Marilyn Monroe at her rebellious best
“She didn’t use alarm clocks.”
“She cooked pasta with her hair dryer.”
“Important phone numbers and contacts were often scrawled on a crumpled Kleenex . . . ”
“A glittering tornado, clothes cascading from the closet, suitcases never fully unpacked, bed unmade ...”
A cautionary tale of a lackadaisical egoist going to the beat of every cliché ever trotted out about millennials? Nah, just Marilyn Monroe, who was either ahead of her time — in a Lena Dunham’s Girls kind of way — or just one sexpot who really, really could have used a copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Marilyn’s trajectory as epic slob? Just one of the arcs that grabbed me by the throat while reading Elizabeth Winder’s savoury new bio Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy, a book zeroing in on the year the icon spent in New York City — an eastward move from L.A. in 1954 that proved consequential both in terms of public image and soulful drift, but also due to a mash of newfound alliances with the likes of Lee Strasberg, Truman Capote and Arthur Miller.
Indeed, decades before Brooklyn would morph into Planet Hipster — a Shangri-La of Mason jars, Edison bulbs and handlebar moustaches — the Some Like It Hot star was waxing poetic about the place.
Having fallen for Miller, the bespectacled playwright — part of the lead-up to a very unlikely (and doomed) marriage — she developed an ache, specifically, for the Brooklyn Bridge, which loomed heavily over Miller’s imagination.
Monroe: “It’s my favourite place in the world. I haven’t travelled much, but I don’t think I’ll find a place that can ever replace Brooklyn . . . the view is better from Brooklyn. You can look back over and see Manhattan — that’s the best view.”
The story of Monroe hasn’t exactly lived in the dark and the bullet points are more than well-trod: from orphanage waif to child bride to factory girl to car model to GI pin-up to studio underling to bombshell for the ages.
In fact, since her tragic death in 1962, there have been more than 200 books about the star of stars (in the English language alone), and this new book now joins a library that includes The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, My Week With Marilyn, Marilyn & Me, plus examinations by such titans as Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates.
What’s irresistible about this new one, though, is that it fits into my own favourite subspecies of biography: it takes a microscopic look at just one transformative moment in a life, extrapolating truths about everything that brought Marilyn to this juncture and foreshadowing what might come. A flourishing form of late, it joins other books that I consider staples:
Tina Cassidy’s Jackie After O: One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams, which looks at the year (1975) when Jackie became a widow twice over, led the campaign to save New York’s Grand Central Station and even went back to work, as an editor at a publishing house.
The wonderful Fifth Avenue, 5 a.m.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, Sam Wasson’s in-depth 1961 look at the making of Hepburn’s most famous movie and the woman behind the little black dress.
Winder herself rode the same horse, to great effect, with her last book, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, about the moment an ill-fated Plath spent interning for a magazine in America.
Marilyn in Manhattan works especially well as a Gladwellian tipping point because it marks the time when the beauty — 27 then and on a stardom high — broke her contract with her studio and blew her pop stand in L.A. (a truly F.U. gesture considering stars of the era were the chattel of studios, which controlled every bit of their lives).
This, then, is a portrait of Marilyn the un-victim, not Marilyn the “hologram goddess.” Not a diamonds-drowning, “Happy Birthday”-cooing Marilyn, but Marilyn the voracious reader, not to mention CEO of her own destiny.
For me, the photos of Marilyn that have long struck the strongest chord were the ones of her in New York — particularly the black-and-white images by Ed Feingersh who spent one monumental week tracing her all over the city. This new book can almost be seen as a companion text to those pics.
Her look, as those photos telegraph, was of a casual glamour that looks just as chic today as then: “more relevant than Audrey Hepburn’s shirtwaists or Grace Kelly’s pearls,” as Winder notes. “Her style,” she goes on, “remained unchanged from 1955 to her death in 1962 — a time when fashions and fads moved at warp speed. Yet she never looked dated. She still doesn’t.”
The hair, moreover, stands as the grandest metaphor. This was the year, after all, when Monroe went rogue with her hair, mussing it up to the extent that “Marilyn was the first star of any magnitude to appear in public unconcerned with the state of her tresses.”
As was the case of James Dean, the crazier her hair looked, the more beautiful she appeared.
This was the screen queen in quiet, bed-headed rebellion.