Forever Marilyn

For writer Joyce Carol Oates, that jolt of inspiration did not come from the movies of Marilyn Monroe, but from a photograph of her previous incarnation, Norma Jeane Baker. She chanced upon it in a memoir by Monroe’s half-sister.

It was a portrait, so full of hopefulness and yearning, and it reminded Oates of girls she grew up with in upstate New York, disadvantaged girls who had lots of dreams but few real options. Oates felt compelled to unravel the complex story behind that long-ago portrait.

The result: the 730-page “Blonde,” a novel based on the life and times of Monroe, that most famous of blonds. The author and subject of the newly published “Blonde” will be featured at two events this weekend, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA and a Marilyn Monroe retrospective at the American Cinematheque.

“You just can’t believe another book can be written about Marilyn Monroe!” says film critic Molly Haskell, who wrote “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.”

“She’s been different things to different people. To Norman Mailer [who wrote “Marilyn: A Biography” in 1973], she was a damsel in distress whom he was going to rescue. To feminists in 1970s, she was a martyr to the Hollywood patriarchy. She’s a kind of screen that everyone projects upon.”

The cult of Marilyn never wants for members. Her pouty-lipped face pops up on postcards, posters, ads. Her name is often invoked as the avatar of American beauty. Her style was the prequel of every platinum blond walking the red carpet at the recent Academy Awards.

Why are people still mad for Marilyn Monroe?

Perhaps some identify with her struggle to find her moment in the sun. “In a peculiar way it’s a form of success,” Haskell observes. “She was a neurotic, near psychotic, turning her weakness to her advantage. That’s a kind of parable that appeals to us.”

Then, of course, Monroe lived fast and died young--at 36--a sadly romantic notion that keeps hers the most visited grave site in Westwood Memorial Park.

And there’s no forgetting that Monroe was magic in front of the camera. Those who see her on the silver screen at the Cinematheque this weekend probably will agree with what the New York Herald Tribune said of her in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”: “As usual she looks as though she’d glow in the dark. . . .”

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For the prolific Oates, author of such weighty volumes as “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart,” “Expensive People” and “Them,” two years is a long time to labor over a novel, as she did with “Blonde.” But she still gets a charge discussing Monroe during an interview at her home in Princeton, N.J. “Have you ever seen this picture I’m talking about?” she asks. “Let me show it to you.”

The photocopy she produces shows a 17-year-old girl, pretty but hardly exceptional. Her curled hair is still dark, her smile radiant--not yet knowing or contrived. She is, in 1940s Los Angeles, the girl next door. This is Norma Jeane Baker.

“You can barely recognize her, she looks so different from that blond thing she became,” Oates says. “This is who interested me. . . . I was just so interested in the phenomenon of the quintessential American girl, maybe of a somewhat lower economic class in the 1940s, smiling so hard and so hopeful, and who would in a few years become Marilyn Monroe but at that moment had no idea what was in store.”

Oates delved into books and visited Monroe’s hometown, L.A. Then she sat down to write. She soon got into the rhythm of Norma Jeane’s roller-coaster life--purgatory and redemption, over and over again. Norma Jeane has exhilarating adventures with her movie-mad mother, Gladys, a film developer at a studio, but Gladys has increasingly severe breakdowns and lands in a mental hospital. The daughter lands in an orphanage. Norma Jeane meets a sweet couple who want to adopt her, but Gladys won’t allow it. Norma Jeane finds a nice foster home, but then the foster father takes a little too much interest in her. And so on.

“I tend to write about girls like Norma Jeane,” Oates says. “I’ve written a number of novels about people from somewhat poor backgrounds who have stories but can’t tell their own stories. I’m more interested in ordinary Americans who don’t know what their lives are going to be, are kind of groping. I guess I identify with them. I don’t identify with successful people, not at all.”

Oates’ prominent eyes stare out from a lean frame of a body, covered with sweater and baggy maroon slacks on this nippy early spring afternoon. Speaking in her slightly flattened tones, she seems to be looking beyond her interviewer as she focuses her thoughts. Those thoughts come forward with sharp, steady clarity, strongly in contrast with the muddled life and logic of Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.”

As a novelist creates characters, so does an actress, Oates believes. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe. “Before that she was just an actress,” she says. “Then she became the quintessential dumb blond with this little baby voice: that was the most prevalent and successful of her different characters.”

But that invented Marilyn wasn’t really her, and the author wanted to get at a real person, to convey the fact that “there’s a real spiritually alive and poetic person inside the public figure.”

Oates had intended to end her narrative when Norma Jeane assumed the trumped-up studio name of Marilyn Monroe, about a year before she made “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950). But the muse wouldn’t let her quit. Instead, the author wrote on, and on. Clear through to the end of Marilyn’s life.

