June 1, 1926 – Norma Jeane Mortenson:
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
Marilyn Monroe was no Meryl Streep, but she sure had that certain something. Pauline Kael, who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, said:
“She could not act. She used her lack of an actor’s skills to amuse the public. She had the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting – and vice versa; she did what others had the ‘good taste’ not to do.”
For me, if she doesn’t exactly have depth, her work does have soul. My own favorite Monroe performance is in Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot (1959) one of the most perfect comedies in film history. Her performance is like Champagne; bubbly and effortless. Oddly, Monroe was at her worst while making this classic: perpetually tardy, unprepared, unable to remember her lines, pregnant and sick, calming her anxieties with vodka and downers, making the shoot especially tough for costars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. But her role as Sugar Cane Kowalczy allowed her to play the dumb blond without giving a dumb performance.
Gay men of a certain age hold Monroe as an ultimate LGBTQ Icon. She was a gorgeous, but tormented person, making a career out of being sexually and emotionally open in a brutal straight-male world. Monroe worked hard for her fame, but it was her suffering that queer people identified with the most.
Monroe’s fans wanted to save her. That was her shtick and it worked. We all know her sad story: the exploitive studio heads, the husbands, the Kennedys, the Strasbergs, the pills and the booze, the insecurities, the misunderstandings.
She was undervalued by the film industry. In 1961, while Elizabeth Taylor was being paid a million dollars to film Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox, Monroe, also with Fox, was being paid just $150,000 for The Misfits. Her estate continues to rake in millions of dollars every year. She has made so much more money in death than she ever did at the dizzying height of her fame. In 2021, Monroe made $30 million!
Monroe:
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
It has been 60 years since her mysterious death, yet Marilyn Monroe remains as enchanting an enigma as ever. She was once the most famous woman in the world and maybe the truest definition of the term “Movie Star” ever, but her true self will be forever out of reach.
Monroe is the most endlessly written about, discussed and mythologized figure in Hollywood History. She remains the ultimate superstar. Her rise and fall are the stuff that both dreams and nightmares are made of.
In 2015, yet another film about her life, The Secret Life Of Marilyn Monroe was released. This one got the Lifetime Network treatment, with added bonus of that nutty Susan Sarandon playing her mother Gladys Pearl Baker.
There have been nearly as many screen portrayals of Monroe as films that she herself made. I don’t know if any of them are very good, certainly not fitting of Monroe’s legacy, but I thought that Michelle Williams came close to getting Monroe right in the charming and cheeky My Week With Marilyn (2011). Williams accomplishes the nearly impossible, portraying Monroe as an actual person, not just an easily caricatured icon. The film centers around the production of Laurence Olivier’s film The Prince And The Showgirl (1957). It is based on a pair of memoirs by Colin Clark who worked as an assistant on Olivier’s film. Clark is played in the film by adorable, freckled Academy Award-winning Eddie Redmayne and Olivier is well represented by Kenneth Branaugh. Williams captures not only Monroe’s fragility, both onscreen and off, but also her magical, unclassifiable charisma. My Weekend With Marilyn entertained and it truly touched me. I recommend this film.
Monroe starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955), How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), Bus Stop (1956), plus 26 other films. But she wasn’t always Marilyn Monroe; she was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, appropriately enough, in Los Angeles. She signed her first studio contract with 20th Century Fox in 1946 for $125 a week. Soon after, Norma Jeane dyed her brunette hair blonde and changed her name.
From Monroe’s first film, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948), to her last, The Misfits (1962), she went from a studio created blonde bimbo to a well-trained actor. She is now beyond camp, making her different than Jayne Mansfield, Sheree North, and Diana Dors who Hollywood had chosen to replace her. She turned out to be irreplaceable.
A living contradiction, Monroe was both divine and profane. She became both myth and metaphor as Hollywood’s most famous martyred saint. At the height of her fame, she had received 10,000 fan letters a week. Many were from men, but women wrote too, commenting about the sadness she showed in her eyes, her vulnerability and how they identified with her.
Amazingly, Monroe’s photograph can still sell magazines. I remember when the May 2012 issue of Vanity Fair arrived in my mailbox with Monroe on the cover. The issue featured even more “newly discovered” photographs of her by Lawrence Schiller. She is like one of those lost tribes in Borneo discovered by Nation Geographic, only over and over again.
Books written by pop culture critics and academics have been devoted to her, some lovely and filled with photographs, many lurid and badly written. Songs have been dedicated to her. Plays have been produced about her.
On an early morning in the summer of 1962, at the height of her fame, Monroe died in her sleep at her little stucco cottage on a dead-end street in Brentwood. She loved her house and she had recently installed a plaque with the Latin phrase “Cursum Perficio” which translates to “My Journey Ends Here”. Suicide, accident, assassination by the CIA, we could speculate forever. Her closest friends believed she was murdered. When actor Veronica Hamel bought the house in 1972, she claimed that while renovating the house she discovered an extensive system of wiretaps.
Monroe grew up in an orphanage and foster homes. She didn’t know her father, and her mother spent her adult life in and out mental institutions. In her will, Monroe had set up a trust to care for her mother until she died; left money to her half-sister, who Monroe didn’t even know existed until she was 12 years old; and made bequests to those she trusted, including her psychiatrist, Marianne Kris.
After Kris died, her portion of the estate was transferred to the Anna Freud Centre in London, which is dedicated to working with children with mental health problems. Monroe loved kids and I like to think she approved.
Monroe left the bulk of her estate to her acting coaches, Lee and Paula Strasberg, who were surrogate parents to Monroe. When Strasberg died in 1982, his second wife, Anna Strasberg, inherited the Monroe estate and eventually hired CMG Worldwide, a company that specializes in managing the estates of dead celebrities, to license Monroe products. That’s when Monroe started to make serious money.
In her will, Monroe stated that she wanted her personal items to go to friends and colleagues. But in 1999, Anna Strasberg commissioned Christie’s to auction off most of those items, including the gown she wore to President John F. Kennedy‘s birthday party. The gown went for one million dollars and is still worth a fortune even if Kim Kardashian ripped it at the seams last month. Her baby grand piano was sold to Mariah Carey for more than $660,000.
Several years and a variety of lawsuits later, Strasberg sold what remained of the Monroe estate to a new company, Authentic Brands Group for $30 million. Now you can purchase a Marilyn coffee mug for $14.99 or a Dolce & Gabbana tee-shirt for $399.
Because of digital technology, Monroe even came back to life. A Dior perfume commercial has her moving and smiling alongside her dead friends Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich, even though we all know that Monroe only wore Chanel No. 5. Her image and name have been licensed for hundreds of products by Max Factor, Mercedes Benz, and Absolut Vodka. Only Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley are more recognizable American Icons.
Monroe was just 36 years old when she left this world. Monroe remains a LGBTQ Icon, Fashion Icon, Hollywood Icon, and influential cultural figure. Feminists claim her. Madonna channeled her. I adore her.
“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
