Marilyn--the Candle in the Wind
You don’t have to be a movie buff to know that her name was really Norma Jean. Or that she was married to two larger-than-life men: baseball great Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. Or that she died, of a drug overdose, way too young, at the age of 36.
Images of her--standing, white skirt billowing, over a subway steam grate or cooing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy in a skin-tight, hand-beaded sheath--are part of our shared memory. With her hourglass figure, her platinum hair and her guileless presence, she was a celebrity sexpot, a vulnerable icon.
No matter how much fashions change or how bone-thin runway models get, Marilyn Monroe--vivacious and full-bodied, Playboy magazine’s first centerfold--continues to help define what it is to be alluring in America. But she is also proof that stardom takes its toll.
Last month, her stuff went on the auction block at Christie’s in New York. Over two days, collectors and fans spent more than $11 million for items ranging from the glamorous to the mundane.
There was her tattered copy of “The Joy of Cooking” and the 35-baguette diamond eternity ring (with one stone missing) that DiMaggio gave her at their wedding in 1954. There were three pairs of jeans from J.C. Penney up for grabs, as well as the famous sequined dress by French designer Jean Louis that she bought for $12,000 to wear while serenading the president at Madison Square Garden in May 1962. It sold for $1.15 million.
Less than three months after she wore that dress, she was dead. Her psychiatrist found her nude body in her Brentwood home, lying face down on her bed, clutching a telephone receiver in her hand. It is hard to imagine a more devastating picture of the loneliness of fame.
She was a woman of simple tastes and sometimes straightforward talk. She knew she was a sex symbol, was aware that people objectified and idealized her, but could be practical about the bargain she’d made.
“A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate being a thing,” she once said. “But if I’m going to be a symbol of something, I’d rather have it sex than some of the other things we’ve got symbols of.”
Still, the adoration was double-edged, and she knew that too.
“People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person,” she said. “They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts. Then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”
Her father was a dashing Danish immigrant who disappeared before she was born. Her mother, a film-cutter at RKO, had a nervous breakdown when Norma Jean was small. The future celebrity was raised in foster homes around Los Angeles and got married at age 16 to an aircraft plant worker she reportedly called Daddy. They divorced four years later.
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She started bleaching her hair. She modeled and got jobs in B-movies. Joseph Mankiewicz saw her in a small part in “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950) and put her in “All About Eve,” which resulted in a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox (which had previously signed her but had let the contract lapse). Two movies in 1953, “Niagara” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” established her as a star.
Still, two years later, when she went to a dinner honoring her work in “The Seven Year Itch,” she had to borrow a gown from the studio because she didn’t own one.
Her jewelry was mostly costume, conveying a lack of pretense that seemed genuine. When she married Miller in 1956, for example, she wore a beige dress. She had trouble finding a veil to match, so she bought a white one and dyed it with coffee.
Invited by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to make her mark in its concrete forecourt with fellow bombshell Jane Russell, she initially suggested that they imprint their best-known assets--her bust and Russell’s behind. When Grauman’s demurred, Monroe settled for hand- and footprints. She dotted the I in her name with a rhinestone.
Norman Mailer wrote a book about her. So did Gloria Steinem and dozens of people you’ve never heard of. Andy Warhol silk-screened her. Elton John wrote a song about her, “Candle in the Wind,” and then--in a linking of two interrupted lives--revised it to memorialize Lady Diana upon her death, at age 36, in a car crash.
Conspiracy theorists have had a field day, suspecting foul play in the movie star’s death. After all, they point out, she left no suicide note.
But it may be that Marilyn simply had nothing left to say or give to the world--to her vast, unknowable public.
“I knew I belonged to the public and to the world,” she once said, “not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I never had belonged to anything or anyone else.”
