<p>I was a kid when Monroe died. The reality is she was not anything then like what she has become in the popular imagination now. Much of that is the adoption of her by gay men as the uber female image. She had a short period of popularity in the 50’s but much of her PR was related to her marriages to DiMaggio and Arthur Miller; she was married to arguably the most famous sports star back when baseball was truly the national sport and the Yankees were the big team and then to arguably the most famous playwright - who also was successful in NYC and with the press. She was pretty much washed up by the 1960’s. She was wholly unreliable at work and needed an insane number of takes when she managed to show up. </p>
<p>The Marilyn legend took off in the 1970’s. A big push for it was Candle in the Wind, the John/Taupin song on Elton’s huge Yellow Brick Road album. Made her into something she wasn’t before. The reality of her life is more ordinary: pretty girl, bad family, tried to get ahead, got used, had mental problems, etc. Lots of that in Hollywood. </p>
<p>As a tidbit, I read a thing by a guy who curated the auctioning of her personal effects. He said a few interesting things. First, she wore her stuff. She didn’t have a lot of clothes and she obviously wore them. Not much designer, mostly ordinary clothes she liked. The things you saw like the dress she was sewn into to sing for JFK were for publicity. Second, she was much smaller than she photographed. They had to get smaller mannequins for her clothes. You can see they accentuated her curves on film - see Some Like It Hot - with closeups of her butt. </p>
<p>A more well known tidbit is her breathy voice seems to have come from training away her stuttering. They then had her emphasize this in some of her roles.</p>
<p>I must disagree with the notion that Monroe had “a short period of popularity” in the 50’s. I was a kid when Monroe died, too, and I remember the enormous screaming headlines on every front age and all the news stories on TV. She was no Lindsay Lohan, whose body of work falls far short of her natural talent, known more for her misbehavior than for her work. Monroe completed only 4 films in the last 5 years of her life, but this was at least partly her choice. She may have been unreliable at work, but she was hardly washed up. There’s a pretty smart theory that she was fired by Fox because, between Elizabeth Taylor, who was bankrupting the studio with her “Cleopatra” shenanigans, and Monroe, whose last film was nowhere near as costly, Monroe was the one they could afford to let go. </p>
<p>She decided to leave Hollywood at the height of her popularity to study at the Actors Studio, and wanted to do important work. And although Lee and Paula Strasberg disappointed her as much as any of the important people in her life, Strasberg knew great actors, and considered her one.</p>
<p>I think much of the difficulty in Monroe’s marriage to DiMaggio was the fact that she was a bigger star than he was, certainly at that time. Ditto her marriage to Miller, to some extent.
This quote from Rand illustrates what I can’t stand about her. She’s so paranoid and deliberately back-assward. She sees the world as out to get successful people because lesser beings are consumed by envy. Sad perspective to embrace.</p>
<p>“This quote from Rand illustrates what I can’t stand about her. She’s so paranoid and deliberately back-assward. She sees the world as out to get successful people because lesser beings are consumed by envy. Sad perspective to embrace.”</p>
<p>Interesting observation, frazzled1. Care to explain a little more? Do you not think that there’s a lot of envy and schadenfreude in the world?</p>
<p>Ayn Rand’s books are juvenile literature, with some of the same themes as the Harry Potter books–I’m really, secretly superior to everybody else, and I’m being held back by the inferior people. This is why the story of liking Rand at 15, and rejecting her ideas later, is so common. Plus, she couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag.</p>
<p>I guess she thought Marilyn was also a superior being who was being held back by the little people. I don’t quite see it, although I thought she was pretty good in “Some Like It Hot.”</p>
<p>1960s naive? No. Read the Kinsey Reports. When Victorianism fully gave way to Freudianism (1920s??) female sexuality became more accepted but within marriage.</p>
<p>But, research the comfort women for US soldiers on Japan for a short time after we invaded and in Korea for years and years (1950- ).</p>
<p>There was a tremendous double standard. Prostitution. Mob girls. Organized crime sponsored “legit” entertainers careers. 1962–this was the same time that Jack Ruby had all his clubs in Dallas.</p>
<p>There were “good girls” --your wife, mother, sister and then there were women of easy virtue.</p>
<p>Things just did not make it into the press/media especially about the powerful men. That is in part how J. Edgar Hoover got so powerful–the threat of disclosure.</p>
<p>Does anyone recall or have they read that the audio and/or audio visual recordings of the Happy Birthday tribute was aired publically at the time?</p>
<p>I think Monroe was pretty good as an actress and quite good in comedy. She was limited in drama, not so much by her looks but by her voice, which tended to sound artificial in drama. She couldn’t do convincing accents. She was actually best at drama earlier in her career in B-movies like Niagara; she sounds more normal, more like the person she actually grew up as.</p>
<p>JFK was a pig. That is a particular hot button for me. He was not a “ladies man” but a serial abuser with what seems to be sexual addiction. I remember Gore Vidal speaking about stories of JFK having a Secret Service man hold a prostitute’s head under water as they had sex so her struggles would get him off.</p>
<p>Quite good in comedy - yup, I think so too! She mopped the floor with Laurence Olivier in “The Prince and the Showgirl,” as he himself admitted freely.</p>
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ThereseR, as far as Rand’s concerned, I got nothin’ to add to the conversation. I clicked on this thread because it was about Marilyn. :)</p>