in her blood too high to be the result of an accidental overdose. It was August 4, 1962, and Marilyn was pronounced dead at the age of 36.
But simple tragedy wasn’t enough for the Monroe legend: could her alleged lovers Jack and Bobby Kennedy have had something to do with it? For the Kennedys too, Marilyn had been a coveted trinket, a celebrity citadel to be stormed. Now she was a glossy tragedy, a cautionary Hollywood tale, but those were just the headlines, and there was so much more.
In 1955, when jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald was banned from singing at LA nightclub the Mocambo, Marilyn told the owner she’d boycott the place, but that if he let Ella sing, she and her celebrity friends would pack out the front row every night. Ella sang, and later expressed her gratitude to Marilyn. “After that,” she said, “I never had to play a small jazz club again.”
