Happy Birthday, Marilyn Monroe. An ode, from my cover story at Playboy Magazine, published December 2012.
“I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them
was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was
someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged
to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”—Marilyn Monroe
“Daughter of God, weaver of wiles,” Marilyn Monroe, like Sappho’s
Aphrodite, will never die. It has been 50 years since she gasped her final
breath on that lonely mattress with no bed frame—her beautiful nude body just
there, collapsed and unrestricted, that body all men (and women) yearned to
cradle, ravage or revere. There she was, Marilyn: her hand clutching the
telephone that kept her company when she holed up in her hacienda on Helena Drive;
her pill bottles visible; her last phone call with friend Peter Lawford; her
odd little housekeeper Eunice seeing lights still on under her door; her
devoted though strange Dr. Greenson first on the scene, breaking windows;
Marilyn’s agent rushing out of the Hollywood Bowl; the cops; the changed
stories; the Kennedys; the mob; the FBI files—what on earth was going on? A
death scene so like Marilyn, that creature of contradictions: bizarrely
glamorous and completely degrading, blatantly obvious and unendingly
mysterious. Suicide. Accident. Murder. Myth.
Monumental M.M. myths don’t die. When Marilyn’s inner light—that
luminosity she could turn on with one brilliant pout of her lips, with one
glance of moist, widened eyes, with one flash of that glimmering, sometimes
puckish smile—departed her body, she didn’t lose her power. She lost her life,
and that was tragic and indeed too soon. But that vulnerable woman, that strong
woman—a woman both in charge of her life and deeply unsure of herself, full of
hope and dope and dreams and fear of the future—that woman maintained her
power.
Marilyn wasn’t a candle in the wind. The well-meaning Sir Elton didn’t
write her swan song. Her poetic soulmate, that troubadour of Americana Bob
Dylan, granted her that honor. As Marilyn said herself, “I knew where she
belonged,” and so did Dylan, the other famous Bobby one wishes she’d made love
to or had lived long enough to meet. (Oh, what a couple Bobby Zimmerman and
Norma Jeane would have made!) Without intending it for M.M., Dylan placed her
in the “ocean and the sky and the whole wide world,” making “She Belongs to Me”
belong to Bobby and herself and to all of us. Marilyn, from the moment she
stepped in front of a camera, was an artist and she didn’t look back. “She can
take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black.” Yes. The
complexity of a woman. The lyrical duality of a poet. And she, deep down, must
have known this, even if she didn’t believe she had everything she needed. And
she remains ever present, ever modern, ever the hypnotist collector. “You are a
walking antique.”
Much has been written about Marilyn’s vulnerability, much of it
irritating. There’s the sad-eyed pat on the head, the poor little-girl-lost
attitude that reduces her to the child-woman so many feminists bristle over, to
which I ask, what is wrong with the child-woman? What is wrong with holding on
to that lost kid, waiting for your daddy to come home? Then there are those who
are quite sincere though simple-minded— Marilyn just needed a hug. She needed
love and understanding. Of course she did. And of course it’s never that
easy—not with a contradictory creature like Marilyn. And then there’s the more
honest, robust look at “vulnerability,” chiefly seen in Norman Mailer’s take on
Marilyn.
Mailer was a man who understood the mystery of women, a man who both
made love to many women and fucked many women, many beautiful women, a man who
admitted he wanted to steal Marilyn from Arthur Miller (“I wanted to meet her
so I could steal her. And you know, a criminal will never forgive you for
preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.”) and
a man who understood that vulnerability can sometimes be complicit and
manipulative, thereby making Marilyn neither total innocent nor doe-eyed dummy. As he wrote, so beautifully, she was, “a female spurt of wit and
sensitive energy who could hang like a sloth for days in a muddy-mooded coma; a
child-girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere;
a fountain of charm and a dreary bore. She was certainly more than the silver
witch of us all.”
Mailer understood her as both a human and celestial being—the “very
Stradivarius of sex.” That may sound like horny hyperbole to some, but to me it
places her on the level she deserves—a woman as a poet, an artist in her own
being, her own sex, her own talent. And no one has ever captured that specific
magic that is Marilyn. No one. Mailer’s words are a gorgeous counterpoint to
what that other famous Marilyn biographer, Gloria Steinem, said of Marilyn on
the American Masters special “Still Life” a few years back: “She was a joke.
