by Zoë Pollock and Chris Bodenner Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of Monroe’s death. David Thomson attempts to unravel her enduring mystery:
When she died, the popular explanation was suicide, and it has always been easy to believe that lovely, uneducated kids often get found out by fame and stardom. But any examination of her death teaches the lesson that hers is the first death in that haunting line of the ’60s that includes the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Lee Harvey Oswald. How can such notable people die in uncertainty? Are there really infinite intrigues in the world, or do we refuse to accept simple and obvious answers? It is a kind of religion. So the collection of stories attending her death are more potent than her films, and they provide an occult explanation for that gorgeous, plaintive look she had: “What do you think happened to me?”
We tell ourselves now that we are known in so many oppressive ways: Our identity is laid out in numbers ready to be stolen; all our e-mails are retrievable; increasingly, we are subject to surveillance, all meant for our “security,” but all contributing to its opposite. Monroe stands for this unlikely possibility: that in an age of mounting data and information storage, it is possible for someone beautiful and famous to be unknowable.
How 13-year-old Agnes Scotti sees Marilyn:
[S]he was a role model who showed young women that they could triumph over a troubled past and still grow up to be anything they wanted. Even though she was the sex icon of her time, she was never a Barbie. She wasn’t especially skinny; she had a good sense of humor, and she seemed always to be trying to be herself.
Impersonator Erika Smith imagines Marilyn for a living:
Sometimes the hardest part of the job is not reacting like Marilyn would react. One drunk birthday boy grabbed Smith while she was in the middle of her act. “Marilyn would have slapped him and said ‘Fuck you’ and ran upstairs,” she laughs. Smith, on the other hand, played it off and kept in character to the extent appropriate in front of a crowd of 60.
Dozens of never-before-seen photos of Marilyn by the famed Bruno Bernard were just published in Marilyn: Intimate Exposures – previewed here. Photojournalist Lawrence Schiller’s recollections of the icon here.
(Photo from the list Celebrities and Their Vinyl from Retronaut)
The Dish 