*When I fall in love: a personal relationship with a goddess
When I was a young girl (I am guessing around nine years old) I laid eyes on a blonde marshmallow woman with softness and curvaceousness and breathiness and cuteness and sexiness and sauciness to spare. Soon after, I decided I was ‘into’ marilyn monroe and wanted anything about her I could lay my young hands on. Thus followed years and years of collecting her pictures, putting them into albums and onto my wall. Reading countless biographies, memoirs, staring at picture books. Watching her movies over and over, and the occasional, precious documentary over and over. Playing her songs - several albums had I - singing along repeatedly until I perfected a worthy imitation. I was in love, a massive crush. She was my goddess, my personal marilyn. I fancied her, yes. I wanted to touch her soft skin (I remember writing a poem about such a thing that was published in a fanzine), kiss her pouty mouth. I also wanted to befriend her, to pull her out of her funk, to wash her when she neglected herself, straighten her up when she was wasted. I wanted her to be my pal, my sister, my lover, my all. It was all-embracing love for a dead woman I would never have known in a million years. In short I was a marilyn monroe fan.
Then, over the years, I grew out of this magnificent obsession and into a more subtle appreciation. But my love for her has never really left. My affection, my fascination, my appreciation. It’s altered, shifted, mellowed but never soured. And why? Why do we love her so?
I find it very hard to pinpoint it. I can list some reasons but they won’t illustrate what separates her from the bunch. Is it quantifiable, this fascination? Collective and worldwide, spanning decade after decade, generation after generation, this woman’s image, myth, work embraced and enjoyed.
Why did I fall in love? She was vulnerable & I felt vulnerable. She was a survivor (and yes, I still believe this) when I wanted to believe I could survive. She was troubled and complicated and I identified with that! She was also sexy, charismatic, sensual, playful, the object of such attention, fascination and awe…something I aspired to be as a woman. She was my ideal, flaws and all, my young self was shaped greatly by this image of her. She was an actress and a singer and so would I be, desired, appreciated, envied and imitated.
If I would dress like her then it would be the casual marilyn, the slinky marilyn, not the bombshell, glamour-puss marilyn of studio publicity shots. A softer marilyn, wearing Capri pants and a tight shirt, open at the neck. Sweater marilyn, tight-yet-simple dress marilyn. A kerchief tied around my platinum locks or bareheaded tousled look. Minimal makeup because I wouldn’t need it, but a pow of red lipstick when an effect was desired. I would move to America where I would become a star, have a poodle and a bungalow, a string of tragic love affairs. I would sing her songs on TV, dressed to the nines in a satin gown with a fishtail, and matching opera gloves.
My hourglass figure would be swooned at and envied. This was my fantasy for myself. All this a part of the ‘myth’ the ‘image’ and the ‘idea’ of marilyn monroe. I fed into it because of want, desire, need and recognition. This is why clichés work for us, why they continue to endure. My falling for it was innocent enough, but because I related so much, and fell so hard for her, in my psyche it became ‘mine’ and it became ‘truth’. I could see behind the glamour to the real woman, the true person. I appreciated her more than most. Or so I thought.
In short then & obviously, I wanted the attention she received and still receives. That none of that happened is testament to many things, not least the fact I never did end up looking like marilyn either by nature or manufacture. I grew out of the idea of ‘imitating’ her, got over it a lot quicker than I did the desire to act. I’ve never got over the wish to sing and perform though. I’ve held onto that, at least; though perform as myself not imitating the inimitable.
In later years marilyn became for me more of an objective fascination. Still reading the biographies, the conspiracy theories, the memoirs and the fictionalisations, I became more aware of what this ‘marilyn’ was. Enlightened to the workings of society, media and our popular culture, I can view it so much more coolly.
I still get the pleasure, but don’t sink all the way into the seduction of ‘her’. However. I can’t explain the fascination of THIS ONE WOMAN. Why watching her on screen, even in a somewhat inferior movie, one is compelled to catch her every screen moment. Why the opening bars of one of her songs still gives me goosebumps. Why I will still defend her acting and singing abilities when challenged. Why even now, when I have looked upon thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of images of her, I am constantly amazed that every day I can find more and more pictures I have never seen before, more and more SHOOTS I have never known of. And the delight, oh the delight this brings!
Look-alike a cliché
I had a bit of a problem with impersonators. They just didn’t seem to get it right and carried out, instead, a caricature of her. That wasn’t ‘MY’ marilyn at all. It took me a long while to realise that maybe that is the point of impersonation. For me it was usually an impression of the IDEA of her, rather than HER (as I THOUGHT I ‘knew’ her) or any of the characters she portrayed. See, I missed the point.
