Marilyn Monroe’s Star Shines Brighter Than Ever : Hollywood: The ‘super icon’ maintains a baffling hold on the American psyche. She would have been 65 today.

Rudy Reyes drives trucks in Hawthorne, but this week he parked on Hollywood Boulevard. He wasn’t going to miss this one for the world.

Six blond bombshells, vamping and sighing before a swarm of photographers, sauntered past well-wishers into Mann’s Chinese Theatre. It was several days before the observance today of what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 65th birthday, but Polaroid was already celebrating with a look-alike contest.

Never mind that two of the finalists were men or that the contest was more about selling film than honoring one of this century’s most enduring legends.

This was Hollywood, after all, where nearly three decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe has become the single most familiar vestige of filmland nostalgia, maintaining a grip on the American psyche that bewilders even some of her greatest admirers.

“I really can’t explain it,” said Jim Dougherty, a retired Los Angeles police officer and the first of her three husbands. “I think she is more popular today than she ever was. I get calls from all over the world. People who weren’t even born (when she died) call me and they want to know about her. Everyone kind of sympathizes with her.”

Michael Marsden, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, describes her as a “super icon” who mysteriously transcends her own place in time and history. Marsden said Monroe has joined the likes of Billy the Kid, Abraham Lincoln and George Armstrong Custer as “an incredibly magnetic personality” that succeeding generations are drawn to without understanding.

“We have never come to terms with her,” Marsden said. “Some of the best minds in America have really tried to understand her. All of these super icons have to be enigmatic. There has to be a large part of their lives that is unexplained, so that you can fill in the blanks, so that you can read her the way you want.”

Reyes, the truck driver, offers a more basic explanation: “She was absolutely beautiful.”

Walk down Hollywood Boulevard and Monroe still lives on every corner. There are posters of her, postcards, commemorative plates, dolls, clocks, pillowcases, toys, jigsaw puzzles, earrings, Christmas ornaments, T-shirts, calendars, watches, stationery, towels, socks and powder boxes.

There is even a Marilyn Monroe wine, named Marilyn Merlot, promoted by a San Francisco look-alike who last year appeared before the California Artichoke Advisory Board singing, “I wanna be sauteed by you.”

“Marilyn is our most popular personality,” said Cynthia Janos, director of licensing for the Roger Richman Agency, the Beverly Hills firm that represents the Monroe estate and those of numerous other deceased personalities, including Clark Gable, W.C. Fields, Mae West and Albert Einstein.

When Monroe died at age 36 in her Brentwood home from a drug overdose in 1962, she had appeared in 29 films and her estate was worth about $900,000. Today, her estate earns more than $1 million each year in licensing fees to vendors and manufacturers.

The most photographed stars and footprints outside the Chinese Theatre are those of Monroe and actor John Wayne, the theater reports. Designer Yves Saint Laurent last year introduced a couture collection in Paris honoring the shapely actress with a white lace dress that “pushes the breasts to the sky,” as one reviewer wrote.

Madonna has built a mini-industry mimicking Monroe, winning an Oscar this year for singing in neo-Monroe fashion, “Sooner or Later I Always Get My Man,” in the film “Dick Tracy,” and later appearing semi-naked in Vanity Fair with poses made famous by the quintessential buxom blonde.

Singer Elton John launched his comeback in 1988 with the re-release of “Candle in the Wind,” a sentimental song about Monroe. The same year, Maxell tapes featured a billboard campaign--including one looming over New York’s Times Square--with an image of Monroe and the words, “The tape lasts as long as the legend.”

More than 50 books have been written about the actress, the mystery surrounding her death on Aug. 5, 1962, her relationship with John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, her marriages to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and literary giant Arthur Miller, and countless “secrets” about her life.

Today, a new Monroe book goes on sale featuring 18 previously unpublished photographs taken in 1945 of Norma Jeane Dougherty, the 19-year-old Van Nuys High School dropout with curly brown hair who worked in an aircraft factory. Norma Jeane used the photos to land her first modeling and film jobs. Later, the studios would rename her Marilyn Monroe and dye her hair blond.

