I’m excited about the big birthday celebration.
Not the crass party that President Trump is having for America’s 250th, with a hulking metal contraption on the South Lawn for the U.F.C. cage fights next weekend, and a solipsistic rally starring Trump, now that most of the “celebrities” have dropped out. (The president says that’s fine because he’s bigger than Elvis.)
For his 80th birthday, he has funneled millions meant for a bipartisan celebration of this remarkable country to a partisan celebration of his contemptible self.
L’Etat, c’est moi!
No, I’m excited about Marilyn Monroe’s centennial bash, which has been playing out across the globe, from a prestigious exhibition at a Paris film museum — “Cent Ans de Fascination” — to a show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, to a concert in Japan, to a display of costumes and personal artifacts at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in L.A., to a joyous look-alike contest with straights, gays, young, old and even bearded Marilyns in Palm Springs, home to “Forever Marilyn,” the 26-foot-tall, 34,000-pound statue of America’s icon of icons in her white-halter pleated, blowy dress from “The Seven Year Itch.”
The smart dumb blonde who sang the most notorious “Happy Birthday” of all time to President Jack Kennedy — the only public erotic event in American presidential history — is getting a very happy birthday, indeed. Norma Jeane Mortenson, who survived a mentally ill mother, a father who deserted her, 12 foster homes and some sexually abusive foster parents, a mudslide of sexual predation in Hollywood, very famous husbands who were peevish and jealous of her fame, and insensitive Kennedy brothers, is getting the love she always craved.
Starting as the 1948 Castroville, Calif., Artichoke Queen, Norma Jeane created Marilyn, putting a high gloss over deep wounds. “Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane,” the actress once said. Some of her foster parents sent her to the movies to get her out of the house, and the little kid sat in front of the big screen and dreamed about a life where she was wanted.
Like her character in “Some Like It Hot,” Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk, Marilyn often got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
She loved the camera and was scared of it. (Hence the bouts of lateness.) She loved the public and was scared of it. Mike Nichols, who went to Lee Strasberg’s acting class in New York with Marilyn, once explained her astonishing staying power to me by saying, “She had the greatest need.” And while there were greater beauties, he noted, Marilyn was “superhumanly sexual.”
Her friend Saul Bellow observed: “She was connected with a very powerful current, but she couldn’t disconnect herself from it,” adding, “She had a kind of curious incandescence under the skin.”
Her strange combination of luminosity and vulnerability made her immortal.
Unlike today’s sex symbols, Marilyn thought it was cool to be smart. She collected over 400 classic books — from Thomas Mann to the works of Freud — and befriended intellectuals, even marrying one.
Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”
When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, “I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”
Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. “Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,” he once wrote.
In a world that increasingly lacks artists — and politicians — who burn through the screen, and with younger generations less interested in offscreen lust, Marilyn remains as fulgent and seductive as ever. The company that manages her estate reported making $80 million from merchandising her name and image in a year. TJ Maxx sells Marilyn Monroe underwear.
Marilyn earned a small fraction of what peers like Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Russell did. She got only $500 a week when she was the blonde in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” with Russell. She bought her first house, a small hacienda in Brentwood, with furnishings from Mexico, the year she died.
So why has she persisted as the most shimmery sex symbol all around the world?
In one of the poems she scribbled in her notebook, Marilyn described herself as “strong as a cobweb in the Wind.”
Hollywood has always had a perch for curvy, sultry blondes — from Jean Harlow to Kim Novak to Jayne Mansfield to Pamela Anderson to Sydney Sweeney.
But Marilyn was one of a kind, embodying our deepest fantasies, ensnared in a film-noir triangle with President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general. The woman was more interesting than the myth.
As Sam Wasson, the author of several best-selling books about Hollywood, put it: “She can be anything to anyone. She is the American dream in darkness and in light — her rise story comforts us to think dreams can come true and her decline story comforts us to think maybe we’re better off if our dreams don’t come true. From the feminist angle, she is equally versatile: She can be seen as defiant or a victim of exploitation, an artist or an object. Also, you can’t underestimate what dying young does for your longevity!”
Leon Wieseltier, the editor of the journal “Liberties,” said Marilyn cast her spell by radiating “happy carnality, which is why her harsh treatment by men seems especially mean. She tried and tried to be ‘serious,’ but there was no point. She was doomed to be a fantasy. That’s what Billy Wilder saw: that she was both incendiary and naïve. She brought the news that desire is just as exciting when it is sunny as when it is dark.”
Wilder, who directed Marilyn in “The Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like It Hot,” was also bewildered by Marilyn’s ability to bewitch, calling her surprising and intuitive in every scene. Even when she made him wait while she cowered in her dressing room, or blew a line — like “Where’s the bourbon?” — 80 straight takes, he forgave her, savoring her “elegant vulgarity.”
“As I’ve said before, I’ve got an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly,” Wilder told Cameron Crowe, laughing. “But who would see such a picture?”
As Marilyn herself noted, “Glamour cannot be manufactured.” It’s magic.
“Fame isn’t everything,” she told the LIFE editor Richard Meryman in her last interview, in 1962. “It warms you a bit. But that warming is temporary. It’s like caviar. It’s good to have caviar, but if you had it every damn day, you know?” She laughed. “Too much caviar.”
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