How Ayn Rand Felt About Marilyn Monroe

Parent Cafe
1

<p>I recently stumbled upon this article. I thought that it was interesting, so I thought that I should share it with you all.</p>

<p>The death of Marilyn Monroe shocked people with an impact different from their reaction to the death of any other movie star or public figure. All over the world, people felt a peculiar sense of personal involvement and of protest, like a universal cry of “Oh, no!”</p>

<p>They felt that her death had some special significance, almost like a warning which they could not decipher–and they felt a nameless apprehension, the sense that something terribly wrong was involved.</p>

<p>They were right to feel it.</p>

<p>Marilyn Monroe on the screen was an image of pure, innocent, childlike joy in living. She projected the sense of a person born and reared in some radiant utopia untouched by suffering, unable to conceive of ugliness or evil, facing life with the confidence, the benevolence, and the joyous self-flaunting of a child or a kitten who is happy to display its own attractiveness as the best gift it can offer the world, and who expects to be admired for it, not hurt.</p>

<p>Read rest here: [Ayn</a> Rand loved Marilyn Monroe | Fox News](<a href=“Ayn Rand loved Marilyn Monroe | Fox News”>Ayn Rand loved Marilyn Monroe | Fox News)</p>

2

<p>

</p>

<p>Ayn Rand must have been watching a different Marilyn Monroe than I did. ;)</p>

3

<p>What I want to know is…what’s prompting the current obsession with Ayn Rand?
Seriously…Ayn Rand???</p>

4

<p>Maybe it’s the rise of atheism.</p>

5

<p>Or Paul Ryan.</p>

<p>And it was drugs, alcohol and mental illness that killed Ms. Monroe. Not some cultural agenda.</p>

6

<p>[Trying mightily to keep from saying what I actually feel …]</p>

<p>I think some of the obsession comes from a need, particularly strong in the US now, to identify some thing or person from the past and to fix that in time as a rock on which all the turnings of the earth depend. We’ve seen in recent years the fetishization of the Constitution into a “thing” - called literally by Scalia a “dead thing”, not a “living thing”. Instead of being a general outline of an agreement among states it has become a sacred object fixed in time, a direct reference to “let no new thing arise” of the Inquisition. </p>

<p>If I read one more reference to Hayek, I’ll scream. Well, in truth, I’ve already done that but it does no good: the dead hand, mortmain, holds sway over minds of the believers.*</p>

<p>Rand, in particular, like Hayek, fits the needs of many people. They take from her free marketism and a sense of individual liberty above all and discard the anti-religion, anti-force, anti-dogma, anti-belief parts. The way she is used matches the forms of American Libertarianism, which generally combine purer libertarianism - with a small l - with religious morality. Funny thing is her close cousin in philosophy is Henry Miller.</p>

<p>That said, I’ve found the attraction to Rand particularly juvenile. The ideas, especially as presented in her novels, are ridiculous, kind of the philosophical equivalent of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and The Incredible Hulk. </p>

<p>*In Detroit, there used to be a newscaster named Mort Crim. The station ran a campaign with huge billboards of him, Carmen name I forget, etc. Big black and white photos with the first name only. So there was a big picture of this guy with the word “mort”. They got lots of calls from French speakers wondering who had died.</p>

7

<p>musicamusica,</p>

<p>How do you respond to those who believe that there’s usually a deeper psychological reason why people do drugs, drink alcohol, or medicate themselves? (i.e–Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, or Kurt Cobain)</p>

8

<p>FYI—I did mention mental illness. That’s deep enough.
Our culture’s obsession with celebrities causes us to dig deeply into the psyches of people we really do not know and will never know. Most people cannot fathom the pain of the people living in their own house let alone some troubled musician or actor living across the country.
And Ayn Rand’s take on things…well that is another story entirely.</p>

9

<p>

Were they really that naive in 1962? How do you watch/listen to her sing Happy Birthday to JFK dripping with…and call that innocent??? Anyone with two functioning synapses would have figured that there was something going on between them…</p>

10

<p>If you’re willing to read the editorial with an open mind, you might appreciate the context of “innocent” a little better.</p>