In the book, as in life, Monroe makes some great films, even as her personal life stumbles from one disaster to another: careless spending of limited income; unsuitable men; abortions and miscarriages; booze and barbiturates and suicide attempts.

“It became obsessive in the last two or three hundred pages,” Oates says. “As I drew closer to the ending and I knew she had to die, it was like going through a little tunnel, and suddenly her options were closing and my options were closing. The last six months of her life were very difficult.”

Increasingly drugged-out and spaced-out, Monroe was constantly late for work, flubbing lines, driving people around her crazy. Then she subjected herself to a humiliating fling with President John F. Kennedy.

One Saturday night, 36 and alone in her little Brentwood hacienda, she overdosed on barbiturates; at least that’s what the coroner said. Oates offers up three hallucinatory alternatives: suicide, accidental and deliberate, and assassination, an idea popularized in various Kennedy-related conspiracy theories.

“Blonde” readers may constantly ask themselves, “Did this really happen?” Though clearly the private conversations and personal thoughts--there are numerous passages of Monroe having rather stream-of-consciousness percolations--are mostly conjured up, what of facts and artifacts?

Book reviewers have already pointed to discrepancies in fact, such as why Charles Chaplin Jr., one of Monroe’s early Hollywood dates, was depicted as gay or bisexual when he was decidedly not. Oates stuck close to the chronology of Monroe’s life--the films, the agents, the lovers--but since this is, as she says in the preface, “a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction,” she wasn’t obligated to be strictly factual.

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One fact to keep in mind, Haskell says, is that “Marilyn Monroe was no role model, no Katharine Hepburn, no Eleanor Roosevelt. She was so needy and vulnerable, embarrassingly dysfunctional, so not in control of her destiny. Those qualities appealed to men--she promised all and demanded nothing.”

The brazen hussy was maybe not brazen enough, and the dumb blond a little too smart. She was deeply insecure and always starved for approval. She was far too sensitive to the world around her and, in the end, desperate to be taken seriously. In her last interview, done shortly before her death in June 1962, she pleaded with a reporter, “I want to be a serious artist; don’t make a joke out of me.”

The verdict on Oates’ opus is being debated--does it further exploit the poor dead actress (as the Marilyn Reporter Fan Club claims)? Or does it serve as a respectful elegy to her poetic spirit (as New York Times reviewer Laura Miller believes)? In any case, movie audiences can decide for themselves whether Monroe was merely a minor actress or, as some hold, a comic genius.

The nine films in the American Cinematheque retrospective include her best known--from the dramas “Niagara” (1953) and “Bus Stop” (1956), to the comedies “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953) and, of course, the Billy Wilder masterpiece “Some Like It Hot” (1959).

‘Beautiful Blond Woman Who Seems Never to Age’

In that classic, she plays Sugar, the hapless, hooch-sipping ukulele player in an all-girls band in which two guy musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) are hiding from the mob.

At her prime in the 1950s, Monroe was clearly in command of her on-screen portrayals. Her singing and dancing in the famous “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was deliciously sassy, brassy and hot, a perfect musical signature for her lucre-loving Lorelei Lee. And the dumb blond she played wasn’t so dumb; she often got what she wanted by playing to the male ego. (In real life, this did not get her so far.)

Those in Los Angeles may get a special kick from the mentions of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in “Blonde”; it is now the home of the American Cinematheque, where the Monroe retrospective will run.

The Egyptian figures prominently throughout the novel. It is the theater where the toddler Norma Jeane discovers the magic of the silver screen and the place where the strung-out adult Marilyn Monroe attempts to rediscover her own purpose. “Entering the darkened theater . . , “ Oates writes, “excited as a young girl looking up eagerly to see on the screen yet again . . . the beautiful blond woman who seems never to age, encased in flesh like any woman and yet graceful as no ordinary woman could be, a powerful radiance shining not only in her luminous eyes but in her very skin.”

Even the creeping signs of age evident during close-ups in her last film, “The Misfits” (1961), are compelling. The grace and fragility we had always sensed about her are now fully exposed in her heartbreaking farewell performance.

Nearly 40 years after Monroe’s death, these films are the foundation of an immortality few actors today will ever know.

BE THERE

“Marilyn Monroe: Actress & Icon” film series continues tonight through Sunday at the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. $7. $5 members. For full schedule, see Special Screenings listings, Page 35.

Panel discussion with Joyce Carol Oates and others, hosted by Leonard Maltin, Sunday at 5 p.m., tickets available at box office day of the event. (323) 466-FILM.

Joyce Carol Oates also will speak Sunday at 10:30 a.m. at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the Korn Convocation Hall at UCLA. Free; tickets required. Tickets are available at participating Ticketmaster outlets.

She will also be at Writers Bloc on Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Writers Guild Theatre, 135. S. Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills. $15. (310) 335-0917.