MARILYN MONROE WAS A PERFORMANCE'
Nearly 60 years after her death, we still can't let go of the blond bombshell. But, asks writer Joyce Carol Oates, did the actress ever really exist?
“All my life I've played Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe,” wept the actress in 1960.
“I've tried to do a little better — and find myself doing an imitation of myself. I so want to do something different.”
Unfortunately, movie audiences wanted the exact opposite: more Monroe, maximum Monroe. In her lifetime, their appetite was rampant enough to sustain the careers of shameless imitators, such as Jayne Mansfield (“the poor man's Monroe”), and make 20th Century Fox millions — of which Monroe herself saw so little that on her death, in 1962, she didn't leave enough money to pay for a funeral. Joe DiMaggio, the second of her three ex-husbands, forked out for the private ceremony.
Today, anything Monroe touched is coveted with a religiosity comparable to the medieval mania for the relics of saints.
Collectors fight for pots of makeup in which you can still see her trailing finger marks. The tag and licence for her pet poodle (Maf, short for Mafia, a present from Frank Sinatra) sold in 1999 for $63,000.
In 2016, the dress she wore to sing Happy Birthday, Mr. President to JFK in 1962 was bought by Ripley's Believe It or Not Museums for $5 million. (Kim Kardashian wore it earlier this month to the Met Gala.)
And Andy Warhol's 1964 portrait Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold at auction in New York this week for $195 million.
What is it that makes people want to get their fingers on a part — any part — of Marilyn Monroe so badly? It's a question that Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde, a 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Monroe's life, plays with in a new short story, Miss Golden Dreams 1949, in a collection called Night, Neon. In it, a sex doll made from Monroe's DNA whispers to bidders at Sotheby's, goading them to outbid each other to take her home.
“It's a surreal story, even a sort of horror story,” Oates tells me, from her home in Princeton. “But it's metaphorical. So many people tried to possess Marilyn while she was still alive.”
Blonde — a 740-page epic about the American dream and the female body that plays with tricks of voice — has been made into a film by Andrew Dominik. Long in development and shrouded in secrecy, it is expected to première at the Venice Film Festival this fall — and Oates is one of the few people to have seen it already. “I thought it was extremely intense. Very stylized and beautiful.
“It's very intimate,” adds Oates. “There are elements of the movie that are quite horrific. In a very brilliant way.”
Oates loves actress Ana de Armas in the lead role — “she looks just like the young Marilyn” — but isn't it a doomed exercise, I ask, trying to impersonate the most famous film star of all time?
Oates disagrees. “Marilyn Monroe was a performance. It was a whole persona of infantile female sexuality, a strange conjoining of innocence and this seductive, over-the-top glamour, with her platinum blond hair and her whole manner — very breathy. If people called her at home, she wouldn't answer that way. She would answer the way we're talking. Her housekeeper said that, too. When she was around the house in her jeans and a sweatshirt, she was nothing like that.
“Marilyn Monroe was a performance, by Norma Jeane Baker.”
Born in 1926, Norma Jeane's surname was first Mortensen, then Baker, as stepfathers came and went. Rare among stars, she was a literal child of Hollywood: her mother, Gladys Baker, was a studio film-cutter. And her life began with a movie-esque mystery — the plot, in fact, of Mamma Mia! Who was Norma Jeane's real father?
The only thing certain, as Monroe later put it, was that, “I was a mistake.”
It was a photograph of Norma Jeane Baker that gave Oates the idea for Blonde, precisely because the girl in the picture wasn't blond at all. “She was 16 and had this brunette hair and she was very pretty — but not glamorous. The kind of girl who smiles, who goes into nursing — something that makes other people like them.”
Monroe's miserable childhood reminded Oates of her own mother, “the ninth of nine children, and she had to be given away. Marilyn Monroe was also given away by her mother — she was put in an orphanage. And it was so unfair, because her mother (by then in and out of institutions for schizophrenia) prevented her from being adopted.”
But Blonde could just as aptly have been called Daddy Issues.
Norma Jeane, Oates says, “felt she had to live up to her invisible father. She was literally a bastard child (and) she always felt inadequate about that. And when she got to be about 12 or 14, she noticed that men and boys would really look at her. And kind of smile at her. And she'd smile back. Then she started wearing lipstick and tight sweaters. She was getting from the world these gazes of approval and interest that were new to her, and that buoyed her up and made her feel better. Unfortunately, there's no end to that. A person who's so wounded in childhood can never, never get enough love.
“So she wore people out — her husbands.” (Before DiMaggio came police officer James Dougherty; after, the playwright Arthur Miller.) “She called them Daddy. It sounds like a sad cliché, but she really called her lovers Daddy,” says Oates. This juxtaposition of the infantile with the hyper-sexual — which to us, seems so troublingly pedophiliac — was in the 1950s a cause for celebration.
British photographer Cecil Beaton found a diplomatic compromise when he called it “pure charade, a little girl's caricature of Mae West. The puzzling truth is that Miss Monroe is a make-believe siren, unsophisticated as a Rhine maiden, innocent as a sleepwalker. She is an urchin pretending to be grown-up, having the time of her life in mother's moth-eaten finery, tottering about in highheeled shoes and sipping ginger ale as though it were a champagne cocktail.”
Oates planned Blonde as a novella, ending as Norma Jeane, after a brutal rape, gets a contract and is rechristened Marilyn Monroe. “And then I thought — what am I doing? Her whole life is just beginning.”
So Oates continued, fighting the “psychological malaise of writing about someone who is going to die, not because you make them die as a fictional character, but because she died. And she was so unhappy at the end of her life — just extremely depressed, on a kind of nightmare of barbiturates, maybe psychosis, not being able to sleep. Then if she wanted to work, she had to take amphetamines during the day. So she's constantly on some drug or other, plus she had trouble with John Kennedy. It's sort of like a ludicrous soap opera — instead of having trouble with your boyfriend, it's actually the president of the United States.”
Monroe's most famous loves were the American equivalent of aristocrats: a president, a baseball hero (DiMaggio), a literary lion (Miller). But she saw her appeal as blue collar: “the kind of girl a truck driver would like.”
The studios may have invented Marilyn Monroe but it was the people who made her a star.
A person who's so wounded in childhood can never, never get enough love.