Beauty, Always in the Eye of the Beholder

Let me entertain you.

--Baby June in “Gypsy”

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Let them entertain you. Sunday brings not Mother’s Day corsages but bombshells and blonds, goddesses large and little, following blueprints set out for them in their childhoods.

One is Norma Jeane Baker, who became Marilyn Monroe, still a disturbing, shrouded, tragic figure nearly four decades after her death at age 36. She’s resurrected again in the fictionalized “Blonde,” a partially rewarding (thanks to endearing Poppy Montgomery) but oh-so-familiar CBS two-parter based on an acclaimed novel by Joyce Carol Oates.

The other is Swan Brooner of Cape Coral, Fla., all of 5 when captured in “Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen,” Sunday’s exceptional “America Undercover” documentary on HBO. Competing for her version of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Swan is a high-stepping comer on a pageant circuit where coquettish miniatures in sequins and hair extensions learn flirting with their eyes and turning their lipsticked frozen smiles on judges.

All for you, Mom.

What Swan’s determined mother has in mind is surely not Marilyn and that especially bleak history but something closer to bouncy Baby June in “Gypsy” or the kiddie glamour of “Child Star: The Shirley Temple Story,” Sunday’s underwritten, overplayed, extremely weak ABC biography about the corkscrew-curled junior movie star of the 1930s.

You get ringlets and dimples in this one-dimensional pop from Joe Wiesenfeld based on Shirley Temple Black’s memoir, which recalls her well-meaning parents and being controlled by studio executives when she was a major star during the Depression. Young Ashley Rose Orr is much too broad under Nadia Tass’ direction, playing Shirley Temple playing Shirley Temple. And having the same actress play her at ages 5 through 12--same height, same munchkin voice even off camera--is not to be believed.

Shirley and Swan have in common their early starts as performers, both having been wee lollipops when first hitting the boards.

Yet something more primal--sex, and how it’s been used to market females--is a subtext connecting “Living Dolls” and “Blonde.”

As author Oates did, this “Blonde” teleplay by Joyce Eliason (who also wrote a brain-dead pair of “The Last Don” miniseries for CBS) liberally mingles fiction with fact, openly fantasizing, apparently in pursuit of some greater truth. If so, it’s obscured in a Joyce Chopra-directed production that takes the stock approach of likening its racy protagonist to a split personality.

First comes Norma Jeane. She never learns the identity of her father. Shaping her entire life, instead, is an unhappy, lonely childhood instigated by an abusive mother (Patricia Richardson) so dangerously wacky she has to be bundled off and institutionalized. Little Norma Jeane (Skye McCole Bartusiak) is sent to an orphanage, then a foster home. Her cosmic curves irresistible to leering males, she is married off at age 16 by her foster mother (Kirstie Alley), then frustrated when her young husband (Niklaus Lange) goes off to World War II, after which the allure of Hollywood beckons her magnetically.

Next comes high-wattage MM--the breathy, voluptuous, falling-out-of-her-tight-frocks platinum-blond creation who is often as dumb-appearing as Norma Jeane is thoughtful. She dislikes the attention her body brings, yet uses it to get what she wants, earning her first part in a movie in exchange for a tumble with a nameless studio executive on his white rug. Her sexuality rooted in her past, MM is exploited by men, sleeps around (“It wasn’t me all those times,” Norma Jeane tattles to the camera about Marilyn) and has a wild, destructive fling with Charlie Chaplin’s son (Patrick Dempsey).

“Blonde” is worthwhile if only for Aussie actress Montgomery’s soulful, hauntingly Monroe-esque performance, the ache of its emotional nakedness never deeper than when Norma Jeane/Marilyn yearns to find in her men the father she never knew. That includes husbands Joe DiMaggio (Titus Welliver) and Arthur Miller (Griffin Dunne), identified only as “ex-athlete” and “playwright,” respectively. To her, they’re all “daddy.”

