You don’t need to be Anna Freud, the psychoanalyst whom Marilyn revered, to work out my preoccupation with the last point. But my life with Marilyn lasted beyond an awkward teenager’s desire to change herself. “Oh honey,” Susan Bernard, daughter of Bruno Bernard who photographed Marilyn throughout her career, told me. “There’s so many layers with Marilyn. We all identify with the vulnerability. And you can take what part of the mystery of her life you want.”
Of course, I’m far from the only one to appropriate Monroe; a rash of new books are battling to claim possession of Marilyn’s soul. A soul, it’s worthwhile remembering, that she once said that “Hollywood would pay 50 cents for, while offering $1,000 for a kiss.’’
In one book, it’s argued that Marilyn the maneater was a lesbian who never really enjoyed sex with a man. Jane Lawrence, who was the teenager in charge of Marilyn’s fan club back in the Fifties, claims an affair that begins when the actress “leaned in and kissed [her] full on the lips, very softly and slowly”; other Monroe conquests are said to be Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck.
In another book, Marilyn – the Passion and the Paradox, history professor Lois Banner recasts Monroe as a proto-feminist who formed her own film company, and battled the movie moguls. “Marilyn was a powerhouse, but the men who controlled Hollywood hated her,” said Banner this week. “They put out the press that she was stupid and a victim.”
Meanwhile, Jacqueline Rose, the academic and critic, has made an impassioned plea in the London Review of Books for acknowledgment of Marilyn’s intellectual prowess. Her last letters to her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, discussed the autobiography of the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey and a new Freud biography.
Since the rights to her image were sold to the merchandising giant the Authentic Brands Group last year, Marilyn now ranks only behind Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley as the highest earning dead celebrity. New deals by the company mean that soon Marilyn fans will be able to paint their faces with Marilyn Monroe MAC make-up, have their nails manicured at a Monroe salon and even sip lattes in a “casual chic” Marilyn Monroe café.
Yet there are dozens of celebrities today who adroitly exploit their image, try to take control of their career or whose sexuality is intriguing but who don’t have the hold that Marilyn does on us. Compared with her, they seem two-dimensional.
The biggest movie star of the age had the qualities of an Everywoman, something that her one-time husband Arthur Miller encapsulated perfectly: Monroe relied on “the most ordinary layer of the audience, the working people, the guys in bars, the housewives… bedevilled by unpaid bills, the high school kids mystified by explanations they could not understand.”
Much of the Monroe mythology revolves not around the red carpet or the scandals, but the kind of everyday stories of Marilyn eating fish and chips on a park bench, sightseeing in Trafalgar Square, stopping to chat to fans – making herself completely accessible, as Michelle Morgan, author of a new biography, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, puts it.
For me, Marilyn was able to mutate as my life changed. When I was a stroppy student, I avidly read feminist Gloria Steinem’s biography Marilyn Norma Jeane, dissecting Marilyn in a man’s world as I struggled to find my place in one. I acted in a student production of After the Fall, Miller’s fictionalised account of their relationship – disappointingly not as Maggie, the Marilyn figure, but in a minuscule part that the director (now a senior TV producer) told me to play as “the incarnation of cheap sex”. Difficult to do when your part consists mainly of telling the main character you’ve had plastic surgery on your nose, but I recalled that when Laurence Olivier directed Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl, he simply said to her: “Be sexy”.
Then as a young journalist, I turned to Anthony Summer’s Goddess, and delved into the conspiracy theories about her death that it peddled and which fitted in my new profession. I bored too many people with debates over when and where Robert Kennedy had last seen Marilyn before her overdose, her links to organised crime and whether she was still alive when admitted to hospital in the early hours of August 5.
Later in thrall to a man who’d read political philosophy at university, I tried to convince him that Marilyn was a Marxian reflection of society’s alienation (I failed, so I married him instead). I did a creative writing course and examined Joyce Carole Oates’s fictionalised, dark and surreal account of Marilyn’s life; but it was Oates’s depiction of the character of the mother Gladys that haunted me as I thought of being a mother myself.
And then suddenly it is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn’s death and I realised that I hadn’t thought about Marilyn at all for months – if not longer. How could I have done so?
Perhaps she was the perfect symbol for a girl in the process of growing up: the endless drama, life on the edge, the self-improvement, the search for Mr Right – and the Mr Wrongs. But however tragic her story and seductive her gaze, the Marilyn saga seemed suddenly rather narcissistic – another set of unseen photographs revealed, another conspiracy theory put forward, another re-evaluation, another anniversary. Perhaps as I reached the age she was when she died, we parted company. Now I couldn’t compare myself with her any more, and had to get on with real life alone.
The pictures of her in Something’s Gotta Give are as luminous as ever. When I look at them today, I find them compellingly beautiful – but they don’t move me as they did when I first saw them back in that old book 20 years ago. So I fear Schiller’s daughter got it wrong. Now I’ve outgrown Marilyn, they show everything – and say nothing.
The exhibition 'Marilyn: Intimate Exposures Photographs by Bruno Bernard’ is at Proud Chelsea until September 9, www.proud.co.uk
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