My Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe, Possession and Book Culture

At the end of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Churchwell writes what she believes Marilyn Monroe was really like. Her Marilyn is ‘humorous but prickly, witty and with a sharp tongue, she took no grief and no prisoners.’ How did she get there?, I thought. No, the Marilyn I adored when I was sixteen was smart and unfussily feminine; she was playful, trying to overcome depressive episodes with humour. She was a bookworm, an introvert and people underestimated her. In the preceding pages of her book, Churchwell examined published versions of Marilyn which mainly fell into two camps: a telling straight-male fantasy Marilyn and Marilyn as a fairy-tale victim, a feminist fantasy about the perils of femininity.

I am starting to believe that, to the people who are deeply invested, Marilyn is who we want her to be. Or, more tellingly, how we want to be seen.

Marilyn fans believe that they – and only they – knew the “real” Marilyn. I am using Marilyn too, for Monroe; far more personable than the Churchwell I quote. We believe that we understand her, know her. There is a familiarity. The song I quote above, called ‘My Marilyn’, was released when Marilyn was a rising starlet in 1952. She is called ‘an angel in lace.’ I don’t remember her ever wearing much lace, my own Marilyn was very much into fitted or flowing cotton dresses – perhaps this was the presumably straight white male writer’s fantasy. Conversely, Elton John in ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘sees her as something more than sexual / More than just our Marilyn Monroe’.

Sarah Churchwell highlights the discourse around “real” and false Marilyns. ‘As soon as one begins reading about Marilyn Monroe, one encounters immediately the idea that “Marilyn” was a persona so artificial, so manufactured and packaged, that it eradicated the person’. This schism and the possessiveness of, and obsession with, an actress who died in the early 1960s now interests me most. When I was a fan as a teenager, I thought that “real” fans all thought the same thing. We knew the “real” Marilyn and other people, fake people presumably, exploited her in life and in death. We want authenticity, but because the persona is so artificial, people are able to fill in the blanks for themselves.

I find the remaining books on Marilyn I own on my bookshelves. There are three. It’s been years since I’ve looked at them. I used to have many but gave them away, or sold them as collectibles, as my interest waned.

I pull the coffee table book Milton’s Marilyn from the shelf. Milton Greene was a photographer who was close to Marilyn. They set up her production company together and Marilyn lived with him and his family for a while. I expect the book to be sympathetic; I am unsure why I’m surprised that a book with such a possessive title is so keen to bring a woman down so that she is equal to the man. ‘Look and say the man behind the lens does not emerge as vividly as the woman in front of it,’ writes James Kotsilibas-Davis, titling one chapter ‘The Image Maker’. Another photographer, Joe Eula, is quoted as saying that Greene ‘was considered the biggest hotshot. Everyone always says it was Marilyn.’ This technique has always fascinated me. The book was published because Marilyn books make money, yet they do her down and piggyback on her popularity to artificially inflate another’s reputation.

I skip through the text, yet what surprises me most is the photographs. When I was sixteen, I had a favourite ‘sitting’ of photographs. In The Ballerina Sitting, as it is known, Marilyn is wearing a white ballerina dress that doesn’t fit. The floor is bright blue and she looks glamourous but dishevelled, like the dress doesn’t fit but she’s making it work anyway. It’s glamourous but isn’t untouchable. I had one of these photos on my bedroom wall. Yet I look at them in my thirties and wonder why her mouth was constantly open. Hedy Lamarr’s quote ‘it’s easy for a girl to look glamourous, all you have to do is stand still and look stupid’ springs to mind. It’s very obviously aimed at straight men. I didn’t see it as that when I was a fan. Or maybe I did and that was how I wanted men to look at me. As I put the book down, the word that lingers in my mind is ‘icky’.

OK, I think. I am surprised I feel that way because I used to really like his use of colour and how happy Marilyn looked in his pictures. But I’ve grown up and changed, fine. I pull Fragments from the bookshelf next. The fragments refer to Marilyn’s notebooks – often filled with very personal words – photocopied and transcribed on the opposite page. When this was released, I remember thinking that it was kind, for real fans. Marilyn speaking for herself, for once. In the introduction, Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment write, with unabashed grandiosity, that ‘in this book a new world of truthfulness and overwhelming clarity is being thrown open. A hitherto unseen Marilyn is revealed.’ Nudity metaphors, and people who see her as ‘more than sexual’ abound in the introduction: ‘this book does not attempt to show her stripped bare but, rather, simply as she was. Through these poems and written papers, she’s more alive than ever.’ I feel that I can’t cringe any more deeply, until I hit the diagnosis: ‘some may be surprised at her spelling mistakes, in which, most probably, a form of dyslexia is detectable.’ Why test for dyslexia anymore when it can be proven in such a way? I flip through Marilyn’s private notes and don’t find too many spelling mistakes. I certainly don’t correct spelling mistakes in my own private writings. And this is the crux, the privacy. Marilyn is used as proof of other people’s versions of her.

