The cult of Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe belongs, of course, to the annals of celebrity, not -- in any significant way -- to the history of movies. She had a few minor moments in the latter realm; small, effective roles in “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Monkey Business” and “All About Eve,” and a few minutes of screen time (largely, as film historian David Thomson has observed, when she was singing) in bigger roles in which she commanded the screen in an uncomplicated way and our attention in an affectionate way -- perhaps most notably in “Bus Stop” (her triumph over humiliation as she hesitantly warbled “That Old Black Magic”). But she never had a great role in a great picture (no, I’m not forgetting the frenzied witlessness of “Some Like It Hot”). Mostly, she appeared in trash.

As a celebrity, however, she was, and remains, a nonpareil. She is believed -- by book publishers and others who think they are the keepers of our collective memory -- to haunt our reveries. In “The Marilyn Encyclopedia,” Adam Victor estimates that 600 books on Monroe have appeared -- and he’s not even counting Joyce Carol Oates’ unreadable novel. Most of them are, along with her movies, not worth looking at. And she has yet to be the subject of a grand-scale, critically acute pop-icon biography like Peter Guralnick’s study of Elvis Presley or Gary Giddins’ work on Bing Crosby (or, for that matter, Laura Hillenbrand’s lovely portrait of Seabiscuit).

In part, that’s because Monroe never accomplished anything in her field remotely comparable to the musical inventiveness of the singers -- and didn’t have that game little horse’s winning personality. In part, that’s because her life is both too easy and too hard to write about. If you stress its mythic arc, her story becomes a cheap-novel archetype -- ill-educated, ill-used girl turns into a kind of pretty, kind of ambitious young woman, does a little modeling, does a few useful guys, gets into pictures, gets restyled, gets famous, gets into trouble. She wants to be taken seriously as an actress and eventually hires as mentors the vile Strasbergs, who do not particularly improve the product. She wants to be taken seriously as a courtesan and has liaisons with (arguably) the nation’s most famous athlete, its most famous artist-intellectual, its most powerful politicians. She completes this sexual trifecta not long before she dies young in circumstances sufficiently mysterious to set the conspiracy theorists going in endless flapping, cawing circles.

On the other hand, if you approach Monroe as a serious biographer would, looking for documentation, looking for eyewitness testimony, you enter a morass. Virtually every “fact” of her life is contradicted by another equally plausible one. We can say with some certainty that her bra size was 36D, but we cannot be equally sure who her father was. We know that her mother was crazy, that one set of foster parents were religious fanatics, that a later guardian was an alcoholic, but we cannot say specifically how they damaged her. What we can say is that all of them were, to some degree, only intermittently involved emotionally with Norma Jeane Baker. The same may be said of the many men (and women) who helped her after she became Marilyn Monroe. Some of them, at least briefly, meant well. But, in the end, all of them surrendered to their own selfish, exploitative agendas.

Take, for example, Andre de Dienes. In 1945, he was a fashion photographer with, for some reason, an interest in becoming a “girlie” photographer. He called for models, and 19-year-old Norma Jeane appeared at his Garden of Allah door. He hired her, for $100 a week, to hit the road with him in search of interesting locations.

Do you think, just possibly, that De Dienes might have had ulterior motives? Some rolls in the hay, perhaps? Possibly some “art” photographs, by which he meant getting his model to shed her dry goods and lean naked against a redwood? Well, yes, he admits (and admits) to that -- in a prose that perfectly matches the banality of his photos. Interestingly, the future movie star briefly acceded to sex with De Dienes but not to the nudes. She was obviously saving what she judged to be her most valuable asset -- her naked body -- for purposes higher than his.

Through the years, his pictures of the young Monroe have surfaced regularly. Now, they have been collected into a single package -- a word I use advisedly -- called “Marilyn.” Fitted into a large yellow box imitating the kind in which Kodak photographic paper was once sold, it contains, in addition to an oversized book of De Dienes’ photos, a reproduction of the heavily emended typescript of those portions of his autobiography that deal with Monroe and a pamphlet reproducing some of his magazine covers of her. This is postmodern, post-ironic publishing -- the presentation of junk as if it were sublime, as if any critical comment on it would sully its ineffability. The pomp and cost of this book redefines the phrase “wretched excess.”

Monroe sports in surf, sand and snow. She fondles simple props -- parasol, volleyball, pumpkins. She grins, occasionally pouts or mimes the angelic. She’s pretty in a nonthreatening girl-next-door sort of way. But she’s never sexy, never distinguishes herself from the hundreds of anonymous cuties who adorned the long-forgotten pages of Pageant, Cabaret or Sunbathing Review.

De Dienes huffs and puffs to make us believe otherwise (the picture-book text is a mercifully edited version of his longer manuscript), but his photos give the lie to his words. Nor can he entirely master his resentment of Monroe -- her failure to hitch her star and his, the way she would suddenly, teasingly sweep into his life in later years, raise his ever-eager hopes, then disappear again.

Because she was so elusive, you can posthumously portray her any way you want -- as a Mailerian damp dream, as Gloria Steinem’s feminist victim -- but De Dienes gives us, all unknowing, an emerging tough cookie in the American style, whispering of vague delights but with a Mickey Finn none too tightly corked in her purse.

This idea squares with another of Thomson’s notions, that she was much more comfortable with the still camera than the motion picture camera. It was like her singing, in that neither activity involves relating intimately with people. Your only audience is the lens, which brings nothing -- no history, no experience, no arguments -- to the party. With it, you can be completely uninhibited because its judgments are amoral. You can seduce it, but you don’t have to listen to its line or feed it your truth. Any agreeable simulacrum will do. Which makes it -- like Victor -- sociopathy’s perfect partner.

I don’t mean that as a criticism of the author of “The Marilyn Encyclopedia.” Like Monroe, his book is without precedent. I know of no other A-to-Z movie reference book devoted to a single individual. If one exists, it surely cannot match the length and range of this closely printed yet handsomely designed and illustrated book. Victor is as close to being a camera as a writer can get. He prints all the rumors and theories about Monroe, her friends, her mentors, her lovers, her employers, her exploiters, her death. He sensibly evaluates all of them without passing definitive judgments on any of them. The result is a sort of do-it-yourself biography, which has the odd effect, sometimes, of putting you in Monroe’s shoes, wondering whom to trust, whom not to trust.

Still, almost all of Victor’s entries about those who were close to her become portraits of people you would not invite home, let alone into your bed. Yet, she was not stupid. She had a kind of shrewdness, grounded in a simple (but prescient) Valley Girl’s instinct that, in postwar America, it would be better to be famous than to be rich. It was not much to go on, and sooner rather than later -- her career as a major star lasted only a decade -- it rendered her sleepless, sickly, erratic, infuriatingly tardy. And unemployable. So, accidentally on purpose, she offed herself. Which, as the saying goes, was a good career move. It made her a legend for the addled and catnip for the symbol-seeking literati. I take a simpler view of her: She was of that portion of the American underclass just bright enough and ambitious enough to perceive a way up, but not quite smart enough to find the right path out. She did all right for a while, but in the end fell through the gaps in her knowledge and nerve. This does not make her a tragic or particularly resonant American figure; it makes her a rather common and pathetic one.