<p>But I suspect you either love Ayn Rand’s writings or you loathe them.</p>

<p>Count me as one of the naive people that loves much of her work. Including that piece on MM. Thanks to the OP.</p>

11

<p>I’m a huge fan of Marilyn Monroe. I am not at all a fan of Ayn Rand. So it’s interesting to me that we should share an appreciation for Monroe’s unique persona and talents. </p>

<p>I did a presentation on Marilyn at our local library a few months ago, to mark the 50th anniversary of her death. To research her life is to despair at finding ANY measure of objectivity in ANY of her biographies (and there are LOTS). I think that Donald Spoto’s comes as close as any to limiting itself to facts, not conjecture or rumors. Yes, Marilyn and JFK had a physical relationship (consummated at Bing Crosby’s house!), but Spoto finds little to uphold the belief that theirs was a deeply involved affair - and even less to prove that she slept with RFK, too. Almost everything I thought I knew about her was wrong.

An excellent description, as far as it goes - though she could also communicate hurt, disillusionment, and desperation as few other actresses ever did. The JFK birthday party? It’s a mistake to judge any actress by 2 unfortunate minutes.</p>

12

<p>

Not neessarily mutually exclusive; a lot of my friends could very well relate to her ideas but would never wade through her works because of her writing style.</p>

13

<p>The first time I read The Fountainhead I thought it was the best literature on the planet. I raced through Atlas Shrugged. Raved and argued and talked excitedly with all my friends about her writings.<br>
We were 14 at the time. Later rereading did <em>not</em> uphold my first impression.</p>

14

<p>Do any of you remember the Ayn Rand postage stamp? (and do you remember what President issued it?)</p>

15

<p>What do you all think of the article itself and the ideas expressed in it? </p>

<p>Here are a few quotes from the article:</p>

<p>“If there ever was a victim of society, Marilyn Monroe was that victim–of a society that professes dedication to the relief of the suffering, but kills the joyous.”</p>

<p>“A spectacularly successful star, whose employers kept repeating: “Remember you’re not a star,” in a determined effort, apparently, not to let her discover her own importance.”</p>

<p>“To survive it and to preserve the kind of spirit she projected on the screen–the radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked–was an almost inconceivable psychological achievement that required a heroism of the highest order.”</p>

<p>“She preserved her vision of life through a nightmare struggle, fighting her way to the top. What broke her was the discovery, at the top, of as sordid an evil as the one she had left behind --worse, perhaps, because incomprehensible. She had expected to reach the sunlight; she found, instead, a limitless swamp of malice.”</p>

<p>“When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way,” she said. “It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she–who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature–and it won’t hurt your feelings–like it’s happening to your clothing. . . .I don’t understand why people aren’t a little more generous with each other. I don’t like to say this, but I’m afraid there is a lot of envy in this business.”</p>

<p>This last quote is actually by Marilyn Monroe</p>

16

<p>Hmmm, are you writing a paper?</p>

17

<p>No, I’m not writing a paper.</p>

<p>I thought that Ayn Rand made a lot of thought-provoking societal observations in the article. I was wondering what everyone else thought about it.</p>

18

<p>

</p>

<p>I was just a baby then, but my husband was 8. He said that even at that age, he knew something was wrong the way she sang that to the President!</p>

19

<p>I don’t know how anyone who has had children can take Ayn Rand seriously. Not to mention the fact that her prose has the elegance of cinderblock buildings.</p>

<p>But, to understand her biography is to understand her fears. And, as I once heard somebody say about Sinead O’connor. “I can’t deny her experience. She’s Irish. Her feelings about the pope are a bit extreme, but I can’t deny what she knows.”</p>

<p>Ayn Rand’s life story is interesting, if only because it illuminates her paranoia and makes her seem a little less nuts.</p>

20

<p>Like dragonmom, when I was about 15 I thought Ayn Rand was the answer to everything. I wore a $ necklace. I had it all figured out. Interestingly, my son went through the same stage. I think it all became dated and irrelevant.</p>