“Marilyn is a symbol of anybody walking in this city today, saying, ‘If she can make it, I can make it,’ ” said actor Tony Curtis, who starred with Monroe in Billy Wilder’s classic movie “Some Like It Hot” in 1959. “If they’ve got a good physique, a good head of hair, they can make it in our profession. It is a unique thing. It is the only profession in the world where you can come from literally nothing on one day and four days later be a star.”

Monroe’s continued popularity comes in part from her uncanny ability to appeal to both men and women. Her oozing sensuality cast her as an instant sex symbol in the 1940s, but her quiet vulnerability and perceived innocence also made her sympathetic to many women.

“It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations,” wrote Gloria Steinem in her 1986 book about Monroe. “It is the lost Norma Jeane, looking out of Marilyn’s eyes, who captures our heart.”

Harvey R. Greenberg, a New York psychiatrist who has written about the psychology of the film industry, said Monroe’s popularity also hinges on her tragic fall after living a classic rags-to-riches success story.

“There is a native human capacity to look beyond ourselves, at something bigger, and more glorious, while at the same time getting the vicarious pleasure in finding out that it isn’t so big and glorious,” Greenberg said. “We delight in people who have more money, more power, more sex, more glamour than we do, and there is a certain thrill we get in seeing these people brought down. We can say to ourselves, “They may be great, but look at all of the problems they get into.’ ”

Marsden, the popular culture professor, said Monroe’s life and death will be continuously reinvented by society in a way that reflects prevailing values. Today, he said, Monroe is seen increasingly from a feminist perspective, cast as a long-suffering, unfulfilled woman who was never allowed to reach her potential because of a male-dominated film industry. Her death, the theory goes, was society “putting the knife to her,” he said.

Twenty years ago, Monroe was seen as an unsophisticated starlet who cashed in on her good looks but was never suited for a more serious dramatic career. Unable to cope with her own insecurities and failings, she turned to alcohol and drugs, eventually killing herself.

“In 2025, she will be interpreted in an entirely different way,” Marsden said. “Our culture reinvents these iconic figures according to the particular set of needs of the time.”

Monroe’s 65th birthday today will be marked by a variety of look-alike contests across the country, a ceremony at a hotel in New York where she posed for photographs in 1954, and the annual pilgrimage of fans to her grave in Westwood.

A longtime friend of Monroe, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the late actress would be “absolutely amazed” at the level of notoriety she enjoys today.

“She knew that she had a beautiful body, and I am sure she was very proud of that,” the friend said. “But that was pride in something that she possessed. But there was nothing she felt that she had attained that would possibly propel her into this kind of stardom for eternity.”

Others said Monroe would be horrified at being 65 and at the accompanying wrinkles and Social Security checks.

“She couldn’t have coped with being 65,” said psychic Kenny Kingston, who advised Monroe when she was alive. “She was one of these people who had to be glamorous. How many face lifts can you have?”

Dougherty, who married Norma Jeane Baker when she was 16, predicted that his wife of four years would be “a chubby little old grandma” if she were alive and still married to him. “My present wife is a chubby little old grandma, and (Monroe’s) mother was a chubby little gal. So she probably would have gotten fatter as time went by too.”

Bebe Goddard, Monroe’s stepsister who lived with Norma Jeane for several years before she married Dougherty, last celebrated a birthday with her in 1953, the year Monroe starred in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Goddard remembers Monroe inviting the family to her Doheny Drive apartment for dinner and birthday cake.

“It was not well-cooked liver and kind-of-tough baked potatoes,” Goddard recalled. “It was the first time I had seen her with a glass of wine and a cigarette, and I was having a fit laughing because she didn’t drink or smoke.”

Goddard, who is preparing to write her own book about her stepsister, said she gets inquiries from around the world about her. She said she spends much of her time trying to set the record straight about Monroe, particularly when self-described former lovers write books or give interviews to gossip magazines.

Goddard said she derives her greatest satisfaction knowing that Norma Jeane has gotten the best of her critics.

“She was so put down by her studio and other people who really didn’t know her well when she was alive,” Goddard said. “To me it is just a glorious experience that the interest in her keeps increasing and that she is up there thumbing her nose at them.”