She was vulnerable. She was so eager for approval. She was all the things that
I feared most being as a teenage girl.”
I don’t believe you, Gloria Steinem. Further, in the same special,
Steinem (who I do believe admired Marilyn) comments on Marilyn’s final shoot
with photographer George Barris—those gorgeous, timeless, casual shots on the
beach, where she’s wrapped in a green towel and smiling or walking along the
water in a sweater, staring at the camera with such soulful ambiguity that we
can only stare back and wonder what she’s thinking; where she looks so modern,
so ready for the 1960s in all her classic Pucci and slimmed-down frame and
progressive ideas about sexuality. She’s clearly enjoying the beach, enjoying life.
But she’s contemplative too. And this makes these photos poignant, not tragic.
She looks so happy and womanly and alive: Who could believe she would die three
weeks later? But Steinem, who sees Barris as a “kind man,” felt Marilyn was not
her true self in those pictures. “The photographs are rather mannered and
female impersonating and pathetic and sad.”
Pathetic? If there’s one thing Marilyn Monroe was never pathetic in
front of, no matter the quality of the shot or the quality of the movie, it was
a camera. She was a master. She had the God-given talent and charisma to turn
on that inner light, and she had the intelligence to dim that light as well, to
create darker erotic images (like Milton Greene’s Black Sitting), sad images,
vulnerable images. And that is not pathetic. That’s strong. That’s brave.
That’s art. Marilyn’s art.
And this instinct of her artistry came to her early. As chronicled by
photographer André de Dienes, who shot some of her better-known youthful images,
Marilyn yearned to express herself. She suggested ideas (as that other great
M.M. photographer, Eve Arnold, can attest to as well). In 1953 the rising star
called De Dienes at two in the morning, sleepless, sad and distressed. And in
this state, she wanted to take pictures. When he arrived she wore no makeup,
her eyes tired, her hair disheveled, and she was on the verge of despair. He
was hesitant to shoot, but she insisted he snap her just as she was, in the
dark streets of Beverly Hills (all her idea).
In one of the most compelling images,
Marilyn is leaning against a tree near a garbage can, eyes closed, in a black
coat, lit only by De Dienes’s car headlights. If you didn’t know it was
Marilyn, you could mistake it for a Cindy Sherman film still (and Marilyn set
it up just as Sherman would). But since she was in real pain, it’s much more
raw than Sherman’s work and in line with the dark beauty of a Francesca
Woodman. She said to De Dienes, “You usually write captions for your photos.
You can put ‘the end of everything’ under these.” The images are heartbreaking—
stunningly beautiful and depleted and scary and fascinating. Not only for
M.M.’s pain, but also for her modern approach to exposing it.
“I can’t figure you out. You’re silk on one side and sandpaper on the
other,” Richard Widmark says to her mentally ill babysitter in Don’t Bother to
Knock, released a year before the “end of everything” photos and a movie that
feels lost among her Technicolor dreamscapes. How many times had Marilyn heard
similar versions of that male confusion? “What are you?” Her movie answer? A
breathy “I’ll be any way you want me to be.”
Does she mean it? I hope not.
Marilyn is brilliant here: so young and sexually damaged and complex, simmering
with erotic heat that flows naturally out of her. There’s a prophetic sadness
permeating her performance as this delusional young woman freshly released from
an insane asylum. Knowing what we know about Marilyn’s childhood— the mentally
ill mother, foster homes, sexual assaults, the longing for a father— she
certainly understood the pathology and despondency of her character. She was a
woman who wanted to be normal. Normal and special. But mental illness— in real
life Marilyn’s greatest fear, that demon—just wouldn’t allow it. The breach
between reality and fiction bedeviled her as a walking work of art—no matter
how effortlessly sensual she looked in a negligee.
Silk and sandpaper. Love and sex. And again sex. As women, may we just
have sex without judgment? Marilyn may have been used early in her career (and
all through it), and she certainly harbored anger and sickness over some of
those rougher moments, but women like that survive it. And she did. It didn’t
destroy her creativity and it didn’t destroy her sex. She may have discussed
her background and heartache as a little girl, but she didn’t let go of her
carnality, healthy or unhealthy or a mixture of the two. I love what she said
in her last interview, before the feminist movement, which often viewed her as
a movie star trapped by the male gaze (a tired criticism that forgets how much
women revere Marilyn): “We are all born sexual creatures, thank God,” she said,
“but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real
art, comes from it, everything.”
