Marilyn Revealed

Even now, more than 40 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe is the vamp who just keeps on vamping--the enduring gold standard of sex appeal. Of course, Marilyn was never just a sex symbol, any more than she was just a star, just an image or even just a cultural icon. She was, to use a term that is often applied metaphorically to celebrities but has a literal application to Marilyn, a goddess--the goddess of a near-religious cult (in the film Tommy, the Who posits a Church of Marilyn Monroe) with relics (Christie's auction house sold her driver's license for $145,000), a hymn (Elton John's "Candle in the Wind"), apocrypha and a biblical text that practically everyone in the world knows by heart. She even has her own crucifixion (her mysterious death in 1962 at the tender age of 36) and an ongoing resurrection. New caches of photographs are always being discovered, and new biographies are always being written. In fact, there is so much Marilyn effluvia that one compelling new book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, by Sarah Churchwell, an American-born scholar teaching in England, is a biography of the biographies, a text of the texts. As Marilyn once said of herself in what Churchwell uses as her epigraph, "You're always running into people's unconscious." Obviously Marilyn still does.

In analyzing Marilyn biographies and Marilyn-inspired novels, such as Norman Mailer's masturbatory meditation Marilyn: A Biography (1973) and Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde (2000), Churchwell essentially shows how, since her death, Marilyn has come to be viewed retroactively-- the death read into the life so the entire life has become a prelude to tragedy. Seen this way Marilyn's story is one of exploitation and victimization. She was used by the men who allegedly loved her but really only desired her, used by the studios that employed her, used by the public that worshipped her and then discarded her, used even by herself. Her death, whether suicide, accident or, as many want to believe, the result of a nefarious conspiracy, was the inevitable consequence of her life. Once the pinup of sex, Marilyn is now our pinup of tragedy.

At least that's the way it has been: Marilyn is a victim for all seasons. Feminists who hated the way the studios and magazines exploited her body, left-wing anticapitalists who hated the way she was packaged as a product, right-wing moralists who hated the way she was turned into a sex object, macabre conspiracy theorists who hated the Kennedys (with whom Marilyn was allegedly entangled romantically) and even one of her ex-husbands, Arthur Miller, who hated the way Marilyn had to wrestle with her image--all have piled on to purvey the portrait of a woman in extremis, lost to herself and the world.

But in trying to differentiate this tragic ideal of Marilyn Monroe from the real woman who captivated the public, one can read Marilyn's life another way, not backward from her death but forward from her birth, and it yields a very different picture--a less burdened Marilyn than the Marilyn Agonistes of the biographies and novels. In this view Marilyn can be perceived as powerful rather than helpless, controlling rather than manipulate, self-aware rather than oblivious. Not least of all, she can also be sexual without being tragic. She's a brand-new Marilyn, or rather, she's the old Marilyn now being rediscovered.

In the traditional Book of Marilyn the sex and the tragedy are closely associated. Marilyn's childhood was dreadful. She was born in Los Angeles in 1926 as Norma Jeane Baker or Norma Jeane Mortensen--Baker and Mortensen were two ex-husbands of her dotty mother, Gladys--but Norma Jeane, named for the actress Norma Talmadge, was illegitimate. She never knew any father, and several biographers believe she spent her life searching for surrogates. Since Gladys was both financially and mentally incapable of caring for her daughter, Norma Jeane spent her youth in foster care, including two years at the Los Angeles Orphans Home. By some accounts, during a brief stay (text continued on page 126) with a close friend of her mother's, the friend's drunken husband sexually abused Marilyn one night, which added both another horrifying scene to the Dickensian tale of childhood woe and an element of sexuality. Meanwhile her mother, always fragile, had suffered a breakdown and been sent to a mental institution, where she would remain for most of her life, providing Marilyn's biographers with a genetic strand for the star's eventual demise.

Naturally the movies beckoned. According to the Book of Marilyn, to escape from the drudgery of her life and the feeling of being unwanted, Norma Jeane harbored fantasies of movie stardom, especially imagining herself as another Jean Harlow. What she initially got instead of fantasy was a marriage at 16 to a 21-year-old aircraft-factory worker named James Dougherty--a marriage effectively arranged for her by her modier's friend so that she would be taken care of. (Norma Jeane called her young husband Daddy.)After Dougherty went off to service during the war, Norma Jeane was working at a factory inspecting parachutes when a crew of Army photographers singled her out for a shoot of girls manning the assembly line. One of the captivated photographers described a "luminous quality to her face" and encouraged her to apply to a modeling agency. Soon she was appearing in ads and on magazine covers and had gained entrée to 20th Century Fox. Shortly afterward she divorced Dougherty. A Fox executive promptly renamed her Marilyn Monroe--Monroe for her mother's maiden name and Marilyn because she reminded the executive of the stage and film star Marilyn Miller.

