MARILYN MONROE DIED in the summer of 1962, while the Seattle World’s Fair was open and celebrating the going-to-be-wonderful 21st Century. Her demise, undoubtedly (except to conspiracy theorists) by her own hand, said and still says a lot about 20th-Century celebrity and its downsides.
Lincoln Kirstein’s Nation obit said something about her that latter-day fetish-iconographers should remember: “Marilyn Monroe was supposed to be the Sex Goddess, but somehow no one, including, or indeed first of all, herself, ever believed it. Rather, she was a comedienne impersonating the American idea of the Sex Goddess…. Her performances indicated that while sex is certainly fun, and often funny, it is only one of many games. Others include the use of the intelligence.”
Nearly four decades later, Monroe’s films and still images still resonate. Marilyn fetishism, meanwhile, remains as icky as ever.
I maintain a revulsion to the continued exploitation of someone who’d fatally burned out on the stress that arose from just such exploitation. That’s why it took me until now to see the HBO movie Norma Jean & Marilyn. It turned out to be just as pathetically trashy as I’d expected.
Screenwriter Jill Isaacs was clearly trying to be sympathetic to her subject. But the stench of celeb soul-robbing is evident from the moment Issacs introduces her psychological-theory premise: that Monroe was a multiple-personality sufferer, torn by internal conflict between the invented sex-goddess persona and the “real” Norma Jean Baker. (I happen to have known real multiples, which makes this particular tabloidist premise even sicker to me.)
Monroe’s problem is much easier to explain, in a way that keeps some respect for her travails. She was simply a smart, aware person who tried to be in control of her own stardom (something Katherine Hepburn, among others, managed to succeed at in varying degrees). But she faltered under the intense pressures of being the locus of corporate entertainment’s impersonal, often cruel machinations.
Anyone who lived in Seattle six years ago can recognize this story.
Cobain also tried to keep his personal and artistic integrity amid intense industry hassles, and shattered from the contradictions.
He also named his daughter and a song on his last studio album after a previous showbiz stress victim, Frances Farmer.
Like Monroe (who showed up in Hollywood around the time Farmer disappeared from it), Farmer’s been the object of much latter-day theorizing and misplaced idolatry.
Many of the recent Farmer fetishists lionize her as a victim of male-oriented Hollywood; even though her involuntary institutionalization was arranged in the mid-’40s by her equally strong-willed mother, probably in a well-meaning effort to get her out of Hollywood.
The Mel Brooks-produced movie Frances (like most Hollywood biopics, full of fiction) spread the rumor that she’d been lobotomized while in Wash. state mental institutions; some who knew her in the hospital have since explained that she was instead probably hooked on severe, primitive psychoactive drugs. (Just about as debilitating as a lobotomy, but less sensationalistic as a film-plot device.)
(If Farmer’s mom really had put her daughter away just to keep her away from the boozing and drugging and smoking and screwing and general bad-living of Hollywood, it turns out she needn’t have bothered. Farmer, who outspokenly espoused left-of-center political causes, would certainly have been forced out of movies during the anti-Communist blacklistings of 1948-60.)
Farmer, Monroe, and Cobain share an object lesson in the relative inability of any individual of brains and integrity to hold onto one’s core values while afflicted with supestardom.
Such is the story of 20th-century corporate entertainment. Don’t become a superstar and you risk the chance to earn a living at your art. Become a superstar and you risk losing everything else.
MONDAY: Hollywood tries to stop the game-show revival by over-stoking it.
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