As in other accounts, though, this is just one more messed-up Marilyn giving us a toot by stepping on a subway grating in a billowing white skirt. Worn down by a lifetime of excess and buckling under the MM mantle, Hollywood’s force of nature shrinks to a little girl, becoming the familiar sad, fragile, delusional, tormented, unstable, booze-and-pill-hazed self-abuser who is again the sum of her neuroses en route to death in her Brentwood home “under mysterious circumstances.”

Montgomery is a force herself. Otherwise, been there, seen that.

How distant the raw erotica and body language of “Blonde” are from 26-pound Swan and other hip-grinding cherubs in “Living Dolls.” And how close.

This is their tumble on a rug.

“Shake it, baby,” a parent coaches a child in Shari Cookson’s film, which delivers a strong message without overtly taking a position on the subculture it chronicles in 1999. Think JonBenet Ramsey, and you’re close.

“You can be flirty with ‘em,” Shane King urges Leslie Butler, 7-year-old superstar of the under-8 pageant circuit, where her 27 titles have earned $60,000. Blond Leslie is at once a pretty child and bizarre, if not garish because of being packaged to look sexy at her tender age when vamping competitively in heavy makeup. She does it under the scrutiny of her flamboyant coach, King, and his partner Michael Butler, who also happens to be Leslie’s father.

Meanwhile, the tuxedo-clad emcee of the Glamour Doll USA National Pageant in Bowling Green, Ky., walks slowly behind a line of sexualized Barbies, crooning, “You are the love of my life” and “You are in my soul.”

What’s wrong with this picture? While driven off by her mother, one 18-month-old contestant is in a car seat with her bottle. And Butler recalls Leslie being asleep when winning her first pageant at 3 weeks old. Yes, weeks.

King and Butler appear to make a handsome living coaching, outfitting and glamorizing pageant wannabes in their extravagant Decatur, Ala., home. Before Swan and her single-parent mother, Robin Browne, reach that level, Cookson follows them on a lesser pageant circuit, where Swan sweeps, taking home trophies taller than she.

“It’s not the crowns, it’s not the trophies,” Robin says. “It’s that little girl out there saying, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ ” Or her mother saying it. Robin to her 5-year-old: “This song you gotta nail, hear me?”

The mother is an attractive waitress entering middle age with hard edges. Besides Swan, the occupants of her small ranch home are her boyfriend and three other children: a toddler and a pair of teens from a previous marriage, 15-year-old Silva and Bubba, a troubled 14-year-old in and out of jail.

Judge for yourself whether Swan, too, is in a kind of prison, even while appearing to enjoy the pageant grind and have a loving relationship with her laser-focused mother.

“She’s like a drill sergeant,” Silva, a beauty herself, says of Robin, who spent four years in the military.

“On the one hand, you have to be the nurturing mother figure,” says Robin. “On the other hand, you gotta kick their ass.” Even fanatical Little League parents may question that.

Trying out the major circuit, Swan goes on a losing streak despite intense practice, elaborate costumes and a stack of teased hair rising a foot above her tiny head. Time to upgrade, as she and her mother drive 700 miles to Decatur for a make-over and crash course from King and Butler. Robin also buys Swan a used designer dress for $1,200. Soon the poorer, happier mother and gaudier, better Swan are off to Dallas for the season-ending Gingerbread Pageant.

Robin says she’s dropped $70,000 sustaining Swan in this activity. It’s money her critics will say could have been set aside to enrich all of her children, especially as the two eldest approach college age.

You wonder what she was thinking when granting the filmmaker such intimate access, appearing clueless that she could be condemned for the values she’s teaching Swan when rolling her out like a commodity and tying success in life to phony smiles and being gorgeous, even sexy.

Most of all, who is being fulfilled here? Is it the daughter--who could be spending more time playing with dolls instead of being one--or her mother?

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* “Blonde” will air Sunday and Wednesday nights at 9 on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-D-L-S (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for dialogue, coarse language and sexuality).

* “Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen” will premiere Sunday night at 10 on HBO. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all audiences).

* “Child Star: The Shirley Temple Story” will premiere Sunday night at 7 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.