When researching Marilyn Monroe, I found the most discussed topics surrounding her were in fact not her actual films or her career as an actress, the medium through which she found global fame. A lot of the discussion focuses on her early demise but after that, the topic which is returned to again and again is that of her image, her looks and her famous body. There is an obsession with her famous curves, shape, size, people discussing her measurements, bra size, dress size, shoe size, that exists with no other person in history. Her name is constantly hauled into debates about whether skinny or curvy women are more attractive. She is the ultimate poster girl for the 'curvy woman' movement, despite having been a tiny 36-22-35 in her dress measurements for most of her life. Even when discussing Marilyn Monroe's impact as a fashion icon, her enduring image – indeed the image she perpetuated herself as the world’s supreme sex siren – it was what was underneath her clothes (ultimately to her dismay – although she no doubt took advantage of it in her lifetime), which defined her and cemented her image as ‘Marilyn’. It is testament to the impact she made that she is still considered the number one sex symbol the world has known – despite being dead for fifty years.
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| Norma Jean Baker on one of her first modelling shoots |
At the outset of her Hollywood career, as an aspiring actress while working as a pin-up girl, the Hollywood fan magazines at the time were calling for a more extreme sex symbol to compete with sultry Italian actresses such as Gina Lollobrigida who were invading Hollywood. Norma Jean Baker, a model, desperately wanting to break into the acting world, saw her opportunity, and she created the synthetic sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, which would give her all the stardom she could have wished for. In a prim 1950s Hollywood, Marilyn, who controversially posed for Playboy in her early career, seemed to avoid the derision that would have befallen, say Elizabeth Taylor had she done the same thing. Her sexuality seemed intrinsically linked to nature: ‘We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.’ Marilyn's role as a sex symbol appeared to come naturally to her – she projected an image of a woman utterly at ease with her sexuality and also aware of her attractiveness and its effect on those who came into contact with her both in person, and on camera.
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| Marilyn’s first Playboy shoot |
According to the critic Jacqueline Rose, she portrayed an image of sex ‘without complexity, depth or pain, something that hovers above the human – which is why it is such a tease and also why, as others have pointed out, her image seems to have such an intimate proximity with death. Miller [Arthur Miller, playwright and Monroe’s third husband] was not immune to this: her sexuality came to seem, he wrote, “the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic.” In Miller’s play
After the Fall, a thinly veiled account and critique of his failed marriage to Monroe, his character, Quentin, a New York Jewish intellectual who marries Maggie [Marilyn], says of her, “She was just there...She was just there, like a tree or a cat.”’
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| Marilyn and Arthur Miller |
Today, people want to know about the woman behind the myth – the Marilyn who is more than a sex symbol. Indeed she is said to have hated being typecast as the dumb blonde. Above all she wanted to be a serious actress. ‘I’d like to be a fine actress,’ she is reported as having said to the photographer George Barris at the end of her life: ‘I wanted to be an artist, not an erotic freak.’
There is also proof she wasn’t as vulnerable or needy as her myth perpetuates – at least when it came to her career. In defiance against Hollywood's control of her image and also in objection to her low wages compared to other Hollywood stars of the day, Monroe took on the movie studios. For Monroe, money meant freedom and greater control of her image.
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| Marilyn and Paula Strasberg discussing scenes |
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| Marilyn in discussion with Paula Strasberg |
In 1954 she broke her contract with Twentieth Century Fox, leaving Hollywood for New York to set up her own film company with the photographer Milton Greene (she made sure she controlled 51 per cent of the stock). It was a scandal. Although the project was short-lived, she was at that moment the only star to have taken on the moguls and won. Fox agreed to give her script and director approval on all her films and to pay her $100,000 a film. A recently discovered letter of 1961 shows that she never gave up on her dream. At a time when the Hollywood studios were more or less writing her off, she wrote to Lee Strasberg – the head of the Actors Studio, which she’d been attending since she left Hollywood for New York – that she and her attorneys were planning to set up an independent production unit. ‘I’ll never tie myself to a studio again,’ she said, ‘I’d rather retire.’ ‘She wanted her fair share.’ says Rose. ‘She wanted some money to stop bigger money from controlling her fate.’ Marilyn’s struggle with the studio system has been seen by many as playing a role in her downfall. On her later films she was accused of being unprofessional and even mentally ill. Her defenders however, have suggested that in fact Marilyn was the victim of a studio system in its decline. That she was instead a harbinger of change in seeking an identity beyond the gilded crown Hollywood gave her.
Also in direct contradiction of her image as a ‘dumb blonde’ who toed the line, is her support of the civil rights movement. When the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella Fitzgerald, the owner received a personal call from Monroe, who offered to take a front table every night if he hired Fitzgerald (as Monroe had promised, the press went wild and Fitzgerald, by her own account, never had to play a small jazz club again). Fitzgerald never forgot. Monroe, she said later, was ‘an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times’.
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| Marilyn and Ella Fitzgerald at the Mocambo Club |
The contradiction between Marilyn’s public sex symbol persona, which she played up to the public, and the more serious actress she wanted to be, undoubtedly caused her personal torment and played a significant part in her downfall. As she said herself ‘a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing...it’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.’ And indeed it was an image that would exact a price. Amy Greene Andrews, widow of photographer Milton Green, one of Marilyn's closest confidantes, claimed she believed Monroe ‘loved her life’, but what Monroe had not bargained for and could not reconcile was the gulf between her image and her real self. In her later life she made the following statement which shows a woman not only deeply aware, but also at great odds with her personal and public persona:‘I’m a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they’ve made of me and that I’ve made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much, and I can’t live up to it.’
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| Eve Arnold captures Marilyn filming The Misfits |
Monroe endures as the great female icon of the 20th century – fans are intrigued by the woman behind the image – and the tragedy that befell someone who, on the face of it, appeared to have the world at her feet. Indeed it is perhaps her vulnerability, as well as her beauty which still endears her to so many people today. In so many pictures of Marilyn there is an intrinsic sadness in her eyes and demeanour. Rather than feeling threatened by her beauty, women empathise with her and want to be her friend, and men want to save her. She is the ultimate image of the little girl lost – the lonely child who grew up in orphanages wanting to be loved, who went on through sheer grit and determination to become the most famous and most desired woman in the world.
Marilyn was a welter of contradictions – voluptuousness and vulnerability, innocence and experience, part angel, part seductress – someone who brought joy to so many but who could be so unhappy herself. The ditzy blonde she played in so many of her roles clashes with what we know of her as someone who clearly had great self-knowledge and intelligence and was only too aware through a life filled with its own share of tragedy, that the Hollywood veneer covered not only its own seedy underbelly, but was projecting an image of her that was ultimately a sham. Marilyn Monroe was an illusion – a character, an idealisation of womanhood that not even Marilyn Monroe herself could live up to 24-7. When Marilyn declared herself a failure as a woman, it was as a failure of the idealised version of Marilyn Monroe, not of her true self. But towards the end of her life, the gulf between her real self and Marilyn Monroe had become so blurred, even Marilyn herself appeared to be struggling with the reality of who she was and what was expected of her. After all, none of her fans knew the real her – it was Marilyn Monroe they were in love with. Had Hollywood unwittingly set up the potentially vulnerable Norma Jean to fail?
See next week's blog for Part 2 of this feature.