In our search for our Marilyn, we mine what was hers. Her private notes, in Fragments, about not feeling she could be a wife, her notes about her traumatic upbringing, her dreams, with recipe notes. In whose interest is this? There is something about Marilyn in that we ignore her privacy. Her fake and real selves – such as they are – meld together. And we are thus allowed to do whatever we want to her.

I pull out the other Marilyn book I still own. One I thought was beautifully kind when I first read it. Private and Undisclosed. Hmm, I think. That’s still an exploitative title; the true Marilyn again – why are we, fans, so obsessed with the truth of her personality and history? I flip through and it does seem balanced as a biography, as far as I know from my perspective. But what irritates me is the fact that her life is sectioned into seasons. Winter, obviously, being her final years (1960 – 62). Why is she treated like her life is a forgone myth? Yet this biography is certainly the most level-headed. In it, Michelle Morgan writes ‘the real person has been lost in a maze of scandal, intrigue and drama.’ I think that the real person has been lost before that, but it articulates something many biographers don’t acknowledge.

I look online at Marilyn books I used to own, struck by my new outlook. Marilyn’s debunked My Story, which I first read thinking that was her words specifically, has been widely discredited. It is thought that much of My Story was invented by the ghost-writer, Ben Hecht. But it solidifies and idealises her voice. I read biographies by Barbara Leaming, Anthony Summers and Donald Spoto. I read a biography by Marilyn’s half-sister, Berniece Baker Miracle. I must have read at least thirty different versions of the same life story. Each book has a new take; each promises a different, more true, version of Marilyn. These books make fans think that they’re getting closer to the Real Marilyn. Their version of Marilyn. If you don’t like a conclusion, if the conclusion of a book doesn’t fit into the reader’s narrative of Marilyn Monroe, then you can find one that does.

The coffee table books work in a similar way. Marilyn is often called the most photographed person of the twentieth century. There are multiple Milton’s Marilyns. People who had just photographed Marilyn once could release several books based on their one session. Yet showing everyone all of the photographs from one session is emphatically not what Marilyn wanted. She was strict with her own image. Marilyn went through photographs and destroyed the negatives of pictures she didn’t like; she would mark the negatives with pen or scratch them with a pin, rendering the photograph unusable. But there is a way around this!. These destroyed pictures have been published and used as covers of books; Bert Stern’s book, for instance, has a picture of her on the cover which Marilyn herself rejected. She crossed over it, destroying the negative, making her seem Jesus-like. This destroying, too, can enable the author to write about how literally self-destructive she was.

Then there were the more creative books, for the hardcore fans, books like The Marilyn Treasures and MM Personal, which promised even more truthiness. Both contained replications of Marilyn’s train tickets and her contracts in folders. There was The Marilyn Encyclopaedia, which was an A-Z of everything about her; foods she ate on particular occasions, her measurements throughout her life, her favourite drink (Dom P). The sheer number of facts in The Marilyn Encyclopaedia exists in the schism between fake and real. Marilyn is being pinned down by facts, but they can’t contain her. It’s as if people hunt for the facts – the replica train tickets and looking at her private notebooks – to confirm their own versions of her.

In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, characters speculate if Holly Golightly is ‘a real phoney’; if she is oblivious to the degree of her seeming falseness or if she is, indeed, putting it on. Truman Capote at least partially based Holly Golightly on Marilyn. Her phoniness allows people to invent their own Marilyn; a fan can decide for themselves what is and isn’t true and discard the rest. I, for instance, thought that she was subverting the male gaze to get what she wanted. But maybe I was being too demanding of, too unfair to, a woman who lived in a pre-feminist era.

Perhaps we should be examining our own phoniness. We see what we want to see. We can never know for definite if Marilyn Monroe was murdered. We can never know who killed Kennedy or who Jack the Ripper was. But we can view these people from the safety of the present. Was my teenage Marilyn obsession not actually about Marilyn at all? After a certain point, does the human at the centre of such an obsession cease to matter?

I’m sure that there’s a book coming out soon that will give us a new perspective.