Then came the sex. As a contract player Marilyn, according to most biographers, in essence slept her way to the top, having sex with various executives and talent agents. She landed bit roles as cheesecake and then larger roles, finally getting the female lead as a demented babysitter in the 1952 thriller Don't Bother to Knock, supposedly because her onetime paramour, 20th Century Fox mogul Joseph Schenck, insisted on it. It wasn't the perfect role for her talents, but it didn't matter. She was a star now--in part, it seemed, because the process of her stardom was palpable in her performances. Just as she had sold sex to the moguls, she sold it to the audience, in a more titillating way than anyone else on-screen.

But Marilyn was more than the latest avatar of sex. Like all stars' lives, hers became a movie too. Regarded in the 1950s as the most desirable woman in the world, she married former baseball star Joe DiMaggio, linking one national icon to another, then divorced him and married playwright Arthur Miller, linking herself to yet another, very different icon. Her fame grew as her story did. Indeed she loomed so large in the culture that rumors of a conspiracy immediately arose when she died; to say she died from either a deliberate or accidental overdose of barbiturates didn't seem commensurate with the centrality of her place in the American psyche. The conspiracy theorists assumed there had been an affair between Marilyn and President John F. Kennedy, the biggest icon of all, which most likely did occur, as well as one between Marilyn and the president's brother Robert, which is a bit more problematic. Depending on the theorist, she was killed either by a right-wing cabal that wanted to embarrass the Kennedys or by the Kennedys themselves, who staged her death to silence her. Whichever, it was all of a piece with her victimhood-- the tragic youth, her mother's insanity, the rapacious men and now her political inconvenience. Marilyn was just a candle in a gusty wind.

Still, victimhood is a result rather than a meaning, and if Marilyn's death needed a conspiracy to justify it, Marilyn's posthumous curse was that her life needed a message to justify the inordinate interest in her--a theme to the text. In effect, Marilyn had to become a parable. Almost all the cultural diagnosticians who have examined her life have settled on the idea that Marilyn was a prime example of the confusion of identity in modern culture and that this confusion was a major source of her tragedy. Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe simply were not compatible. As she transformed herself, and let others transform her, from the natural, girlish, wistful Norma Jeane to the made-up, womanly, worldly Marilyn Monroe, she lost herself and wound up adrift in the horse latitudes of celebrity, neither Norma Jeane nor Marilyn Monroe. Divided between these selves, she could never be whole and ultimately died for it, allowing her exegetes to turn her into a cautionary tale of what happens when one is not true to oneself. Or as Churchwell puts it, "She will be destroyed by the struggle between innocence and cynicism, love and sex, light and dark, Norma Jeane and Marilyn...."

According to her apostles, the second great lesson of Marilyn's life and her second great tragedy is that in metamorphosing from Norma Jeane into Marilyn Monroe, she turned herself, or allowed others to turn her, into a commodity rather than a human being. By this analysis "Marilyn Monroe" was not only a separate identity; it was an entirely new and totally artificial thing--a creature of platinum blonde hair (Marilyn's actual color was honey blonde), lacquered nails, Technicolor lips and a seductive, breathy whisper of a voice. Even her nose, jaw and teeth were enhanced.

Once refurbished she went about selling herself, particularly her sex, which turned her into yet another cautionary tale--this one about what happens when one thinks of oneself as an object, specifically an object for the delectation of the opposite sex. What happens, at least as Marilyn's feminist admirers viewed it, is that one ceases to exist except as a fantasy. One loses oneself. Every man's woman, Marilyn was finally no man's woman. Thus, as Clare Boothe Luce observed ironically in one of the many postmortems, the very symbol of happy sexuality in the buttoned-down 1950s died alone on a Saturday night: "The girl whose translucent beauty had made her the 'love object' of millions of unknown lonely or unsatisfied males had no date that evening."

That, in a nutshell, has been the standard interpretation of Marilyn Monroe for nearly half a century--a victim of her genes, of her childhood, of her profession, of her image. "If ever there was a victim of society," Ayn Rand said, sounding the theme succinctly, "Marilyn Monroe is that victim." But there is one big and inescapable problem with this view. Whether or not it is true, it speaks only to the dead Marilyn; it explains nothing about what made Marilyn the colossus she was in her lifetime. While Marilyn lived, while she was one of the world's most popular movie stars and its reigning sex queen, her life was obviously not informed by her death or even by any sense of ongoing tragedy. Yes, there were divorces (three of them), miscarriages, a breakdown, rumors of drug abuse and bouts with her studio over the money she was paid and the projects she was strong-armed into, but these are the sorts of stormy passages that stars routinely undergo; they are die stuff of celebrity (continued on page 148)marilyn monroe(continued from page 126) narrative, not of celebrity misfortune or calamity. Just think of Elizabeth Taylor.

Only when one looks at Marilyn not as a holy ghost but as a woman who lived can one begin to appreciate the important questions about her. The very things her apostles now interpret as tragic, her fans, and Marilyn herself, regarded as triumphant. Take the great dichotomy between Norma Jeane and Marilyn that is said to have destroyed her. During Marilyn's lifetime, the press portrayed the transformation of Norma Jeane into Marilyn Monroe less as a crippling loss of identity than as a powerful example of the great American theme of reinvention. Through hard work and cunning, an illegitimate girl who had bounced from foster home to foster home, a girl some claim wasn't all that beautiful to begin with, turns into the most coveted and famous woman in the world--a real-life Cinderella. So while she was a dream girl in the conventional sense of fulfilling fantasies, she was a dream girl in another sense as well: Marilyn Monroe was the American dream come true--a living monument to the country's promise of self-realization.