Still. I have always had a bit of a fascination with checking them out. I am picky, picky in my analysis. Their hair is seldom right. Ok, she had many hairdos actually, but if you are wearing a certain outfit – MATCH THE HAIR! They usually go for a bob that is one length and styled slightly curly. That’s why it doesn’t work. When she had the curls, it was short, short all over and curled. The seven year itch hair, the gentlemen prefer blondes, bus stop? This is the style that most go for and that’s how they get it wrong. Later, later with sugar kane, amanda dell, the wig she wore for the misfits, something’s got to give, that’s all one length, but seldom are people portraying these looks. See – I’m a pedant!
Well. I was trolling the net for pix of dear mm and came across a look-alike who not only had the hair down pat, but while she doesn’t necessarily crack the LOOK of ‘her’…well I was somewhat taken. Which is why I wish to call this selection of ladies, you see in this section of the essay: ‘not but still hot’.
I realise now, in my old age, that it is all about the perception, the idea of her. Not about ‘being’ the person or even the actress ‘marilyn’. But instead, portraying the iconic image of ‘marilyn monroe’: the blonde, the pout, the blowy kissy, the red lipstick, the white eyeshadow, the black false eyelashes, the white dress, the gold dress, the gasping, the breathiness, the little girl voice. It’s all exaggerated, it’s all an extreme impression of ‘femininity’ and ‘womanliness’ that is carried with the idea of ‘marilyn monroe’, whether people realise or care it wasn’t what ‘she’ was ‘like’ at all.
Sure she played some of the roles to a certain extent in this way, played up to it at premieres, to crowds, sometimes to the press. But those of us who love her, study her, have watched her every documented move over the years, we know. We know that there was a canny, intelligent, earthy gal underneath all that manufactured fluff. ‘Our marilyn’.
Upholding the mythEven in the biographies, and particularly in the biopics, we see the same, breathy, girlish, simple, naive, ditsy blonde again and again and again. Why? Why isn’t anyone gutsy enough to portray her as a three-dimensional human being, with many personae, many moods, and many ways to relate to those around her? There is plenty of evidence and these people must be doing their research! But I suppose in the end, feeding the myth, expressing the cliché - that’s what the people expect right?
For me there are many ways to sample other ‘ideas’ of marilyn (for they are all alternate ideas, not actualities. None of us can ever know her or anyone else, in such a way from such information). Read the following: ‘conversations with marilyn’ by weatherby; ‘my sister marilyn’ by berniece baker miracle (her half sister); ‘marilyn and me’ by susan strasberg. But above all else, for a really, really enlightening insight into the woman, read truman capote’s ‘a beautiful child’. Here we have marilyn using ‘salty language’, talking about prince phillip and eryl flynn’s appendages, being angry, bitchy, HUMAN. It’s a delight. Though she doesn’t seem totally together or even stable, her insecurities are there but expressed in a tougher way to that which we are used to when thinking of her.
It’s a treasure. And her comment on the queen? Well for this anti-royalist, it is just priceless. It sums up just one of the many, many reasons why I still love marilyn.
Perhaps, in the end, icon, caricature, or ‘real’ woman, we all project our idealised marilyn onto her myth. For me, as a child, I projected all the things I wanted to be and that which I wanted to be given. Those who want the look-alikes want the cliché, the caricature, the drag queen imitation. They pay for the exaggeration of ‘woman’: the sex bomb, the girlish sensuality. And those in between are also buying into an idea, projecting their image of this woman who inhabits our cultural psyche, not a true historical place but an ideology, a stereotype, an iconic symbolism of womanhood and celebrity.
For me now, it is all this. For me now it is enough to gaze at that face, that face I have swooned at for nearly 25 years. The awe, the delight, the love is still there. She is still ‘my marilyn’ – a different one to that of my childhood. Perhaps a different ‘marilyn’ with each change of my mood.
*Before someone decides to point this out to me: I am more than fully aware that the song ‘when I fall in love’ that appears on nearly all marilyn monroe compilations is not, in fact, her singing. Or is SAID to not be her singing. Why it appears again and again is a mystery. I agree with those who protest. It sounds NOTHING like marilyn’s voice, so unless she was trying ‘something new’ with it or someone ever comes up with evidence that she recorded this, at all, I stand with those who say ‘that’s not HER!’ Using it as the title for this, is therefore an awareness of this fact, becoming even more appropriate to my story: it is ironic and part of the myth, the inaccuracy, the confusion and the fact that we don’t ever know if what ever are reading, hearing or seeing is indeed ‘the truth’.
copyright corinna tomrley 2005