Marilyn & Me

She stood there bewildered. “Mom, this is a cemetery,” my daughter said, pointing to a small square gravestone embedded in the grass at her feet. “Erma Gill,” it read. “Budded on Earth. Bloom in Heaven. March 6, 1907.” She was right, we were in a cemetery. But when I had picked her up from school, announcing we were going on an adventure, a cemetery, I knew, was not any destination my daughter would imagine.

Smug in the knowledge that the cemetery itself was not the prize, I took my daughter’s hand and walked with her across the grassy expanse. A few moments later we arrived at the mystery. In the shaded corner of a wall of crypts, a slab of stone held the plain bronze letters that spelled out “MARILYN MONROE, 1926-1962.” This was our adventure. I had taken my daughter to see Marilyn Monroe’s grave.

It wasn’t what I expected. For years I had heard Monroe’s grave was tucked away in the middle of Westwood, but I had never given it much thought. But once there I realized I was looking for a shrine, at the very least some statuary, “Venus Rising From the Mists,” perhaps, or the Lincoln Memorial.

“Is this it? Is this the surprise?” my daughter asked, looking at me with complete incomprehension. At 10 1/2, she was unmoved. Indifferent. She was bored.

“Do you know who Marilyn Monroe is?” I asked, sure that ignorance was the reason for her lackluster response.

“She was a movie star,” she answered and looked at the single white carnation resting in the holder at the crypt. A handful of note cards had been inserted into the groove separating Monroe’s block from the one below it. My daughter, drawn by an illustration of hearts and halos, retrieved two cards that had fallen. The first one entreated Marilyn to look after Princess Di now that they were sister angels in heaven. In the second, the writer vowed that he would not rest until he rooted out the conspiracy that had murdered the star. My daughter read the cards and handed them to me to return to their place in the wall. She wanted to know why someone had killed Marilyn Monroe. Were she and Princess Di friends? And why do people write to someone who’s dead?

I had never envisioned this--having to explain the lost and the lonely, or the mad ones with no link to the world my daughter knows. In my mind, this trip of ours was simply an innocent encounter with a significant figure of my youth. When I was growing up, Marilyn Monroe had been a consistent presence, familiar, like a distant companion waiting for me to take my place beside her when I was grown. I knew my daughter was aware of Monroe, but in a different way. In addition to her films, she’d seen Marilyn Monroe on postage stamps, mugs, jigsaw puzzles. I had assumed her name would mean something, that at the very least she’d think our foray was cool. But what caught my daughter’s attention was not the name, or the image that it evoked, but the cards. She understood we were at a site of pilgrimage, but the pilgrims who journeyed there had nothing to do with movies or fun. Where we were was strange. Someplace eerie. And in the same moment that I recognized this unforeseen turn our field trip had taken, I saw myselfstanding there with my daughter, in a cemetery, in front of a movie star’s grave. What was I doing? I asked myself. Why, of all places, had I taken my daughter here?

I wanted to spend time with her, I told myself, to have a meaningful mother-daughter day. But how could I have been so misguided? Was Graceland next? Would my mother have taken me to see a movie star’s grave? I understood that, on some level, I had thought this trip would be a female passage my daughter and I would take together--if not quite the mystery rites or the ritual baths of the ancient world, our own version of something eternal. And, yes, there had been something eternal about it, but it was nothing female. It was death. This, certainly, I told myself, had not been my intention.

Then it dawned on me how I had arrived at the idea. It wasn’t some twisted notion from a gothic past life. It was ordinary. Trips like these are the L.A. equivalent of seeing the Statue of Liberty in New York or the Washington Monument in D.C. These sites--whether they be Marilyn Monroe’s burial ground or the cement handprints at Mann’s Chinese Theatre--are our city’s markers. But unlike other places, where the sites represent history or symbols of ideas, here they represent faces, timeless faces. Our city is built on the immortality of these faces. From its start, it’s been nourished by a celebrity culture, and in a celebrity culture, where immortality can yield profit, no one, despite the facts, dies.

But this wasn’t true for my daughter. This world of celebrity immortality held no meaning for her. In her disinterest, she refused to gawk. And her indifference lent an unexpected human quality to Marilyn Monroe. To my daughter, Monroe was merely a person, albeit a movie star, who had died. The two of us were in a cemetery, not a palace shrine. Looking at the square of pink stone with Monroe’s name on it, what I saw was so simple, the opposite of all the hype and commerce that still surrounds her image. And it struck me that this plain stone in this nondescript cemetery allowed Marilyn Monroe a humanity she never had while she lived. It meant, like all the other lives the gravestones testified to, that her life, too, could end. Standing there, with the Avco cinemas towering in front of us, I realized that my daughter and I were in the only place in L.A.--if not the world--where Marilyn Monroe is actually dead.

On the drive out of Westwood Village Memorial Park, past the sanctuaries of Tranquillity, Devotion and Tenderness, I asked my daughter what she thought of our journey. She shrugged. “I don’t really care about Marilyn Monroe.” There was a mixture of apology and questioning in her voice.

“It’s OK,” I said.

“Will you put on 102.7?” she asked. “And, please, can we get a Slurpee?”

I hit the button on the radio. The latest Spice Girls single filled the car. As my daughter sang along with them, I caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror. On the brink of adolescence, her face had taken on a mobile quality--at one moment, her features were still soft and girlish, in the next, the planes of her face seemed suddenly more defined. Then, as the giant movie billboards above Wilshire Boulevard came into view, I understood what I had wanted out of that afternoon. What I had wanted to share with my daughter was a vision of my girlhood, what Marilyn Monroe had meant to me. She was beautiful. My father had thought so. So had my mother. Therefore, I had, too. Somehow, I wanted to convey to my daughter the sense of hope and promise a young girl feels about her life when she sees a beautiful woman. I wanted her to understand the thrill and simple power of that identification--before the politics, the self-scrutiny, the fall from grace come charging in. It’s a time of innocence I cherish. It’s a time I would like to keep my daughter in. And driving in the car, with my daughter singing pop, dreaming of a Slurpee, I knew we were in that time, and I wished that somehow, if we kept on driving, with the radio playing, we could stay there.

When Marilyn Monroe died on Aug. 5, 1962, I was, like my daughter, too young to understand the tragic consequences of her death--that she felt vanquished at 36, felt the terror of beauty fading, and that without this youth, this beauty, life should end. It wasn’t until I was older, when I had learned for myself that we all inevitably fall short of the beautiful image, that I understood that the flesh-and-blood Monroe herself couldn’t live up to her image. It was this that I wanted my daughter to learn from our adventure--that in her coming of age, she, too, will experience the fall of the image. But rather than heralding the end, it will clear the path for her own character to emerge. The ideal vanishes, except in those celluloid faces. Character is what endures.

So maybe there is a value to these shining images. They take us on a journey that leads us back to ourselves. By telling us who we’re not, we must go back and discover who we are. Perhaps, at a later time, my daughter will remember this trip to Marilyn Monroe’s grave and understand why I took her there. It won’t be the answer that emerged from my girlhood. The answer will come from her own. Our histories, though bound together, are not common property.Our pasts, like our dreams, are our own. It’s not the way the story would end in Hollywood, but that’s OK. My daughter and I are not the stuff images are made of. We’re for real.