Forever Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe smiles at me every day. She is there on my living room wall, in one of the zillions of silk-screened portraits of her that Andy Warhol began producing in the early Sixties, shortly after Marilyn's substance-induced death. Rendered in pastel hues of optic intensity, MM looks down heavy-lidded, with the wrinkle of a grin, wised-up and happily alluring.

Marilyn no doubt commands a shrine in thousands, perhaps millions, of homes around the world. As we approach what would have been her 75th birthday, she has emerged as the aboriginal pop culture heroine. But what's odd in my case is that, while she was around, I did not think Marilyn Monroe was much--conventional firepower, when some other women were thermonuclear.

With her pudgy nose, Marilyn really set no standard for classic female winsomeness. And her form, fully revealed to the nation in December 1953 when Marilyn was this magazine's first Sweetheart of the Month, was no better than fetching. For sheer flag-raising pulchritude, I always preferred MM's nearest competitor in the swelling ranks of blonde boobshells, Jayne Mansfield. Even Playboy conceded in the text that ran with the now-renowned photo of Marilyn lounging against red plush, "Her curves really aren't that spectacular."

I'd grown up in one of those urban, ethnic enclaves where the beauties I knew--and for whom I had my first yens--were dark. Sophia Loren, sensual and passionate, was ideal. More to the point, Marilyn's blondeness came straight from the bottle. Whether she was Norma Jean Baker or Norma Jeane Mortenson at birth, a fact still disputed, she was, in the photos I've seen, nigh on to a brunette when she first married at 16. Thus, there was an element of the fake about her, a trait that persisted in the girl-off-the-farm routine for which she was best known. The ingenue who cooed as the subway draft fluttered her skirt to her waist in The Seven Year Itch was a sexual creature who men could have found fully bewitching only in a patriarchal and puritan era, a woman too naive and too slow on the uptake to recognize--and thus to control--the phenomenal power she exerted.

The real Marilyn, the one who seemed to be there behind the burlesque posturing, was too neurotic to command more than sympathy and too insubstantial to require much respect. Jayne Mansfield, at least, went to SMU and supposedly had an IQ over 160. Marilyn was famously temperamental. "I've been on a calendar," she admitted, "but never on time." Drunk and druggy, she had no apparent gratitude for what luck and good PR men had created for her. Billy Wilder, who directed my favorite of her films, Some Like It Hot, called Marilyn "the meanest woman I have ever known in this town." What could you say about somebody who married both Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, except that she did not have a clue what she wanted?

Yet in the nearly 40 years since her death, one of us has changed. These days, the image I see in the print on my living room wall is of a unique figure who encompassed many of the dominating--and contradictory--impulses of the second half of the American century just concluded.

With Marilyn, sex seemed to be the heart of the matter. Her initial appearance on these pages embodied, in all senses, the first truly open communication in America about sexuality. Hef bought the photo rights from a calendar company, which had engaged in only limited distribution of the photo for fear that McCarthy-era morality would have led to prosecution for mailing obscene material. Hef, with little to lose, put Marilyn in the post, and with her image, essentially said to America, "Gather round."

The fact that she did not quail in that role was part of Marilyn's power. In 1933, Hedy Lamarr had appeared in her fabled nude swimming scene in Ecstasy and the resulting uproar initiated an era of censorship. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America's Hays Code, effective in 1934, was so brainlessly restrictive that even characters who were supposed to be husband and wife could not be depicted in the same bed. Marilyn's appearance here was an announcement that at least one starlet was not about to succumb to shame--or modesty. She had it and flaunted it. She never pretended to have been caught unaware or exploited by the photos Playboy presented. Indeed, she was back on these pages again, naked as God had made her, near the time of her death, when she was at the apex of her career. She was nude because she wanted to be.

The inherent feminine power wielded by the tease always underlaid Marilyn's on-screen persona. What I was too young to understand when I watched her playing the archetype disparaged in blonde jokes was that it was essential for her to be unconvincing. She-knew-that-we-knew-it was all a little too much. Marilyn was perhaps our first postmodern figure who addressed us in subtexts. Always traveling beneath the surface, as she lamely feigned innocence, was that canny frankness about the dominating nature of sexuality. We look back at her slithery rendition of Happy Birthday to You for JFK, wearing a dress for the ages, and feel ready to blush or to laugh out loud at an era so restrained by proprieties that it was decades before Americans could openly acknowledge the forthrightness of her come-ons.

Unlike any of her peers or predecessors, Marilyn added one further element: an undertone of regret. Yes, she was willing; but there was a tenderness about it, a sadness that she could not be that farm girl and thus relieved of the burden of the reactions she inspired. Because she made that bow toward the acceptable, Marilyn blurred the former distinctions between high art and low, between good taste and bad, between whore and Madonna. Her Playboy pose seemed to be pasted to the wall in the dingy recesses of the backroom of every hardware store I visited in childhood, a lurid testimonial to the baseness of men. Yet Marilyn, somehow, was never confined to the shadows; her apparent vulnerability saved her. She also was welcomed--and probably schtupped--at the White House.

Looking backward, we now see the America that emerged from the Second World War as one where imagery and commerce were increasingly intertwined, where our national identity was rooted more and more in certain images marketed coast-to-coast. The endlessly photographed Monroe was probably the most famous face on earth--and as a self-conscious sex symbol, she made herself a virtual commodity. It is no accident that Warhol began turning out his serial portraits of her around the same time he was painting pictures of Brillo boxes and soup cans.

It was the eagerness with which she gave herself to that role that really distinguished Marilyn. She somehow suggested the degree to which we created her. She succumbed to us more powerfully, more willingly than any woman before, beaming back our callow, but widely shared, fantasies. Her celebrated allure was inherently democratic. She belonged to everybody--indeed, in retrospect, that is one of the clear messages of the fact she could attract both our best ballplayer and our preeminent playwright.

Nevertheless, it was death that ultimately made Marilyn Monroe larger than life--and spared her the excess that has overwhelmed the likes of Elizabeth Taylor. It is hard to imagine who Marilyn would be, approaching her dotage. Dietrich's legs still gathered raves when she was well into her 60s, but by 75, even Marilyn's sexual candlepower was bound to have dimmed. Instead, she remains in memory fully possessed of all her carnal appeal, like athletes who retire at the height of their powers.

The poignancy of her story lies in the fact that her end taught us to distrust so much of what she seemingly stood for. She may not have been the first celebrity destroyed by celebrity--that honor may belong to Socrates--but she was certainly the first one who was essentially photographed as she danced over the brink. Hollywood is a place that teaches over and over again the Greek gods' lessons about hubris. Marilyn stands--with Elvis and dozens of others--as the object lesson that fame is worth little in the end. That the most glamorous woman on earth died in desperation cements the message that "real life" is the only place to find a life.

As important, Marilyn was raised from the dead a feminist icon. It turned out that being craved by most of the men in America capable of an erection did not make a woman happy. Quite the opposite. Like her third husband's most famous hero, Willy Loman, Marilyn seemingly died because she had the wrong dreams. Her destruction inspired women to resist being similarly reduced to symbol or package.

It is far too romantic to believe Marilyn understood all of this. In fact, it is the essence of her legend that she fully surrendered herself to what everyone else wanted to make of her. But at 75, she seems certain to be remembered as the first emblem of the omnivorous nature of our developing pop culture, and of the ability of certain figures to become a River Ganges of national passions, into which all of them poured in--until they washed her away.

Her celebrated allure was inherently democratic. She belonged to everybody.

For our online tribute to Marilyn, join the Playboy Cyber Club at cyber.playboy.com.