Real art. Marilyn’s innate acting ability and sexuality radiated in
early pictures, like her unaffected, jeans-wearing charm in Clash By Night—a
movie in which she utters Clifford Odets’s dialogue with such naturalism you
wish the movie were about the girl in those jeans. She held her own with the inimitable
George Sanders in All About Eve and gave us more than a mere plum honey in The
Asphalt Jungle. In front of the movie camera she was pure talent, pure
instinct, pure sex and sympathy and strength, from her fantastically overripe
voluptuousness in Niagara to her sweet playfulness in The Seven Year Itch to
her impeccable comic timing in Some Like It Hot—imbuing what could have been
dumb blonde Sugar Cane into a soulful chanteuse who breaks our hearts and turns
us on (that translucent dress!) with “I’m Through With Love.” She is not only
dreamlike but bursting through the celluloid with such humanity and temperature
that you feel as if you could almost touch her.
In The Misfits, her bravura performance, the
faded cowboys circle around a near faded woman but one still so lovely that
classic movie star Clark Gable, sitting on Marilyn’s bed, just next to her
exquisite bare back, is humbled by the sight of her. Yes, even Rhett Butler is
honored to be touching that skin.
The Misfits was a notoriously tough shoot, but I don’t care how many
accounts I’ve read about her lousing up lines, showing up late or not showing
up at all. She was worth it. Even Billy Wilder, who was deeply frustrated while
working with her, cited her “elegant vulgarity” and her understanding of the
camera: “She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. She also loved the
camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that
comes through. She was not even aware of it.”
She must have been aware of it, at least sometimes. Watch Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes. Once you get to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, with that
famous pink dress and those black-clad sadomasochistic ladies hanging from
chandeliers (what a fantastically kinky touch!) and Marilyn’s “No, no, no, no,
no,” she is such a movie star and yet has such a sense of humor about herself
and is just so damn glamorous that she brings you to your knees. And she had to
have known that. She wasn’t stupid.
And most self-respecting Marilyn biographers know she wasn’t the dumb
blonde. But as much as Marilyn has been written about, with all the usual facts
emerging—her pain and her undeniable magic, her epic rise and fall—she still
seems, through all these years, misunderstood. Good. For as ubiquitous as she
is, she’s still mysterious. She’s still beguiling.
Her films are more layered, enchanting and intricate now. I recently
took in Marilyn’s powerful performance in Bus Stop and Lars von Trier’s genius
Melancholia back-to-back and thought to myself, My God, would Mr. Von Trier
have gotten Marilyn! In Bus Stop she’s the ultimate hillbilly beauty—broken
down and abused and filled with all that excitable “Hollywood and Vine” hope
that will never pan out. But she’s an angel. Like one of Von Trier’s tortured
martyrs, she’s a unique woman because she’s so confused and frustrated, because
she’s willing to demean herself. Painted up in that gorgeous chalky white
makeup that only M.M. could pull off so naturally, gyrating in that dive,
donning costumes probably unwashed for weeks, standing onstage in sexily torn
fishnets and bruised legs and sweetly warbling through “That Old Black Magic”
(even though M.M. was a talented singer and dancer), she is a deity—a vision
that man-child Don Murray sees right away. And he’s right.
Yes, she’s an earthly woman, a woman who sleeps in all day and probably
bleeds on the sheets and spills liquor on her clothes and continually
embarrasses herself, and a woman so lost or sacrificial that she just gives up
her dreams and leaves with that insane cowboy. But that makes her even more
interesting and almost guiltily desirable. As I’ve written about Von Trier’s
women, they live in hard, oppressive worlds filled with people who harbor
little concern for their goodness or who at least attempt to understand their
ugliness. I can imagine Marilyn, like Kirsten Dunst’s Justine, basking under
that doomsday planet, naked and pale and accepting—absorbing and eroticizing
that pain—and, as Marilyn did in film, giving us the pleasure of looking at her
beautiful body.
Because through it all, no matter what was happening in her life,
Marilyn gave us that gift: pleasure. Pleasure in happiness and pleasure in pain
and the pleasure of looking at her. And great artist that she was, looking at
her provoked whatever you desired to interpret from her. Her beauty was
transcendent. For that, we should do as Dylan instructs: “Bow down to her on
Sunday, salute her when her birthday comes.”
"The Nude Marilyn." Originally published in Playboy Magazine.