By Rich Heldenfels, Akron Beacon Journal –
Marilyn Monroe died 50 years ago today. For half a century or more, she has been analyzed, but understanding has been elusive.
The TV series “Smash” has had three different characters trying to get to the essence of Marilyn Monroe, and no one of them gets it all right. Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) has the lush sexuality that helped make Monroe a pinup and poster icon for decades — but does not have the innocence that accompanied it. Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee) has the innocence but struggles with the sex. Rebecca Duvall (Uma Thurman) understands the pain but misses the humanity under Monroe’s artifice.
Translating Marilyn — I have tried to type Monroe, and it just feels wrong — has long baffled actors, writers and blatant imitators. Film critic David Thomson sounded exhausted a decade or more ago when he wrote that “there have been so many extensive postmortems of Marilyn Monroe that we can do without one more.” He argued that analyses “err in interpreting a life that was unordered,” before soldiering on, offering 10 “broken pieces” of a life that “she was unable to sort into a recognizable shape.”
Another case of soldiering on, the Oscar-nominated movie “My Week With Marilyn,” tried to deal with her by grabbing just one piece of her life, the making with Laurence Olivier of “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Michelle Williams is marvelous in the movie. But is she Marilyn? Is this moment key to understanding her, or an especially broken piece?
So many fragments to assemble.
Poor, tragic Anna Nicole Smith never understood that Marilyn was sometimes foolish but never stupid, even when her movie characters suggested otherwise; the seeming dumbbells of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “All About Eve” are cunning and methodical in their pursuit of what they want. Madonna seized on “Gentlemen’s” grasping Lorelai Lee for her “Material Girl” video — but could not replicate Marilyn’s sweetness. (Jane Russell faces a similar problem in “Gentlemen,” one of my favorite Marilyn films along with “Bus Stop”; Marilyn’s character is the more cynical one, but it’s Russell who comes across as hard and grim next to the soft edges of Marilyn.)
Lindsay Lohan, also fascinated with Marilyn (and who re-created a Marilyn photo shoot with one of her original photographers for New York magazine), seemed only to have taken self-destructive behavior from Marilyn’s life lessons — that, and a belief that Marilyn shows “what this industry can do to someone.” But Marilyn-as-victim is too easy a fit, too, since her career also has its moments of ambition, even of strong will, and countless others have more than survived “what this industry can do.”
Norman Mailer lost her in torrents of words and images, as with “a very Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender that even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin.” More than a decade before “Smash” — which attests to Marilyn’s appeal by imagining a present-day musical about her — a TV-movie tried to assess Monroe with two actresses playing her. Ashley Judd was the young Norma Jean, Mira Sorvino the famous Marilyn, the two sides of her character arguing with each other.
Yet, remarkable as Sorvino and Judd were, they still held only pieces. Another piece is Marilyn’s acting, often underestimated. Then there are the images, ranging from the pretty, young, almost unformed woman to the brassy blonde who eventually shows too many signs of despair — and only 36 years old when that despair overtook her.
Her pieces drop across American culture, including politics (a Kennedy connection, the specifics of which continue to be argued), sports (marriage to Joe DiMaggio), and theater and more politics (another marriage, to leftist playwright Arthur Miller).
Is there any explanation of how she was in so many cultural places? I can’t offer a complete one, save to say that people were drawn to her by her movies, and in those movies she was often astounding. It is sometimes difficult to know how much, now, because she is so familiar: especially in her smaller roles, are your eyes drawn to her by some magic in her gaze or performance, or by the recognition — hey, that’s Marilyn!
Maybe it’s a little of both. There are plenty of claims that, off-camera, she dimmed all that inner light. But when onscreen, not only was she often on her game, the movies knew it and showcased her. The subway scene in “The Seven Year Itch” now looks pre-planned as a poster for countless dorm rooms.
In “All About Eve,” she sits among Anne Baxter, Bette Davis, Celeste Holm — a trio of Oscar winners, when Monroe was never nominated — and gets your attention not only because she is Marilyn, beautiful and funny, but because she is dressed in brilliant white where everyone else in the scene is darkly garbed. “Some Like It Hot,” considered by some her best film, repeatedly pays tribute to her anatomy. (The performance is another matter; she looks worn down in some scenes, and the production problems are now notorious; Mailer notes that co-star Tony Curtis nibbled on 42 chicken legs during retake after retake as Marilyn kept botching her lines.)
The acting struggles hint that her career was over not long before her life was. Had she somehow cheated death, would she have found better roles and movies, or simply sunk more slowly into career emptiness? And would a Marilyn dying, say, in her mid-40s, after a decade of failure, still become an icon — or prove just another sad Hollywood story?
Fifty years on, the questions tantalize. Fifty years on, she’s still a focus for “Smash” and “My Week With Marilyn.” The pieces may not look as if they fit neatly. What if we look at them as they are — and see not a plain portrait but a Picasso?