Similarly, what so many of her biographical apostles saw as her commodification Marilyn and her fans saw as a form of liberation in the sexually repressed 1950s. It was self-evident that much of the attention Marilyn Monroe garnered was focused on her voluptuous body. Early in her film career, when she was between jobs and before she was famous, she posed for pinups. One of the photos--Marilyn posed against red velvet-- emerged as a calendar in 1952, the same year she made Don't Bother to Knock. A controversy ensued--major stars at that time did not pose nude--which Marilyn defused by admitting, against her own studio's judgment, that it was she in the photograph. (This photo, of course, became the first Playboy Centerfold.) "I don't want to be just for the few," she told UPI reporter Aline Mosby, disarmingly turning her nudity into an egalitarian gift. "I want to be for the many, the kind of people I come from." She was funny, too. "It's not true that I had nothing on," she quipped when asked if she was really nude. "I had the radio on."

Marilyn's reaction said something important about her appeal. At a time of enormous circumspection about sex, she didn't try to hide her participation in the photo session or act as if she had outgrown these youthful indiscretions, which even now is the typical gambit when an actress's allegedly unsavory past is revealed. Expressing her comfort with nudity--she would later relate a dream in which she entered a church wearing a hoopskirt and nothing underneath as the congregants lay beneath her--Marilyn embraced the photo and for years afterward would gladly sign it. It was, in fact, part of what made her so popular even as it now drives feminists crazy: Marilyn Monroe helped redefine sex by letting people know she was fully aware of her commodification and accepted it as a kind of joke. "I don't look at myself as a commodity," she once said smartly, "but I'm sure a lot of people have." In effect, just as she had defused the controversy over her posing, she defused the idea of sex as a danger in 1950s America and became more popular as a result.

Though the famous calendar photo shows Marilyn with heavy-lidded eyes and half-open mouth, this was not the way she would come to project herself to her fans. She was not a siren, a temptress, a seductress or a femme fatale, though she played one in one of her early films, Niagara. Marilyn was something new and different. She took the open, playful, flirtatious, winking attitude of the pinup in less arty magazines and main-streamed it into American movies. Seemingly intoxicated by her own sexuality, as Mae West and Jean Harlow had been, but also naively bemused by it and at times even oblivious to its effect, as West and Harlow had not been, Marilyn Monroe always seemed to be having innocent fun. (It was what cultural analysts meant when they called Marilyn a child-woman.) She wasn't distant or self-regarding. She was available--so much so that near the end of her life, when she was a megastar, she removed the flesh-color body stocking she had been wearing for a scene in her last, unfinished film, Something's Got to Give, and appeared nude again. Her very last photo shoot was also a nude session with photographer Bert Stern. It wasn't degradation. It was joy--Marilyn's gift.

The real duality, then, for Marilyn Monroe was not the cosmic one between Norma Jeane and Marilyn but the much more parochial one between the Marilyn on-screen and the Marilyn off it, and far from being a source of tragedy, the recognition of the difference between these two was one of the major sources of her popularity. Marilyn played the dumb blonde on-screen; she practically invented the role in movies such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. But offscreen Marilyn made it clear that, while she was uninhibited and libidinous, she was not stupid. She created the image; it didn't create her. And she resisted anyone, even her own husbands, who tried to force her into die Marilyn mold. "They think they arrange me to suit themselves," she once said about photographers in what could generally have served as an expression of Marilyn's modus operandi, "but I use them to put over myself." Because audiences knew this about Marilyn from her interviews, knew that she wasn't really a bimbo, she became a subtle symbol of power--a woman who fully understood her wiles and who had learned how to use them to navigate a difficult world. Her strength, which she deployed so strategically, far more than her much-discussed vulnerability, let people know they were laughing with her, not at her, and that made Marilyn the icon she was. As Rupert Allan, Marilyn's longtime publicist, once put it, "Under all the frailty was a will of steel."

If at the end of her life Marilyn may have seemed a mess--and this is by no means an established fact--there was nothing inevitable or emblematic about it. Contrary to the biblical Marilyn, she wasn't a victim or a divided self or a commodity--at least not to her fans. If anything, she was an aging and disappointed actress who was trying to assert her control over a tough, misogynistic system. And to understand her popularity now, one has to see her not as a tormented, doom-laden goddess enshrouded in Freudian analysis but as a tough-minded star who, through the force of her personality and will, managed to seduce the world--and rather enjoyed doing so. That may not be the Marilyn Monroe the biographers want, but it is the Marilyn Monroe everyone loved.

Marilyn took the open, playful, flirtatious, winking attitude of the pinup and mainstreamed it into the movies. She always seemed to be having innocent fun.