It`s there in the pictures somewhere–the mysterious magic that transformed a sweet-looking, slightly pudgy teenager into an icon of something that was not entirely sexual and yet could not be called anything else.
And it`s there in the way we look at the pictures, 24 years after her lonely death on a Hollywood Saturday night, the way we still search for the essential element that transformed cuteness into the eternal appeal of Marilyn Monroe.
No other woman`s sexual appeal can have been subjected to so much scrutiny, squeezed through so much analysis, studied in so many pages and pages of prose.
And the flood of words shows no sign of abating. This fall will see three major new books on Marilyn: ”Marilyn,” by Gloria Steinem, ”Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of a Love” by Roger Kahn, and ”Marilyn Mon Amour,” a pictorial memoir by the late photograper Andre de Dienes.
The first two are serious books by serious writers. The last is neither, but it remains the most fascinating of the three–a look at Marilyn Monroe from the age of 19, when she was still Norma Jean Baker, when she still had the light brown hair, the crooked teeth, the bumpy nose and the soft chin she was born with.
The pictures themselves are silly and stilted: an American girl in braids and ribbons, a barefoot beauty kneeling by a baby goat, a pretty young thing in an ugly swimsuit on a chilly beach. The poses are awkward, and some of the details are comical–waist-high underpants peeking out above her jeans, a bulge of tummy slipping out from her tied-up shirt, sunshine glinting off the razor stubble on her legs.
The text is even sillier, filled with a sort of hindsight mysticism that reads prophecies of stardom into the words that thousands of photographers have said to a million pretty girls, trying to get them to widen their smiles, straighten their shoulders and drop the sheet just a little lower, please.
Yet the book is compelling because we know what this bouncy young girl with the garden-variety prettiness was destined to become. We search for some clue to the quality that made this girl so vastly different from a thousand other pretties with clean-scrubbed faces and sparkly eyes.
One clue can be found in the early pictures that are not there, that do not exist at all. Apparently no one bothered to take many baby pictures, many snapshots of a little girl so pretty that people turned to stare at her on the street. There are no dime-store portraits of the mental patient`s illegitimate daughter who spent her childhood bouncing from foster home to orphanage and back.
Her childhood nicknames are revealing: ”Mouse” and ”The Human Bean.”
But those nicknames, like her childhood, came to an abrupt halt when Norma Jean started to bloom.
”When I was 11, the whole world, which was always closed to me–I just felt like I was on the outside of the world–suddenly, everything opened up,” Marilyn told Life magazine in an interview published the week she died. ”Even the girls paid a little attention to me just because they thought, `Hmmm, she`s to be dealt with!` And I had this long walk to school — 2 1/2 miles to school, 2 1/2 miles back — it was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked
— you know, workers driving to work, waving, you know — and I`d wave back. The world became friendly.”
By the time she was 16, the world had become so friendly that her guardian thought it prudent to marry her off. Her first husband says she delighted in keeping their little apartment clean. But as Marilyn sighed two failed marriages later: ”I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.”
Those fantasies drove her to quit her factory job and throw herself into becoming a model.
”The graduate I am most proud of is Marilyn Monroe,” Emmeline Snively, the founder of the Blue Books Model School, once said. ”Not only because she is the most successful and well known of my students, but because she started with the least. She was cute-looking, but she knew nothing about carriage, posture, walking, sitting and posing. Girls ask me all the time, how they can be like Marilyn Monroe. And I tell them, if they showed one-tenth the hard work and gumption that that girl had, they`d be on their way.”
By the time she was 20, she had a new smile, a new name and a new studio contract. She was on her way to success, a trip that took six years of bit parts and supporting roles in 18 movies, most of them forgettable B-pictures. But when she emerged as a star, her celluloid image gave no hint of the steeliness that kept her in Hollywood through those long years of tiny roles. Instead, the on-screen Marilyn had the appeal of a naked baby, completely vulnerable, innocent and strangely untouched.
”Look at that face,” Laurence Olivier said. ”She could be 4 years old.”
The Marilyn in the movies wanted only to be loved, completely, uncritically and forever. To win that love, she was willing to be anything and everything, to mold herself into the fantasy woman of her chosen man`s dreams — and her chosen man was every fellow inside every movie palace in the world. Clark Gable summed it up: ”I think she`s something different to each man, blending somehow the things he seems to require most.”
Because the screen Marilyn was so open, so transparent in her desire for love, women warmed to her, too. They wanted to be her friend to shield her, to help her get rid of the louse-with-the-spouse who was certain to break her heart.
”When you look at Marilyn on the screen, you don`t want anything bad to happen to her,” said a woman fan named Natalie Wood. ”You really care that she should be all right . . . happy.”
The women who saw her on the screen saw a bit of themselves, taken to the furthest possible extreme. It is a rare woman who has not tried to resculpt some part of herself to fit the fantasy of some man.
Occasionally the woman behind the image would stand up and walk in front of the projector, blotting out the fantasy with her own dark shadow.
The reality of her off-screen image could be jarring. There was something inappropriate about a blonde bombshell who read Dostoyevsky, who loftily reminded an interviewer that she shared her zodiac sign (Gemini) with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Queen Victoria.
The conflicts between the willing Galatea on the screen and the platinum- haired Pygmalion who created her were felt most strongly by Marilyn herself.
She kept trying to fit her unruly self into her porcelain exterior, but cracks in her shell grew longer and deeper as she grew older.
Those cracks destroyed her marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. In marrying DiMaggio, she forged a mythic union of two American fantasies, the Sex Goddess and the Ball Player. The marriage lasted only nine months, although their friendship continued until the end of her life.
When she married Arthur Miller, she made an even greater effort to become what she thought he wanted, the perfect wife and helpmate of the great intellectual. On the backs of their wedding pictures, she wrote: ”Hope, hope, hope,” But the effort proved too great, and the third marriage ended after 4 1/2 years.
Afterward, Miller wrote: ”The thing is, Marilyn has become a sort of fiction for writers: Each one sees her through his own set of pleasures and prejudices.”
Ultimately, the fiction obscured the fact of her, even to herself. Between the ambitious woman who created the symbol and the wide-eyed girl who lived it, there was a space of absolute zero, a space necessary for each man to create her in his own image, but a space that was filled finally with a bottle of Nembutals.
That last, tragic action may have been a final triumph of public relations. Had she lived, the reality of Marilyn would gradually have choked out the image, either by bringing the strong, hard-headed woman to the surface or, more sadly but more likely, smothering lost loveliness in fat, alcoholism, drug addiction and madness. By dying, she allowed her admirers to keep on filling in the blank in the way that suited them best.
That constant restructuring of the Monroe legend is done, not only by individuals, but also by society. Since her death, each generation has had a different vision of her life, her death and her significance.
In the `60s, she epitomized an American tragedy, a lovely martyr destroyed by money-grubbing within the film industry and a sensationalist press. To the `70s, she was a blithe but doomed spirit whose true, essentially spiritual appeal was felt by only a few, a fading figure evoked by Elton John`s ”Candle in the Wind.” Now she seems to be recast in the mold of the
`80s, as a fundamentally strong and intelligent woman burdened by a loveless childhood and facing a sexist world.
Perhaps the reason our facination with her has remained alive is that she is a mirror of our dreams, our desires, our impossible yearnings.
Marilyn–who would have turned 60 this year–sensed that role.
”Maybe I shouldn`t say this,” she said once about stories written about her, ”but I`ve always felt those articles reveal more about the writers than they do about me.”
